Category: Reviews

Strange Pictures by Uketsu – #ReadIndies

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Translated by Jim Rion

Strange Pictures is a strange novel, but it’s also a completely fascinating one. I’ve been reading a lot of the classic Japanese crime published by Pushkin Vertigo recently, but this is a modern crime novel, first published in Japan in 2022 and made available in an English translation last month. I had never heard of the author, but apparently he’s a ‘YouTube sensation’ known only by the single-word pseudonym Uketsu. He always appears in his videos wearing a mask and his true identity has not been revealed to the public.

In this book, Uketsu takes as his premise the idea that studying drawings made by victims or perpetrators of crime can give us important insights into the psychological state of those people, which could provide clues to help solve the mystery. Strange Pictures consists of three interconnected short stories based around this concept. The links between the stories are not clear at first, but gradually an overall narrative starts to form, raising questions that are answered in a final, fourth section of the book.

Each of the three stories involves some ‘strange pictures’. First, a series of drawings made by a pregnant woman before her death, which her husband posts on his blog. Then, a disturbing picture of a house drawn by a child at school. And finally a sketch of the mountains drawn by a murder victim in the final moments of his life. These pictures are reproduced in the book, along with various other illustrations, and Uketsu interprets them for us step by step as the characters begin to uncover the clues they contain. He discusses the symbolism in some of the pictures and in other cases the physical drawing itself – the paper it was drawn on; the way images can be digitally resized, rotated and layered; the use of gridlines to help with proportion and perspective; coloured crayons that smudge and blur. All of these things and many more are significant to the plot.

The first two stories in the book help to introduce the characters and provide context, but the third one is a great little murder mystery in its own right. I loved the interactive feel, with not just the main drawings but also other sketches, maps and diagrams helping to clarify what’s happening and lead us to the solution. There are also some very creepy moments, particularly a scene with a woman and child convinced they are being followed home to their apartment, and another where a man awakes in his tent in the mountains to discover that he’s no longer alone.

Although I found this book very enjoyable, it’s not one that you would choose to read for the beauty of the prose as the writing style is very plain and simplistic. However, it’s easy to read and while it’s obviously better if you can experience the book in its original language, I think Jim Rion has done a good job with the translation. A second Uketsu book, Strange Houses, revolving around a series of floorplans, is due to be published in English later this year. I’m already looking forward to it!

As Pushkin Press are an independent publisher, I am counting this book towards this year’s #ReadIndies event hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith

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Virago have just reissued ten of the books from their Modern Classics range with new green cover designs, including Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston – and this one, Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness. I’ve been meaning to try another Highsmith novel since reading Strangers on a Train a few years ago, so when I spotted this book on NetGalley it seemed the perfect opportunity.

This Sweet Sickness was first published in 1960 and takes us inside the mind of David Kelsey, a young man who lives in a boarding house in the town of Froudsburg, New York, and works as a scientist at a fabrics factory. At least, this is his life from Monday to Friday. When the weekend comes around, David leaves for his own house in nearby Ballard, where he becomes William Newmeister, a freelance journalist. For two whole days he locks himself away and imagines he is happily married to Annabelle, the love of his life. He has decorated the house the way he thinks Annabelle would have wanted it, prepares the meals he’s sure she would like and has even bought her a piano. The only problem is, Annabelle ended their relationship two years earlier and married another man. She and her husband, Gerald Delaney, live in Connecticut with their baby son and Annabelle has never even visited the house in Ballard, let alone lived in it.

David thinks he has successfully covered up his dual identities, having convinced everyone at work and at the boarding house that he visits his elderly mother at her nursing home every weekend. His mother has actually been dead for many years, but he’s sure no one will ever find out! However, two of his friends – a work colleague, Wes Carmichael, and a fellow boarder, Effie Brennan – begin to grow suspicious and decide to investigate. They are right to be concerned, because David is becoming increasingly unstable. He can’t and won’t accept that his relationship with Annabelle is over and bombards her with letters and phone calls, urging her to leave Gerald and marry him. Eventually, things take a more sinister turn and David finds himself in trouble. Is his double life about to be exposed at last?

I loved this book and although the first half is quite slow, I was completely gripped by it all the way through. It’s definitely a disturbing read, though, particularly as the whole book is written from David’s perspective (in third person). I was so impressed by the way Highsmith changed my perception of him several times throughout the book. At first I saw him as a basically decent person who’d had his heart broken and was struggling to move on, then I quickly lost sympathy for him when it became clear how dangerous his obsession was and how relentlessly he was stalking Annabelle, and finally, despite his actions, I began to pity him again because by then he had completely lost his grip on reality and desperately needed help.

Annabelle, although we do meet her occasionally, exists mainly as a fantasy woman in David’s mind and it seems obvious that if he got his wish and married her he would find that the real Annabelle didn’t quite live up to the imaginary one. Annabelle frustrated me because she could have been much more firm with David; instead, at least at first, she seems to be encouraging him, speaking to him on the phone, agreeing to meet him and letting him think there’s still hope. It would have been interesting to have seen things from Annabelle’s perspective, I think. Did part of her still care about David and not want to hurt him? How did she really feel about Gerald?

Effie is another character who interested me. She’s clearly in love with David, but he’s too preoccupied with his delusions and obsessions to pay her much attention. He becomes more and more irritated by her persistence and her ‘spying’, without acknowledging that he is behaving the same way towards Annabelle. Effie and the other characters in the book are seen only through David’s eyes which almost certainly doesn’t give us a true or fair picture of what they are really like.

This Sweet Sickness is an unsettling novel and not very comfortable to read, but it’s also fascinating from a psychological point of view and I found it very immersive. I liked it better than Strangers on a Train and look forward to reading more of Patricia Highsmith’s books.

Thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK/Virago for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Queen of Fives by Alex Hay

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The Queen of Fives. They breathed the title with reverence on the docks, down the coastline. A lady with a hundred faces, a thousand voices, a million lives. She might spin into yours if you didn’t watch out…She played a glittering game: lifting a man’s fortune with five moves, in five days, before disappearing without a trace.

I enjoyed Alex Hay’s first novel, The Housekeepers, about a group of servants staging a heist during a ball in a grand London house. I hoped for something similar from his next book – and that’s what I got! If anything, this one is more complex, ambitious and inventive.

It’s 1898 and Quinn Le Blanc has five days to convince the Duke of Kendal to marry her and trick him out of his fortune. Why five days? Because Quinn is the ‘Queen of Fives’, the leader of a network of London con artists based at a house known as The Château who play by a specific set of rules. Their current game is called False Heiress and there are a number of steps that have to be carried out on each day of the con. The Château has been operating for generations and there have been many previous Queens. During Quinn’s eight-year reign, however, things have started going wrong: debts are mounting and the house is falling into disrepair. She desperately needs this latest scheme to be a success.

Quinn is assisted by Mr Silk, whose job is to serve the Queen and to guard the all-important Rulebook, which contains the instructions for the Château’s various games. But watching from the shadows is the mysterious Man in the Blue Silk Waistcoat – and also the equally mysterious Woman in the Cream Silk Gown – who will do whatever it takes to stop Quinn in her tracks.

As you can see, this is an unusual story based on an unusual premise and, to be honest, I was never fully convinced by it. I didn’t really understand why it was so important to complete the game within five days and to stick so rigidly to the Rulebook, when allowing more time or adapting the rules to fit unforeseen circumstances could have made it easier to win. Still, I managed to just suspend disbelief and go along with it! After a slow start, with time spent introducing the characters and the history of the Château, things gradually pick up pace and by the middle of the book I was gripped.

As with The Housekeepers, the reader is in the rare position of wanting the villains, in this case Quinn and her friends, to succeed. However, we also get to know the victims, the Duke of Kendal and his sister, Tor (short for Victoria). Tor is a single woman in her thirties who still lives with her brother and their stepmother and she is worried about losing her home should the Duke decide to marry. Tor is immediately suspicious of the woman who appears out of nowhere and introduces herself as Miss Quinta White, but the Duke himself seems unsuspecting. Later, we discover that he has reasons of his own for wanting to marry quickly, so Quinn’s attentions aren’t unwelcome to him – though, of course, he has no idea who she really is or what her plans are.

There are some great twists towards the end of the book and although in hindsight I feel I should probably have seen them coming, I didn’t and was taken by surprise. I think overall I preferred The Housekeepers, but both books are fun and I’m already looking forward to a third book by Alex Hay, whenever and whatever that may be.

Thanks to Headline for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor

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The story of our Roman Escape Line has been characterised as a tale of courage. But it was always a story of friendship, first and last. The friends we knew and those we did not, some fleetingly encountered, others never at all. I am no sentimentalist, but I call it a love story.

This is the second book in Joseph O’Connor’s new trilogy inspired by the true story of the Rome Escape Line, a secret network that smuggled thousands of Jewish refugees and Allied soldiers out of Nazi-occupied Rome. The first novel, My Father’s House, introduces us to the work of the Escape Line who meet in the neutral Vatican under the guise of a choir to avoid the attentions of the Gestapo and focuses on one member in particular – Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the Irish Catholic priest who is the leader of the network.

The Ghosts of Rome continues the story, beginning in February 1944, six months into the Nazi occupation. Although Hugh O’Flaherty is still part of the group, we see very little of him in this book as he steps into the background to let other characters’ stories be told. The main focus this time is the widowed Contessa Giovanna Landini, known as Jo, whose palazzo is commandeered by Gestapo officer Paul Hauptmann. Hitler isn’t satisfied with Hauptmann’s performance in Rome so far and he is under pressure to produce results. If he could obtain evidence of the Choir’s activities he’s sure that would help to improve his reputation with the Führer. Hauptmann hopes that the Contessa, whose house he is living in, will lead him to her fellow Escape Line members, but Jo is a resourceful woman and decides to take advantage of Hauptmann’s interest in her to try to protect herself and the Choir.

Another significant storyline revolves around a Polish airman who is shot down over Rome. Some members of the Escape Line want to help him, but others are more cautious. How can they be sure he is who he says he is? What if he betrays them? When it becomes obvious that he has life-threatening injuries and will die if not treated, they are faced with an important decision to make.

Of the two books, I think I preferred My Father’s House because it was more suspenseful, describing the countdown to a major mission on Christmas Eve, and because I found Hugh O’Flaherty such an interesting character. This is an excellent book as well, though, and I’m sure other readers will like it better than the first one. Although Jo Landini is at the forefront of the story, most of the characters we met in the previous book also reappear, including British Envoy Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, diplomat’s wife Delia Kiernan and escaped soldier Sam Derry. We also see a lot of Delia’s teenage daughter, Blon, who is angry when her mother leaves the Escape Line and insists on trying to take her place, which not everyone is happy about! These are all people who really existed, but O’Connor includes an author’s note to explain that the way they are portrayed in the book is just his interpretation and shouldn’t be relied on as fact.

If you haven’t read the previous novel, you’re probably wondering whether it’s necessary to have read it before starting this one. I would say it’s not really essential, but it would make it easier to follow what’s happening in this book. There are a lot of characters and O’Connor constantly switches between different perspectives throughout the novel, as well as inserting passages written in other styles – such as transcripts of (fictional) BBC interviews – which means you do need to pay attention otherwise it would be easy to lose track of things. As with My Father’s House, I was particularly interested in the insights we get into the mind of Paul Hauptmann – a very human villain, which just makes him all the more unsettling to read about. It’s the brave and tireless work of the Escape Line, however, that makes these novels so compelling; in this book, I loved the way they managed to hide hundreds of people inside a derelict old theatre right under the noses of the Gestapo.

This is a planned trilogy and although I can’t see any details of the third book yet, I know it will be something to look forward to!

Thanks to Harvill Secker for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

I’ve read all five of Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries that have previously been published by Pushkin Press in new English translations. This is the sixth, with another due later this year, and I decided to read it for the Japanese Literature Challenge being hosted this month and next by Dolce Bellezza.

The Little Sparrow Murders was originally published in Japanese in 1959 and is set a few years earlier in the village of Onikobe in Okayama Prefecture. Private detective Kosuke Kindaichi is taking a break from crime-solving and has decided to travel to Okayama to visit his old friend, Inspector Isokawa, at the prefectural police headquarters. Isokawa gives him the address of a nearby inn to stay at, run by Rika Aoike, a widowed friend. Although Kindaichi had been hoping to relax and avoid any mysteries for a while, he finds himself drawn into one when he learns that Rika’s husband, Genjiro, was murdered twenty years earlier – and the killer was never found.

As Kindaichi hears more about the events before and after Genjiro’s death and gets to know some of the people involved, another murder takes place, coinciding with the disappearance of the village chieftain and a sighting of a mysterious old woman on a mountain path. It seems that Kindaichi’s relaxing break is over before it even started. He and Isokawa begin to investigate, convinced that the key to the present day mystery lies in determining what really happened to Rika’s husband all those years ago.

Having read a lot of older Japanese crime novels over the last few years, thanks mainly to Pushkin who are doing a wonderful job with their new translations, I’ve found that many of them – most notably the ones I’ve read by Yukito Ayatsuji and Soji Shimada – are more concerned with solving seemingly impossible crimes and complex puzzles than with characters and motives. Yokomizo, I think, usually finds a better balance between the two; although his books still have intricate plots, the focus is often not so much on working out how the murders were committed, but rather on why they were committed and who could have had a reason for doing so. The impossible crime books can sometimes be fun as well, but I personally prefer the more character-driven ones. In this particular novel, the murders take place out in the open, not in locked rooms, and there’s almost no discussion of alibis, timings or similar things that can sometimes bog down a plot.

One thing I loved about The Little Sparrow Murders is that Yokomizo builds the story around a children’s rhyme – a device that Agatha Christie also often used. The killer in this novel is inspired by a temari song (a song sung by children in Japan while bouncing colourful embroidered temari balls). It begins “In the trees in the garden behind our house, Three little sparrows came to stay” and goes on to describe three young women from different families, who were “all of them sent away” – in other words, murdered. The deaths in the book correspond to the rhyme, which adds some extra interest to the mystery. I hadn’t heard of temari songs or balls before so, as always, a Yokomizo novel has contributed to my knowledge of Japanese culture.

This is one of my favourite Yokomizo novels so far, along with The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse, but I did have one problem with it – trying to keep track of the huge number of characters! There are five families in the book and it’s not easy to remember which family each character belongs to and how they’re connected to people in the other families. If you’re reading the ebook version (or maybe even if you’re not), I recommend taking the time to draw some family trees using the character list at the front of the book before you start, then you can easily refer to them as you read. I would have been lost otherwise, I think.

I’m now looking forward to the next Yokomizo book, Murder at the Black Cat Café, coming in September. Pushkin Vertigo also have another Ayatsuji novel, The Clock House Murders, on the way, as well as others by authors I haven’t tried yet, so 2025 should be a good year if you’re a fan of Japanese mysteries!

Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain

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I’ve had mixed experiences with Rose Tremain’s books, enjoying some and struggling with others. Absolutely and Forever was shortlisted for last year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and as it’s a personal project of mine to try to read all of the shortlisted titles, I decided to read this one despite it not sounding particularly appealing to me. It’s a short book (under 200 pages), so at least it wouldn’t be too big a commitment if I didn’t like it.

Here’s how the book begins:

When I was fifteen, I told my mother that I was in love with a boy called Simon Hurst and she said to me, ‘Nobody falls in love at your age, Marianne. What they get are “crushes” on people. You’ve just manufactured a little crush on Simon’.

What Marianne Clifford has manufactured, however, is more than just a little crush. It’s an obsession. She knows she’s going to love Simon Hurst ‘absolutely and forever’ and at first it seems that he feels the same way about her – but when he leaves for Paris to study at the Sorbonne and never returns, Marianne’s heart is broken. As the years go by, Marianne tries to move on and build her own life, but she can never quite let go of her love for Simon and the dreams she once had.

The book is set in the 1950s and 1960s and Marianne narrates the story of her life during and after her relationship with Simon. A lot happens to her over the years – she attends secretarial college in London, has several jobs, gets married and makes new friends – but all the time she’s pining for Simon, which holds her back from finding happiness and contentment. It’s understandable that she would be upset for a while, but when she continues to grieve for years and years afterwards, it quickly becomes frustrating, particularly as it’s so one-sided and Simon clearly doesn’t care as much as she does. But Marianne herself is naïve, innocent and childlike, never really seeing the world as other people see it, so it’s maybe not surprising that she reacts the way she does. Although she grows from a teenager into an adult over the course of the book, she doesn’t develop very much as a person and the Marianne at the end is not a lot different from the Marianne at the beginning.

Although I didn’t dislike Marianne and found her story quite sad, it was Hugo, the man she marries, who had my sympathy. Hugo is completely devoted to Marianne and she does like him very much, but her feelings for Simon prevent her from loving anybody else. At least Marianne is lucky enough to have a close female friend in Petronella, a sensible, practical Scottish woman she’s known since their school days, and Petronella does her best to help her move on with her life, but ultimately she can’t control whether Marianne chooses to take her advice.

The time period the story covers is the period when Rose Tremain herself was a teenager and young adult and I’m sure she’ll have drawn on some of her own personal memories and experiences of that era. Having read her memoir, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life, however, this novel seems to be only partly autobiographical – Marianne’s life follows a different course from Rose’s own, but there are also some similarities, such as Marianne’s desire to be an author (for much of the book she’s working on a novel narrated by an Argentinian horse).

As I’ve mentioned, Absolutely and Forever appeared on the Walter Scott Prize shortlist in 2024, but it didn’t win and I think I can see why. Although I found it quite an easy, enjoyable read (despite Marianne being a bit irritating), sometimes the more readable books aren’t the ones that win prizes and this one doesn’t really tackle important or topical issues like the others on the list. I have the final shortlisted title, The New Life by Tom Crewe, to read soon.

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

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This is the final novel in Pat Barker’s trilogy telling the stories of some of the women involved in the Trojan War. Books one and two, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, focus on Briseis, who was given to Achilles as a prize of war, although I was surprised by the number of male perspectives that are also included in those two books, considering the titles! In The Voyage Home, we leave Briseis behind to follow three other characters as the victorious Greeks return home from the war.

One of these is Cassandra, the Trojan princess and prophet who is cursed never to be believed. Like Briseis, Cassandra has become a war prize – in her case, she has been taken as a concubine by Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. Then there’s Ritsa, a Trojan slave and healer given the job of accompanying Cassandra on the journey to Mycenae and acting as her personal servant. Finally there’s Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, who is grimly preparing for her husband’s return. It’s been a decade since Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for a wind to sail to Troy, but Clytemnestra has never forgiven him and is ready to take her revenge.

I enjoyed the first two books in this trilogy and I did like this one as well, but not quite as much. I’ve read several other novels about Clytemnestra and the events of the Oresteia recently (including Elektra by Jennifer Saint and Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati) and I felt that her sections of the novel didn’t offer me much that was new or different. Having said that, the way Barker portrays Clytemnestra’s emotions – her anger, bitterness and grief – was very well done. There are also some atmospheric scenes of ghostly children haunting the palace – although, oddly, chanting British nursery rhymes such as Oranges and Lemons, which pulled me right out of the Ancient Greek setting!

Of the main characters, Ritsa is probably the easiest to like and as a servant, of a lower social status than the others, she has an interesting perspective on the events that unfold. Cassandra is a fascinating, complex character in the unusual position of being both enslaved and the wife of the king. She has already predicted the deaths of herself and Agamemnon but due to the curse she is under, nobody takes her seriously. I would have liked more of the book to have been written from Cassandra’s point of view, but instead Barker concentrates on showing her through the eyes of the other women: Clytemnestra, who views her with suspicion (after all, Agamemnon was her husband first) and Ritsa, who initially resents Cassandra for not being her beloved friend Briseis, who has not accompanied them to Mycenae. Ritsa sees Cassandra as wild and deluded, but gradually starts to have more sympathy for her.

This is a satisfying end to the trilogy, although if you haven’t read the first two books I’m sure you could read this one as a standalone.

Thanks to Hamish Hamilton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.