The Sleeping and the Dead – Ann Cleeves

 It has been a warm summer in Cranford, a small town in the north east of England, where DI Peter Porteous has transferred in the hope of a quieter life. But as the water level in the lake drops, a weighted body is discovered. It has been there a while, years, but the post-mortem and missing person records eventually identify the victim (for it is murder) as Michael Grey, a young man who disappeared shortly after completing his A levels in 1972.

But Michael Grey is a bit of a mystery. He arrived in Cranford only a couple of years before his demise and was fostered by a local elderly couple, now deceased. There are school records to be had, there is an old teacher who remembers him, and a few of the school cohort can be traced living locally. A little further afield, living in a coastal town, is his then girlfriend, Hannah Meek. She is recently separated, living with her teenage daughter, and works as a librarian at the local prison. That makes for a stressful life at home and work, so Porteous’s questioning just adds another level of aggravation.

The story unfolds as Porteous investigates in his quiet unfussy way, and Hannah gently unravels. Tension ramps up towards the end as disparate side stories cleverly coalesce to provide a satisfactory ending to a devious plot.

And the plot is the main thing; the characters never quite grip the imagination, which is possibly why Peter Porteous never made it to the serial book status of other Cleeves stalwarts like Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez. But it is still a diverting enough early (2001) work by one of the leading detective fiction writers around.

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

 Evangelical Baptist minister Nathan Price has a new mission, talking the word of Christ to the dark continent. What the Reverend Price decides, his family have to lump as God’s will, so wife, Orleanna, and four daughters have no option but to up sticks and leave their comfortable home in the southern United States for a primitive shack in the interior of the Belgian Congo.

But it is 1959, and white colonial rule enables the family to maintain a veneer of civilisation and relative wealth with a dollar stipend coming in and an established link with Leopoldville via a maverick South African airman.

It is still a culture shock, but more humorous than worrying, until the Belgians pull out and grant a chaotic independence to the natives. Most whites flee the country, but Nathan is determined to fulfil his (now unpaid) mission. The family remain and the consequences for Orleanna and the girls are profound.

The narrative is delivered in real time by the four girls, passing the baton chapter by chapter. This gives a pleasing variety of styles in line with their diverse personalities. Eldest Rachel (15) is the frustrated prom queen who bemoans most the lack of hair products, her language peppered with delightful malapropisms. Leah and Adah (14) are twins, but only in the sense of sharing their birthday. Leah is strong willed and confident, willing to follow her father into the good fight and well able to cope with jungle life. Adah, damaged in the womb, limps along in her wake, selectively mute but articulate in her dark atheistic thoughts. Ruth May is barely more than a toddler but adds her child’s eye view of events. Orleanna’s contribution is a retrospective introduction to each section of the book, bitter with hindsight and outrage.

The book delivers on so many levels – strangers in a strange land; familial relationships that are authentically complex; the impact of local and global politics at the individual level – with prose that uses words to great effect, witty, wise, angry and moving.

Read as part of the African leg of the book-packing journey, the book wears its six hundred pages lightly, each of them a gem to read.