"Murder at the Christmas Emporium" by Andreina Cordani

An audio book.

The main time-line is an Xmas eve in the recent past. There are sections from past Xmas-eves to give us the characters' backstories.

Merry (in the 2020s?) is a Greetings Card writer. She wants to be with Ross, especially on Xmas day. She takes her boss's invitation to Verity's (a retro department store) for Xmas Eve. Verity's closed in the 1980s then re-opened. At the entrance she sees Vera's name on the guest list and pretends to be her. Phones are taken on the way in, which angers influencers. Attractive Monty is the owner. Fran is another guest. She's black. She used to be on daytime TV. She got cancer and raised lots of money for charity. She was at Oxford University. She has a secret. Evangeline is a guest too. She went to Oxford University and shared a room with strange Peggy. After a party there, Peggy and Evangeline were with 2 boys, Kit and Peter, in their room. Peggy started asking Kit about the Emporium - his surname was Verity. Evangeline hooked up with the older boy, Peter.

In the Emporium a few of them fall asleep (drugged) and get stuck in the dark. Barbara (Evangeline's assistant), in a rush to catch a plane, escapes. Dean, who's tried to take control, dies in a fall trying to escape. Rudi, the best craftsman, is killed.

Peggy Goodchild was Verity's first toymaker. She came from Jamaica. It's revealed that she was exploited and had a child.

One by one the trapped guests are revealed to have possible grudges against Monty - business-related, love-related etc. Merry is keen to work out why they're all there. Evangelene is hung and killed. We learn that Josie lived/squatted in the shop and that she was in a children's home (her nickname was "knife"). Some of the remaining people think that people might have been working together, Monty the main suspect.

Fran tells Josie and Merry that she had lied about having cancer. A doctor helped her sustain the lie as long as she didn't profit from it.

Rita is Ross's mother. We get her PoV. She was orphaned and went to Oxford. She was Peggy and Margaret before becoming Rita. She married Kit, a womaniser. He died. She was a controller, disliked by Kit's family (the Veritys). Merry told Ross to break free of Rita's influence.

Monty regains consciousness. He says that Rita hired Verity's that night as an Escape Room. She exploited her knowledge of the guests' dynamics to set up some murder opportunities. She was Barbara. She has the same kind of cancer that Fran claimed to have. She has grudges against all the trapped guests. Rita makes herself known to the remaining guests who wonder how Rita's going to kill them. Rita shoots Josie when Josie tries to retrieve a phone. Rita tells Merry to shoot her (otherwise she'll kill Fran). But Merry fears that Ross will never marry her if she kills Rita. Fran overpowers and kills Rita. Nigel/Monty phones the police.

After, we learn that Ross and Merry are together. Actually Fran didn't kill Rita - she dropped the knife and Merry did. Fran takes the blame so that Ross and Merry can be together and because she thinks she deserves to be punished. Josie contacts Merry to say that she saw what happens and intends to blackmail Merry.

I like the complicated plot, the way that the clues first lead to Monty then Rita.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• ladybookdragon (I loved this book because it gave me real Charlie and the Chocolate Factory vibes with Agatha Christie vibes. It was a weird concoction which worked brilliantly together and although it was set in modern day London, at times you could almost say it was set in Victorian times with a bit of Dickens Christmas thrown in as well. Montagu Verity is definitely the Willy Wonka character in this book)
• Kirkus reviews (The problem is that at no time do any of her retrospective thumbnail sketches give readers much reason to wish for the grown-up characters’ survival. ... When bad things happen to good people, justice cries out for an explanation. But when bad things happen to bad people, well…why the hell not? A joyless Yuletide tale offers little to celebrate.)

"I will crash" by Rebecca Watson

An audio book.

The narrator, Rosa is an assistant teacher living with John. She hasn't seen her older brother for 6 years - he used to bully her. When he went out with her friend Alice she felt safer. When she discouraged Alice from going out with her brother, Alice thought it was sibling rivalry. Rosa once wanted him dead. Recently she turned him away when he tried to visit. Her father phones to say that he's died in his car. John asks if he should stay rather than go to give a conference talk on Gertrude Stein who said "what is the point of remembering anything?" He warns her that the shock may bring memories back. She tells him to go, though nearly changes her mind. She talks to Sarah, a friend from school.

An older man chats her up. She tells him her brother's died. He tells her that he's been divorced for a year, that he overworked to earn money to treat his sick son. She briefly contemplates sex with him.

She recalls when she realised she had power over boys. When she saw her rapist in a TV quiz show, she told John. She doesn't know why her mother suddenly left the family. She suddenly turns up on the doorstep. She didn't know how Rosa had suffered. She knew Rosa's brother was living with a girl. We learn that Alice died after Rosa's brother had humiliated her (broadcasting nude pix etc).

She goes to Portsmouth to visit his girlfriend Julia, and asks if he was an aggressive person. Julia says that he said Rosa irritated her and she was aggressive against him. His telling of Alice's plight doesn't match what Rosa knows. Julie is 5 months pregnant. Rosa had come to tell her the truth about her brother, then changes his mind. They discuss the possibility that it was suicide.

30 mins from the end of the audio book we learn about how she's permanently scarred him with a lighter. Maybe she'd suppressed this memory. He used it to get Alice and Julia to think that she, Rosa, was the guilty one. That evening (she was 15) she got drunk for the first time. She was with Alice.

At the end John hasn't yet returned. She thinks about lines drawn. Cordons? Who did the lines protect?

Things I'm not keen on -

• "arms a foil blanket wrapped around me" - would arms really feel like that?
• Too much of the info-dripping isn't justified psychologically. For example, why is the news of Alice's suicide delayed?
• The reviews suggest that the book has typographical trickery. I'm glad I had the audio version.
• Julia doesn't seem overwhelmed by loss. He'd died less than 5 days before.

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (As with any deeply rooted family trauma, it is difficult for those who were not there to fully appreciate the damage that has been done. Neither can we as readers ever be certain. ... Through word-patterning, font-switching, broken lines and poetic cadences, she integrates the raw strangeness of the present moment with the dagger-bright flash of memories that will not be eradicated. Once again, her free-form approach, a dense intermingling of different registers of language, of spoken words and internalised thoughts, allows the reader a uniquely personal experience of the novel’s spaces.)
• Anthony Cummins

"The garden of evening mists" by Tan Twan Eng

An audio book.

The epiphet points out that there's a goddess of memory but not of forgetting. Later in the book somebody points out that we may have forgotten that there was a goddess of forgetting.

The narrator, Teoh Yun Ling, a respected female judge in Malaysia, has just retired earlier than she needed to. She's been told that in the coming year she'll forget a lot. She has bouts when she doesn't understand language. "Memories I had locked away had begun to break free like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep these broken floes drift towards the morning of remembrance". After spending so much of her life wanting to forget, she now wants to remember - "I pull myself from the quicksand of memories". She'd spent 3 years in a Japanese prison camp. She was maimed there (2 fingers cut off for smuggling food from the kichen). Her sister was a whore for the soldiers. Teoh became a translator for the camp leader. She was let out just before everybody else was killed. She'd been an informer.

There's a mix of cultures - Japanese, Chinese, Malay - combined with mock tudor buildings. Mangus came from the South Africa, married to Emily. Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, English and Japanese is spoken.

In her 20s she was a researcher for the War Crimes Trials, trying to find out where her sister was buried. She studied Law at Girton college, Cambridge. Aritomo was a gardener - Japanese. She wanted him to design a garden in memory of her sister. He'd only do the job if she became her apprentice. He'd the palace gardener for Hirohito. He taught her the ancient wisdom of garden design. She became his lover. She's warned that she mght be a target for CT (Chinese Terrorists), having sentenced them in the past. Her servant's brother wants to surrender (he gets a reward for doing so). She helps. The new High Commissioner visits. His security entourage say to Cho that they suspect Magnus of helping (or paying protection money to) the CT. And they don't trust the Aritomo either. They want Teoh to spy for them. Aritomo had already given Mangus a tattoo. He wants to give the narrator a big one, on her back - with a garden theme. Having finished the tattoo he disappeared, leaving a letter to be sent to his son. Aritomo was the last to see the tattoo - no other lovers.

Returning to the mountains after 36 years she sees a heron like the one she saw 40 years ago. She'd like it to be the same one. She wants to restore the garden to the way it was, but there's no plan to follow. Frederick (67) is the house-keeper. Long ago she slept with him. She says she wants to sell off Aritomo's woodcuts. She calls Tatsuji, who's writing a book about Aritomo. She shows him her tattoo, saying she'd like it preserved after her death. He tells her that the Japanese used Malaya to hide treasures (the "Golden Lily" project), and that Aritomo might have been involved with selecting sites etc. She realises that her camp might have been a site.

In a framed story Tatsujia tells how he was Japanese suicide pilot and had to abort because his plane was broken. He met his teacher who wanted to sabotage the plane - were they in love? The pilot's father was a plane designer who killed himself in the pilot's presence, in shame.

The CT raid again, taking Mangus and killing him. Emily dies soon after. Mangus hadn't been paying protection money - the gardener had been, for her sake.

Bats were "trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly. Are all of us the same I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the unspoken moments of our memory?". Fredrick offers to nurse her.

I didn't realise how plotty the book was until later. I enjoyed the book. I didn't like the phrase "light brown in colour". The concentration-like details aren't new, alas.

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (informative, if bland ... The reason I found it impossible to love is the quality of the writing. There is no discernible personality in the dutiful, dull voice of Yun Ling, and non-events stalk us on every page ... The self-conscious dialogue resembles a history lesson collated for the benefit of the western reader, and everything is ponderously "like" something else, so it takes twice as long)
• liketellingthetruth
• maxxesbooktopia (The pacing is not the best part of the novel. I thought it dragged sometimes and some scenes in the novel flew by too quickly. For example, the scenes about the guerrillas went by so quickly that I cannot actually understand the guerrillas intentions and why they did what they did. The scenes that dragged are normally scenes that can be cut out of the novel and it will make no difference in the end)
• goodreads
• an interview, with a sketch of the garden

"To be in the same world" by Peter Kane Dufault (Worple Press, 2007)

He's American, went to Harvard, a non-academic, with poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, etc. Ted Hughes wrote of his work that it's "So fresh and new and itself ... wonderful stuff". I've never heard of him.

He likes physics, in a rather name-droppy way. Titles include "On gravity as a curvature in space-time" and "Un-unified field."

"Acer americanus" (about 6 pages long) has interesting interactions of trees, moon, and self - "Sap is still running sometimes/ as night comes and one's bootprints stiffen/ and overhead among black branches/ the stars bud out"; "'There is only one kind of power,'/ my father said, 'but many kinds of men./ There's only one kind of gravity -/ but there are wings and there are stones.'". The inclusion of mentions of Harding (37th president) is less successful.

"The pony stallion" begins with

In dusty blockhouses of oak- planking too high to leap, too think for their musketry of hooves, the pony stallions trumpet at one another, march and wheel, their tails and manes a-breeze like a massing of flags. They're exactly the same size as rocking horses!

Later the rocking-horse and pony interpretations are played against each other in a way I rather like. The line-breaks puzzle me though. The poem has 4 7-lined stanzas, which don't share a pattern. There's some end-rhyming here - "oak/think"; "breeze/size". There's some syllabics - 8/8/7/8/8/6/6. I don't think there's a method to it.

His "thoughts ...", "Notes on ..." and "Perceptions ..." poems begin rather slowly. For example, "Notes on Nostalgia" starts with "Just now many long for the Past/ as though one could live there. But/ nobody ever lived in a Past./ In the Past maybe they lived,/ but to them it was always Now - / as it is with us - a Now/ more like that of a brook or a cloud/ than a stone's or a tree's, meaning/ they never could hold on to any thing/ or any shape for long, even/ when for their very lives they wanted to ...". It warms up later, but poems like "Scenario" and "The chief writes a speech" never get going.

Other reviews

• Michael Tolkien (Dufault is perhaps one of America’s most important and undervalued writers ... His weighty if not unwieldy book divides into two contrasting sections: the first is a treasury of object lessons from present and retrospective correlated experience of the natural and human worlds; the second is a series of scathing reflections on a corrupt political and financial establishment. Here the well-rooted, hard-bitten pioneer of the first part stalks about on rhetorical stilts. His verse becomes inaccessibly allusive or abstract, longer pieces drag, pithier ones are dry or flat. A problem for me is that the psychology behind what’s criticised is analysed in abstruse verse while particular episodes are presented separately and without clear connection to the defined malaise.)

"Apparitions: a hurricane" by Damian Smythe (Templar Poetry, 2012)

A 9-line poem for each of the years from 1962 (his year of birth) to 2010. Each poem is 3 stanzas of 3 10-syllabled lines, the rhyme scheme being aba/bcb/cac.

I don't get the poems.

"Without you" by Sakia Sarginson

An audio book.

The prelude starts with "It was April when I drowned, a month after my 17th birthday."

Suffolk, July 1984. Faith is thinking about her sister Eva (7 years older than her) who drowned 3 months before (a sailing accident with her father in the boat). Her body hasn't been found. She knows about Selkie legends, and the local legend of a man with webbed feet.

Eva is being held captive by Billy on an island where the army used to do tests. A voice had told him that he'd find a girl and save her. He's awaiting further messages. She daydreams about her house, food and her boyfriend Marco, a Goth musician. There's the usual captive/captor relationship-building.

Her parents are coping - over-polite to each other. We learn how they met, when Max was a trainee solicitor and Clara was auditioning for acting parts having been brought up in Egypt then sent to boarding school after her parents were killed in a bombing. After 4 miscarriages they decided to adopt (unofficially, secretly - from nuns). They live in a 6-bedroom house. They start to employ a live-in au pair, Sophie (French). Faith argues with schoolmates who say bad things about Eva. She befriends a black boy Joe, whose mother is Sandra. They live in a caravan. She begins to believe that Eva's on the island and that Sophie (who's fatherless) fancies her father. She gets 2 boys (one of them Joe) to help her launch a boat to go the island. She can't swim. Joe breaks a limb. Faith's warts disappear?!

Clara is scared that Eva's family will reclaim her. She's dark-skinned. Faith was a surprise, a natural birth. Max wants to move away and start again. Clara finally agrees. She still distrusts Max about whether he'd made Eva wear a life jacket.

Bored Eva decides to learn about Billy. He was a soldier in Northern Island. He killed. His grandad, who he liked, was Eva's grandmother's boyfriend. She informs him that his grandad's dead. She was told by a barman that she was adopted. He tried to rape her. When she and her father were on the boat for the last time she told him that she knew she was adopted.

Faith canoes to the island. Billy finds her and takes her to his hide-out. When he's told that the girls are sisters (and he hears voices) he lets them go. They get back home.

Eva defends Billy. She's interested in meeting her biological family. The barman's found dead. Eva thinks that Billy killed him. There's a big explosion on the island.

It's difficult to be original about the captor-captive relationship. Faith's language doesn't sound like an 10 year-old's. It doesn't even sound like a 10 year-old's thoughts expressed in adult language. Some other uses of language are questionable too -

• "I don't know whom I'm apologising to"
• "the rigid craters of herself relaxing and expanding with relief" - uh?
• "after the rain, the air was complicated" - with smells, but I've seen the phrase and idea used before.

"The Italian secretary" by Caleb Carr (Little, Brown, 2005)

A Sherlock Holmes story.

Holmes and Watson are called to Hollyrood, Edinburgh. There's been 2 recent murders - Sinclair (an architect of historical building) and McKay (a plasterer). In the time of Mary (Queen of Scots), David Rizzio was killed in the same way - multiple stabbing. The train they take is attacked by a Nationalist Scot and a bomb thrown into their carriage. They defuse it and later meet Mycroft who tells them that 9 attempts have been made to kill the Queen, all by young men whose pistols were loaded with wadges of newspaper. One man, Alec Morton, escaped, last seen in Bremen - are the Germans behind the assassination attempts? Mycroft regularly talks to the Queen, who's at Balmoral. He leaves.

They stay at Holyroodhouse, lived in by Lord Francis. There's a skeleton staff which includes Hackett, a butler with a badly fitted glass eye and Robert, a ghillie. They examine McKay's body - so many bone breakages that it's floppy. They find a young girl, a niece of Hackett's, pregnant thanks to Will Sadler (brother of the ghillie). They hear a ghost. The niece says that someone gets money by doing ghost tours for tourists. Holmes and Watson book a place on a tour, finding out that the Sadler brothers organise them.

They discover that Lord Francis and Will run the tours, Robert an unwilling aide. The money they've earned is hidden in the haunted wing, in a mattress. The Nationalist Scot was the Lord in disguise. Mycroft (away with the Lord at Balmoral, where the Queen is), is at risk. Mycroft returns. He and Sherlock conclude that the 2 murders were to do with covering up the tours, and that the assassinations weren't orchestrated - they were copy-cat crimes. Will and the Lord would suspect by now that Sherlock is onto them and would attack. Sherlock has insufficient evidence against them for the murders. They prepare for an attack in the night.

A window's smashed. A crossbow bolt flies in with a note on it. They want their money back. A flaming body launched by a trebuchet hits the house. It's a security guard, his bones smashed by the impact. Police arrive. Perhaps a ghost appears, perhaps in the form of a goshawk. The girl escapes, jumping from a window, caught in a blanket.

Enough plot for a novella. Too many words.

Other reviews

• Tac Anderson
• krauser pua (For the first thirty or so pages it appeared promising as his prose style imitates the vocabulary and verbosity of Conan Doyle’s Watson but then it all starts to fall apart. ... It takes Carr fully three pages to convey the action of walking up a staircase and reaching the Queen’s old room. It should’ve taken one paragraph. This is painfully slow writing made all the worse that it’s utterly boring and none of the added details does anything to add richness to the scene, the characters, or the plot. The only deduction is Holmes recognising the face of a man he meets, a couple of hours after the same man stared right into his face but had a red beard. ... He finds out about the plot because they stumble into a girl who tells them the full story.)
• Colin Greenland (In the crowded field of Holmesian pastiche, Carr's characterisation is outstanding. ... Unfortunately, he's not such an admirable narrator. ... Though Carr's version reproduces superbly the peculiar éclat of Holmes's often absurd but spectacularly correct "deductions", he's a terrible windbag. The mystery isn't much of a mystery, and it's interrupted far too much by explanations of things Doyle could take as read: who Mary Queen of Scots was, for instance.)