|
| Tuesday October 19 2021 | Issue 103 |
|
|
By Mark Sanderson
|
|
Michael Connelly’s latest Ballard & Bosch thriller, The Dark Hours (Orion, £20), will be published on November 9. It features a character called Captain Gerald “Sandy” Sanderson, who is the scourge of bad cops. So far so good. However, later on, we’re told: “He’s all bluster. The only thing intimidating about him is his breath.” I wonder what Connelly would have written if I’d ever given him a bad review.
|
| Mark Sanderson |
| Crime Club editor |
|
|
|
|
Star pick
|
|
|
★ Star pick
|
|
Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir, translated by Quentin Bates
|
|
Orenda, £8.99
|
An expert in tracing hidden funds travels to Iceland in search of her missing sister.
You can read my review by following the link below.
Meanwhile, read on for a piece specially written for Crime Club, in which Lilja Sigurdardottir introduces her new series.
|
Find out more
|
|
|
Iceland through an outsider's eyes
|
|
| |
Cold as Hell is the first in a new five-book series, each of which can be read as a stand-alone, says Lilja Sigurdardottir (pictured). The characters are recurring, but the story goes full circle in each instalment. The main character is Arora, a half-British, half-Icelandic woman living in Edinburgh, who works as a financial investigator, specialising in finding hidden money in tax havens around the world.
Arora is annoyed when her mother asks her to return to Iceland to look for her sister, Isafold, who seems to have gone missing. She and her sister aren’t on speaking terms, and this isn’t the first time there has been a drama. But when Arora reaches Iceland, she discovers that her sister isn’t just avoiding her — she really has disappeared without trace.
Iceland has a very low murder rate. It is a small nation of 370,000 people and there are, on average, two or three murders every year. However, every year people disappear, never to be found again and — excluding the fishermen and sailors who are lost at sea — the same number go missing on land as are murdered. Iceland might seem small on the world map, but it is, in fact, quite a big island spanning 103,000 sq km — approximately the size of the island of Ireland and Wales combined.
The population of Ireland and Wales is more than nine million people, but Iceland has fewer than half a million (although the increasing number of tourists can double that at any given time). A scarcely populated land, Iceland is very rugged and largely inhospitable, with huge lava fields, rocky deserts, impassable mountain areas, innumerable cold mountain lakes, fissured glaciers and the wild Atlantic Ocean crashing against its rocky shores. Nature is dangerous in Iceland, and it’s all too easy to become lost, to disappear. It is also the perfect place to hide a body.
Arora’s investigations uncover many baffling details of Isafold’s life in Iceland. Arora is no stranger to her sister’s difficult relationship with her abusive boyfriend yet it seems he is not the only one who has something to hide. The couple’s neighbours also have secrets they are desperate to keep.
But Cold as Hell is more than just a missing person case. It is an exploration of belonging, of fitting into a country and its culture, of revisiting your childhood and trying to make sense of it. Having been raised in many countries, returning to Iceland in between, I have always wanted to write about Iceland through an outsider’s eyes, where traditions and cultural idiosyncrasies are not just taken for granted but questioned and explored. Arora’s half-Britishness allows me to do this. I hope readers will enjoy this approach — and learn more about my wild, beautiful, often terrifying homeland.
Cold as Hell is set in the relentless, shiveringly bright, 24-hour midnight sun, but the light isn’t the only thing playing tricks.
|
|
Competition 1
|
|
| |
Ten signed copies of Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurdardottir are up for grabs. Simply send the answer to the question below, with “Hell Yes!” in the subject line, to competitions@orendabooks.co.uk before 11.59pm on Monday October 25. The winners will be selected at random.
According to James Boswell, who claimed to be able to repeat a complete chapter of The Natural History of Iceland, namely Chapter LXXII — Concerning Snakes: “There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island”?
|
|
Page 99
|
|
| |
Ford Madox Ford, friend of Joseph Conrad, novelist and literary critic, said: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Arbitrary, perhaps, but surprisingly accurate.
This week, a grim flashback in The Cult (HarperCollins, £7.99) by Abby Davies, which will be published next week. Detective Inspector Pearline Ottoline investigates the link between the disappearance of two children and a commune set up 30 years ago.
But Uncle Saviour did not give them a kiss. Instead, he beckoned to one of the adults kneeling in the outer circle, who stood up, walked forward, and handed him a long-handled scythe. Uncle Saviour held the scythe aloft, turning in a slow circle to make sure that every adult and child in the barn glimpsed the long, curved blade.
Love frowned. A few adults and children were fidgeting. They ought to be as still as stones during this part. This was the new part Uncle Saviour had been telling the community about for the last few weeks. She glared at the new woman, who had gone very white and begun to tremble. Only the weak and disloyal tremble in the face of the journey to Total Illumination. That was what Uncle Saviour always said.
“With this blade, on this very night, I offer those who are new to us the chance to be birthed with a higher level of purity than I have ever been able to offer before. Indeed, now that I have reached the stage of Total Illumination, I am able to transfer some of my strength through this blade with two simple cuts and a kiss. By giving you these cuts, I am freeing you of any lingering ties to the outside world and any ties to the evil within it. By giving me your blood, you are revealing your undying devotion to our journey and thus marking your first step on the road to salvation.”
He paused and looked around the barn, stepped closer to the inner circle and said, “Members of Eternal Life Community, say it with me: To be free, you must be cut. To be pure, you must give blood. The end justifies the means.”
|
|
Picks of the week
|
|
|
On the Edge by Jane Jesmond
|
|
Verve, £9.99
|
|
Jenifry Shaw is addicted to adrenaline and cocaine. After a spell in rehab, the free climber is determined to keep her feet on the ground and her head out of the clouds, but, summoned back to her native Cornwall, she wakes up one night, as you do, dangling from the local lighthouse. Why does someone want her to die? The answer lies in her troubled past. Jane Jesmond sweeps the reader along through all the highs and lows of dicing with death and drugs. A promising debut. Favourite sentence: “Something was missing if you didn’t experience just once that heart-pounding, adrenalin rinse when your feet slipped on the tiny ledge you were balancing on, when the next hold needed an awkward leap above a sheer drop or when the edge you’d grasped splintered beneath your fingers.”
|
|
Find out more
|
|
|
|
Orders to Kill by Edward Marston
|
|
Allison & Busby, £19.99
|
Detective Inspector Harvey Marmion and Sergeant Joe Keedy investigate the gruesome murder of a doctor who worked at the military hospital in Edmonton, north London. It is 1917, the First World War is dragging on across the Channel, yet, in their ninth case, there is no escaping savage violence even on the home front. It turns out there was another side to the seemingly respectable GP. Favourite sentence: “One of them was Detective Constable Clifford Burge, a powerful, thickset man in his thirties with a face that even his best friends would never call handsome.”
|
|
Find out more
|
|
|
|
Next in Line by Marion Todd
|
|
Canelo, £8.99
|
|
Detective Inspector Clare Mackay is at her ex-boyfriend’s wedding when she is introduced to the TV celebrity Gaby Fox, who, shortly afterwards, suddenly ups and leaves. Her brother has been fatally shot at Lamond Lodge near St Andrews. A satisfying Scotch mystery. Favourite sentence: “The sunrise exploded in his head and he spun round, falling like a stone to the floor of the walkway, a trickle of blood at his temple.”
|
|
Find out more
|
|
|
Downtime
|
|
| |
An occasional series in which authors reveal what they like to do when not writing.
This week, James Swallow (pictured, in Tenerife), whose latest Marc Dane thriller, Outlaw (Zaffre, £14.99), will be published next week, reveals he’s always writing — even when he’s not.
What do I like doing when I’m not writing? There’s a flaw in that question, the part about when I’m not writing. I can say I like to read, to game, to travel, to explore, but really all writers are writing all the time, you just can’t always see it happening. The process begins when a story first gets a grip on you, back at that distant origin point when you first started thinking in narrative — and then it’s lodged there, like a splinter in your mind, forever being worked at, or worked for, or worked around.
Looking out of a window, gazing at a piece of art, enjoying a sunset, counting the seconds until you open your parachute: these experiences are all writing tools that will be refracted through the lens of your characters at some future point. The conversations you have, the places you visit, the people that you meet. The world provides raw material for the author, whatever the genre they write in, and we’re never not taking it in.
There is no state of not-writing. It bubbles away back there, constantly ticking over, lurking at the horizon of our thoughts until, inevitably, we pick up the pen again.
Every writer is always writing; they’re just not always writing it down.
|
|
Competition 2
|
|
| |
Five copies of Outlaw are up for grabs. Simply send the answer to the question below, with “Swallow Tale” in the subject line, to eleanor.stammeijer@bonnierbooks.co.uk before 11.59pm on Monday October 25. The winners will be selected at random.
Which crime writer published a novel titled Outlaws in 1987?
|
|
Re-issue of the week
|
|
|
Measure for Murder by Clifford Witting
|
|
Galileo, £8.99
|
|
First published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1941, this masterly theatrical whodunnit is narrated by a former bank clerk. Strangely enough, Clifford Witting was once a clerk at Lloyds Bank. Someone has been murdered with a stage-prop sword at the Lulverton Little Theatre. Inspector Harry Charlton, Witting’s regular detective, investigates — but only after the surprising identity of the victim has been revealed halfway through the novel. It also paints a fascinating picture of Middle England during the early stages of the Second World War.
|
|
Find out more
|
|
|
Paperback of the week
|
|
|
Left You Dead by Peter James
|
|
Pan, £8.99
|
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, in his 17th case(!), investigates the disappearance of a woman whose husband has been arrested on suspicion of her murder.
Below, Peter James explains how technology plays a big part in his new novel.
|
|
Find out more
|
|
|
Peter James on the technology of crime
|
|
| |
Police and criminals play an eternal game of catch-up with each other. When fingerprinting came in, villains donned gloves. When DNA came in, villains used coveralls; when police began to follow the money, villains fled into the digital vault of cybercurrencies.
I always ensure the way Roy Grace approaches an investigation is as accurate a picture of current police procedure as possible. When researching Left You Dead, I discovered the amazing world of what3words. What3words is an app that has given every 3m square of the world a unique combination of three words — Brighton Pier’s Turbo Coaster, for example, is “token.vivid.rival” — and it is used by the police to locate crime scenes and call-out locations quickly and accurately.
The app is also available to the general public and when, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I was unable to travel to England from Jersey to go location scouting for Left You Dead, a friend used what3words to give me the exact spots they visited and suggested they would be ideal for the book.
I have been asked several times by my contacts in the police to spread important public service messages by writing them into my novels. When I highlighted the terrible shortage of livers for transplantation in Dead Tomorrow, the number of donors rose substantially after publication. After a request from the police, I highlighted their White Ribbon campaign to help to end male violence against women in Want You Dead. And Dead at First Sight started with a phone call from a detective superintendent in Sussex asking if I would consider writing about the world of internet dating — a world in which people looking for companionship and love in just that one county had been fleeced out of more than £5 million.
Left You Dead is about a missing person, a type of case where accurately locating possible sightings of the “misper” is paramount, thus presenting the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the value of what3words to my readers. In the UK 230,000 people are reported missing every year and — while, thankfully, the majority are found — every second the police have to locate a potential victim is vital.
Image credit: James Clarke
|
|
Last word
|
|
| |
John le Carré (1931-2020) was born on October 19.
“I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.” (A Murder of Quality, 1962)
Image credit: AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth
|
|
%%DC::ST Crime Club Unsubscribe v2::ST Crime Club Unsubscribe%%
This email is from a member of the News UK group. News Corp UK & Ireland Limited, with its registered office at 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom is the holding company for the News UK Group and is registered in England No. 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.
To see our privacy policy, click
here.
|
|
|
@MrMarkSanderso1