"Dark is the grave" by T.G. Reid

An audio book set in/near Glasgow.

Prologue: Hazel Garvey is tied up. She recalls a pub, Fiona's birthday party. She's buried alive.

DCI Duncan Bone suffered brain damage in the Peek-a-boo case - the main suspect John Mickeljohn caused an explosion killing himself and injuring Bone. His wife Alice and son Michael have left him because of behaviour issues - PTSD. He's on sick leave.

He's sent a memory stick with a video on it showing a copy-cat scene from the Peek-a-boo case, with details never made public. The woman on the video is identified as Hazel Garvey - a police officer, wife of McLean, the state prosecutor. She might still be alive. Bone's boss wants him to lead the search. He starts work. The location in the video is identified. They dig there and find Garvey's body.

Garvey had talked to a friend about problems in her marriage. Her husband is cross rather than sad. He has a mistress and a child. He accuses Bone of unprofessionalism. He's investigated by Tenison. He gets angry.

A man with records is strangled. Turns out he's Harper, a policeman with something to hide. Bone's framed (video evidence) and suspended. He tells Alice to send Michael away to her mother. He suspects Tenison. He searches her house, works out where a missing policeman is being kept, saves him. Tenison drives away. He follows her to his ex's mother's farm. Tenison is holding his ex captive. His wife escapes.

Tenison was Mickeljohn's girlfriend while he was in jail. She wanted to make Bone pay for Mickeljohn's death. She had access to police records, and had army training.

It's all too linear for me. Too little use is made of the secondary characters.

Other reviews

• betweenthelines (My pet peeve. Non speech based dialogue tags such as sneered and smirked and especially those that are equivalent to animal sounds such as snarled and barked. They always pull me right out of a story and make the dialogue and speaker seem unnatural and forced. Other than that the plot, although gruesome in parts, was good. I didn’t have the slightest idea of the perpetrator until well into the story which is always a bonus. There’s a diverse group of characters, both in Bone’s team and generally—most likeable, others not so much, so a good mix. And I always enjoy short chapters when they build tension and suspense.)

"the perfect match" by Dandy Smith

An audio book.

Zara, 28, has blood on her hands. There's a body in the morgue. She'll be asked questions.

We go back a few months. She's known Luke since they were 3, and lost her virginity with him at 16. He's a travel writer. She wants to settle down. His brother died a few years before. Zara's mother is a depressed drinker. She never married Zara's father. A university lecturer, he left to happily marry and have a child Polly. Zara lives with promiscuous Ivy whose grandfather disinherited her and whose mother died young.

Zara gets on well with Henry though he's 40 (it's Ivy who's into older, usually married, men). She discovers that he's rich. She's called to help her mother when she's drunk too much. He comes too and doesn't mind. Ivy gets inheritance money after all - a mansion. Zara and Ivy move in. They have a party. Henry arrives and Zara takes him upstairs - they've known each other for 3 months and haven't slept together yet. Zara makes sure that Ivy notices. She receives an anonymous e-mail warning about him.

Zara likes her half-sister's little daughter, Bonny. Ivy doesn't like Henry. An intruder enters their house. He's known to Ivy but they're no longer friends. Zara moves in with Henry.

Henry tells Zara that he thinks Ivy fancies her. He pays for Zara's mother to go to a distant clinic. During a party at Henry's Ivy argues with a man, and goes upstairs with him. He's found dead on the ground (but this isn't the death mentioned at the start). He'd known that Ivy's mother wasn't her real mother, which would have stopped her getting the inheritance money. He'd been the intruder. Henry's security cameras catch the death. Ivy's biological mother appears on the scene. Ivy tells Zara that Henry once raped her. Henry's friend Jonti uses a date-rape drug on her with Henry's permission. A threesome begins. She's saved. She wakes, goes to Henry's, who locks her in a room and leaves. She's saved again - by Hazel, the person who'd been sending her anonymous mail. She's seen before how Henry tries to isolate his lovers from their relatives, friends and workmates. She knew Tabetha, an ex of Henry, who disappeared.

When Ivy and Zara are back in the house together, Henry breaks in and threatens Ivy. Ivy kills him. Ivy was Henry's lover when he was with Tabetha. She also quite recently slept with Luke. Back in the present Zara is on the way to court having to decide whether to tell the court that Ivy killed in self-defense.

The "Emotion-Verb-Bodypart" template is extensively exploited - e.g. -

• "A prickle of unease whispers across my chin"
• "A realisation arrives like a slap to the face"
• "Fear winds itself around my body"
• "Shock rolls through me"
• "Shame creeps across her cheeks"
• "Terrible icy fear drips inside me"

"Tales From the Cafe" by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

An audio book. I have trouble remembering names. The book has quite a few, and to add to my diffculties they're Japanese.

In Cafe Funiculi Funicula, Tokyo, customers can go back or forward in time (subject to rules that we're frequently reminded of). The boss is Nagare who has a daughter Miki. Kazu is one of the waitresses who can pour the time travel inducing coffee

To time-travel, customers have to sit on a particular chair when it's vacated (by a ghost, whose identity is revealed later). They can't changed the past, and they can only meet people who've visited the cafe. If the coffee goes cold before they return to the present they will never return.

• When Gohtaro, 51, was young he had a friend, Shuwishi Kamira. They both played rugby. Shuwishi was married with a daughter. He owned a restaurant. When GoTara became penniless they offered him work at their restarant. When the couple died in a car accident, GoTara brought up their 1 year old Haruka. Now, 22 years later, she's getting married. Goohara will have to tell her that he's not her real father. He goes back to record a message by her father to play at the wedding.
• Yukiyo, 40ish, struggled to be a potter and is going bust. He finds out that his mother has died. He goes back in time to see her and plans to stay there. She tells him to return to his time. He does so, works hard, and pulls his life around.
• A man with months to live asks a friend of his girlfriend to get the girlfriend to the cafe on a day 6 years into the future, but only if he's dead and she's happily married. He time-travels to the future and she's there. He's long dead. She's borrowed the ring.
• An old detective goes back 30 years, to a day when he didn't turn up to meet his wife at the cafe. After she had left the cafe, she died at the hands of a mugger. Having gone back, he sees her as a stranger might. She's kind to him, an old man. She confides that she thinks her husband might be breaking up with her. He says who he is. She'd suspected anyway.

Bereaved people, trying to find ways to be happy, discover that they have a duty to be happy, that they don't have to punish themselves.

Other reviews

• armedwithabook (Though the first book was more of a short stories collection since the perspective of the customer is key to its organization, this book felt very much like a novel)
• Nic Daniels (An unexpected story that was woven throughout the narrative was a subplot between Kazu and the woman that stayed too long in the past, becoming a ghost — what happens when the coffee becomes cold. It turns out that the ghost is her mother. ... Kawaguchi’s first book centered on four women who used their opportunity to shift the path of their life. They went back to help move themselves forward in the present, where they were emotionally stuck, whether out of defiance or heartbreak. Now, it’s the guys’ turns. With the men, the stories are more focused on reconciling the past and accepting it.)
• James' Coffee Blog

"Paper cuts" by Colin Bateman

An audio book.

Rob, who works at The Guardian (but is under a cloud), returns to Belfast for an old colleague's funeral. The colleague had been editor of a local newpaper a few miles away, the Bangor Express. Jerry, the owner, asks him to be a managing consultant for a day because the paper's in trouble. Peter is the acting ed. Alex (female) is a young, promising senior reporter. Michael is a reporter. Janine does the ads. Rob thinks she's been raking 20% from the fees - she's the accountant too.

They're approached with photos of a local robbery that could lead to a scoop. Rob realises that when writing for a local paper you often risk upsetting people you know. McCarthy, the father of the photographed robber is a counsellor. He comes to the newspaper's office with heavies asking for the photos back. Rob decides to become editor. He visits Sean the photographer, saying that he admires his work. He's been roughed up.

Janine's not been pocketing the money. It's a protection racket and she gets roughed up too.

Dylan, imprisoned for manslaughter (drunken driving), is out after 3 years, living in a halfway house. Alex sees him drinking and driving and confronts him. That night the halfway house is set alight. Dylan saves people - convict to hero. The office equpment is repossessed.

McCarthy has been using his influence to stop advertisers using the newspaper. Janine has photos of the 2 of them together, when they were having an affair. She blackmails him to get the advertisers back.

When Michael's send to cover court cases he changes the name of a criminal because his sister chats him up after. With little cases like that, the biggest punishment is to be mentioned in the local paper.

Rob likes being a big fish in a little pool. He makes their web-site useful. A month into the job his wife and kids turn up - a surprise to the reader and his colleagues. The couple are friendly but separated.

Rob saves the life of a prostitute frpm Prague. Is that a local interest story? They help her friend escape from captivity. The story is picked up by bigger papers.

A shopping centre is being built on a graveyard, perhaps without the builders knowing. The graveyard contents were dumped by a farmer in his field. Michael wants to write an article on it, but the village would benefit from the shopping centre.

An old lady is found in her house, dead for weeks. The paper decides to point out the tragedy of this. Researching into her, they find she'd been active in Civil Rights, and that someone's still drawing her pension.

A shopkeeper is taken hostage by Patrick, who's armed. He wants to negotiate with Rob who he used to work with on a paper. Rob exchanges himself for the hostage. Rob's journalistic skills help him out.

So, many little stories that gradually give us a portrait of the town, and of the developing spirit of the newspaper.

"Keep you close" by Lucie Whitehouse

Marianne (Maz), a famous artist, has died in Oxford, sliding off her snowy roof. Rowan Winter had been her friend since before public school days, but they'd fallen out. She goes to Marianne's funeral and wake, meeting her mother Jacqueline and brother Adam (who lives in Cambridge, doing a Ph.D). Seb was Maz's late father. Towards the end Maz thought someone was trying to steal her minor works - sketches etc.

Rowan was born and brought up in Oxford. Her mother died when Rowan was a baby so Rowan spent a lot of time in Maz's house. She was shocked when she thought Seb was having an affair, more shocked still when she discover that Maz and her mother knew. She's kept a secret for 10 years, been out of contact with Maz for all that time. Maz had sent her a note that arrived after her death. Rowan house-sits to protect the contents.

Maz had become friends with James Greenwood (her agent) 4 years before but didn't live together. He had a daughter Briony, now 18, who Maz had been friendly with. He was making a lot of money out of Maz. Rowan's told that Maz was sitting for Michael Cory, a portraitist with a reputation - surely James knew the risk. She'd started a sequence of pieces based on anorexia.

Rowan meets Theo, a friend from uni who's a chief inspector. He sleeps with her then says he's married with a kid - he thought she knew. She has tea with friend Peter/Turk who was briefly famous after releasing a single. We learn that Seb was in his early 30s when his big book came out. He killed a woman in a car crash and died. Maz was different after that. She paid for the dead woman's son to go through university. Michael Cory's celeb models subsequently killed themselves or had mental breakdowns. Did Cory's intense treatment make them mad, or was he attracted to mad subjects? Cory meets Rowan, wanting to know more about Maz so he can complete the portrait. He thinks she painted anorexics because she was "consumed" by guilt about someone's death - not her own. Rowan's nervous that he might discover something.

She and Adam (who she's always fancied) sleep together. She discovers that Peter/Turk has been stealing sketches and selling them. He says that Maz's family thought she was a leech.

There's a flashback to Seb's 50th birthday party at their house. He'd invited his current lover, Lorna, breaking the unwritten rules about his affairs.

Cory finds a sketch by Maz of a face in a houseboat window. Rowan had been keeping it so that Maz wouldn't go to the police. She tells him that Lorna was killed. He takes him to where Lorna's secluded houseboat was and kills him. There's a flashback to when she and Maz were discussing how the houseboat exploded - how Rowan confessed saying that Lorna's death would put things right, and that it was Maz's idea.

She puts clues together and tells the police enough to incriminate Briony, who confesses to the police that she'd been on the roof when Maz died - an accident. Brain-damaged Martin, who lives opposite, is an important witness.

Rowan thinks she might get away with it and spend her life with Adam. The police investigation of Cory's death reveals unfortunately details. She goes on the roof. Adam talks to her there. He seems to have guessed the truth. She jumps.

I liked the art-related details, and the Oxford setting. I hadn't been expecting an unreliable narrator, though there were clues.

Other reviews

• damppebbles
• beautyisasleepingcat ( I didn’t mind the slow pace as much as the implausibility of some of the twists. One was really surprising and well done, the others were over the top)

"April in Spain" by John Banville

An audio book.

Terry Tice, raised in an Irish orphanage then a soldier in SE Asia etc, became an enforcer in London. He thinks he likes killing people because it makes things tidier. People think that he doesn't have emotions but he loves his gun. He's killed 6 times. He lives with rich Percy. 6 rooms to himself. He fellates him but nothing more. In return he steals from him. Then Percy is killed. Terry moves out, goes back to Dublin, buys a few gun.

Quirke and wife Evelyn (a pyschologist), both married before, holiday in North Spain. He sees a woman who's familiar somehow. She's animated, with an older man. His wife is Austrian and still has secrets. Relatives died in concentration camps. He's a pathologist, we're finally told. They invite the couple - they're doctors, she's Irish. Quirke thinks she's April Latimer. Years ago, her brother said he'd killed her, then he killed himself. She was a friend of his daughter.

Phoebe waits for Paul (who's Evelyn's cousin) at an airport. She used to go here with a man she thought was her uncle. Actually he was her father, Quirke. After Quirke phones her, asking her to come to Spain, she visits April's uncle, a politician (Minister of defence). She suspects that he knows April is alive. How much else does he know? Phoebe knows that April and her brother were abused by their father, that April was made pregnant by her brother, and that she had an abortion.

April's uncle asks Gallagan, the head of the Civil Service, to deal with April. Gallagan, gay, has contacts. One of those contacts knows Tice, who is sent to Spain. Meanwhile, a policeman goes with Phoebe to Spain to identify the woman. Tice attacks April, who throws acid in his face. Tice escapes, botches a second muder attempt and kills Evelyn and the policeman kills Tice.

April's uncle is forced to resign.

There's little plot, but I was never bored. The conversation between Quirke and Evelyn is fun, so are Terry's thoughts.

Police tour the Spanish beach "to make sure that no-one, especially not a women, was showing more than the minimum of bare skin" - shouldn't "minimum" be "maximum"?

Other reviews

• Doug Battersby ( The publication of this latest Quirke novel under Banville’s literary moniker raises the question of its intended audience — crime fiction fans hooked on Black’s distinctive brand of Dublin noir or devotees of the introspective literary works, more invested in sublimely poetic prose than anything resembling a suspenseful plot? I suspect that the former will be more enthused by April in Spain than the latter. ... The subtly playful, lyrically evocative and polished prose, meanwhile, is evidently of a calibre rarely seen in crime fiction today. That said, readers of literary fiction may find it hard to overlook the extent to which the morose, alcoholic, enigmatic Quirke is, if not quite a figure of cliché, then certainly cut from a thoroughly familiar cloth, his self-sabotaging behaviour following a fairly predictable pattern. Characters’ philosophical ruminations on the nature of memory, desire and loss likewise come across as rather halfhearted, even tired, compared to those found in Banville’s finest works)
• Reading Matters (The narrative eventually brings all these characters together in a surprising end, although it’s a slim premise for a crime novel. The strength of April in Spain is really the way in which Banville tells his story and builds suspense via his beautifully crafted prose ... I suspect diehard readers of the crime genre might find this novel a little disappointing.)
• Harriet

"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. )