2016 books, #36-40

Coffin road, by Peter May. London: Quercus, 2016.

A man wakes up, soaking wet, on a beach.  He has absolutely no memory of how he got there - or, indeed, of who he is.  When he gets back to where he seems to have been living, he finds he's told people he's a writer, but there's no draft of a book on his laptop, and no personal identification in the cottage.  Trying to retrace his own movements, without revealing he has no clue who he is, he stumbles across a body. But did he kill the dead man?  Another brilliant book from Peter May; genuinely gripping.

London rain, by Nicola Upson [audiobook]. Read by Sandra Duncan. Rearsby, Leics.: WF Howes, 2015.

Another of Upson's Josephine Tey novels.  It's the Coronation of 1937; the implications of the Abdication rumble on, but London has put on its glad-rags and is ready to celebrate.  All but Vivien Beresford, anyway; her husband has been unfaithful one too many times, and she's set on avenging her humiliation.  Vivien is the temporary editor of the Radio Times, and her husband Antony is one of the BBC's most respected commentators, so there's a lot of backstage-at-the-BBC in this one.  Josephine is there to watch the Beeb bring Richard of Bordeaux to the airwaves, and gets involved,  Meanwhile Josephine's uncertainty about her on-off relationship with Marta is coming to a head...  If you've enjoyed other books in this series, definitely keeps the standard up.

A trick of the light, by Louise Penny [audiobook]. Read by Adam Sims. Oxford: Isis, 2012.

Three Pines stakes its claim in the murder stakes alongside St Mary Mead and Midsomer, as yet another body is found in its peaceful surroundings, this time after Clara Morrow's triumphant vernissage in Montreal.  Initially, the woman's identity is a mystery; once it's discovered who she is, all sorts of secrets, mainly based around the Québec art-world twenty years earlier, start creeping out. Gamache, Beauvoir and co. investigate; but Beauvoir has problems of his own...  Another excellent book in this series.

The steel kiss, by Jeffery Deaver. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016.

A Lincoln Rhyme novel (this is obviously the post in which I catch up with series...)  Lincoln has resigned from consultancy with the NYPD after a disastrous case; and Amelia hasn't forgiven him for it. However, a dreadful event in which Amelia fails to save a man from being eaten alive by an escalator motor brings Rhyme back from lecturing to investigation on the civil damages case. And he has a new sidekick...  This is good - it's Deaver - but there are one or two "reveals" which don't quite ring true; still entirely worth reading though.

Smoke and mirrors, by Elly Griffiths. London: Quercus, 2015.

A Stephens and Mephisto mystery, set in Brighton in the aftermath of World War II.  Two children go missing, and Stephens is investigating when he hears of an eerie connection with an earlier murder in the theatre in which Max Mephisto is in rehearsals for Aladdin in panto.  I like the period details here, but somehow this one fails to catch fire...