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A roundup of Unusual Suspects: Isolation Island, by Louise Minchin; The Trials of Lila Dalton, by L J Shepherd; Long Time Dead, by T M Payne; A Limited Justice, by Catriona King.

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Summary: books that it would be criminal to overlook!

I once met a woman who had given her newborn daughter the second name of “Danger” just so when she was older she would be able to say, like the heroine of a 1930s movie, “Danger is my middle name!”,

There is a strong hint of such movie heroines in Lauren, the investigative journalist protagonist of Louise Minchin’s Isolation Island. 

Minchin uses her experience of journalism and having been a contestant on the storm ravaged set of “I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here!” to craft a fun, Agatha Christie inspired, tale of murder amongst game show contestants. 

Minchin brings a lovely devilment to her tale, fattening up the despicable before despatching them while Lauren desperately tries to unearth the evil genius behind the mayhem.  

Minchin has described her heroine as being braver than herself. That may or may not be true – Minchin is also a triathlete and having done one myself I can attest that those are daunting things. But, perhaps as importantly Lauren is driven by a sense of journalistic ethics and a conviction of the importance of truth, which must be Minchin’s own. 

In a time of in which even genocide is being made undiscussable, it is important to be reminded that some truths, no matter how inconvenient, must be spoken. 

On the opening page of The Trials of Lila Dalton, the titular Lila, a barrister it seems, stands up in court with no knowledge of how she got there, but with a client to defend. LJ Shepherd, the author, a barrister herself, describes her book as an “ontological mystery”. That is, not only does her protagonist have to get to the bottom of the facts of her case – the defence of a man accused of a bombing atrocity – but also work out who the hell she is and what she is doing there. 

Shepherd’s is an entertaining and intriguing story. I am not sure that it really required the reality questioning elements as the issues she deals with – the importance of the right to a defence in a criminal trial no matter how seemingly heinous the accused, and the question of how democratic societies protect themselves from violent assaults by those who do not share their values – are important enough.

These quibbles aside, the quality of Shepherd’s writing is exceptional, particularly when describing the treating of casualties in the aftermath of an explosion: these recalled for me some of the accounts of the survivors of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. In this Shepherd does that most difficult of things: she forces the reader to empathise with victims that they may prefer not to think of.

In Long Time Dead, an extra body shows up in a grave and it is identified as a man suspected of murdering a cop and grievously injuring a bystander seven years earlier. The investigation eventually falls to Detective Inspector Sheridan Holler. 

It was Chandler, I think, who conceived of his tales of gumshoes as updated versions of the stories of Knights Errant from Arthurian legend. So, whatever else was unclear in his mysteries, no matter how corrupt the world in which they ventured, one thing you could count on was that his shamus would endeavour to do the right thing, protecting the innocent and unmasking the guilty. 

TM Payne’s peeler protagonist in Long Time Dead is an inheritor of that tradition. While she may find the sort of defence barrister of which LJ Shepherd writes somewhat distasteful, she is still fundamentally decent and committed to the finding the truth. 

There is an echo of Payne’s book in Catriona King’s A Limited Justice. Like it, it is a police procedural – a type of crime novel for which I have a particular affection. 

Both have the bonus of being written by writers who know what they are talking about: Payne is a former cop; King has worked as a police forensic medical examiner. Both eschew the brooding detective for sympathetic professionals – the sort of people who you might actually like to work with. 

A Limited Justice begins with King’s investigator, Marco Craig, opening a probe into a particularly grisly killing on a Belfast garage forecourt. As with many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, as the investigation unfolds the story of the perpetrator and their motivation becomes as important as that of the investigators. Consequently, King is able to use her story to explore not just the crime itself, but contemporary Northern Ireland. As is typical of Northern Ireland the story is replete with black humour. 

Both King and Payne have founded book series based on their protagonists. It is easy to see why: both are appealing companions on the mean streets of the imagination, and King and Payne, like Minchin and Shepherd, are both very gifted writers. 

Some Service to the State

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Summary: why partition in Ireland has been such an injustice.

“… sometimes it is absence itself which is the hardest thing to hide.”

I grew up in South Armagh, just a mile or so from the British-imposed border in Ireland. That border is a thing that, in many ways, has cast a long shadow over my life. It was, I sincerely believe, at the root cause of many of the problems for both parts of Ireland during the Twentieth Century, not least the squalid little war known as the Troubles during which I grew up.

With partition, the British sought, successfully, to create two sectarian states in Ireland rather than one plural one. My novel, Some Service to the State, is at heart an exploration of some of the human rights abuses that Irish people had to endure as a result of this.

Hence it is an indictment of the injustice of partition’s continuation. As the impetus takes hold for an end to partition and the establishment of a new Ireland, I hope that this book will resonate with an audience that wants to understand better why the status quo has been such a poisonous thing for ordinary people living on the island of Ireland.

But Some Service to the State is also a gripping detective story, about the repercussions of an enquiry into the fate of a girl who seems to have gone missing in that politically divided island.

Here is what other authors said about it: 
Ronan McGreevy, author of Great Hatred: the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, has said of Some Service to the State that it is “a superb book with dialogue that would not be out of place on the stage of the Abbey Theatre. … [in Mick McAlinden} McQuade has created a character whose travails highlight the thwarted dreams and the tragedy of partition for so many people in post-revolutionary Ireland.” 

Rosemary Jenkinson a multi-award winning playwright and author of Marching Season, has said that the book shows a “prodigious skill in shining a spotlight on the scandal of the mother-and-baby homes and in brilliantly imbuing the past with … [a] potent blend of heart, soul and wit”

If you would like to get a copy, the book is available in the UK from Bookshop.org and in the US from Barnes and Noble. It is also available on Amazon.

I hope you will read it, and if you do, I would love to hear what you think in the comments below.

Keep safe and many thanks.

The Voyage Home, by Pat Barker

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Summary: a fine novel of Cassandra that suffers in comparison with Barker’s initial foray into the stories of Troy

The Voyage Home continues Pat Barker’s feminist retelling of the tales of Troy, following the return of Agamemnon to Mycenae with the enslaved Cassandra in tow. This guarantees that the reunion with his wife Clytemnestra is going to be awkward. Just how awkward Agamemnon, even if he was a cleverer man, could not imagine.

But Cassandra, gifted with prophesy, but cursed that no one ever believes her, knows. In the bloodshed that she foresees she also discerns some measure of justice for the genocide that the Greeks have inflicted on her homeland. 

For this story, Barker replaces Briseis, the narrator of her previous Trojan books, with Ritsa, Cassandra’s maid: slave to a slave, or, as she describes her lowest of the low status, a “catch-fart.” 

The Voyage Home dealing with the beginning of the Oresteia, is, I think, a considerably better book than its predecessor, The Women of Troy. But neither of these books say much additional thematically to the stunning originator of this series, The Silence of the Girls.

Still, it is elegantly written, and Barker’s continuing focus on how war affects civilians and the sexual violence endured by women is important. In addition, Cassandra is always a compelling figure, and Ritsa is a fine creation. 

The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood

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Summary: “You tried to bury us, but we were seeds.”

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 it was quickly recognized as a classic. An all too believable dystopian thriller, it is set in a United States that has been transformed into a theocratic dictatorship of the sort imagined in the fevered dreams of the legions of Trump’s incel supporters. 

It is told in the first-person, recounting the experiences of a young woman enslaved under the name Offred as the mistress of a leader of that state, Gilead. Such mistresses are prized because environmental devastation has rendered so much of the population sterile and it is a chance for the elite to reproduce. 

The compelling world that Atwood created in this book, and the open-ended nature of its ending could have seduced a lesser writer into a commercially successful career with spin-offs and sequels galore. However, Atwood waited over 30 years before returning to this fictional universe. That is, she waited until she finally had something new to say about it. 

The Testaments has stylistic similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale, but this time with three first-person narrators, including Lydia, a former judge now an “Aunt” – an older woman tasked with helping Gilead oversee and control its young women. In her deepest conscience however, Lydia is part of the Resistance, and The Testaments tells the story of how she plots to strike a blow to the heart of the dictatorship. 

Both books are gripping, building considerable tension as the protagonists strive to assert some aspects of freedom and free will in the cause of a more moral future, and hence place their fates in the balance. Both books are also deeply satisfying complements to each other, with Offred’s grim struggle for survival given context by Lydia’s more strategic overview of the battlefield. 

Lydia doesn’t have a cat. But she is doubtless the stuff of JD Vance’s nightmares. Such a brilliant character was well worth the 30 year wait. 

Resting places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution, by Ellen McWilliams

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Summary: trying to see “higher than the ditches that break up the canvas of the land”. 

There is an echo of Martin Doyle’s book, Dirty Linen, in Ellen McWilliams’ Resting Places. Like Doyle, McWilliams also uses the literature of Ireland and Britain, experiences from her professional career, and the local history of her home place, in County Cork rather than in County Down, to reflect on wider issues of Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations. 

But McWilliams doesn’t stop there. Resting Places is also a remarkably personal work. Her insights on the “big” themes are also prompted by the most domestic ones: by reflections on her relationships with family – both the Cork ones and the English lot – and from her experiences of her own body in her most private moments as a lover and as a mother.

This is apposite: Women and girls were, as McWilliams reminds us, the subject of institutionalised systems of abuse and enslavement, including the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes, for much of the 20th Century in Ireland. In writing of her own body with such candour she reminds the reader of the strength and fragility of human flesh and how this can be so easily desecrated by bigotry masquerading as righteousness. 

By pondering these very intimate aspects of life McWilliams also comes to some of her most important historical insights, ones that can be lost or overlooked in more traditional narrative or political histories. Because so many of the dynamics of war, and particularly of war-crimes, in revolutionary and civil wars have their sources in the domestic sphere: around hearths and kitchen tables, in whispered conversations the memories of ancient ills – of land expropriations, of scorched earth and famine – are kept alive. 

And it is one atrocity that perhaps grew from such conversations, the Dunmanway massacre, that lurks at the heart of this book. The country was meant to be at Truce when these killings occurred. But there is no truce on bitter memories. 

Between 26 and 28 April 1922, fourteen Protestant men and boys were killed or disappeared around Dunmanway and the Bandon Valley, in the very roads and fields around which McWilliams grew up. These were the families of neighbours killed by the families of neighbours, and indeed the comrades of her own family, which was deeply involved in the struggle for Irish independence. 

The fate of two 16 year old boys, Robert Nagle and Alexander McKinley, are particularly difficult for McWilliams to contemplate. A new mother when writing this book, she writes of these boys with an agony of empathy, knowing what it is to carry a child for nine months, tend to him as he grows into his own little person, and to worry that something awful might happen to him. For these boys’ mothers, they awakened to that nightmare.

Perhaps there are still whispered conversations telling new generations why these murders “had to be done.” But McWilliams remembering how Greek tragedy reminds us that crimes that stay buried poison the water of the living, shows true patriotism in confronting this vile aspect of the Irish revolution.

McWilliams is an exquisite writer, warm and frequently very funny. At one point she muses if, in marrying an English scholar of the English civil war, she has actually ended up – at some psychic or metaphorical level – marrying Cromwell himself. 

On the evidence of her book, I think the answer is a resounding “NO”. I can’t imagine Cromwell ever fretting over the recipe for soda bread, which her lovely-sounding husband does. Feeding other people is antipathetic to genocide. Cromwell would have hated him. 

McWilliams book is an incredibly rich one, fizzing with more ideas that any review can do proper justice to. Read it!

Spent Light, by Lara Pawson

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Summary: “It’s quite hard to describe really. To begin with, it’s about a toaster, but it ends up being about everything,” the Kirkdale Bookshop on Spent Light.

When, about 20 years ago, I first introduced my father to the televisual masterpiece that is The Wire, his stunned reaction to the first episode was, “I have never seen anything like that before.”

This memory came back to me, more than once, reading Lara Pawson’s extraordinary book, Spent Light, because I quite simply have never read anything like this before. 

From time to time it seemed to me almost like some other  things: Maybe the notebooks portions of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines? Or some of the (allegedly) imaginative passages in Anje Krog’s Country of My Skull? But in the end it is very much its own thing – intimate, funny, at times uncomfortable, occasionally horrific, wholly original. 

It is writing that has the intensity of poetry. And so perhaps the best way to describe Spent Light is as a series of linked autobiographical prose poems, starting with a toaster but in the end being about the whole world, as the Kirkdale Bookshop put it with such brilliant concision. Along the way, Lara touches upon love, war, squirrels, atrocities, and the joys of a good broom. 

I’ve known Lara since Angola where she was a journalist during that country’s brutal civil war. So, perhaps the only unsurprising thing about this book is that it is unsurprising that she wrote it. It is a work of genius. It should become recognised as a modern classic.