IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS BOOKS OF THE PAST YEAR

This is an odd Books of the Year list, because it basically includes only those books I wrote about on Irresistible Targets, or reviewed on The Crime Vault Live, and the books I read and wrote about were not necessarily written in 2016. And of course, some I haven't yet written about, which means a number of my favourite books of 2016 will, I hope, get mentioned here soon, including Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat, Reza Aslan's Zealot, Henning Mankell's Quicksand and David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. 

I admit I probably should have written about the books I reviewed on The Crime Vault, but once I'd done the podcast, reviewing them in some detail, I had pretty much said what I wanted to say. You can find links to all five of the the CVL podcasts here at IT, just use the search engine.  All the other books I mention you can similarly find in the past year.

My favourite 2016 crime novels were James Sallis' Willnot and Alex Marwood's Darkest Secret (CVL). Runners up were Michael Connelly's Wrong Side Of Goodbye, Robert Crais' The Promise (CVL), Graham Hurley's The Order Of Things, Stephen King's story collection Bazaar of Bad Dreams (CVL) and Johan Theorin's Made In Sweden (CVL).

I was also a judge for the CWA Short Story Dagger award, and John Connolly's Night Music, from which two stories made the judges' (and my) short list, was exceptional. The runner-up story came from another fine collection, Crimes, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from Venezuela.

But my favourite crime novel of the year was Sara Gran's Dope, which for some reason I came to late. Read my review; it really is as good as I say.

The other two non-crime books that stand out from the year's reading were Kevin Jackson's study of modernism and 1922, Constellation of Genius, and Joe Abercrombie's hugely entertaining story collection, Sharp Ends, which proves not only that the whole sword and sorcery genre is not dead, but that a good writer can do wonderful things with it.  Serious writing in a not always very serious genre. But then you probably watch Game Of Thrones, right?

THE CRIME VAULT LIVE: EPISODE 3, IAN RANKIN

The third episode of The Crime Vault Live podcast is now available for downloading: here's a link via The Crime Vault website, it's also available on ITunes, Soundcloud, and many other reputable sources for downloads off the interweb.

Mark Billingham and I are joined by the great Scottish writer (and former music journo) Ian Rankin, who jumps right in on our discussion of TV adaptations of detectives--off the news of a new series of adaptation of Mark's books, though NOT starring Thorne--and we talk about both versions of Rebus as well as the travails of transferring characters you create from page to screen.

Also reviews of new books by, uh, Ian Rankin, Stephen King, Tess Gerritsen, and Jo Nesbo; the audio book of JK, whoops, Robert Galbraith's Career Of Evil, and discussion of new detective shows on TV, including River and From Darkness, and the influence of Scandi Crime on those and other series. Along with Ian's brilliant analysis of the Scandinavian crime marketing technique which no one in Britain can match.

And if you imagine there was a pint or two (or maybe a whiskey too) don't let the picture fool you....before the pub we didn't look like an oldies band about to play a community centre near you...

MEMORIES...IN THE CORNERS OF MASS. AVE.

I was reading the New York Review of Books, and was struck by the opening of an article by Jerome Groopman on memory. Describing his waking before dawn on a Sunday to start work on the piece, he makes his way to the kitchen.

"The dark-roast coffee was retrieved from its place in the pantry, four scoops then placed in a filter. While the coffee was brewing, I picked up the New York Times at the door...I prepared an egg-white omelettte and toasted two slices of multigrain bread. After a few sips of coffee, fragments of the night's dream came to mind..."

It's not how I would write it. Note the adjectival specificity. Not 'coffee', but dark-roast coffee. Not 'the paper' or indeed 'the Globe' since Prof. Groopman teaches at Harvard, but The New York Times (it is Sunday, in mitigation). Not 'eggs' but an 'egg-white omelette' and finally not 'toast' but toasted two slices of multigrain bread. It's not brand-name specific, like a Stephen King story, but it has the feel of one of the personal ads in the back of the NYRB, all professorial good taste and healthy options.

The article itself is an interesting review of a number of books about how memory works, and stops working. But Prof. Groopman's dietary preferences come back into focus near the end, as he discusses Alzheimer's disease.

"To be sure, there is merit in seeking environmental factors that affect risk for a disorder like Alzheimer's disease...But in this search we need to be alert to wishful thinking. Identifying something simple in the environment, like junk food, as having a major impact on developing dementia is wonderful to imagine. If true, we could markedly reduce our risk by committing to a lifestyle free of soda, pizza, and French fries."

Wishful thinking indeed! Soda, pizza and French fries sounds like the sort of stuff the creative writing professor discovers in the ice-box of the trailer-park waitress with whom he's having an affair in one of those 'dirty realism' novels from the Reaganite Eighties. But would losing them really be 'wonderful to imagine'? I now feel guilty in admitting that I followed my trip to the Yale Art Gallery last week by sharing a white clam pizza and a pitcher of birch beer with a professor friend at the Modern Apizza. Obviously we undid whatever positive effect walking through Yale had on my brain cells.

It occurs to me it might be even more wonderful were we to discover that Cambridge's dark-roast coffee, egg-white omelettes, and multigrain bread turned out to increase the risk-factor of Alzheimers. And isn't it even more likely that we someday discover the brains of readers of the New York Times have chosen to shut themselves down rather than remember being subjected to the likes of Tom Friedman or David Brooks?

JFK ASSASSINATION LITERATURE: THE OPEN BOOK ESSAY

Last week my essay on the literature of the JFK assassination was broadcast on Open Book. It's still available on IPlayer here (about nine minutes in).Because of time limitations, portions of the essay we recorded had to be edited out, so what follows is the original script; what we intended to cram into six or seven minutes.

The bits that are gone are mainly toward the end--the establishing of Oswald as a patsy and, most sadly, the brilliant JFK And The Unspeakable, which not only makes the case for conspiracy, but places that conspiracy firmly into an ongoing context. You can read my original review of that book, written for the magazine Lobster, here.

Still, it's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the inevitable deluge that will engulf the 50th anniversary come November, and Open Book is, as always, a great listen...

THE LITERATURE OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Everybody remembers. I was in eighth grade art class when Mrs Hugins was called away. She came back to tell us President Kennedy had been shot and we were being sent home. Two days later I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald dead. It was all open and shut.

So it seemed to this boy of 12. JFK's Camelot of a White House had been struck down by a Communist defector misfit. A year later, the Warren Commission endorsed that simple explanation, but instead of calming the nation, it raised more questions than it answered. The Warren Report spawned a minefield of debate and disinformation, which has spawned more than a thousand books. By the time I turned 16, it was open and shut no longer.

The best of the first wave wear their reaction in their titles: Mark Lane's Rush To Judgement, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact which catalogues the evidence buried within the Report's 26 volume appendix. The early fictions, meanwhile, approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49, Loren Singer's Parallax View, and Winter Kills, by Richard Condon (author of the Manchurian Candidate) where the president's assassination is ordered by his mob-connected father.

Stephen King's recent novel 11-22-63 is a throwback, dismissing doubters of the official verdict as those who can't accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. In his novel, a Maine school-teacher goes back in time to stop Oswald. It's a good time-travel story, powerfully imagining the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival; much of King's work has always been revisiting a more innocent time. His picture of Oswald as lone crazed assassin fits his sense of American innocence betrayed.

He still had that prissy little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He's wearing that smile in just about every photograph anyone tried to take of him....basically, there's nothing more to see anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.

But in the end...it was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? ...'all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'
- (reading from 11-22-63)

The collapse of trust in government in the Seventies wake of the Watergate scandal, saw a House of Representatives investigation conclude the likelihood of a Kennedy conspiracy, but also a reluctance to blame anyone but the Mafia. The derailing of the committee is detailed in Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. British journalist Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, first published in 1980, became the crucial one-volume summary, but the real steps forward belonged to the two best Kennedy novels. Charles McCarry's Tears Of Autumn got him labelled the American John LeCarre,while Don DeLillo's Libra shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable.

“Think of two parallel lines...One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

-(reading from Libra)

The third wave of JFK literature was sparked by the 1991 release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK—whose JFK: The Book Of The Film is itself worth reading. The establishment response was Gerald Posner's ballyhooed Case Closed, a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and for the Warren Report. Norman Mailer called Posner only intermittently reliable, but used him as the basis for Oswald's Tale, in which Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of jealous envy. More telling was James Ellroy, who claims America's innocence disappeared on the first boats over, and said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. No idealist, his conspiracy, laid out in The Cold Six Thousand oozes with sleazy reality.

He got the basic stats: One suspect caught—a kid-- a sheep-dipped leftist. Guy Bannister dipped him. The kid killed a cop. Two cops were sent to kill him. Phase two went bad. The second cop botched his assignment.

Littell holstered up. Littell studied his ID....

The streets were dead. The windows zipped by. Ten thousand TVs glowed.

It was HIS show.

He developed the plan. Pete Bondurant helped. Carlos okayed it and went with Guy Bannister's crew. Guy embellished HIS plan. Guy revised it. Guy botched it. …

Littell counted windows. All tint-distorted. Smudges and blurs. His thoughts blew wide. His thoughts cohered:

Talk to Pete. Kill Oswald. Ensure a one-shooter consensus.
- (reading from The Cold Six Thousand)

The portrait of Oswald we get from Warren, Posner, Mailer, and King actually shows most convincingly that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine, in Oswald Talked, made a convincing case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And in 2008, James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, eerily similar plot derailed only by the President's cancelling a trip to Chicago. After nearly 50 years, Douglass showed there were still new approaches, with echoes right up to the present.

The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the grounds for the government's 'plausible deniability'....by avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the unspeakable opened the door to JFK's assassination and its coverup.
- (reading from JFK And The Unspeakable)

The problem is believers in conspiracy assume the burden of proof, not just to find who really did pull the trigger on Kennedy, which would be impossible now, but for every other conspiracy as well, whether the Royal Family are really lizards from space or Elvis is still alive. As the generation which remembers the event begins to die off, newer, more immediate plots may push Kennedy into history's background. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains a permanent patsy, there to persuade us violence and history really are random, beyond our control. Which is why as Don DeLillo, reminds us...

The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.
- (reading from De Lillo's 1983 essay 'American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK')

STEPHEN KING GOES BACK TO DEALEY PLAZA: 11.22.63

Note: I read 11.22.63 (note the title wasn't reordered for British audiences, yet they seemed to buy and read the book without undue perplexity) while writing an essay on the literature of the JFK assassination for BBC Radio 4's Open Book programme. It will be broadcast Sunday (30 June) at 4pm, and repeated on Thursday, which coincidentally is the 4th of July. It should be available on IPlayer. I'll also post the essay itself after the programmes have aired.

It's not surprising Stephen King should approach John Kennedy's assassination through time-travel; one of King's recurring themes is a nostalgia for a more innocent America. His use of the time travel device to alter history is not a new one; in fact, at its best 11.22.63 feels like a particularly good Twilight Zone episode, the kind the late Richard Matheson, one of King's heroes, might have written, and indeed it carries some of the same themes as Harlan Ellison's City On The Edge Of Forever from Star Trek. Having said that, inevitably as a JFK killing novel it disappoints.

Jake Epping is a recently divorced school teacher in Maine, who is recruited to time -travel by Al, the dying owner of a local diner, who has discovered a portal back to 1958, and who wants to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from killing JFK five years later. Since you come back from your journey only minutes older, regardless of how long you've stayed in the past, this is possible—but because he is dying before he's become absolutely sure of Oswald's guilt, Al needs Jake, with no ties to the present, to do the job for him.

The novel is really Jake's story, not Kennedy's, and it's a very good one. I compared it to the Twilight Zone but there is one difference—at 700-plus pages, King's novel lacks the economy of a TV script. Jake's dry runs, trying to alter the history of a local killing, and his romance in the past, are King at his best—his strongest point may be in subjecting human emotions to the relentless twists of fate—and his prose, while occasionally digressive, moves forward. Because this is time travel the reader needs to allow some slack for repetition: form follows function and seeing the same story from slightly different angles reinforces our sense of time as a dimension, if not an entity of its own (which King implies as time itself seems to conspire against Jake making changes in it).

King's style, which includes setting the scene through intensive use of brand-names, references specifics of the everyday to serve as mundane contrast to the horrors he writes about. It was something adopted by the so-called 'dirty realists' in the mainstream, who used the specifics of working-class life in America as a sort of horror trope to contrast with the safety of their middle-class  academic life. I was therefore on the alert for anachronisms in 11.22.63, and spotted only a couple, the most telling being a reference to George Of The Jungle, a Jay Ward cartoon that didn't air until 1967. Being old sometimes has its advantages--but perhaps time itself was just messing with King or me.

Of course, the fabric of time is more fragile than either Jake or Al realise. There is a character whom they encounter as they go through the portal, whom I was convinced was Jake himself, in an ultimate time paradox, but turns out not to be when the final twists of fate are revealed. But King makes much of the butterfly effect, of causality, particularly in relation to JFK—his scenario of the future had Kennedy survived is one of the more fascinating parts of the book.

The Oswald story, however, is not very satisfying. King follows the Warren Report, Gerald Posner, Norman Mailer path, in characterising Oswald as a maladjusted, wife-beating, glory-seeker. That Mailer himself called Posner 'only intermittently reliable' doesn't seem to bother King, and of course, Oswald as part of a conspiracy would complicate his plot beyond measure; Jake could hardly go back in time to stop a multi-shooter assassination.

And King's characterisation of Oswald and Marina serves as an interesting counterpoint to Jake's courtship of Sadie, his fellow schoolteacher in the past. It also provides an explanation, albeit a thin one, of why George DeMohrenschildt and his white-Russian friends in Dallas might have befriended the supposed leftist Oswald—because of his wife, and despite him. Though DeMohrenschild seems to be amused by this version of Oswald, and this hints at a problem.

DeMohrenschildt is the lynch-pin of King's plot—Al tells Jake he needs to determine if George is the man behind Oswald's attempt on the right-wing Gen. Edwin Walker; if he wasn't then Oswald truly is a lone crazed assassin. The problem is, even in King's scenario, DeMohrenschildt seems more involved in that plot than not. And in reality, his apparent suicide just before Gaeton Fonzi was to interview him on behalf of the House Assassinations investigation (the 'suicide Bill O'Reilly claimed to have heard from DeMohrenschild's front porch, which was a neat trick as it was proven O'Reilly was in Flordia at that time) remains as suspicious as Johnny Roselli's dismembered body being found floating in a gas drum in Miami, just before his recall for a second round of testimony before the same committee.

For King, the question seems to be more about Kennedy, and us, than about Oswald. Do we believe that Kennedy's death ended some sort of Camelot, and do we need to believe that death was not a mere random act, by a willful malcontent? In trying to answer those questions through time-travel King actually confuses the issues, because time itself seems to be acting as if it trying to preserve the act we consider random—in other words, it is a kind of predestination-- and the Camelot we may think ended with JFK turns out to be better in many ways than the world he might have left behind had he completed his presidency. That is a paradox which renders King's own scenario of the assassination itself less important than the way time impacts on the lives of his characters, and what they are and are not able to overcome as people. So the final reveal, the wider scope of history, and the ultimate denouement, all feel rushed in relation to what's gone before. The bigger future shouldn't be a shadow of the assassination's becoming a narrower concern, but it's a broader one too. It's ultimately not very satisfying as a look at that assassination, though it makes for an entertaining, if overblown, Twilight Zone time travel story.

ASA LARSSON'S UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST

The thaw is a crucial part of life above the Arctic Circle, and it is a dangerous life, so when the body of a young woman surfaces in a river, it is going to be written off as an accident or suicide until prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson has a vision in a dream, and realises she is dealing with a case of murder.

Asa Larsson's first two novels both won awards in Sweden, so it is interesting to see the chances she takes and different directions she pursues in her third. Martinsson is a compelling lead character, drawn to life in Kiruna (full disclosure here: my grandfather came from a nearby town, and I have never really felt the urge to settle there) despite the prospect of success in Stockholm, That Wilma Persson (a nice choice of name), the dead girl, participates in the story as a ghost, isn't new; it's a device that's won awards for mainstream writers in the English-speaking world, and ghosts have factored in Johan Theorin's work (set in Oland, oddly enough, because it's the other end of Sweden and it's where my grandmother was born). As a devide it frees Larsson from having to worry about making her book into a 'whodunit', but what makes it really effecticve here is the idea that a character as rational and driven as Martinsson, trying to come to grips with the irrational love she has for the area where she was born, it becomes particularly effective as part of the draw of the north.

Martinsson's romantic relationship with her former boss forms one of the one of the sub-plots here, and Larsson contrasts his handsome charm and city slickness with the more homey virtues of one of the male characters. The other big contrast is between Martinsson and Anna-Maria Mella, the police inspector, who has her own problems with men, including her police partner, which were detailed in the previous novel. It's no coincidence that Scandinavian work examines the pressure of work on the domestic lives of women (think about the Danish TV drama The Killing as a recent example, though it factored in the Martin Beck series 50 years ago) because they have long been established as equal in the workplace, yet the inbuilt prejudices are brought out most strongly in this extreme rural setting. Which leads to Until Thy Wrath Be Past's other real strength: its setting.

By setting I don't mean, in this case, the landscape or weather of the north, although Larsson's descriptions are often telling. Rather, it is the rural background; this novel could be transposed into the American south say, fitting somewhere into the territory of Erskine Caldwell or James Dickey's Deliverance, or perhaps more closely into the Maine of Stephen King, John Connolly or Michael Kimball. It is the people, and in the Krekula brothers Larsson creates two frighteningly vivid villains who are recognisable to anyone who has spent time in those rural areas with their undercurrent of repressed violence. Although Hjalmar, the oversized adolescent, a violent savant, seems familiar from other stories, but he is drawn with depth and sympathy, while the viciousness of Tore, the brother in control, is palpable, and made more so when it is unleashed in a very modest way, on Anna-Maria.

It's also fascinating, because the brothers are trying to protect a secret which has remained hidden for many decades, and which relates back to a time of what in Sweden was divisive (I'm thinking of how America's Southern gothics refer back to the Civil War). In the far north of Sweden, during World War II, the plight of the 'plucky Finns' was very close at hand, as were the Nazi trains moving men and materiel between Finland and Norway. The changing allies in the years between 1939 and 41 made choosing sides difficult all over the world, but the quiet role many Swedes (and indeed some Norwegians)and their businesses enjoyed while supporting the Germans has been a feature of many books, not least Asa Larsson's namesake Steig. That it should remain a somewhat contentious issue seven decades later speaks to its power.

Until Thy Wrath is a many-layered novel, deftly written and as best I can tell, well-translated by Laurie Thompson. And if the ghost story is indeed resolved, and the past revealed, it leaves enough of Martinsson's life unsettled to make readers look forward to the next one.

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson
Maclehose Press, £12.99, ISBN 9780857050724
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time
www.crimetime.co.uk

HORROR ON NORTH 40

Let's say HP Lovecraft was born around 1980 and was a big Elmore Leonard and Justified fan, read comics and Stephen King, loved punk music and southern rock. Well, maybe not that last. But posit all that and Lovecraft might well have written something a lot like North 40—an entertaining update of Cthulu for redneck America in the 21st century.

In Conover County, somewhere in America's Dukedom of Hazard, a book is opened by slackers in the town library and with it opens a hole and threatens to await one of those evil sleeping things that horror fiction couldn't die without. Meanwhile, half the county's people are transformed, given strange powers and, some, even stranger appetites, and all this with the big dance at the high school about to happen.

Scripter Aaron Williams not only keeps the action moving, he actually makes all of this make sense, progress in a fashion which never asks us to suspend our disbelief. Like King, he works the inequities and battles of mundane life into the supernatural creatures these people become, and like Lovecraft he imbues his hidden monster with exactly the kind of hidden fears and desires that drive horror, that make Lovecraft, for all his baroque eccentricity, still scary after all these years.

The art, by Fiona Staples, complements the script perfectly; her creatures are inventive and well realised, and always remind us of the people they once were. The sense of this evil merely being an extension of real life is palpable in the art, which is why the story works so well. That its apocalyptic finish is confined to Conover County is a lesson in restraint, but the setting up of a sequel is welcome. This is one of the most engaging comics I've seen in a long time.

North 40 by Aaron Williams art by Fiona Staples
Titan/DC Wildstorm £14.99 ISBN 9780857680501

TOM FRANKLIN'S CROOKED LETTER CROOKED LETTER

Larry Ott was a loser, an awkward child growing up, a horror-addicted bookworm disappointment to his garage-owning father. Not athletic or handy with tools, certainly inept with girls, he possessed none of the currencies of manhood in rural Mississippi. One night, Larry went out on a date, and the girl disappeared, and was never found. Ostracised, his father's garage lost its business and Larry went away, only to return eventually to Chabot, where he now runs his father's empty garage, drives his father's truck, and lives in his parents' house, alone and reading.

Silas Jones was, at one point, Larry's only friend. But Silas was black, living with his mother in a cabin on the outskirts of the Ott's land. Their friendship foundered after a fight; Silas went on to be a baseball star, and returned to Chabot to be the town's constable. Now, years later, another teenaged girl has gone missing, Silas is investigating, and Larry, inevitably is the number one suspect.

It is a wonderful, if not unusual set up, but what makes Tom Franklin's first crime novel (after the admirable reconstruction-era tale Hell At The Breech) is the quality of the story-telling and characterisation. Franklin actually name-checks Stephen King in here, but this story has much more in common with the Southern traditions of Flannery O'Connor or Carson McCullers, the novels of writers like Pete Dexter or Michael Malone. This is the south of traditional American literature, the Faulknerian south, but told with a modern sensibility that reflects the massive changes since the days of Faulkner or McCullers, but also the unchanging realities beneath those changes. There is a sense that the traditions of Southern gothic were maintained in the style known as 'dirty realism', the writing-workshop stories that make working people the horror-creatures, their brand-named accessories props that signal a sub-human essence. In effect, that style was ironic comment on Stephen King, and what Franklin does without ever striking a wrong note is to reclaim the materials of Southern gothic for real characters, straightforward as King, but in the end much closer to Daniel Woodrell, just a few hundred miles east.

If this all sounds like great praise, that's how it's intended. Larry Ott's character is built with overwhelming compassion, but with just enough distance to allow us to consider the awful possibilities. The weaving of past and present is deft, and of course the secrets that lay hidden, while somewhat obvious to the careful reader, are delivered with a moving sensitivity that gives them the space to work. All the while, the reality of growing up in Mississippi, the 'crooked letter' spelling of which provides the book's title, and the reality of living there now are both sketched out in great and subtle depth. It is one of those stories that wraps you in its setting, ties you to its characters, and imprisons you until its end. One of the best books of the year, whatever else happens in the next 10 months.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
Macmillan £11.99 ISBN 9780230753051
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)