Review: Twisted

Twisted by Steve Cavanagh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Who is J. T. LeBeau?”
A few years back there was a television series called ‘Harper’s Island’ which essentially took ‘And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians’ and slasher movies and ramped up the intensity until it almost, but, importantly, not quite, became parody. It was great fun. In ‘Twisted’, Steve Cavanagh has done the same thing for the current trend for ‘this novel has a twist you will not believe’ books.
J. T. LeBeau is the blockbuster thriller version of J. D. Salinger. His novels fly off the shelves, constantly at the top of the bestseller lists and yet nobody knows who he is, not even his publisher. Except, that’s not quite right. Four people know who he is and two of them are dead… When Maria Cooper and her lover discover that Maria’s husband has $20 Million dollars in a hidden bank account, she suspects that her spouse is in fact J. T. LeBeau. And she wants her share of that money.
Cavanagh piles twist upon twist, poking fun at publishers’ need to SELL THE TWIST, while doing what a lot of the popular ‘twist’ books forget to – telling a compelling and exciting story. Yes, it veers close to spoof at times but, crucially, Steve Cavanagh expertly keeps it, just, on the side of believability and keeps the thrills, well, thrilling.
‘Twisted’ is great fun and I’m sure it will be a huge hit. And perhaps the producers of ‘Harper’s Island’ should give it a read…


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Review: The Wych Elm

The Witch Elm by Tana French
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A new Tana French novel is the highlight of my reading year. ‘The Wych Elm’ is a departure from her Dublin Murder Squad crime novels in the sense that the story is told from the perspective of the victim of the crime rather than the investigators but, like that series, is a character-driven story which really gets into the psyche of the protagonist.
When we meet Toby he is on a night out with his friends, middle-class Dublin rugby types, apparently fairly harmless, if slightly unlikeable, slightly full of themselves. But, when Toby confronts burglars at his apartment that night, he suffers head injuries and memory loss in a vicious assault. Returning to The Ivy House, his uncle’s home at which he spent a lot of his childhood, Toby’s convalescence is, at first, bolstered by helping his uncle cope with his own, terminal, illness. The two support each other and fall into an easy routine, aided by Toby’s girlfriend, and, through conversations with the cousins with whom he grew up, Toby tries to regain the memories he has lost.
Tana French is a master at these familial relationships, the small interactions, the petty jealousies and misunderstandings between people who ‘love’ each other. Toby is an unreliable narrator, all the more so because of his brain trauma, but there is a sense that each of the characters is hiding something or, at least, reframing their own narratives, editing their own stories. Then the discovery of human remains in the hollow trunk of the ancient Wych Elm tree in the back garden of The Ivy House starts Toby on a path of investigation, casting suspicion on his cousins, his uncle, even himself. As the police tear apart the garden so Toby’s questions open up old wounds, gradually unravelling first his relationships, then his self-image, his sense of who he is.
‘The Wych Elm’ is a story of psychological disintegration told with Tana French’s keen ear for dialogue and ability to get inside the minds of her characters. It is a slower novel than the Dublin Murder Squad books but no less compelling. I enjoyed it and thank Penguin Random House and NetGalley for the early access.

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Review: The Wolf and the Watchman

The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A dark and disturbing, very well-written and translated, novel set in late 18th Century Stockholm. King Gustav has been assassinated, paranoia is rife and, as the Revolution tears Paris apart, Sweden fears that the violence will spread from France. Against this background a city watchman pulls a body from the fetid lake, a corpse that has had his limbs amputated and his eyes and teeth removed. The watchman, Mickel Cardell, a one-armed veteran of Gustav’s ill-fated war with Russia, is thrown together with Cecil Wings, an investigator who is slowly dying from consumption, in a race to identify the mutilated man and bring his murderer to justice. This may not sound pleasant, and it is not, it is harrowing but also haunting and absorbing. The mismatched investigators are compelling characters and the first section of the book is as good a procedural as I have read recently, albeit a very unusual one.
The novel is however, split into four sections. The second section takes the form of a series of letters as a young dandy chronicles his descent into poverty and squalor. The third section tells the story of a young woman, Anna Stina, mistreated and unfairly condemned to a workhouse prison. These middle sections of the novel are almost as gripping as the main story but, for me, they broke up the rhythm of the plot. The stories are intrinsically linked to the central one but I would have preferred to have had them as more regularly interspersed subplots rather than as distinct, separate ‘parts’.
I knew next to nothing about this period of Swedish history but Niklas Natt och Dag brings the period to life, the sights and smells, the trauma and atrocities. There is a description of a naval battle that is as vivid and frightening as anything I have read on the subject. So, while I have problems with the structure of the novel, its power is unavoidable. It will stay with me for a long time and I thank NetGalley and John Murray Books for the opportunity to read it.

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