Skip to main content

Book Review Crime fiction with Mat Coward: March 21, 2019

Reviews of The Wife’s Shadow by Cath Weeks, Run Away by Harlan Coben, The Bothy by Trevor Mark Thomas and Brothers Keepers by Donald E Westlake

OWNER of a deli in Bath and happily married with two delightful children, Suzy has a good life.

But, in The Wife’s Shadow by Cath Weeks (Piatkus, £8.99), an awful and unresolved secret from her childhood means that she can never quite allow herself to relax into contentment. After her mother’s funeral, she begins to notice odd signs that her past may be returning to haunt her.

But is she being stalked or is she having a breakdown? Does she need a detective or a therapist?

Readers will work out who the villains are a long time before Suzy does but that just adds to the tension of this very involving story, as one blow after another brings her closer and closer to disaster.

In Harlan Coben’s compulsive thrillers, every step the protagonists take to try to get themselves out of trouble creates two new dangers, each worse than the one before.

So it is in Run Away (Century, £20), in which New York businessman Simon searches for his missing daughter. All he knows for sure is that she disappeared from her college course and from her family and that drugs and a weird boyfriend are somehow involved.

When he manages to track her down busking in Central Park, she slips through his fingers again and Simon ends up getting arrested. Before long, that will seem like a trivial problem compared to where it leads.

Tom is recovering from a shocking bereavement and is on the run from a price put on his head as a result of it in Trevor Mark Thomas’s debut novel The Bothy (Salt, £9.99).

He finds refuge of a sort at a dilapidated and rarely visited pub in remote Lancashire moorland, where his host is an ageing gangster who lives there with the last dregs of his retinue.

None of them trust Tom any more than he trusts them and, if they were to find out about the generous bounty offered for his capture dead or alive, there isn’t anywhere for him to run.

This taut and extremely violent thriller, as claustrophobic as a single-setting play, is about characters whose desperation comes not so much from having nothing to lose but from their conviction that they have nothing to gain either.

Lean, sharp writing supports a striking talent for uncovering the emotional lives of people who are determined not to have any emotions.

Out of print for decades, Brothers Keepers (Hard Case, £7.99) is a 1975 novel by revered crime humorist Donald E Westlake.

He introduces us to a cloistered and obscure order of monks, made up of men escaping from their various pasts, who live peacefully in their old monastery on Park Avenue, Manhattan.

When they find that their home has been sold from under them to a mob of ruthless property sharks, the brothers will risk their vows and their faith to prevent its demolition. Charming, funny and charitable, Westlake was a true master of using comedy for serious purposes.

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 13,288
We need:£ 4,712
3 Days remaining
Donate today