Rubbernecker – Belinda Bauer

It starts when Sam Galen skids on an icy road in South Wales and sends his car over a precipice. Among the other motorists delayed by the accident is Sarah Fort, who is driving her son, Patrick, to a university interview in Cardiff. As their car halts at the scene, Patrick gets out to look over the abyss to the smoking car below. Is the driver dead, he asks the police, who give him and the other rubberneckers short shrift.

But Patrick is interested in death. When he was only seven, his father died in a car accident. And with Patrick on the autism spectrum, interested means obsessed.

But back to Sam Galen. He survives the crash but ends up in the coma ward at Cardiff. There, one of the nurses is Tracy Evans, not so much an angel of mercy as a mercenary angel on the look out for a rich husband, not necessarily her own.

The three storylines pan out. Sam’s is in the first person, a nerve-wracking account of an active mind in an unresponsive body. He sees things, bad things, but cannot report them. Tracy, who maybe should have noticed Sam’s attempts to communicate, has her focus elsewhere – on romantic novels, the boxes of chocolates from grateful relatives, and on the potentially widowed husbands.

Patrick too ends up in hospital, hoping that a course in the dissecting room will answer his questions about death and what comes after. He even manages to overcome his distaste of company to mix, if not socialise, with his fellow medical students and flat mates.

The book whizzes along with pithy prose and OMG inducing twists and turns. Incidents require police involvement, and a new character, DS Emrys Williams emerges and begins to knit together the plot strands. It all leads to a fine conclusion (for some if not all).

An excellent read; bring on more Belinda Bauer!

Origins – Lewis Dartnell

The aim of this book is to explore the linkage between the geology of Earth and human development and history. In the terms of the subtitle, how the Earth made us.

Starting from the formation of the planet and its structure, of which the drifting continents are the key feature, it swiftly homes in on what geological factors led to the emergence of homo sapiens as the dominant species.

Further chapters explain how climatic change affected early population spread; how wind patterns and ocean currents follow on from geological factors and how the discovery of them enabled Europeans to shift the axis of trade from overland routes such as the silk road to naval routes to overseas empires;  how science and technology has found and utilised the laid down rocks and minerals to drive development and draw on a bank of stored energy freeing mankind (for good or ill) from the previous constraints of sun-powered agriculture.

Well argued, informative and thought provoking.

Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir

Earth is in danger. The sun is dimming, losing energy faster than it should. The consequences are unthinkable. Forget global warming, the world will freeze to death.

Scientists of the world unite and find the reason. A strange life form, christened astrophage, is absorbing the sun’s energy and using it to migrate to Venus in order to breed and return in bigger numbers to start the cycle again. Good to find out, but how to fix the problem? A straw to grasp is that though the phenomenon is observable in most nearby stars, there is one that bucks the trend: Tau Ceti.

Dr Ryland Grace, who gave up a potentially brilliant academic career in science to teach high school, somehow gets head hunted into the Project Hail Mary team – so named as the hopes of the planet rest on a long hopeful shot, namely a thirteen year space flight to Tau Ceti to find out its secret. It is a suicide mission for the four crew, who must survive an induced coma, tended by robotic nursing for most of the trip, then send their findings back to Earth, using what fuel is left to power four tiny spacecrafts. Job done, the astronauts get to choose how to die.

Fortunately for Grace, he is not an astronaut, but as the novel opens with him waking up on-board, some last minute change must have occurred that his coma-fogged brain cannot fathom. From there the book twin tracks the ongoing mission with the back story.

Both breeze along from one scientific discovery, through setbacks, to the next problem only science can solve. It is a bit far-fetched, and when the Hail Mary gets to Tau Ceti, credibility is stretched to, or beyond, breaking point.

This is The Martian supercharged to beyond reason, just about worth pursuing to get to a tense conclusion, which is in doubt to the end.

The Reindeer Hunters – Lars Mytting

 This, the second book of trilogy, takes up the story twenty-two years after the end of The Bell in the Lake. Kai Schweigaard is still the pastor at Butengen in rural Norway, and still tends the grave of Astrid Hekne, who died in Dresden giving birth to twin boys. Kai brought her body home for burial and her one surviving son, Jehans, home to his mother’s family.

Head of the family, Osvald Hekne, has kept Jehans at arm’s length, but Kai Schweigaard has compensated by nurturing the boy at least up to adolescence at which point Jehans went rogue. He now spends most of his days fishing and hunting with an old rifle.

Now, up in the hills, he shoots a fine buck reindeer, but the kill is disputed by another hunter. He is a well-heeled English gentleman, Victor Harrison, and the two men strike up an immediate mutual liking, they even speak each other’s language – Victor had a Norwegian nanny, and Jehans was schooled in English by Kai. Without animosity the two reindeer hunters examine the corpse to discover it was a simultaneous hit. They agree to share the spoils, Jehans taking a cash settlement, just enough to buy a better rifle.

A year later and Jehans and Victor bump into each other again in the hunting grounds. When Victor is injured, Jehans takes him back to Butengen to recover at the pastor’s house. When Kai sees Victor, it is like déjà vu. He is the double of Jehan’s deceased father.

As Jehans’ and Victor’s stories develop separately, their potential true relationship seeps into their, and Kai’s consciousness. Is it possible that Astrid secretly gave away the second twin, and he has now, unknowingly, found his way back to Butengen? Kai believes it without understanding how. Victor is in denial, unwilling to disown his English heritage and family pile. Jehans is just happy to have a soulmate.

In parallel, Kai continues to search for the legendary, long-lost Hekne weave – a seventeenth century tapestry that is reputed to foretell events. All this against a backdrop of World War I that affects Victor and the subsequent flu epidemic that threatens Jehans and his family.

It is as beautifully written as its predecessor and builds to a tense and satisfying climax. We get a hint of who will carry the tale forward into the concluding (yet to be published) volume. I cannot wait.

The Echo Chamber – John Boyne

 Meet the Cleverley family who enjoy a privileged lifestyle funded by successful parents: George Cleverley, television journalist turned chat show host; and Beverly Cleverley, best-selling author churning out romantic fluff. Both are having secret affairs. The three children (17 to 23) benefit from liberal upbringing and generous allowances.

Eldest Nelson actually has a job at the school he used to attend, where he is bullied, as he was when a pupil. Next is Elizabeth with ambitions to be an on-line influencer, and a boyfriend so woke that he gets Elizabeth to sign a written consent when they make love. Youngest Achilles uses his boyish good looks and charm to provide an income from honey-trapped middled-aged men.

So far, so harmless. Just your regular 2020’s family, until:

George is hit by a double-whammy, his lover announces she is pregnant, and he gets into a pronoun tangle with a transitioning receptionist, a gaff amplified by the echo chamber of social media. Beverly (who no longer actually writes her books but employs a ‘ghost’ to ‘fill out’ her creative ideas) finds she is losing her lover, a Ukrainian dancer whom she partnered on Strictly. Nelson, who hides his insecurity by dressing up in uniforms to which he has no right, goes a step too far when he changes from nurse’s scrubs to police officer. Elizabeth, whose @ElizCleverley social media presence is pitiful, finds vilely trolling celebrities, including her father, as @TruthIsASword more rewarding in terms of followers. As for Achilles, his latest mark seems to have gone cold, requiring the ante to be upped.

The five story lines ricochet forward reflecting life in the modern, media obsessed, fast lane, but they are all heading pear shaped.

It is fast paced, easy, entertaining reading, the characters relatable and not so much bad as caught in bad situations. It is funny, with some slapstick moments, holding up a mirror to society, and taking a few well-meaning pot shots at political correctness and woke behaviour.

The High House – Jessie Greengrass

The High House – Jessie Greengrass

The location of the High House is unclear, other than it is a few miles inland and built on high rocky ground. Francesca, a climate change scientist and activist, convinced sea levels will soon rise disastrously, chose it for that reason and spends years fixing it up, clearing the attached smallholding, and latterly stocking it up with enough food, clothing, spare parts, and toys to make it self-sufficient.

The toys are a late addition as Francesca falls pregnant, but baby Paul sees little of his globetrotting mother, being left increasingly in the care of teenage stepsister, Caro.

In the coastal village below the High House another teenager, Sally, lives with her ‘Grandy’, who makes a living caretaking holiday homes left empty over winter. With the clock ticking to Armageddon, Francesca appoints Grandy as full time concierge at High House, and she recruits a reluctant Sally as housekeeper – Grandy is getting on and this is a long term project.

Finally the panicked word comes to Caro – don’t delay, get Pauly and yourself off to the High House.

Narrated in flashback by Caro, Sally, and a lesser extent Pauly, the preparation, disaster, and aftermath are told in personal and understated detail. These are resourceful girls, and you root for them. The novel is an excellent blend of a dystopian story of a near future and a study of relationships in a closed community of just four.

Barnaby Rudge – Charles Dickens

 This is one off my Book-et List, completing the fourteen (finished) novels of Charles Dickens. I read Oliver Twist in 1975, David Copperfield in 1977, ploughed through six novels in the 1980s, two in the 1990s, two more in the noughties, and the last prior to this in 2009.

Set earlier than most of his novels, we are in the period of the Gordon Riots of the 1780s, when the mob, whipped up by Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, took to the streets to protest at the removal of official anti-Catholic discrimination that had been in place since 1698.

Dickens’ plots cannot be given justice in a precis so instead, themes and characters. Star crossed lovers across the religious divide, Edward Chester and Emma Haredale; their respective father and uncle, lifelong enemies; good-hearted Joe Willet, at odds with his innkeeper father and rebuffed by flighty locksmith’s daughter, Dolly Varden, who prefers to bask in the attention of the local dandies.

Then there is Barnaby Rudge, a simple youth eager to please and easily led. By, for example, black-hearted ‘gypsy looking’ Hugh, who sees the riots as an outlet for his violent tendencies, and apprentice locksmith Simon Tappertitt, who fancies himself as a commander of the rabble.

The action ranges between London and its hinterland. Catholic’s property is at risk from the rioters; the rioters are at risk from the military; the ladies are at risk from the villains; love is at risk of being frustrated; and poor young Barnaby Rudge, an innocent abroad amid the chaos, is at the most risk of all.

The characters may be stock rather than memorable, but the descriptions of the riots are vivid and filled with jeopardy.

So, with Dickens done with, my pick of his fourteen major works are: Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend.