The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing – Mary Paulson-Ellis

Solomon Farthing is an aging, down at heel heir hunter in Edinburgh. He owes money he has not got, but a local DI owes him a favour and gives him a tip off that could save his bacon. Thomas Methven has just died in a care home; he has no known next of kin and no real estate, but he does have a fifty thousand pounds sewn into his burial, or rather cremation, suit. If Solomon can find an heir and agree commission before the funeral, he will be off the financial hook with cash to spare.

Interspersed with the 2016 heir hunt, a flashback to November 1918 unfolds involving Solomon’s grandfather, Captain Godfrey Farthing and his small band of WW1 soldiers holed up in a deserted farmhouse close to the front line, days before the armistice. One of his men is Archibald Methven.

As the two stories move forward in parallel, links between them emerge and resonate down the years, not only the characters and their families but also in the form of seemingly inconsequential objects. Valueless in themselves these items – including a pawn ticket, a reel of pink cotton, a walnut shell, a silver cap badge - become charged with significance as they are gambled for and traded by the soldiers, then passed down the generations. Solomon Farthing’s own past is revealed as his investigations brush up uncomfortably close to his long repressed memories.

The 2016 story has black humour and elements of farce as Solomon keeps one step ahead of his pursuers; as well as the debt collectors there is a rival heir hunter and a (not quite) relative whose car Solomon has purloined. As counterpoint, the 1918 story is necessarily dark with the men mentally stretched to the limit having endured much and got within days of relief - provided no order comes to advance once more before the cease fire.

Each element leads to a fine climax after five hundred pages of pleasing complexity and intrigue.

The Whisper Man – Alex North

A young boy goes missing; police efforts to find him are fruitless until the body turns up weeks later close to where he disappeared. Worrying for the local community, particularly as it echoes serial cases twenty years earlier when the ‘whisper man’ was at large.

But he is still behind bars, and still keeping schtum about where his final victim lies. DI Pete Willis, who put him away, still visits prison periodically to get him to tell, and now must visit again due to the copycat ‘whispering man’ element of the recent crime.

Into the area moves single dad Tom Kennedy and his son Jake, the latter sensitive and still affected by the death of his mother. Their new house has an unfortunate connection to the whisper man case and when Jake hears whispering in the night…

It gets spooky; and complicated as Tom’s own childhood trauma gets stirred up. Throw in an attractive single mum at the school gate and a hardnosed female DI on the case and the story moves on apace, the narrative switching all the time among Tom Kennedy, Jake, the two police officers, and the unknown new whisper man.

The mix of crime, family relations, and the potentially paranormal works surprisingly well to give a good, mildly scary, read.

The Memory Chamber – Holly Cave

Isobel is a heaven architect, one of the best. Her job, in a time not far off, is to craft virtual heavens that will combine the memories of (usually) dying clients with key brain cells extracted after their death to enable a consciousness to continue in an eternally pleasurable state – heaven indeed.

She falls for a client and creates memories that will last beyond his too soon demise. But when he is suspected of committing a violent crime hours before his death, there is only one way to prove his innocence: for Isobel to enter his heaven and look for unwanted memories that may lurk there. And it is vital that he is cleared, as criminals are not allowed a heaven; sentencing goes beyond life here.

Murky waters are stirred. The ethics of the infant heaven architecture industry are lagging behind the technology; the law is even further behind, but its enforcers are very interested. The future setting is credible with driverless transport, eye-lens videos, and subcutaneous chip communications. And there are plot twists not to be spoilt here.

It is all narrated in the first person by Isobel, so we know only what she knows and share her doubts and fears about people and events around her. That makes for an intense reading experience, for her character is complex and interesting. After the intriguing first third, the middle third flags slightly but is worth pushing through to the exciting and frantic final section.