This was one of my Book Club choices and I read it on a weekend away with some girlfriends (the aforementioned Book Club) for our first Annual General Meeting!! I downloaded it to my Kindle, perfect as it took up less space for our hand luggage only trip. We chose it because it has a local flavour (to us), set in Manchester, and because we hadn’t done a thriller for some time. It is not a book I would ordinarily have chosen (but isn’t that the point of book clubs?); thrillers are not usually my thing, although I have to say that I am usually gripped when I read one (the good ones anyway). Whilst I would not describe it as my read of the year, I did enjoy it, it engaged me and I thought it was a pretty decent story – I did not predict the ending.
The book jumps back and forth in time between the present day and April 1990. In the present day we meet a middle-aged Danny Johnston, a long-in-the-tooth presenter of investigative television documentaries. He is past his peak professionally and clearly has some deep-rooted, well-suppressed emotional difficulties; the book opens with him crashing into a tree whilst drunk. He lives an empty life alone in London and is borderline alcoholic. His accident is well-publicised in the media and as a result he loses his television contract and is let go by his agent. With nothing to keep him in London he decides to return to the north, to Manchester where he grew up and where he began his career as a local radio reporter.
When he is back in Manchester Danny decides to follow up a police case he was involved in that was never solved. It was April 1990 and the riots at Strangeways prison dominated the media for weeks. The ‘occupation’ of the prison by the inmates lasted twenty-five days. At around the same time, the body of a young boy is found at Black Moss reservoir just outside Oldham. Danny is assigned to report on the case, the more senior reporters having their attention fully occupied by Strangeways, and happens to be the first reporter on the scene. He catches a sight of the boy’s body as a breeze lifts the covering on it, and sees that it has been partially taped up, presumably by the killer. This detail is omitted from the public statements made by the police which makes Danny feel there is more to this than the average homicide. Danny starts to build a relationship with the chief investigator on the case Detective Inspector Smithdown who takes Danny into his trust, he being one of only two reporters showing any interest in the case. The other is a reporter from the Oldham Messenger called Kate, who also happens to be the daughter of DI Smithdown.
As a disgraced middle-aged ex-broadcaster Danny gets in touch again with Kate. He learns that her father is still alive and he goes to see him. They talk about the unsolved case of the boy at Black Moss and Danny feels it is time for him to try and resolve it once and for all. It sets him on a journey which will expose him to a dark underbelly of historic child abuse in the Manchester area and police corruption. It will also force him to face aspects of his past that he has suppressed all his life and to learn things about his childhood that go part way to explaining his present day problems.
I enjoyed the book and felt the pace was good. It was a decent story to get your teeth into and deals with some important issues. Here in Manchester and the north west of England more widely we have still to come to terms with some dark facts of recent history where children, particularly those living on the margins of society, were abused. Whilst this book is fictional, I think it is a brave piece of work and part of the catharsis which it will be necessary to experience before we can all put this chapter behind us. I understand that police officers and child protection professionals were consulted in the writing of it.
Well worth a read, and a local author (to me anyway!) to boot.
I find thrillers a bit hit and miss – have you read any good ones lately? I also like Cath Staincliffe.
I had that very experience recently with my book club when we decided to read To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Some of us had read it before (though years earlier) others had not read it at all. But even those of us who had read it before could not remember very much about it! I read it when I was studying for my English degree 30 years ago; I would probably have got through most of Virginia Woolf’s books in a very short space of time, because that was what my degree entailed – reading lots and lots of books very quickly! I always remembered that To The Lighthouse was my favourite, but I could not honestly have told you what happens in it, except that the journey to the eponymous lighthouse was about something desired more than something fulfilled.
I was tempted to go for Haruki Murakami – after reading 
The novel begins in 1969 with the four children of the Gold family – Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon – visiting a fortune-teller in her grimy downtown New York apartment, who is said to be able to predict the date of a person’s death. The mystic consults each child privately about their fate. Their reactions vary; Daniel, the second oldest, for example, says he thinks it is all rubbish. The younger children seem more vulnerable and more preoccupied, particularly Simon, who at this point is only seven years old, and who is told that he will die young.
The Silence of the Girls has been critically-acclaimed and was shortlisted for last year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. I really, really wanted to love this book, but I’m afraid I didn’t. It could be that the timing was wrong – December for me was mad busy so I read the book in short bursts over a longish period when I was quite stressed. I don’t think I gave it the time and attention it deserved. But then, neither did it really grab me when perhaps it ought to have done.
This book grabbed me by the throat right from the outset; I listened to it on audio (fantastic performances from the actors Julia Whelan and Kirby Haborne, by the way) and simply could not ‘put it down’. I got a lot of exercise in January, because going for a walk became an excuse to listen to a few more minutes’ worth!
In Winter, Ali Smith examines the ideas through the dynamics of a family thrown unwillingly together at Christmas. Sophia lives alone in a large house in Cornwall. She was a successful businesswoman but, now late in life, finds herself alone, estranged from her sister, not knowing what is going on in the life of her only son in London, and navigating with despair some of the dehumanising aspects of modern life. When we meet her at the start of the book, she is communicating with what I can only describe as a hallucination of a child’s head, which floats about with her. To the reader, this seems surreal at first, but it gradually becomes merely a manifestation of Sophia’s mental state – her deep loneliness and her disconnection from normal life and society. Arthur, Sophia’s son will have similar hallucinations later in the book. Sophia goes about her Christmas Eve business in the town with sadness, recalling the once vibrant high street that is now a series of boarded-up shops, frustrated at being unable to withdraw money from her own bank account and the inability of the young man in the bank to appreciate or meet her needs as a customer – she has nostalgia for the days of the friendly bank manager.
A book I listened to at the end of last year was Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor. I borrowed it from the library when it was first published in 2017 but did not manage to get through it before I had to return it for someone else. It is a historical thriller set at the time of the Great Fire of London in September 1666 and is the first in Taylor’s Marwood & Lovett detective series. I have not yet read (or listened to) the second and third books in the series, both of which were published last year, but they sound intriguing.
Last week I launched my 
Julia's books 