"Barking Up the Right Tree" by Leigh Russell

An audio book.

The author's sold over a million crime fiction novels, so I thought I should read something of hers. This book is described as "cozy crime". I've read a book by Richard Osman which belonged to that genre but this book is cozier. Emily is 24, red-haired, and lives in London with Ben. When she loses her job, he leaves her within a week. A great-aunt who she's hardly met bequeaths her a house in a Wiltshire village as long as Emily looks after her pets. She accepts the offer and moves. The pet is a dog, Poppy. Maud runs the local shop. Toby is the eligible bachelor who looks after his old mother. He's allergic to dogs. Hannah runs the tea-room where Emily begins to work. Hannah and Toby used to go out.The pub landlord is XXX.

Emily soon becomes suspicious of her neighbour Alice, who has a metal fence among her garden. Poppy doesn't like her. Her young daughter suddenly disappeared - allegedly travelling. The great-aunt fell down the stairs 2 months after she got Poppy.

Emily tries to befriend Alice. Alice shows her the letters her daughter sends, and reads them out. They sound generic. Alice would like the stamps for her nephew, but Alice makes an excuse. Pete the postman tells Emily that Alice doesn't receive letters.

She's warned by Alice that Toby has a dark side. A lit firework is put through her letterbox.

Ben suddenly appears after 6 months. After an afternoon of love-making Emily's in love with him again. Hannah thinks that Dan's just after her money. She tells her that Toby likes her. Emily resigns from the tea-room job. She tells Ben about her suspicions. Ben thinks the pub, tea-room and village are rubbish. He warns her that whoever killed her great-aunt might kill her too. Ben accuses great-aunt's 2 sisters (Katherine and Denise) of pushing her down the stairs. He asks for money in exchange for silence. All they'd done wrong is to secretly sub-contract the care of Poppy until Emily took her over. He wants to sell "their" house and the dog.

Except for his looks Ben impresses nobody. She dumps him.

She visits Alice, who locks her in a bunker with her daughter. Alice and her daughter are both mad. After days, Toby visits Emily's house and alerts the police. Emily's found thanks to Poppy. The daughter remains mad. I'm surprised she's released.

Emily seems gullible and silly. Ben is obviously unpleasant and overbearing. Why does Emily think he has "undoubted charm"? The crime (which surely would have attracted national interest and would have had psychological after effects on Emily) is forgotten about as quickly as it happened.

Not a good book.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• crimeandmysteryclub

"The flower arranger" by J. J. Ellis

An aesthetic male flower arranger watches girls and steals flowers.

Holly Bain, a bisexual English woman working in Tokyo as a journalist covering teen culture, wants to cover more serious stories. She plays guitar in a band. Detective Tanackar (American father; brought up by a single mother) finds her skills useful when a 17 y.o. French girl, Marie-Louise disappears. Her father finally admits he's been to hostess bars. A Swedish girl had disappeared earlier. Her body is found in a rubbish tip, maybe drained of blood, with a flower in her mouth. Holly's girlfriend Haruka is a hostess.

The Swedish girl worked for 2 nights in a hostess bar before disappearing, having become friendly with 2 men. The bars may be infiltrated by gangs (Yagasa?). A policeman in Tanacker's team might know more about the club than he should.

Holly's girlfriend Haruka is a hostess. She knows someone who worked in the Swedish girl's hostess bar, and gives Holly info that lets her write a headline story. But Tanacker is angry that she didn't tell him first.

The French girl had asked for a long-term job at one of the schoolgirl-themed bars, which is strange because her father said they were in Japan only for a few days, having won a fashion competition.

There's CCTV footage of a man stealing flowers. He wore sunglasses, like a man seen at a bar. He models himself on Roy Orbison.

The flower arranger has a shrine to his mother, who killed hersef by draining her blood. His father shot himself. When police search his house they find a secret cellar containing the French girl alive.

Holly receives a 3rd cryptic message through the post, this time a death threat. She finds out that he's left for a tropical island to pick an orchid. She follows him though she knows it's a trap, and is choroformed, added to a flower arrangement and bled to get a pale complexion. The police follow, finding his lair while she's still alive. It's protected by snakes. We learn about the flower arranger's past - how his foster mother was killed in a typhoon. He kills himself. Holly is saved. Blane is Tanacker's daughter-substitute - his died young. Tanaker's deputy realises he was the flower arranger's adoptive brother. We learn that Holly is an orphan.

The plot details and coincidences are far-fetched.

"Mightier than the sword" by Jeffrey Archer

An audio book.

October 1964. The Buckingham liner is on its maiden voyage to New York. 3 IRA men are on board. So are the owners, Barringtons. A bomb is in their cabin. They call their security who throw it into the sea just in time. The passengers are told it was a navy night exercise.

The attempt had been paid for by Martinez, who'd tried to take over the shipping company.

The Barrington board meet on the ship. Emma Clifton (nicknamed the Bodacia of Bristol) is the chair (her husband Harry is a novelist). Her brother Giles is a politician. Her sister Grace is an academic, a labour supporter. Her 24 y.o. son Sebastian is voted onto the board. His US girlfriend is Samantha, who plans to do a PhD in London. Jessica, a younger sister of Seb, died a few years before. Bob Bingham's also on the board. He owns a fish-paste firm in Bristol. His wife is Presilla. Their son had been engaged to Jessica.

In New York Harry meets his publisher, Ginsburg. He wants to be active in PEN, helping an imprisoned Russian author. Emma visits the home of cousin Alistair, who she's not seen for 20 years. He's out. They all return to England.

Seb, a deputy at the property section of a Farthings (a bank), realises that his line-manager Sloan is cheating the firm. He tells the bank's boss about it. The boss is sacking Sloan when he has a heart attack. Sloan does nothing to help him. He dies, and Sloan takes over the firm, sacking Seb. Seb puts money before morals so Samantha leaves him.

Harry, who has contacts with the PM's office, goes to Moscow to do a PEN talk, memorises some data about spies, and returns. Harold Wilson is prime-minister.

Lady Virginia, Giles' first wife, convinces Prisilla to divorce Bingham. Alex Fisher is Lady Virginia's enforcer. Seb helps them reconcile.

Giles is 50. His marriage to Gwynneth isn't going well. Their first child died at 3 and she can't have any more. On a Berlin trip as Minister for Foreign affairs Giles sleeps with his interpreter, Karin. She's not Stasi or hired by Fisher, but nevertheless photos are released to the press. Gwynneth leaves him. He resigns as minister but is encouraged to stay as candidate for the forthcoming General Election. Fisher is the Tory candidate. Giles loses by a few votes. He flies to East Berlin to find Karin. At passport control he's asked if he supports Harry's campaign to free a criminal. He says yes, and is refused access.

In 1970 Seb goes to the States in search of Samantha. He sees her daughter and realises she's his daughter. Sam has recently married, though her husband is gravely ill. He secretly donates money to them.

There are attempts by people to take over the board of Farthings Bank and of the Barrington board - insider dealing etc.

Harry learns from the wife of the imprisoned Russian that the only copy of "Uncle Jo" is hidden in plain sight in a Leningrad bookshop. He fetches it but is arrested at Leningrad airport. If he signs a confession that he's an MI5 spy, he'll be released. Instead, he submits to a show trial. To his surprise, the imprisoned author appears as a witness. He says that his book was all lies. Harry pretends to believe him. They're left in the same cell! The Russian dictates the novel to Harry, who has a prefect memory. Harry signs a statement and is released.

Meanwhile, Emma has to defend herself in court against Lady Virginia's accusation of libel/slander. George Fisher is called as a suprise witness. After being exposed, he kills himself. The 2 trials are described in parallel. The novel ends on a cliff-hanger.

Honour and reputation matter to many of the characters. The initial bombing didn't in the end have such a bearing on events.

I didn't realise until I'd nearly completed the book that it was part of a series, a family saga. That explains the treatment of things like Jessica's death, Emma's visit to her cousin, etc.

"Fight Night" by Miriam Toews

An audio book.

Narrator Swiv (female) lives with a pregnant mother who goes to acting rehearsals, and an ailing grandma. They live in Canada? Swiv's been expelled from school. Her father is away. They watch "Call the midwife". Mother and grandma are disinhibited about sex. When they can't tell from the ultrasound scan the baby's gender (the sex organs obscured), Swiv thinks the baby's better off without sex organs. She thinks that adults are busy so they have to look happy and sad at the same time. Swiv wants everyone to be normal. Mother tells Swiv that she should have more friends, or at least one friend. Swiv thinks grandma isn't paying attention because she's too preoccupied with going insane. Suicide and madness are in the family tree.

While Swiv and grandma are on a plane waiting to take off for San Francisco, grandma explains with perfect clarity that Swiv's mother had gone to Albania for 4 months to do a film. Her passport had been taken, she stayed with some of the cast in a lighthouse, the drinking water made her ill, she did her own stunts, and had an affair. The baby she's expecting might be her lover's, which is why Swiv's father left and why her mother's feeling so guilty. In California they visit nephews. We learn that Swiv is about 100 months old (i.e. not yet 9).

Grandma breaks her arm dancing at an old people's home. The return to Canada, go a hospital where grandma goes into acute care. When Swiv's mother visits she goes into labour. Swiv takes the baby to Grandma.

It's full of jokes and funny anecdotes, aided by the cranky old grandma who gets into conversation with anyone. But the California part of the book didn't interest me.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt ( the motifs that are reworked through all her books are largely autobiographical. She draws on her cultural background – growing up in a strict Mennonite community in rural Canada – as well as her family history: both her father and her sister killed themselves after long battles with mental illness ... Elvira shares a name and part of her biography with the author’s own mother; in the novel, she too has lost a husband and a daughter to suicide and escaped a repressive small-town religious community with an authoritarian leader. ... Her narrative takes the form of an extended letter to her unnamed father, who has recently left with no indication of any intention to return. As a framing device it’s not entirely convincing; for long swaths of the story the form appears to be forgotten, so that when the second person suddenly intrudes the effect can be jarring. ... Some of Swiv’s precocity can be explained by the weight of responsibility she carries, though at times she displays a knowingness that doesn’t quite ring true in a nine-year-old and occasionally tips into archness ... In less skilled hands, the emotional double whammy of the novel’s ending could easily come across as trite.)
• Dina Nayeri

“Uneven Ground” by David Thear (Clavering Press, 2021)

Quite a variety of effects, right from the start -

• It begins with "Costa Coffee", a poem that has an "aba cbc ded fef gege" rhyme scheme. There are many non-formal poems too.
• Then there's "Morning", which after some nature observations ends with "daffodils ring out their bells/ of hope and love and sadness too./ It's March and I am missing you.". A familiar trope.
• "Not much love" has a more interesting punch-line. The persona tells us that s/he buried their parents' ashes side by side - might as well, because they'd been married 50 years, though they didn't get on. S/he doesn't visit the graves - "There was never much love" says the poem at the end, meaning presumably that there wasn't much between them and the persona either.
• In "Hollyhocks" the flowers are described as "a legion of rowdy spires", which I like.
• But then there's "Moments", an insight which reveals nothing new to me.

The mix continues through the book. "From the cliff top" is a near-specular. The first-person persona is "Liverpool Street Station" on p.56. My local car park stars in "Trumpington Car Park". There are poems that, without being ambitious, succeed in what they set out to do - "Sycamore", "There will come a tim", etc. I like "Each day". I'm less keen on poems that end with "Oh, please shine on me./ I am February inside and need the sun" (p.29) or "joking about everything/ except the darkness that lies ahead" (p.42). I prefer "Evening sunlight falls asleep/ wrapping the trees in gold" (p.39) as an ending, though it uses symbolism that by this stage in the book is familiar. Anthropomorphic imagery (birds - seagulls in particular; flowers budding, opening petals to the sky) is used by a solitary "I" surrounded by nature to describe moments that can't be captured or recalled in their full richness.

"Seven empty houses" by Samanta Schweblin

An audio book of short stories.

• None of That - A daughter and mother drive around, go to a house (her mother likes doing this) and get stuck in mud. The mother feels faint. The occupier calls for an ambulance. The mother is envious of the big house and takes a fruit bowl. They go home. There'a knock at the door. It's the house-owner, asking for her bowl back. The mother is burying it in the back garden. The daughter suggests that the woman look around for it, the way people should.
• My parents and my children - A divorced man is meeting her remarried ex-wife and her husband with their 2 kids. His naked parents are in the back garden, cavorting. Later, they can't find the 2 children, only a trail of their clothes. The mother calls the police. As the mother and father drive off in the police car the man sees his parents playing rudely with the children upstairs and says nothing.
• It Happens All the Time in this House - The male neighbour comes round every so often to retreive the bag of his dead son's clothes that her wife had thrown over. The narrator (who has trouble with her son's clothes too?) wonders whether the male neighbour's doing the right thing. She gets the neighbour to hang clothes on a tree. When her son arrives, he collects them up.
• Breath from the Depths - Lola wants to die. She's increasingly housebound. She faints sometimes, and forgets what's happened. She's been married 57 years. Their son has died? A new family move into the street. Her husband befriends the boy. She doesn't trust him - she thinks he's stolen her husband's tools and has burgled a take-away. One night she sees him in a ditch at the end of the garden. He goes missing. He's found dead in the ditch. His mother says that had she phoned about him earlier he'd still be alive. Lola sees him at the foot of her bed. Her husband suddenly dies. Lola tells the boy's mother that her son is braking all her mirrors. At the end we learn that the boy and her dead son had the same name.
  Much the longest piece.
• Two Square Feet - A couple are back in Buenos Aires having been in Spain, staying with the husband's mother who paid for the trip. The wife goes out late to get painkillers for her mother-in-law
• An Unlucky Man - While her sister is in hospital with her parents having swallowed bleach, the young girl wanders, looking for underpants. A man helps, who tells her that he can't tell her his name or a woman will kill him. She gets underparents and nothing bad happens but when they return to the hospital the man is attacked by police and the father
• Out - A woman who lives in the same block where her sister has a studio wanders at night just wearing a robe. She meets a man in the lift. He repairs fire escapes - an escapist. He thinks that when he goes home his wife will kill him, though he intends to go home. She wants to tell him something about her sister but never gets round to it.

I didn't concentrate on this audio book as much as I should have. I like the mood of uncertaintly in some pieces, and some scenarios. None seemed especially successful. Maybe "None of that" was my favourite.

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (in It Happens All the Time in This House ... there is no catharsis; the circularity and sense of stagnation is unremitting, the author’s determination to conceal the full reality of what has occurred making for a story that is oddly static. An Unlucky Man is more dramatically successful and, for me, the highlight of the collection.)
• Gabriella Martin (Many motifs (ambulances, fences between homes, boxes of objects, discarded clothing, lost sons, rotisserie chickens, fainting spells, voids) overlap and reappear in different forms throughout the collection. The stories are interconnected not by plotlines or characters (or, at least, not explicitly so), but by images, moods, objects. The most salient undercurrent in the collection, however, is a meditation on the concept of lack.)

"And then she fell" by Allicia Elliott

An audio book.

Alice, 13, lives on a Mohawk Reservation - Six Nations. She fancies Mason. She's babysitting, and has invited him to join her. She wants to lose her virginity like her friends have. But watching Pocahontas, she and the TV start talking together. Pocahontas tells her to not to let Mason in. She does what she's told.

Her gran was a medicine woman, in touch with spirits. Her mother dies. She marries Steve (a white academic who's learning Mohawk) and moves out of the reservation, befriending neighbour Megan. Toronto. Alice has a baby, Dawn, and post-natal depression. She thinks Dawn likes Steve more than her (everybody likes Steve). When Steve introduced her to colleagues, he says she was writing a novel which was a rewriting of a creation story. She thinks Steve misses his colleague's micro-aggressions against her. She talks with trees, with a cockroach. She begins to think that building her life around Steve is a big mistake. Did he marry her just so he could learn about her culture and further his career? Is he gaslighting her?

She sees Mason in a shop. She hides her ring and flirts. She supplied her mother with the drugs she overdosed with. Now she tries drugs and vodka herself.

We jump 2 generations ahead, to her grand-daughter who has followed in her footsteps. We learn that Alice survived her suicide attempt and published her work. It was her grand-daughter who spoke to her from the future via the Pocahontas image, and who saved her from suicide.