Maigret and the Apparition – Georges Simenon

An attempted murder in Paris is a crime close to home for Chief Superintendent Maigret as a fellow officer is gunned down in the street. The victim, Inspector Lognon, is not a member of his Crime Squad but is an old colleague and as he is rushed to hospital, Maigret gets on the case.

But what is the case? Lognon is in a coma, no-one at his station knows what he was working on or why he was in the street at night. When investigations on site reveal he was a regular late-night visitor to the nearby apartment of a young woman, who has since disappeared, some jump to the obvious conclusion. But Maigret thinks not and digs deeper, roots around the neighbours, builds a hypothesis that centres on a substantial property across the road where lives a Dutch art dealer and his attractive wife.

Police procedure proceeds impeccably, though Maigret, as ever, finds time to pop into bistros and cafes for necessary refreshments. Drawing on the work done by his inspectors in the field and intelligence gleaned from his contacts in Nice and London, Maigret probes, interrogates, and deduces.

It is classic Simenon and Maigret with the atmospheric Paris setting, quirky characters, economy of prose, and a complex puzzle to unravel. Done and dusted in under 160 pages. Old school!

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray

The Barnes family are, to all appearances, successful, one of the leading families in the Irish town where they reside. Dickie Barnes runs the local car dealership, taken over from his father. Imelda, his wife, was the town beauty when they married and still has the looks, the clothes, and the bearing to attract admiring glances. Daughter, Cassandra (Cass), is doing well at school, destined (with best friend Elaine) for Trinity College Dublin. Son, PJ, is younger and happy just to amass scientific facts and play his computer games.

But the Barnes business has entered the choppy waters of the crashing Irish economy and is about to hit the rocks. The narrative passes through the four points of view in satisfyingly meaty sections.

Cass gets wind that Dad’s business is ‘slowing down’ and that belts need tightening, not what she wants to hear ahead of university. It’s another insecurity piled on top of her own teenage angst. She turns to parties, drink, boys.

The crash affects PJ too as, targeted by school bullies, he needs cash to buy them off, but the bank of mum and dad is dry. Desperate measures need to be considered.

Imelda is reduced to selling off her extensive wardrobe and accumulated household luxuries to maintain her lifestyle and place in the local ladies’ society. Dickie is to blame of course, and marital relations are non-existent. An attractive woman, neglected, is prey to temptation.

Finally, Dickie, at a loss, waiting for an upturn, haunted by a past that is waiting to re-emerge, and fearful of a future where his own problems become conflated with potential societal breakdown. Building a bunker to hole up in seems a good option.

The four perspectives work well, and the narrative weaves the developing crises with the back story of Dickie and Imelda, which increasingly contextualises the present. A final section combines the four voices in a ratatat crescendo and a helter-skelter dash for the line as storylines merge in a thunderous (literally, it takes place in a thunderstorm) climax.

A good, compulsive, insightful read, but two reservations. Murray chooses to eschew some punctuation conventions, like speech marks (an increasingly common affectation) and, in one narrative, full stops! And he ends with a bit of a tease, a disappointment after the 650-page build-up.

Lion – Saroo Brierley

At five years old, Saroo lived in poverty somewhere in India with his mother, brothers, and sister. He had no education, barely any vocabulary, did not know his family name, and had only vague phonetic notion of where he lived. Not that unusual in his situation but when he gets onto a train that deposits him over 24 hours later in Calcutta (as it was then known) such ignorance is problematic.

He can’t get a train back (where to?) nor ask someone to contact his family (what name?) so he wanders the platforms of the vast Howrah station and surrounding streets, begging and scavenging, and narrowly avoiding the fates lying in wait for such as he.

Eventually he falls into the hands of the authorities and is soon classified as a lost child whose origins cannot be traced and is taken in by an agency that facilitates international adoption. Within weeks he is in Hobart, Tasmania with Mr & Mrs Brierley. Talk about culture shock! But Saroo thrives and soon takes to the Aussie lifestyle.

However, he never forgets home, his mother, his siblings. Periodically, at university with access to the internet, then as a young professional with a laptop and Google earth, he searches for places that might fit the few clues held in his childhood memory. It is a needle in a haystack task, but he is dogged and methodical and he finds it. (No spoiler – the prologue reveals this before flashing back.) He takes a trip back to see if any of his family remain.

What has it to do with a lion? It is explained in the book, and a 2016 tie-in film used that title. However, the original title of A Long Way Home fits better.

It is a good story, and a true one, a biography remarkable enough to make the simply told narrative an interesting read.