"The Glass Room" by Ann Cleeves

Vera, a single detective, her parents dead, lives next to Jack and Joanne. Joanne hasn't been taking her meds and disappears. She's found at The Writers House (where residential courses are run). There's a murder of Tony Ferdinand, a guest speaker and influential critic, and Joanne is found holding the knife. She claims she has just picked it up. Then the house's owner Miranda is found dead by Nina, who's on the course. Nina's unread story has some details from the murder. Alex (in his twenties) is Miranda's son. They've been living there 15 years.

Ferdinand (lecturer) and Miranda (librarian) had been at St Ursula's college at the same time. Miranda's novel had flopped until Ferdinand praised it. Then it was televised.

Joe, married to Sal, is worried that he's neglecting the kids when working for Vera. He begins to fancy Nina, a writer. Joanna had tried to blackmail her ex-husband, an MP. Miranda's cat is killed, left in chapel like a sacrifice Nina's room is broken into. Dried apricots are left.

Publisher Chrissie decides to publish a book with pieces by Writers House people, hoping to raise money to keep the place going. The launch is at the house. After the launch finishes, the killer falls into a trap (?) attacking Nina. It's the retired local policeman. After his divorce from Margaret, Mark Winterton, didn't see enough of his daughter Lucy. She wanted to be a writer. At university she'd tried drugs. She had done a course at the Writers House. When Ferdinand was teaching there her work was savagely critiqued. She killed herself. Winterton did literature evening classes. When he heard that Ferdinand would be at the Writers House again, he decided to take revenge. He'd got ideas from Shakespeare's revenge plays.

Joanna wanted a baby and couldn't the treatment, hence the pleading letter to her ex.

Other reviews

• Mushy Cloud (I found it extremely irritating that the character of Vera Stanhope was constantly being described and fleshed out in this book. I suspect it’s because the earlier stories have been made for TV now and this is the first book to be published since the viewing public have been introduced to the stories, so the author is redefining Vera for those people ... I was let down by the ending a little too. It was very clumsy and very clunky and the revelation of the murderer was completely out of the blue. There were no red herrings along the way and there were no clues to his identity)
• rachelreadsbooks (My major issue with the books is the unrelenting fatphobic comments about Vera. Nearly every time she’s mentioned we are told she is fat. We get it! This is book five! It is really at the point where it seems like sloppy writing and unbelievable. ... I did feel like the solution here was one that was difficult to guess since we weren’t told much backstory for some of the characters. )

"What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

In 2008, after a bang on the head at the gym, Alice, 39, is taken to hospital. She thinks she's pregnant with her first child. The doctor points out her Caesarian scar. Her last 10 years have disappeared.

Some chapters are Alice's. Some chapters are her older sister Elizabeth's homework for Dr Hodges (her therapist). Some chapters are old friend Franny's blog posts and the resulting comments (Franny, 75, lived next door to Alice's mother until her mother moved away).

From Elizabeth, married to Ben, we learn that Alice has 3 children and that her husband Nick Love walked out 6 months before. There's a custody battle. Alice recalls many moments from 10 or so years ago as she tries to make sense of who she's become. She learns how she reacted the first time to what she's re-learning now. She feels like an imposter in her own life. Alice is shocked to find out that her mother Barbara has married Roger, Nick's father. Elizabeth has tried expensively to have children. She and Ben disagree about adoption.

Alice returns home. It's the sort of house she's always wanted. She looks around for clues about herself and her children (who are with Nick's parents). Franny visits. Even she doesn't know why the divorce is happening. Alice suspects that it might be something to do with "Gina". Alice is hosting a party for kindergarten parents that night. The head is who she's been dating for a month, apparently. Have they had sex?

Gina was Alice's best friend, making Elizabeth and Nick envious. Gina also had IVF children. She didn't have an affair with Nick. She died in a car accident that Alice and Madison (a daughter) witnessed.

When Nick returns the kids he seems to be expecting hostility but Alice is kind. She finds the new Nick irritating at times. Had she been right to separate? Had they married when they were too young? She's organised a world record attempt to bake the world's biggest Meringue pie using Gina's recipe.

Madison is suspended for bullying. Before, Nick had left Alice to deal with such issues. Now she insists that Nick is involved.

Her memories return. We're rushed through them. Things make sense. Elizabeth is tense about being pregnant - months of anxiety ahead. Franny meets a man.

In the epilogue 10 years later we find out how the kids turned out. Nick and Alice are together.

I like the idea of how Alice needs to recalculate her decisions, how she had to work out how she'd changed from who she was to who she is, how she makes use of having another chance

Other reviews

• thebookbag (Alice soon learns that who she thinks she is, is at odds with the woman she appears to have evolved into, someone she has little in common with and for that matter doesn't even like very much. ... I'll admit at times I was a bit too eager to second guess where the story was going as I figured this type of novel would be fairly predictable, so extra points go to Liane Moriarty for genuinely surprising me)

"The labyrinth house murders" by Yukito Ayatsuji

An audio book.

Shimada receives a book. It says it's based on true events that the police never resolved. Names have been changed. He was a respected whodunnit writer. He'd seen fashions come and go. He was a slow writer, not a best-selling one. He'd always wanted to do a murder. He'd moved from Tokyo into a strange labyrinthine house which is mostly underground. Rooms are named after mythical characters (there are Cleudo associations too). Previous houses by the same architect have been sites of crimes.

He invites 8 people to his 60th birthday party on 1st April, 1988 - his editor Otiyama and his pregnant wife Keyko (a shy ex doctor), a priest's son Shimada Kiyoshi (whose brother is a detective), a critic and 4 authors (one a pretty woman who'd early promise had faded, who'd been briefly married to one of the other authors). On that morning he kills himself (he was sick anyway). The guests are shown his body. In a recorded message he says he's leaving half his money to run a yearly competition, and half to the writer of the best 50k piece written in 5 days by one of the authors, judged by the editor, the priest's son and the critic. They mustn't leave the house, and their stories must be based on the house and their own demise.

The solvers are aware of story conventions. They know that in real life the obvious options (rather than the ingenious ones) are often true. People are murdered one by one. The killer might be trying to impress by using allusions to famous stories. The stories on the authors' word processors match events - why? The female author, realising this, doesn't start writing.

One story involves replacing the victim's head with a bull's head. Another's called "A year for poison". Someone's stabbed in the back - "The Ghost in the glass". "Killing Wings" might be the female author's piece. Each is a mini whodunnit. There'a locked room mystery in a locked-house mystery. The titles are a word-puzzle leading to the house owner. He wasn't really dead. The remaining people track him down to a room in tunnels beneath the house. He's dead. In a will he leaves all his money to his heir.

At the end Shimada meets the book's author who's at pains to show that he was playing by the rules of the genre in its Golden Age (Christie etc). The critic was in fact female. She'd had a child by the house-owner. She was the killer. In the story there was blood but nobody at the time was wounded or had had a nose-bleed. It was her menstrual blood (the only part of the plot that I'd worked out).

The are multiple stories within stories and twists - I had trouble coping with this audio version (the book version has a map, which might have helped a little). It's easier to admire the book than whole-heartedly enjoy it.

Other reviews

• shereadsnovels
• ahsweetmystery
• Vicki Weisfeld (Those classic rules also suggest a story should emphasise plot and not get bogged down with lengthy descriptions or character analyses.)
• theinvisibleevent

"The feral detective" by Jonathan Lethem

An audio book.

Phoebe (an only child of NY shrinks - one child too many) goes to LA. We're told that there's a detective in this story, and it's not her. We're told there's a missing person in the story that might be her. She's looking for Arabella, the 18 y.o. lost daughter of a friend, Roselyn. She meet Hiest, a detective in his 50s who has a cowboy style. He finds people. He has an opossum and a young girl in his office. She offers to accompany him on his investigations. She wants sex, ending up with Heist. Arabella seems to have used the name "Phoebe". Heist doesn't want Phoebe to be tracable, wanting her to hide her car and not use her credit card. Up in the mountains they find a ritually murdered girl - not Arabella. The mountain people, off grid, are his kin. He was the first born there. There are "rabbit" people and "bears". He spent time in each then got into foster care and went to college. Now the bears have a new leader - Solitary Love. There's a fight to the death between Heist and Solitary Love. Heist wins, gruesomely. Phoebe finds Arabella in the audience. She's happy to be taken home.

Phoebe returns back to the wild lands to find Heist - he's wounded and needs help. She gets stuck on a Ferris wheel, escapes, and drives away with Heist to a hotel, tidying him up. She has sex with him, cries. She thinks they might be done for murder. By chance, they meet her friend Stephanie and her artist friend Wild Edge. She shows off about her now exciting life.

There are literary allusions - fair enough because she worked at a literary magazine for a while.

“In the lily room” by Erica Hesketh (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from “And other poems”, “The North”, “Magma”, etc., mostly about the trials of first-time motherhood. The earlier poems are packed with imagery. The fragmentary “Birth notes” ends with “Tree frog in my lap,/ wet limbs folded, preparing/ to draw first breath … /// A slick coating for vernix./ Snow melting before a frost”. The more coherent “Placenta” has “everything you need to build a world,/ and all without a drop of blood” and “nine months from cyst to city”. I like "Pupae" too.

After the birth, social pressure and the long lists of advice put strain on the narrator. On p.44, "Ball python wife" begins with "It's happening again". She feels her skin turning to scales, her eyes becoming lidless and milky. Near the end "I want to tell you I am scared/ but my tongue has split open".

By Xmas, things are worse. "And peace to men on earth" ends with "O glitter bauble family/ in secret overcast,/ then bright eyes sing to ravaged was/ and weeks to later first".

"Scenes from our bed" comprises 6 near-haiku, from the mundane "The rumbling trains./ Our slumbering neighbourhood/ underneath a mackerel sky" to the good "Rain on our window./ Rain on our baby's window/ through the monitor".

"The body remembers" ends with "but the body remembers/ that early autumn morning// red cloud in the bowl// never wanting anything more in your whole useless life/ brow pressed against cold tile".

"Live action role-play" includes "At the front door, the rickshaw driver and the kangaroo/ flip a coin to see who gets the morning shift./ ... Where the herbalist was sitting there is now/ a four-poster bed. Solidarity, says the cow from her stall." The cow and some other themes link the fragmentary stanzas.

"Boat" is a sestina.

"In the lily room" (longlisted in the 2023 NPC) is 2 pages of couplets - "Lilies are to living/ as rocks are to raccoons. Rock on!// ... We pick up the grains of rice one by one, like astronauts".

By p.75 we've reached "Last feed". On p.76 "we'll tell tell stories in bed,/ where all of the past counts as yesterday". There's been little mention of the father.

I like the variety of approaches I soon came to trust the poet even when I didn't understand everything. Sometimes there's a clear narrative. When there's obscurity it's sometimes radical, sometimes solvable. Fragmentation can be on various scales - word, sentence, stanza.

The Notes are useful. I needed to be told that "Birth notes" is a 36-verse kasen renga chain with seasonal words in each verse and verses at specific points that refer to the moon or flowers.

The graphics do little for me.

"The Carhullan Army" by Sarah Hall (Faber and Faber, 2007)

In Rith, near the Lake District, there are marshall law conditions - after a recession, the Forward Party and wars, now the Authority rules. The main character ("Sister") leaves her husband Andrew (who she doesn't like any more - they met at college. He used to be rebellious, but he's given up) in the night to head for Carhullan and Jackie Nixon. There's a travel ban. She's been forced into birth control.

She's been tense because she's been hiding her dead father's rifle. She's carrying it now through the rain.

At Carhullan there's a sort of women's collective that started before the troubles. It's the highest farm in the country. It was rumoured to be a cult or a den of witches/lesbians. When she nears it she's taken prisoner, kept in isolation for 3 days. Gradually she integrates. She has an arm in a sling and she has her coil taken out. She's warned about illnesses and told that she'll have to eat meat. She realises that her old life is over. There are 64 of them, including a baby. Veronique, Jackie's partner (they met at Cambridge as pgrads), died 3 years before. She's told that "London's finished". She comesto realise that there are fewer victims in the group than she thought, and more misfits.

Sons leave when they reach puberty. Some men (including the husband of one of the women) live in a nearby hamlet. She visits, with a few of the women. Some have sex with the men. She gets excited and has sex with Shruti, one of the collective. They continue having sneaky sex.

Jackie organises security. There are a mock raids. We learn 3/4 into the novel that Veronique had cancer, refused to go to a hospital, and ended up in so much pain that she asked Jackie to shoot her. She did.

The king dies. Jackie hears that there'll be no successor and that within 18 months, all free land (including theirs) will be repossessed. The men move closer. Fighters (including the narrator but not Shruti) are trained up. The narrator and Shruti become "just friends". She spends the odd night with one of the men. Jackie secretly gives her Veronique's necklace.

After 1.5 years she returns to Rith with a little army. They plan to conquer the Authority'd castle HQ and win over the population. Carhullan had been evacuated, the people sneaked back into villages. The married woman there had never believed Jackie's news, and told the narrator that Jackie had been grooming her. The woman and her husband try to escape in the night. Jackie shoots them. Then there's "[Data Lost]". The final page or so is a statement saying that they held the town for 53 days before they were captured. Jackie died. They destroyed all official records for the North. "You will not find out who am I .... I am second in council to the Carhullen Army"

The chapters are subtitled "FILE ONE" etc, from a penal archive. 2 of them are partial or corrupted.

Other reviews

• Richard Lea
• shigekuni (A book meant and conceived to be a popular read, easy on the brain, presenting no hurdles, innovations or critical difficulties. And yet, there’s a spark of originality in it, of careful thought. It is this spark that makes it worth reading. ... Penrith which means “Red Hill” or rather, “Hill Red”, is shortened to just “Rith” ... The Carhullan Army contains a few sex scenes, which are almost all of them risible and cheesy instead of erotic and involving. The same applies to the book’s depictions of Carhullan’s revolutionary leader and her ideology. It is as if Hall decided that all the worst implications about femininity and the images and contexts of it in male-dominated prose were all correct and worth emulating and reproducing. The embrace of cheap clingy stereotype is the single worst part of the book and I can personally understand every reader who broke off reading the book after the first or second of these scenes, although it is certainly worth persevering. ... Even the ‘partially recovered’ chapters turn out to be a trick without real narrative consequences. Flashbacks help fill in all the necessary gaps, and what we don’t know, we don’t want or care to know. The effect is disappointing, yes, and deeply puzzling: why would the writer hint at complexities she clearly has never really attempted to include in the book? )

"The In Crowd" by Charlotte Vassell

An audio book.

Harriet, newly engaged to Indigo, doesn't want her old friend Calli (a hat-maker) to be bridesmaid because she's too pretty. Arthur, an important (gay) MP, is at her party. He doesn't get on with her father, Peter. Her mother's from a rich family.

A woman's corpse is found in the Thames - Lynn, an old lady. An alcoholic?

Caius, a policeman (34, politics degree, mixed race, a year at the Sorbonne) is stood up at a date at an alternative theatre event. The're performing "How to beer Ernest" where some of the cast are very drunk. Calli sits beside him. A man dies in the audience. He's Martin, an amateur sleuth from Cornwall who's interested in a cold case about a missing schoolgirl Eliza. One of the cast was in her class.

Arthur tells Caius that Lynn used to work at a place where her boss Robert stole the pension fund and the 2 of them went to Brazil. He wants the case investigated. Caius discovers that Peter worked for the company then.

Cali had been hoping to marry Max. Caius and Cali sleep together on their first date. She resigns from help at Harriet's wedding. Peter is her landlord. Rupert, a writer (rich cousin of Arther) starts chasing Cali.

Peter's a self-made man, having built up a fashion firm. His wife Jane might be the brains of the couple. Were they involved with the pension-fund theft? Did they kill Lynn?

Cali's dad left when she was 8. She's known Peter since about then.

The police learn from the school that the fees of Harriet and Cali were paid by Peter, and they both left a year before the girl went missing. There's a fight at Jane and Peter's house - Peter gets concussion. Cali distrusts Caius, thinking he deliberately met her and knew about her connection to the cases. Cali is Peter's daughter. Harriet isn't Peter's daughter but Robert's

Cali tries to have sex with Rupert on the bounce but he can't perform.

Henry (the 21 y.o. son of the headmistress at the time of the girl's disappearance) has been sought for questioning for a while [often a sign that they're the guilty character]. The police track him down to a remote house. Eliza is his wife. They have 5 unregistered children. He'd groomed girls at school and had imprisoned her.

Lynn had suicided. Caius is related to Arthur!

Other reviews

• Jen med