AudioBooksReview: Quercus

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Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes

read by Julian Rhind-Tutt

The American-educated son of a wealthy German publisher once crowed proudly to me of the magnificent wide roads and wonderful autobahns the Fuhrer had been responsible for, as we toured the sights of Berlin. But his father’s staff looked away and blankly refused to comment when in passing I mentioned a fascinating BBC radio programme about Hitler’s relatives, whom it was suggested he might have visited in England before the outbreak of the First World War. Hitler was simply not a subject for conversation for ordinary Germans.

Which might go some way to explaining the reception Timur Vermes’s novel Look Who’s Back seems to have had when it was published in German in 2012 under the title Er ist wieder da. Hitler has for so long been taboo in Germany and his writings banned (even though they are so vile that readers hardly need to be protected from what successfully condemns itself). But can it really be that German readers are so ignorant of the facts of the Third Reich that at the end of Look Who’s Back Vermes has to provide potted histories of the main players in the Nazi hierarchy? In the UK there are television channels that provide little more than documentaries on Hitler, Nazism and the Second World War.

So perhaps the German-speaking world was ripe for a satire on the modern world through the simple conceit of Hitler reappearing almost seventy years after his death and continuing with his deluded rants. And there is some humour in the idea that Hitler is taken to be a clever mimic who takes his method acting to the point where no one can question him again as to his true name, age and identity. And as a television and internet ‘comedian’, the Rumpelstiltskin dictator, like a modern-day Thersites, is thus allowed to comment on the present day and interrogate twenty-first century Germany and its immigrant workers, ‘handies’ and computers, modern architecture, fast food, liberated women, uncensored newspapers, non-Gothic typefaces, Americanisms and pooper scoopers.

The translation is excellent and the performance by Julian Rhind-Tutt exemplary. But the whole idea falls limp and flat: the book is simply not very funny and not for that matter particularly satirical. The true irony is that Hitler wouldn’t for a minute suffer the foolish and deluded television performers and producers, especially as we are led to believe that he has not mellowed at all during his absence. Perhaps Vermes is trying to tell us that we have become so distracted by celebrity and trivia that we wouldn’t notice if another rightwing movement became popular again, and that we flatter ourselves at our peril that modern culture is too sophisticated to be hoodwinked once more. Perhaps.

Look Who’s Back remains, when all is said, a cultural oddity, with a nice piece of artwork on its cover.

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Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill

read by Patricia Rodriguez

The short but poignant tale of Baby, aged twelve, being brought up by her father Jules, still in his twenties, in the seedier parts of Montreal, won much acclaim on its publication in 2006. Words such as ‘gritty’, ‘raw’, ‘real’ don’t do justice to the skilful and sensitive voice of this talented writer. And so much more comes across in the powerful reading by Patricia Rodriguez. Influenced, perhaps, by Donna Tartt, Heather O’Neill is a new voice who will undoubtedly go on to even greater things. Her second novel, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, has just appeared in the UK.

Jules is a drug user and little more than a child himself. Baby’s mother, so Jules tells Baby, died when Baby was born. Quite how she died he doesn’t let slip until almost the end of the novel. Most of what he says is wishful thinking. Baby for the most part has to look after herself. She makes friends, but the parents of her friends don’t think she is a suitable companion, and with her father often absent and her own apartment locked and unavailable, Baby is pushed into the clutches of the local pimp, who at least provides shelter and sustenance. Too soon, of course, Baby has to go to work turning tricks, with a succession of punters, most of whom are gripped with self-disgust when they learn just how young she is.

In spite of everything, it is Baby’s resilience, wit and optimism that strike you – the childlike trust that things can only get better, despite the bitter cold of the streets of Montreal and the frosty indifference of Baby’s better-off fellow citizens. At the end of the book, Baby’s future seems just a little brighter as she moves out of the big city to the aunt who, it appears, is one of the few people in the world who want to look after this haunting street smart little girl who has grown up in so many ways and is in reality still just a baby.

Outstanding.

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The Resistance Man by Martin Walker

read by Peter Noble

Rural France might well appear to outsiders and tourists to be something of an idyll, but chief of police Bruno’s life is far from tranquil. The delicious compensations of wonderful food, good wine, faithful canine, fine horses to ride, and a choice of beautiful women can always help matters, but political intrigue, brutal murder and uncompromising ambition appear increasingly less welcome but controlling factors in Bruno’s complicated life.

First there is the (natural) death of an elderly resistance hero and the appearance of some old bank notes that might have come from a famous Second World War train heist, when millions of French Francs disappeared from under the noses of the occupying Germans. Then, the retired former head of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee has his house burgled, losing antiques and wine to thieves who have been targeting empty houses in the region, getting away with furniture and art that is strongly in demand on the other side of the English Channel.

One particular burglary leads to grisly murder, with the victim’s lover, a theatre director, charming Bruno’s friends, despite being the prime suspect. A further burglary, this time involving Jacqueline, a long-term political activist and writer, who is revealing the strength of the French reliance on the USA for their ‘independent’ nuclear defence, brings back old flame Isabelle to St Denis.

There is always a lot going on in Martin Walker’s novels – and tragic revelations regarding Bruno’s deep need to become a father and raise a family to make complete his otherwise rewarding existence make this a most poignant listen – brilliant and compelling.

Definitely one for the road.

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Peter May, Entry Island

Read by Peter Forbes

Peter May is clearly drawn to isolated small communities and inspired by the tensions and drama they provide. Those disappointed that May’s Lewis Trilogy has now been completed will find much in Entry Island to make up for things.

This time a detective by the name of Sime Mackenzie investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman on Entry Island, which is 850 miles from the Canadian mainland in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and which, as its name suggests, was the first stopping point for all the migrants from Ireland and Scotland in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The seemingly open and shut case, in which the victim’s wife, drenched in her husband’s blood, is the only suspect, turns out to be much more complicated than at first sight.

Mackenzie, who was sent from Montreal to bring in the suspect, is of course the only member of the police force to think that all might not be as it seems. Mackenzie’s judgement, however, is clouded by a host of issues. First, his ex-wife Marie-Ange is the crime scene investigator appointed to the case. Then he discovers Marie-Ange has been having an affair with his superior officer and that all his colleagues have known of this for months. Finally, when he meets the suspect, Kirsty Cowell, he has the uncanny feeling that he knows her.

Parallel to the murder investigation May recounts the story of one of Mackenzie’s forebears, taken from a journal written 200 years ago, which tells of the Scottish Highland clearances and the fate of Simon, son of a crofter, and another Kirsty, daughter of a wealthy land-owner, whose life Simon saves when he is only a young boy, but who remains his loyal friend despite the social barriers that divide them. The journal story is a tour de force on its own. Combined with a claustrophobic procedural, an emotionally and physically exhausted insomniac detective painfully conscious of his Scots roots and a series of convoluted twists of plot and circumstance, Entry Island is another masterpiece in the Peter May canon.

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Elly Griffiths, The Outcast Dead

Read by Clare Corbett

Elly Griffiths’ cast of characters are certainly not going to appeal to everyone’s tastes. Ruth Galloway is undeniably eccentric and her domestic arrangements far from conventional, but her circle of friends (including the druid Cathebad and Detective Inspector Harry Nelson) and the rural university where she works provide more than enough material for a somewhat satirical slant on the forensic detective genre that has gripped readers and television commissioning editors so strongly in last ten or fifteen years.

Ruth is a forensic archaeologist and her excavating work quite naturally leads to the discovery of crime scenes from the distant and sometimes not so distant past. Digging in the grounds of Norwich Castle, Ruth uncovers the remains of a body that evidence suggests might well be that of a murderess named Jemima Green, aka ‘Mother Hook’ on account of her claw-like hand, hanged in 1867 for the murder of five children in her care. Soon, much to the delight of the university board, a television documentary team are on the scene.

As this is unfolding, a tantalisingly similar crime, this time in the here and now, is being investigated by the police led by the cynical Harry Nelson, father of Ruth’s daughter Katie. Three children from a family in King's Lynn are found dead, one after the other, and then another child goes missing.

While some of the twists and turns of this likeable yarn are a little slow and the villain is plain to the listener long before she is recognised by anyone in the book, there is a lot to enjoy in the evocative setting (Norfolk and it environs) and the people who inhabit this particular part of England. If you haven’t tried any of Elly Griffiths books before, it is well worth a listen.

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Anna Smith, Screams in the Dark

Read by Sarah Barron

Glasgow is fast becoming the underworld’s capital city, with a growing number of writers setting their stories in this apparent cesspit of crime.

With good reason. Always having had a reputation for hard men, Glasgow is a place where working-class toughness and the deprivation that results in amoral criminality are triumphing over the refinement and civilisation that are, arguably, more the province of Glasgow’s close neighbour and rival Edinburgh. And with immigration slowly integrating equally hard men from, in large part, former authoritarian Eastern Europe, Glasgow is not a particularly nice place to be if you want to stay on the right side of the law but come up against the city’s stinking underbelly.

But Glasgow is a great place to be a crime reporter, especially a woman crime reporter. There is just so much crime to choose from – most of it shocking and venal and dangerous. Anna Smith’s Rosie Gilmour is a great creation, and in this, Rosie’s third outing, Smith has produced a terrific and all too believable narrative. This time Rosie’s dogged pursuit of Bosnian people smugglers and body part merchants is a tense, dramatic and satisfying listen.

If you haven’t met Rosie Gilmour before, don’t hesitate to download Screams in the Dark – a tale that will keep you guessing from start to close.

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It’s All About Treo by Dave Heyhoe (with Damien Lewis)

read by Malcolm Hamilton

Accounts of the reasons for American involvement in Afghanistan, supported by the British and other allies, have varied over the twelve-year course of the conflict. Part of the American ‘war on terror’ following the events of 11 September 2001, the campaign in Afghanistan later morphed into a campaign against the Taliban, a war on the growing of the opium poppy and even an ideological struggle in support of the right of girls and women to have an education. Only when history is written a hundred years hence will the truth emerge.

One thing is certain, however, and that is that warfare has changed fundamentally since German and British forces faced each other across no man’s land in the Great War a century ago. Guerrilla and ‘insurgent’ forces play today by very different rules, and one of their most terrifying weapons is the improvised explosive device, which is responsible for countless injuries and deaths in the twenty-first century theatre of war.

Dave Heyhoe, of Ranger Company, the Royal Irish Regiment, is posted to Afghanistan to help detect the roadside bombs and booby traps that make every soldier’s work immeasurably harder and infinitely more hazardous. Fortunately, he is not alone. Dave’s black labrador Treo, a member of the Arms Explosive Search dog team, is his constant companion, and the star of the book.

It’s All About Treo:Life and War with the World’s Bravest Dog is an absorbing and at times very moving account of the skill and dogged determination of Treo and Dave, as they front foot patrols scanning for explosives and other devices in the notorious Helmand Province. Treo is so successful that soon enemy communications traffic is thick with chatter referring to the ‘Black Dog’, as Treo and Dave become major targets for enemy fire. Snipers train their sights not on troops but on the dog that is scuppering all their dastardly work. Scraps of food and even other dogs are set as distractions and bait. And in the unrelenting heat in the field, man and dog are under enormous pressure: expectations are great and there is no allowance for mistakes.

It’s All About Treo is a great deal more than just another heart-warming tale of ‘one man and his dog’. Here loyalty, proficiency, discipline, training, confidence and single-mindedness all work together to make a team with more sensitivity and focus than any machine could muster. With a few initial points to prove and scores to settle, and more than one tragedy to come to terms with, we learn how, in the end, everyone is impressed by, grateful for and trusting in the outstanding teamwork that has won well-deserved decorations, fulsome praise and much-merited retirement for Dave and the indomitable ‘Black Dog’ that is Treo.

Malcolm Hamilton’s reading brings all the spell-binding drama, tension, joy and sadness of this wonderful story to life. A brilliant account, It’s All About Treo confirms the almost unbelievable bond that is possible in man’s centuries-old relationship with the domesticated descendant of the wolf.

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The Blackhouse by Peter May

read by Steve Worsley

Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy has for good reason drawn praise for its enviable prose – the vivid descriptions, almost palpable atmosphere – and for its psychological and emotional depths. In The Blackhouse, May brings maturity and grandeur to the crime novel that remind us of some of the greatest of Scots storytellers. This is certainly more literature than pulp – full of dark truths that make it at the same time compelling and disturbing. And any avid reader will celebrate the added power brought to the audiobook by the narrator Steve Worsley.

It will be a rare listener who is not drawn in by the setting, the characters, the plot, the denouement. There are two murders with similar MOs – the first in Edinburgh, where former Lewis man police detective Fin Macleod is living, having recently lost his young son in a hit and run accident, a second on the Isle of Lewis, which is why Macleod is sent to investigate. His local knowledge will be invaluable, and it will take his mind off his own bereavement.

But Macleod’s return to where he grew up stirs up more than simply memories of his boyhood. There are more profound revelations, including the existence of a teenaged son, Fionnlagh, born to the girl he fell in love with when they met at primary school and who followed him to the mainland where they began at the university. Fionnlagh, like Fin before him, is set to make the treacherous annual voyage to a far-off rock in the middle of the sea to cull and bring back the gugga seabirds that are still prized as delicacies by the locals. The Blackhouse of the title is the only shelter on this awful place. When Fin made the trip, as a teenager himself, he almost lost his life after slipping on the guano-covered slopes of the island. And it is the long-incubated rivalry, envy and jealousy, having festered all the years since Finn’s distantly recalled accident, that finally reveal themselves in a dramatic climax to the novel. Only this time, Finn’s new-found son is going to pay for what ensued.

A modern classic.

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Alex by Pierre Lemaitre

translated by Frank Wynne

read by David Rintoul

A truly terrifying roller-coaster of a novel, Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex has justly been praised by critics and readers on both sides of La Manche. Inviting comparisons with the books by Larsson and other twenty-first-century European crime writers, this is as far from Simenon as one could imagine. Stark, cold, cruel, brutal, intense, raw, extreme, violent: such adjectives simply do not do justice to the sadism and desolation of this book, brought vividly and unforgettably to life by both the translation by Frank Wynne and the narration of David Rintoul.

At first, one’s curiosity focuses on Alex and the details of her daily routine – what she wears, her interest in wigs, where she eats. She is an innocent victim, and her brutal abduction and imprisonment make difficult listening. She is placed naked in the notorious fillette – a suspended cage in which the prisoner cannot sit, stand or lie down – cold and starved save for dog food, that we soon find out is intended to attract rats that will wait for her to become unconscious before they start to feed on her.

Meanwhile, the French police have very little to go on. They are led by Commandant Camille Verhoeven, whose personal history of having had his own wife abducted and murdered adds poignancy to the drama. All they know is that a girl was snatched off the streets of Paris and forced into the back of a white van. They can do little but speculate and curse. Alex finally identifies her torturer as the father of a former boyfriend, but when he throws himself to his death following a police car chase, we think that her fate is sealed and that no one will be able to find her in the abandoned building on the outskirts of Paris. All our sympathies are with her. But why was she singled out for this bizarre cruelty? Is Alex all she at first seems?

One does not see the twists in this drama coming, and it would be wrong to give too much away. This is a book that must be listened to in suspenseful anticipation so that the shocks make as much impact as they can. And there are plenty of shocks.

This outstanding novel’s ambiguous denouement leaves us long pondering the meaning of evil, ending as it does with the cynical assertion that in this morally bankrupt world ‘what is important is not truth but justice’. You will need a strong stomach, but Alex is a masterpiece of the new gothic that shouldn’t be missed.

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The Lewis Man by Peter May

read by Peter Forbes

The Lewis Man is not to be dismissed simply as ‘crime fiction’, a label often associated with those last-minute grabs from mountainous piles at airport bookshops. The mise en scène of The Lewis Man might read at first like a murder thriller, but it is so much more. A corpse, which could have lain buried for thousands of years like the famous peat men of recent discovery and celebrity, is recovered from a peat bog on the Isle of Lewis, except that a tattoo of Elvis Presley visible on the darkened flesh makes the date of death much more pressing of enquiry, as do his injuries. And when DNA from the remains is matched to some recently taken from all the men on the island during the murder enquiry in the first Lewis novel, The Blackhouse, Former Detective Inspector Fin Macleod is drawn into the drama. It turns out the dead man is related to Tormod Macdonald, father of Fin’s childhood love Marsaili, whose house is overlooked by the ruin Fin is attempting to bring back to life.

Tormod is now an elderly man suffering from dementia, thrown out by his wife and rescued by Marsaili before he is found refuge in a care home. He always claimed to be an only child and, like many in the Islands, was fervently anti-Catholic. But we hear brief remembrances of his boyhood and upbringing in the small moments of lucidity in his deepening dementia; and we learn a different story – tragic, profound and moving – as Fin discovers the painful truth of Tormod’s relationship with the body buried in the peat, and their bitter experience of Scottish Roman Catholicism.

Peter May’s writing in the Lewis novels has a literary quality that makes these books equal to the best authors writing in English in the twenty-first century. And, arguably, his prose is even better in Peter Forbes’ reading, which is superb – sympathetic, dramatic and intense in all the right places: a true tour de force.

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The Deliverance of Evil by Roberto Costantini

translated by N. S. Thompson
read by Saul Reichlin

At just under 22 hours of audio, The Deliverance of Evil is, by any account, a tour de force. Accolades

should go to the translator, N. S. Thompson, and to the reader, Saul Reichlin; both achievements are superlative and should be duly acknowledged.

The Deliverance of Evil is an epic book. Epic in sweep, in scope, in significance. As much literary fiction as genre fiction, this is writing of the highest order, and merits (indeed demands) rereading or revisiting. Some familiarity with Italian is an advantage – a number of the names, ranks, locations can confuse: twists and developments in the plot sometimes come so thick and fast as to bewilder. But the audiobook medium is perfect for rewinding and repeating. The density of the novel contributes to its greatness – and to its appeal. Stick with it: the denouement is masterly.

On the day Italy wins the 1982 World Cup, a beautiful young woman is murdered. Fascist, misogynist detective Commissario Michele Balistreri, the principal character, is too preoccupied and dismissive to investigate at first. It is the first of a string of similar killings. And the crimes – unsolved – live with him as we see him age and mellow, and mature. The story follows Balistreri’s life and the cruel deaths that haunt him, climaxing in 2006, just as Italy are about to be victorious at football once again. Who is it that murders young women and carves a single letter into their flesh? What is the killer trying to say? Can Balistreri ever discover the truth?

Political, relentlessly violent and deeply psychological, this is a book you will savour and recommend. And it is a book to which you will return, to understand better all that it contains.

A prizewinner.

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The Dark Winter by David Mark

read by John Curless

Some genres work better than others in the audiobook medium. Crime is one of the best and we are always glad at AudioBooksReview to discover and encourage new talent. David Mark’s début novel The Dark Winter has justly won pretty much unanimous praise and is soon to be followed up by a second, which we eagerly await.

The Dark Winter has all the right hallmarks of a classic in the making: a solid, believable hero in Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy of Humberside CID – family man with a moral past that sets him apart from his colleagues; a well-trodden beat full of local knowledge honed from the writer’s former career as crime journalist with the Yorkshire Post; a confident series of tense, well-thought-out plot twists filled by characters that come out of the page with the deft mention of just a few traits and idiosyncrasies of personality.

In The Dark Winter, the opening is stark, troubling and full of menace: an elderly fisherman is found murdered at sea. In a Christmas bedecked church, a young girl - the last surviving member of a family slaughtered during the conflict in Sierra Leone - is hacked to death with a machete. A junkie, who fled the burning home where he had set his family alight, is found torched to death in a dilapidated council house. There is a madman dispatching survivors in what appears to be the manner they had escaped death.

Aector McAvoy (no H) of Humberside CID sees more in the string of killings than do his colleagues, who arrest and charge the first suspect to come under the radar. McAvoy, always one to go off on his own hunches, has to dig deeper. It is McAvoy who eventually discovers the truth and, at great personal risk, goes forth, alone, to prevent further mayhem.

Ingenious and disturbing: a truly terrific début.

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The Chessmen by Peter May

read by Peter Forbes

The brooding presence of both landscape and weather fill Peter May’s Lewis Man trilogy, which comes to a commanding close in the final instalment, The Chessmen, available now as a Quercus audiobook.

This is the art of the audiobook at its finest. And reader Peter Forbes is unparalleled in his timing and execution. I can imagine sitting down and reading the book in the time-honoured fashion, but it is with Forbes’s Scots timbre and rhythm that the tale really comes alive. The whole cast of place names, lochs, mountains and coastline are so much more immediate and real when read in the right voice.

The tale itself is full of chance and circumstance and regret and tragedy and dark withering humanity. A tale for winter. Full of sound and fury.

The protagonist, Fin Macleod, is head of security on a privately owned Lewis estate in what must be the northernmost isle off Scotland’s west coast. He is looking into a recent spate of poaching that seems to be taking place on an industrial scale. The landowner ill, his spoiled son who has taken over the running of the estate is quick to make enemies, amongst them Fin’s boyhood friend and saviour Whistler Macaskill, who lives from what he can catch in the forests and in the lakes where he has spent his entire life. He is the carver of the eponymous chessmen – as large as life and replicas of an ancient set discovered at one time on the isle. He is keeper of a secret that bonded a group of the local young people as they grew up at school, at university on the main land, and then when they formed a music group that went on to fame and fortune in exile.

As the book opens, a freak storm diverts a small loch to reveal a crashed light plane – a plane that went down many years before. Inside is what is taken to be the partially preserved body of one of Fin’s and Whistler’s boyhood friends. But is all as it at first seems?

This audiobook simply cannot be recommended highly enough. You are sure not to be disappointed.

Exceptional.

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