A Knife to the Heart by Barbara Nadal

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A Knife to the Heart by Barbara Nadal

Forty years on, a wealthy but broken family must relive the dreadful events surrounding a young married woman’s alleged suicide. Although Cetin Ikmen has retired from the Istanbul police force, he is persuaded to investigate this not-so-cold case. A historian has discovered, in a ruined seaside villa, the Ouija board that predicted the bride, Deniz, would be the first of those present to die.  While Ikmen delves deeper and deeper into the circumstances surrounding her violent death, both past and present are obscured and illuminated by dynamics motivating the surviving relatives.

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Disrupting the reader’s complacency is what Sara Collins does best. Identifying with Frannie, we face the historical realities of slavery, but there’s also plenty of humour, passion and adventure in her story.

Collins’ description of Frannie’s passionate relationship with her aristocratic mistress is only one brilliant facet of this exciting, unsettling book. In addition, there are colourful accounts of life below stairs and on the streets of London, recounted by Frannie in response to her defence lawyer’s desperate plea, ‘For God’s sake, give me something I can save your neck with!’

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The Stepney Doorstop Society by Kate Thompson

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The Stepney Doorstop Society by Kate Thompson

The Stepney Doorstep Society is a heartfelt and entertaining celebration of strong, intelligent, working-class women who took on not only poverty, but also Hitler’s Third Reich, in a never-ending struggle to care for their families and support their community.

A Boomer friend of mine, born a few years after WW2 ended, spent his childhood playing on London bomb sites and has the scars to prove it. I know the district this book is about and in the past I met many elderly people who had been through the kind of experiences described. While I was reading it, I wondered if I might have encountered some of the old ladies who shared their memories with Kate Thompson, because their voices came across as genuine and familiar.

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The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star by Vaseem Khan

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The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star by Vaseem Khan

This book, and indeed the series, is illuminated by the personality of Inspector Chopra, a detective whose motto in life is ‘honesty, integrity, decency.’ In spite of every distraction that the underbelly of Mumbai life can throw at him, he adheres to these principles. He is a family man of great tenderness but also immense toughness. If his ‘maudlin silences’ occasionally annoy Poppy, they are understandable in the context of the corruption and greed he faces every day. ‘In our country, honesty is like the scent of blood in shark-infested waters,’ he complains.

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