The Last Passenger – Will Dean

Caroline (Caz) Ripley embarks on a transatlantic crossing on the luxurious Atlantica liner accompanied by her relatively new boyfriend, Pete Davenport. After a first-evening meal and drinks they retire to their cabin and bed. In the morning when Caz wakes, slightly hungover, she is alone.

More alone than just missing Pete. The whole ship is deserted. Cabins empty, decks deserted, bridge unattended. No other passengers, no staff, no crew. But the ship is ploughing on regardless. It is a scary scenario; bizarre; inexplicable. Will Dean takes it forward in all its psychological unnerving detail, until …

Well, that would be telling, and we don’t do spoilers here. However, to give some reassurance, it’s not just about one woman and a ship. Other characters are involved, and there are back stories to be shared. Then there is a mind-blowing reveal that hikes the action and tension up a notch.

And that is what drives the story on, along with, for me, a reducing willingness to suspend disbelief in the premise and a growing curiosity as to whether a more sensible explanation might emerge.

What more to say? The main Caroline character is well drawn, the present tense narration (hers throughout) works well enough, and give Dean credit for extrapolating a contemporary trend to an ultimate if somewhat preposterous end point.

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.

The Railway Viaduct – Edward Marston

1852. As a train on its way from Manchester to Liverpool rumbles over the Sankey viaduct, a figure falls from a carriage into the canal below. It is a long way down, but the man was dead before he hit the water, as evidenced by the stab wound in his back.

It is clearly a job for Inspector Robert Colbeck, the ‘railway detective’ - a soubriquet earned in book one of the series (this is book two) by bringing some violent train robbers to justice. He is a bit of a dandy but with formidable (if rather intuitive) detection powers, single but semi attached to the dependable Madeline Andrews whom he rescued in book one and now seems unwilling to let go. Colbeck works out of Scotland Yard, but his specialist knowledge means he is called in when the crime has connections to the new but booming industry.

Back to the case. Aided by Sergeant Victor Leeming (who loathes trains as much as Colbeck loves them) and hamstrung by his stick-in-the-mud boss, Superintendent Tallis, Colbeck intuits, due to the profession and nationality of the victim, that the key to the crime lies in France. So he hops across the channel to where a British industrialist Thomas Brassey’s attempt to build a new railway line for the French government is suffering from a rash of sabotage. Could the murder of his engineer be part of that, or is there some motive in the Frenchman’s personal life?

Colbeck works his way through the case. The plot, characters, and settings in Victorian London and a navvy camp in Second Empire France, work well enough. But the prose, possibly to reflect the period, is stilted, heavy on dialogue and light on atmosphere. So, no work of art but a decent story that simmers along to its neat and tidy conclusion. Easy if unrewarding fare.

North Woods – Daniel Mason

The place, and it’s all about the place, is found first by illicit lovers fleeing their fledgling puritan community in New England. It is remote, to the north (obviously) and in the woods (ditto). It is well off the beaten track then; and remains so for the next 400 years.

A succession of ‘owners’, some legal and others mere squatters, provides the subsequent episodic narrative. Early bloody struggles set the tone but then follows a period of calm as a veteran of the French and Indian wars sets up a commercial apple orchard (though the sweet tasting variety he discovers has sinister origins). His daughters remain after his demise in the War of Independence, and their antics echo down the years.

No more spoilers. Suffice it to say that each episode delights (or horrifies) and adds to the place’s spooky aura that lies heavy over would-be residents.

The style varies by episode reflecting the life and times. Third-person narratives are mixed with some first-person testimony, including newspaper reports, letters, and a psychologist’s case notes. There are even ballads in the voices of the dead daughters making light of unsavoury events.

It is a bit of a mishmash but none the worse for that. A smorgasbord of styles, events, and characters that work pretty well together. The passage of time and effects on the landscape and natural world are particularly well done. The location of the yellow house and its grounds in the north woods is, at the end of the day, the main character.

An unusual book that makes for a rewarding read.

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

August 1944, two months after D-Day, but the Germans hold onto Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. They, and the French inhabitants, brace themselves for the coming Allied bombardment. Eighteen-year-old Werner Pfennig is holed up with his unit in a hotel. Close by, in a seafront apartment block, is sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure LeBlanc, blind and alone.

The perilous hours that follow are interspersed with their respective narratives, beginning in 1934 when Werner is in an orphanage in Germany destined for a working life down a coal mine, and Marie-Laure is coming to terms with her blindness in Paris, where her father is a curator / locksmith at the natural history museum. Even then they have a tenuous connection neither is aware of - Werner repairs a discarded radio and listens in secret to a Frenchman broadcasting scientific lectures; that radio ham lecturer is Marie-Laure’s great uncle in Saint-Malo. That connection will prove crucial ten years later.

Werner, inspired by the broadcasts, develops a precocious talent in radio communication that saves him from the pit but propels him early into Second World War combat. The war affects Marie-Laure too as she flees soon-to-be occupied Paris with the father, ending up in Saint-Malo. Their trajectories converge to dramatic effect, but only after they each experience trials and tribulations, losses and minor victories, which shape these formative years.

The lead characters demand empathy so we root for them. The more minor characters too, are well fleshed out and satisfyingly complex. The toxicity of the Nazi regime is portrayed but not overtly judged; the realities of sightlessness are laid bare but without mawkishness.

Overall, a very good read.