"The gone and the forgotten" by Clare Whitfield

An audio book.

Croydon, 1993. Prue, 16, is staying with friend Subo. She doesn't know who her father is. Her gran, who held the family together, has recently died arguing with Prue's mum Caroline, who's in a secure unit and has previously tried suicide. Her aunt Ruth (married 3 years to Archie, from a locally rich family), who lives on a remote Shetland island, tells her she should stay with them a while over the summer, awaiting her exam results, so she does. She's hoping to find out about her father. Robbie, Archie's cranky mum, lives with them.

For a while, Prue and her mum and lived with a man and Hope was born, who her mum loved more than her. Hope was taken and found dead. Prue, 7 at the time, said that she seen Joan Gardner (a local strange women) take Hope, but she's not sure now. Joan had confessed. She learns about a local girl Evie, who went missing at 17, 20 years before. She finds photos and letters about Evie hidden in the house. Archie, an artist, asks Prue to pose. One pose is just like in an Evie photo. He gives her recreational drugs. Archie and Evie had been lovers. He was a suspect. Prue becomes friends with the pub-owner's son James. When they're about to make love Prue changes her mind, telling him (honestly) that she's a virgin. She gets to know Charlie, Evie's brother and local drug dealer (she and James smoke weed).

Evie had been pregnant. Archie knew. Prue's father is her mother's father! He was a charming man. Even after, Ruth didn't hate him [really?]. Prue has sex with James. He's considerate but not exciting. She finds a canvas bag that Evie had went she disappeared. Evie and Archie have sex. Archie announces to the family that he wants to sell up. Her exam results him through - many As. She doesn't want to go back and live with her mother when she's released.

Ruth asks Prue what she actually remember on the day Holly died. Ruth tells her that she'd abandoned Holly in a field that flooded. She helps Charlie's gang by being a getaway driver! She told the gang about the money hidden in Archie's books. They broke in. Prue returns home to find Archie dead and Ruth nearly dead. Ronnie poisoned them and tells Prue that she (Ronnie) has been poisoning her. She tells Prue that she killed Evie because Prue wasn't good enough for Archie. Ronnie poisons herself and dies. A year later Joan is released.

Full of action (suicides, murders, accidents, burglaries, incest, drugs, etc) and unlikely reactions, not least by Prue. What about Subo?

Other reviews

• Adrian Atkinson (It all just seemed designed to shock. I really didn't like this book.)
• Mimi (The rest of the novel I found to be a bit broken up. It didn't have that flow and pull that I think it needed given the mystery at the heart of it. It was certainly an interesting and original story and I wouldn't describe it as predictable but the tone of it fell a bit flat for my taste.)

"Gone Before Goodbye" by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben

An audio book.

Baltimore. Maggie had a highly regarded medical mother. She has a purple heart - she'd worked as an army surgeon. She started a charity along with Trace and Mark (her husband). Now she lives with her sister Sharon, a prodigy. They're poor. Mark, a field surgeon, died on the battlefield. During grief she'd messed up an op and had her medical license revoked. She's offered $10 million by a rich Russian to do secret surgery - and have her malpractise issue resolved. She's flown to Russia to do a face-change for the man and a boob job for his wife Nadia (who has sold a kidney; who had asked for her in particular). Maggie finds on Nadia the same tattoo design as Mark had. Beth's sister's created a grief-bot for her. The bot tells her to escape. She flees in a vintage car, out of range of the comms block, sends a message for help, then crashes. She wakes in a hospital bed. She learns from Charles, FBI, that Mark and Trace had had misgiving about being funded by an immoral Russian (the same one who she operated on) and had tried to rebel. The Russian had threatened them. They'd offered the FBI info on the Russian. The FBI get her to Dubai on the pretext of doing another op. She meets Nadia there. Her tattoo's gone (it was there only to make Maggie curious). Nadia works with Charles who hints Mark might not be dead. Maggie sees Oleg, the rich Russian, stabbed. She's seeking Trace, who was last seen there. Nadia and Trace had met there. Nadia's looking for him and blames Maggie for her disappearance. Maggie flees to Heathrow.

Mark was born to a 35 y.o. mother. His father (Porkchop, a biker) was 17, and looked after him. Porkchop finds out from Barlow (an ex-biker; the go-between for the rich Russian) what's happening. He goes to Heathrow. He and Maggie fly to Bordeaux. Oleg is there (his body double was killed in Dubai) about to have a heart transplant. He insists that she does the op (which involves a device she knows about). Porkchop says he killed Trace, making him denote organ after organ.

It sacrifices believability for speed - a James Bond film without the FX. Did I keep reading? Yes, but only because I had nothing else to listen to.

Other reviews

• Marc Weingarten (a book that taps into our fascination with the follies of the impossibly rich at the same time that it ponders real questions about the ethics of social engineering via medical advances in organ regeneration. ... The book’s plot mechanics hum along with great pace and verve, even if a few of its particulars are too far-fetched to swallow.)
• syllableinthecity (While fans of fast-moving, conspiracy-driven stories might appreciate its momentum, the overcrowded cast and complex plotting detract from overall enjoyment. For this reader, the book was ultimately disappointing, and reaching the final page felt more like relief than reward.)

"Unicorn" by Angela Carter and Rosemary Hill (Profile books, 2015)

Poems by Angela Carter (about 40 pages) with essays by Rosemary Hill (about 50 pages).

I don't see much in the poems (one, a rewrite of a Dunbar poem, got into London Magazine). Promising women writers of those time struggled with their role. Ann Quin suicided at 37, Frances Chadwicke suicided at 27, and several others, Carter included, divorced early. Here are some of Hill's observations -

• she thrived on the marginal and contrary sides of life (p.48)
• not only has Carter's fame been erratic, her femimism is of a very particular sort (p.48)
• Carter, who was not always the most perceptive critic of her contemporaries (p.82)
• the climate in Carter's novels is mostly wintery (p.96)
• the themes that occupy her: types, archetypes, the mythical blonde and woman as an assemblage of parts (p.100)

"Queen's gambit" by Walter Tevis (Widenfeld & Nicolson, 2020)

First published in 1983.

Beth, orphaned at 8, is top of her class. She learns chess from the janitor. She can soon play 5 games simultaneously without boards. She hoards sleeping pills so that she can at least sometimes deeply sleep. Jolene, 12, black, feels her up. Beth's caught stealing pills and is banned from playing chess.

When nearly 13 she's adopted by the Wheatleys. She's not played chess (except in her mind) for years. Jolene's still not adopted. Beth misses her. Beth steals money from classmates so she can enter a tournament. During the tournament she has her first period, she find out that Mr Wheatley has left home, and she wins all her games, beating a state champion and winning $100. Mrs Wheatley (who's on tranquilisers) is happy to lie to further Beth's career.

By the time she's 16 she's fancying some of the players, and flying to events each month or so. At 17 she's joint US Open winner, has $3,000, has learnt how to smoke joints and drink, and has lovelessly lost her virginity. At her first international event in Mexico she sees the Russian world champion, Borgov, losing to him. Mrs Wheatley dies while they're at the event. She wins the US Open so she's invited to play in Moscow. She realises she needs a coach. She sleeps with Benny Watts, US Champion, and learns from him. She plays in Paris, where she loses to Borgov again though she play brilliantly. She buys her house off her father for $7k, leaving $2k in the bank. She goes on a drinking binge. For some reason she thinks Jolene can help. Jolene takes her to a gym. A christian (anti-communist) organisation gives her $4k which she returns - strings attached. Benny rejects her. The government help her. After a 5 month break from chess she goes back to her orphanage for the janitor's funeral. He'd kept press cuttings about her. In Moscow she beats Borgov (and his backroom team). Benny had phoned her suggestions.

The writing's purposeful - you can see the reason for each sentence. I used to enter chess tournaments. The descriptions of them (such as they are - there could have been more observation) ring true. The details of games make sense to me and they add a "reality effect" feel to the text, but they're technobabble to non-players. It avoids chess notation - "Then he picked up the black queen bishop pawn and dropped it on queen's bishop three" could nowadays be "He played c6". In her first event I think she'd find it strange writing down the moves and using the clock. "Someone had said that when computers really learned to play chess and played against each one another, White would always win because of the first move. Like tick-tack-toe" (p.130). But is any of that true?

Other reviews

• cannonballreadoverall character development is pretty thin. I was really drawn in to the plot but often felt disappointed by his two-dimensional characters. ... Tevis re-introduces Jolene to save Beth. This part of the book is just preposterous. It isn’t clear why Jolene should give a damn about Beth since that whole relationship is woefully underdeveloped. Moreover Jolene is a weird combination of stereotype and, as a Pajiban on FB noted, a “magical Black person.” Only a white man could make up the nonsense that happens next, including a Black woman and a white woman having lunch together at a fancy restaurant in Kentucky in the 1960s. It’s like Jim Crow and segregation never existed.

"The Impossible Fortune" by Richard Osman

An audio book, the 5th of a series that I'm familiar with. Elizabeth (ex spy), Joyce, Ibrahim (psychiatrist), and Ron (with the help of Bogdam) try to solve crimes.

Joyce, nearly 80, is pleased that her daughter Joanna has at last married. Her husband Paul's best man Nick owns a company along with Helen. It's worth £350 million, thanks to bitcoin. They'd been thinking of cashing in. Each had part of the code number for the account. Nick finds a bomb under his car and asks Elizabeth (now a widow) for help. Nick disappears. Texts arrive from his phone which don't seem authentic. Helen is blown up. They'd both recently visited Davey, a drugs criminal and investor in their company. Lord Townes is also involved with the company. Helen had phoned Jamie and Jill Usher. Elizabeth and Joyce go to Manchester to interview them.

Danny hits his wife Suzie. She threatens him with a gun. He leaves. They have a son Kendrick. Suzie's father is Ron. Bongan is sleeping with policewoman Donna. Her boss Chris is sleeping with her mother. Connie, now out of prison after a crime committed in a previous book, is training up Tia, a criminal. Ron and Bogdan visit Davey, who talks to them with a gun on the table. Elizabeth visits Lord Townes, who's strapped for money. He says something that they know to be a lie.

Paul (a professor) admits to Joanna that he'd known Holly for years and in his 40s, just before his whirlwind romance with Pippa, he'd been back with Holly for a year or so. Tia's crime goes wrong. Connie asks Ibrahim to take her in. Kendrick and his uncle Jason are shot at. They escape to Ron. Kendrick ends up at Ibrahim. Elizabeth realises that the Ushers' phone number was part of the code. Kendrick realises that Nick's texts were a sort of acrostic - the other part of the code. Ron and Connie go to the compound where the bitcoin info is in a vault. After getting the info, they disappear.

Pippa finds out that Holly and Davie were seen together at the compound. The Lord had visited too.

Davey says that the bitcoin info was bogus - the info in the vault was worthless. Holly was blown up by the bomb intended for Nick. Danny threatens Ron with a gun, demanding the bitcoin info from him, but Ron had set a trap and the police arrest Danny. Elizabeth gets Tia a job. The lord kills himself. Nick is still in hiding, not knowing what's happened, waiting for Elizabeth to find him.

I much prefer Joyce's sections - funny, sad, flashes of insight.

Other reviews

• Jen Med (by expanding the story to include asides about Ron’s family and Connie’s ill advised attempts at becoming a mentor to a young woman who has had her own brush or two with the law, as well as a really enhanced part for Joanna in this story, the action moves well beyond the TMC’s normal remit)
• damppebbles
• 1girl2manybooks (This is not my favourite instalment of this series)
• thewallflowerdigest (Everything felt half-baked, and the story lacked heart. There was no emotional core to it. The mystery was lacklustre and easily predicted.)

"Forgive me" by Susan Lewis

An audio book.

Sections about Archie's letter alternative with the main timeline.

Archie, 19, is writing a letter to "you" for Dan, who's about 40. "you", because of a crime commited by Archie, might be unable to read. Archie started delivering drugs when he was 10 and went on to deliver guns. His mother's an unreliable druggie, in and out of prison. Archie doesn't want to write about his mother and his handler BJ.

Claudia's late husband Joel died when their daughter was 11. She remarried rich, controlling Marcus. Now, 5 years later, Marcus has been sentenced to at least 18 months in jail for insider trading. Claudia and Jasmine, with the help of Claudia's mother Marcie, 64, have run off and changed their names, fearing Marcus. They've taken an attache case belong to him. They have at least £3m. They settle in Kesterley by the sea. Only after weeks do they contact the police - their missing persons case has aroused media interest.

Andi (45, female) lives with Graham in Kesterley. They do up properties. Friend Dan's wife Ellen died 5 years before. Liane Delany (about to marry Tom) is Andi's friend. When Andi sees Claudia's interior designer work, she's impressed. Andi wants to start a restorative justice scheme (where criminals contact their victims) with Dan. They get funding from a local businessman.

Marcie has a boyfriend, Henry, who used to own the law firm that Dan took over. Dan and Claudia are becoming friends. Abby, Lianne's daughter, is becoming violin-playing Jasmine's best friend. Andi works out that Claudia, Marcie and Jasmine are the missing people who had been in the news. Claudia et al move into a big house. Archie's paid to set it alight. He didn't know that Marcie was inside. [It's here that Archie's PoV and the main timeline sychronise.]

There's a long section about Marcie's burn treatment. Archie's mother goes to the police about Archie's involvement, thinking that he'd be safer in prison. BJ is Archie's uncle! Archie is encouraged to say that he delivered drugs to Marcus. Marcie finds Archie's letters useful and wants a meeting. Claudia is against it, angry about it, then gives in.

Marcie speaks up for Archie in court. He gets a suspended sentence and lots of letters from women - he's cute.

Marcus offers Claudio a divorce. Henry and Marcie become a couple. Dan and Claudia become a couple. Marcus is arrested. Archie, who's turned his life around, offers to testify. He writes to Marcie that "Getting to know you is the best thing that's ever happened to me."

Some of Archie's diction is surprising - e.g. he writes "I've already touched on [that topic]"

Other reviews

• tealeavesandreads (Having worked on a Restorative Justice programme myself in the past, there were a few points within this book that made me cringe. Firstly, Dan seeing someone he knew in the pub and disclosing to Claudia that it was a person on the Restorative Justice programme… Secondly, Maria’s portrayal is a little unfair. Yes she has a learning difficulty or disability – from the way she is described. However misspelling words when she speaks to highlight a speech impediment and difficulty with words is not necessary. You can portray someone’s dialect or way of talking quite easily with a few descriptive words after their speech marks have closed and with a brief background of the character when we first meet them. I’m sure other characters in the book would have had different accents but the Author did not choose to misspell words to indicate their speech. ... I would have liked to see the serious theme of forgiveness further explored when it came to Claudia and her daughter)

"Things like this" by Dave Alcock (Arroyo Seco Press, 2026)

37 Flash pieces, all of which have been previously published from 2017 onwards in the "Journal of Radical Wonder", "MacQueen's Quinterly", "The Dribble Drabble Review", etc.

I read it in one sitting. Even just flicking through, the variety is evident: "Mortician" is laid out like a poem - 24 lines with at most 4 words per line; "Sun squares" is a 3 page prose piece, conventionally laid out. Most of the pieces have something of interest - sometimes the characters' struggles and realisations, sometimes a phrase (e.g. a flock of lorikeets "flushes through the treetops like a psychedelic wind"). There's no whiff of gimmickry or workshop exercises. It's an enjoyable read. I've a slight preference for the shorter pieces.

There are leit-motifs giving the book coherence, though I wondered whether the effect of some pieces was diminished by being beside stories which shared details and tropes. Unsure whether I was being objective about this, I did some counting -

• Light effects - "sparks of the bonfire" (p.1); "sloping column of light" (p.4); "Cones of streetlight" (p.8); "beams of his headlamps" (p.15); "Shafts of yellow light" (p.19); "A ray of light" (p.57); "a sunbeam ... broke on a wind wave into a galaxy of stars" (p.57); "a yellow shaft of light" (p.57)
• Cars - p.8, p.14, p.27, p.33, p.42 (Some car-parks and "traffic" too - hardly a mention of public transport)
• Hands - p.1, p.17, p.23, p.35, p.38, p.41, p.49, p.57. (some fingers and thumbs too)

None of that's out of the ordinary - when one reads a book non-stop, one is bound to notice such preferences. I'm less sanguine about the recurrent tropes. For example, there's a lot of staring into the distance, especially towards the end of stories (symbolically transcending the story, looking to the future) -

• "John looked through the window" (p.5, penultimate paragraph)
• "He looked through the windscreen" (p.9, final paragraph)
• "Her father looked out at the garden" (p.11)
• "Pete kept staring through the window" (p.15, final paragraph)
• "Richard ... turned to look again out to sea" (p.19)
• "Richard blinked and looked out at the sea" (p.21, final paragraph)
• "He turned his head and looked beyond the car park into the near distance" (p.25, final paragraph)
• "looked at the sea" (p.33)
• "She looked at the skyline" (p.34, final paragraph)
• "he would look down at the lights of the pit" (p.43)
• "He looked up from the page ... into the darkness downstairs" (p.48)
• "looked out across the field" (p.50)
• "looked through the trees to the wide brown river" (p.57)

Even if there's no staring at the end, there's sometimes a hint of distance -

• p.18 ends with "launch him skyward, on a one-way journey from the world"
• the last sentence on p.39 includes "distance"
• on p.51 the penultimate sentence include "distance" and the penultimate paragraph includes "distant yellow field"

The sea, the horizon, darkness and fields play the role that stars and the moon might in other books.

Another recurrent (though less so) concept is the idea of background movement/noises repeatedly punctuating the foreground dialogue/action. p.11 has buses and motorbikes. Elsewhere bicycles and wipers provide the contrast.

The abiding, endearing theme is parenthood, passing knowledge on -

• The first piece ends with "your words of guidance I seem always to forget"
• The last story ends with "he took the boy's hand and they set out again along the path"

Father and young son is the most common pairing, the father trying to do his best - p.4, p.8, p.13. On p.8 a father teaches a son about hiding emotions. On p.11 a father teaches a daughter about white lies. p.23 has a father with son (4) and daughter (7). On p.36 the son is at least 21. p.39 has mother and son. p.56 has parents and children. The fathers/husbands aren't perfect - they have affairs or they separate. "Transients" has a female PoV - I'd have welcomed more.

p.s. "Succour" is mentioned in the Acknowledgements but isn't in the book.