Dolphin, 2000, 121 p.

After her father died in an accident Roshana Kemal’s family – mother and younger brother Jino – lives in a caravan in the grounds of the factory where her mother works. At night Roshana has strange dreams involving The Shadowman and a jackal named Shivalu.

All too soon, in Roshana’s eyes, her mother remarries; to a plump businessman called Rajah, making good in the India of the twenty-first century. Even though the family is now much more comfortably off – all Rajah’s business friends show signs of enjoying life – Roshana resents the disruption to her life and the betrayal of her father it represents.

Her friend at school, Jeevamani Anjumbandare, frequently regales Roshana with tales of her sister Smita’s latest boyfriends. This seemingly inconsequential detail has plot ramifications.

There is a slight disconnect between the resolute realism of the depiction of Roshana’s everyday existence and interactions with her friends and the undercurrent of menace in her dreams, aspects of which can pop into her daily life. Menace appears soon enough, though, when Jino is abducted from outside a shop into which Roshana had gone to make a purchase.

Partly it is her dreams which lead Roshana to the discovery of where Jino has been taken.

True to its YA milieu the jeopardy in Spiritfeather is not over the top. A solid, straightforward read through which Greenland’s professionalism as a writer shines.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccough (it isn’t a cough; ‘hiccup’,) “in Roshana’ picture” (Roshana’s picture,) Anjumbandane (Anjumbandare.)

Cassell, 1975, 589 p, including 2p Map of mediæval Northern France and the Low Countries.

This is the sixth and last of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, following on from The Ringed Castle. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph in French and there are copious quotations/song lyrics in French throughout.

Among other incidental historical goings-on such as the French capture of Calais from the English, the French war against the Spanish (in both of which Lymond has a guiding role,) and the wedding of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, the main plot concerns the unravelling of Lymond’s seemingly uncertain parentage, an unravelling performed in the main by Philippa Somerville, whom Lymond married in The Ringed Castle to protect her honour, a union which remains unconsummated and from which Lymond is desirous of an annulment (as, to be fair, is Philippa.) The reasons for this desire are complicated and not entirely voluntary and obstacles continue to put in its way but both contract promises to future marriage, in Lymond’s case to Catherine d’Albon, daughter of the Maréchale de St André, in Philippa’s to Austin Grey.

Lymond is neither ashamed nor guarded about his past amours – he has a son, Kuzum, by the deceased Oonagh O’Dwyer; a former lover, Guzel, left behind in Russia, and in this book he beds the Maréchale (or, rather, she beds him) before the proposal to her daughter. When Catherine asks if she’s agreed to marry a libertine she gets the reply, “‘Everyone marries libertines,’ Lymond said. ‘But not everyone knows it beforehand.’”

A minor sub-episode reveals the young Scottish Queen, under the influence of her de Guise uncles and prospective father-in-law, King Henri II, secretly agreeing that if she died childless the throne of Scotland should pass to France. This does not go down well with delegation of Scottish nobles sent to witness Mary’s wedding, who are obliged to keep their knowledge of the pact secret but Lymond goes so far as to warn Mary that such an outcome would meet with all but universal opposition back home.

Also contributing to the proceedings, helpful in relieving Lymond of a burden of sickness as well as in the resolution of the parenting issue, is one Nostradamus.

While the level of research and historical detail are impressive and incident is never far away once again Dunnett’s writing and dialogue lacks clarity.

Pedant’s corner:- hiccoughing/hiccough (it’s not a cough; hiccuping/hiccup,) “Daedalus’ honeycomb” (Daedalus’s,) palinquin (palanquin.) “After Russia, campaigning in France, would be like” (that second comma is needless,) “the aesthetic figure one would have thought from his reputation” (‘ascetic’ makes more sense in context,) Luxembourg (sometimes here spelled Luxemburg, which may have been a rendering of the usage of the viewpoint character of the moment,) “the Vidame de Chartres’ voice” (the final ‘s’ in Chartres is not voiced so its possessive is certainly Chartres’s,) “like Crassus’ lamprey” (Crassus’s,) “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) alambic (usually spelled ‘alembic’,) “his language than had not been moderate” (his language then had not,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, “there had been nothing demanded of Philippa which needed intrude on this relationship” (which need intrude; or, which needed to intrude.) “The pavilion of the Duke de Guise and that of his brother d’Aumale were empty” (The pavilions,) “was tinging the cloth” (tingeing; tinging is something bells do.) “One of the Count of Egmont’s foraging parties had acquired half a dozen wagons of grain and were occupying the village”  (One … was occupying,) “tell the prayers” (they were musicians, not supplicants: ‘tell the players’,) “a Brazilian dancer” (I wondered if Brazil was known as such in 1558 but the term is apparently from around 1506,) a missing full stop.

Everyman’s Library, 1991, 150 p, plus 22p Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury, 2 p Select Bibliography and 9 p Chronology. First published 1925.

I had had this on my tbr pile for years without ever getting round to it. I might still not have had it not been on both the Guardian’s list of 100 Best Novels, where it was no 11, and also in the readers’ list (16 [equal]).

It’s a bit of an odd experience to read a book held in such regard: especially if you’ve seen a film made from it (in my case the one starring Robert Redford.) In this instance it was also dispiriting. Few, if any, of the characters have any redeeming features.

Gatsby, born Jimmy Gatz, is blinded to just about all else – especially caution – by his obsession with Daisy Buchanan, who is herself narcissistic, superficial and, strange as that may seem given his bootlegging activities, actually unworthy of him. Her diffidence makes her more of an absence in the book than an active participant. Even her crucial contribution to the story, the driving of the car whose fatal encounter precipitates the denouement, occurs outwith the direct narrative. Her husband Tom is nothing but a bully, a racist and white supremacist, subscriber to the great replacement theory (yes in the1920s,) who sees racial intermarriage as the end of civilisation and treats his mistress Myrtle Wilson with casual violence. Myrtle’s husband George is merely a catspaw.

Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker, and our narrator Nick Carraway’s sometime girlfriend (a relationship always somewhat tenuous,) seems to be present only for purposes of information dumping.

Nothing much is revealed of Carraway himself, a very un-USian protagonist in that he affects little in the story and only reacts to what is around him. (That last is not a criticism, by the way; they also serve.)

There is a curious statement in, “Americans, while willing, even eager, to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”

I note that a door marked, ‘The Swastika Holding Company’ reads now a little differently than it would have done in 1925.

I wouldn’t rate this anywhere near my top 100 reads. It may be it is as much – perhaps more – to be noted for its highlighting of the vacuousness and indifference bordering on callousness of the monied during what was called the Jazz Age as for any literary merit. But then the monied are vacuous and indifferent in any age, you only have to witness our own, where callousness seems endemic.

Sensitivity note: ‘kike’, ‘three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl’, ‘a small flat-nosed Jew’, ‘a lovely Jewess’.

Pedant’s corner:- “‘you’d of thought,’ ‘he’d of got me’ and ‘appendicitus’” (spoken by Mrs Wilson or her sister, so possibly an attempt to render a lack of education: ‘you’d’ve thought,’ he’d’ve got me,’ ‘appendicitis’,) “had reached a crescendo” (a crescendo is the rise, not its peak,) caravansary (caravanserai.)

Vintage, 1992, 236 p.

I suspect that Carter actually enjoyed writing this book, which fizzes with energy and sly humour and at times tips into magical realism. Its title is based on the old saw that a wise child knows its father. Narrated by Dora, one of the twin sister dance act known as the Chance Girls. She and twin (Leo)Nora are daughters, on the wrong side of the blanket, of theatrical great Melchior Hazard, who unfortunately did not acknowledge them as his. That burden was taken on, though, by his nomadic brother Peregrine.

The convoluted nature of the family relationships here – the girls were brought up by the woman they know as Grandma (even though she wasn’t) and told their mother died shortly after their birth in Grandma’s house – is further complicated by the fact that living with them is the disabled former wife of Melchior, Lady (in her own right) Atalanta Hazard, known to the now 75 year-old twins as Wheelchair.

There is a measure of smoke and mirrors to proceedings, reflecting theatrical illusion. The novel is steeped in theatrical and stage lore, with Shakespearian references abounding. A trip to Hollywood illustrates the excess of the early film industry with a climactic scene perhaps owing a little something to slapstick comedy. The contrast between Melchior’s status as a grand old man of legitimate theatre and the lower brow nature of the sisters’ dance career highlights the disparity between their own legal status and that of their half-sisters,  acknowledged by Melchior, born in wedlock, though possibly not sired by him.

At its core, though, is Dora’s longing to belong, her search for a figure to fill in for the father who disowned her.

Dora’s vice may be irritating to some what with all the theatrical allusions, irreverent asides and references to lost cultural staples.

But along the way she has some more serious thoughts. “Let’s not call it a tragedy. A broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. And war.”

Much later we have this exchange with her sister.

“‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’”

‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

‘That he doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said.”

She also tells us that, in story telling, “If you get little details right, people will believe anything,” (true in life as well perhaps?) and vouchsafes that, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

This was Carter’s last novel, written after her diagnosis of lung cancer. In the circumstances it is something to be wondered at that, while touching on seriousness, overall it has such a consistent lightness of tone.

Pedant’s corner:- “she’s showed her all” (intended I’ve no doubt – the book’s background is show business after all – but it ought to be ‘shown’,) “to whit” (it’s ‘to wit’,) forbad (forbade,) “Nora said, he was young enough” (that comma alters the sense,) “Epps’ cocoa” (was that a proprietary brand. Whatever it ought to be ‘Epps’s’,) a musical revue called What You Will, later rendered variously as “What? You Will?”, “What! You Will?”, “What! You Will!” and “What You Will!”, “than sang” (then sang,) “oblivious of” (it’s oblivious to,) “legs akimbo” (how you can put your feet on your hips is beyond me,) slax (slacks, spelled so to indicate lack of care or attention,) “never forgave a grudge” (a malapropism for forgot?) “Peter Jones’ store” (Jones’s.) “Nora sunk in thought” (sank.)

Polygon, 2007, 276 p, plus 7 p Introduction by Alan Warner.

In an interpolated framing device we have here the story of an author trying to write a piece of fiction celebrating goodness, where the characters are happy because they deserve to be, surrounding that same story which he is writing to find out what becomes of them. The author’s wife tells him his desire is impossible since he has always been severe on his characters and she thinks he cannot change. Still less does she believe he can set such a story in Scotland because he thinks the Scots have lost faith in themselves. The novel he is writing is that story; or an attempt at it.

That novel features the Sempill family, already relatively comfortably off – the father was an architect – but at its beginning lately come into a large inheritance.  The Mama and Papa Sempill have five children, Diana, Jeanie, Effie, Rowena, Rebecca; all named after Walter Scott heroines. All but Diana are blonde, she is dark-haired and at their story’s beginning old enough to fancy herself guardian of them all, parents included. They are on holiday in Argyll when they come across an abandoned house whose proper name is Ardmore but is known to the locals as Poverty Castle. As a family they resolve to buy it and bring it back to its former glory. This involves irritating the Camptons, inhabitants of the “big” house, on an enclave of whose land Poverty Castle sits, but with access rights. An encounter with the children of the house exemplifies all that can be good or bad about aristocratic attitudes. Their sons Edwin and Nigel (Nigel; enough said) are opposites in their demeanours.

Mr Sempill is an easy-going soul, but his wife is racked by desire for a son though perhaps too old and lacking in vigour for the risk involved. The crisis of the tale is when she becomes pregnant again despite her husband’s stringent efforts to avoid that.

There are several time jumps in the narrative, Diana goes off to University, where she takes digs in a humble establishment, rooming with working class Peggy Gilchrist. Both the blurb and the Introduction describe Peggy as the Sempills’ nemesis but there is really nothing in the text which justifies that. What we do get is the middle- and upper-class perspective of Peggy being a member of “a class lacking culture, education, and money”. Her mother resents her not conforming to what she sees as her station in life (a job in a supermarket) but her father is keen for her to do as well as she can. Then again, as described, Peggy’s brain is her only asset.

The Sempills are, by and large, good, and happy enough, but, in novels as in life, there will always be something to disrupt contentment.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; Jenkins’ (several times; Jenkins’s.) Otherwise: crème de menthes (crèmes de menthe?) “Mary Queen of Scots’ effeminate secretary” (x 2, Mary Queen of Scots’s.) “Mr Chambers’ tone” (Chambers’s,) “a plebian habit” (plebeian,) plus marks for “the Misses Sempill”, “none of the other girls were keen to have” (none … was keen to have,) “Keats’ room”, “Keats’ country”, “Keats’ poetry” (Keats’s,) Inverary (Inveraray,) “Roslin Chapel” (original spelling of Rosslyn Chapel,) “Burns’ Highland Mary” (Burns’s,) “Cortes’ burning of his boats” (Cortes’s,) “cooker irradiating warmth” (irradiating [to shine light upon] is the opposite of what was meant; radiating.) “The Moon could be seen though it was not yet shining” (if you can see it is shining,) “a racket” (racquet, the reference was to badminton.)

Tor, 2014, 264 p.

This is a strange concoction, part SF (with more than a touch of Altered History,) part history of the author’s family – including the mystical implications of being born in a caul – part disquisition on the art of fiction.

The first section seems to be from the viewpoint of a child living in a post US Civil War era where the North is ruled by a queen and there are Martians apparently threatening Earth. (Or is that bit an extract from the SF novel being discussed?) The second revolves around a Second World War secret endeavour. The third is less clear cut, with the narrator (or Park himself) looking into an incident in his family’s past that may, or may not, have involved aliens.

The later sections refer to and turn back on the earlier ones, with characters appearing again in different guises, or are the same but in a different situation, all mixed in with the author’s family’s convoluted history. This metafictional aspect of the book does make it slightly less than a straightforward read. And hence difficult to sum up succinctly.

At one point we read, “It’s all metafiction, all the time.” Being told this doesn’t make it any easier on the reader, who, in any case, has already worked out this is metafiction.

A recurring theme is the Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg, about which I had some previous knowledge but Park subverts that when at one point, in an Altered History twist, instead of a mine exploding, the crater is said to have been created by the explosion of a locomotive on lines dug under the entrenchments to provide swift access to the city when the projected attack is to take place. (Or is this some sort of joke about the Underground Railroad?)

Park does present some aperçus. “One of the interesting things about autistic people is the insight they provide into ourselves. We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear.”

In his capacity as a tutor of writing, our narrator – we are again perhaps intended to assume this is Park himself – says, “I always warned students against complexity for its own sake, and to consider the virtues of the simple story, simply told.” Park is poking fun at himself here, I suppose, for All Those Vanished Engines is very far from a simple story, simply told.

Pedant’s corner:-  “The tiny incised pattern on the plates …. were not identical” (The tiny patterns….,) “I went upstairs and smote for a while, trying to get Captain Lukas to finally make a stand” (‘smote’ here does not seem to be the past tense of smite,) “the kaiser’s government” (the Kaiser’s,) “a font of the kind of wisdom” (the phrase is ‘a fount of wisdom’,) “Burnsides’s Corps” (the general was called Burnside; so ‘Burnside’s Corps’.) “I shined the light” (shone, please.)

Mantle, 2019, 348 p plus 5 p List of characters, 5p Afterword and 2 p Acknowledgements.

This novel’s title is not particularly apposite – though it does allude to its subject, those Greek tales of the Trojan War – as it barely mentions the legendary ships at all. Instead, its focus is on the women caught up in that conflict and more or less sidelined in all the years since they were first written about. And not simply, like Pat Barker’s Women of Troy sequence, on the Trojan women, but also on the those the Greeks left behind and the Muses and Goddesses said to have influenced affairs.

Thus we have the muse Calliope irritated by the importunings of “the poet” for her to sing for him of the events he wishes to describe (Haynes thereby echoing the usual translation of the Iliad’s opening line, “Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.”) Creusa, woken by the tumult of the city’s fall, fearing for her five-year-old son and wondering where her husband Aeneas has got to. The captured Trojan women on the shore by the Greek camp, their travails only beginning but intermittently returned to through the narrative. Penthesilea the Amazon, fighting for Troy against the Greeks to atone for being responsible for the death of her sister. Penelope, writing increasingly tetchy letters to her husband Odysseus as his long absence is exacerbated by failure to return promptly on the war’s end and then prolonged on – and on and on – (the poet’s missives suggesting he will use any excuse not to come home.) Chryseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, who is befriended by Briseis in shared adversity. The sea-nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, bemoaning her forced marriage to a mortal and her son’s own mortality. Laodamia begging her husband Protesilaus not to be the first onto the beach at Troy, though she knew he would be. Iphigenia, tricked by her father Agamemnon’s promise of marriage to Achilles into being sacrificed for a favourable wind to set sail for Troy. Aphrodite, Hera and Athene using wiles and false promises to trick Paris into his famous judgement. Oenone, who rescued Paris as a baby after he was abandoned due to the prophecy that he would cause Troy’s downfall. Eris, goddess of strife, setting up the business with the golden apple. Hecabe, Queen of Troy, struggling to accept her new diminished status but still able to revenge at least one of her dead sons. Her daughter Polyxena, accepting her fate with stoic dignity. Cassandra, cursed to see the future as the present and not to have her visions believed. The goddess Gaia resenting the ravages humans wreak on the Earth. Clytemnestra nursing her fury at Iphigenia’s death and preparing her vengeance for it for ten long years. The three Fates spinning the threads of mortals’ lives. Andromache slowly coming to terms with her new life as a slave.

Not a straightforward linear narrative, then, and the many viewpoints and scenes mean the whole thing comes across as fractured and a bit scattershot. This stands in contrast to Haynes’s previous novel The Children of Jocasta which was more tightly focused. The lack of linearity of the storyline works, though, and Haynes clearly has a deep knowledge of her source material.

Her main point, that the sufferings and endurance of the women of these wars (and by extension the women of any war) are as – or even more – heroic than any acts carried out by warriors is certainly worth considering.

Pedant’s corner:- “Odysseus’ nurse” (Odysseus’s,) “Aeneas’ heart” (Aeneas’s,) Briseis’ back” (Briseis’s,) Chryses’ character (Chryses’s,) all names ending in ‘s’ are given s’ rather than s’s for their possessives, “to staunch your bleeding” (stanch,) “each head will open its gaping maw” (stomachs are not usually located on heads,) “‘that Hector deserved to die.’ she said” (‘that Hector deserved to die,’ she said’,) “not known to have expressed regret for any cruelty he had perpetuated against anyone” (he had perpetrated against anyone.)

Little, Brown, 2020, 442 p.

The sixth Karen Pirie book and again she is juggling two cases.

The first is when a skeleton is discovered in a campervan stored in a house’s garage for years. Suspicion falls on the deceased owner’s former lover, who abandoned her for a life as an artist. The second is a live case of a body hauled up along with a creel by a fishing boat off Elie. Since the dead man is one James Auld, whose brother Ian, a high-up civil servant in the Scottish Office, disappeared ten years before, and Karen had recently reviewed his case, she is given the remit.

James had fallen under suspicion of murdering his brother and to escape that had made a new life for himself by joining the Foreign Legion and then settling in France as one Paul Allard. Since the initial investigation was carried out in Fife DS Daisy Mortimer out of the Kirkcaldy Police office ends up seconded to Karen’s Historic Cases Unit. (This becomes semi-permanent when Karen’s assistant DC Jason Murray – aka the Mint – suffers a broken leg during the investigation.)

Connections in both cases are soon made – though not between them – but take time to tease out. In the meantime Karen is still grieving over the death of her former lover Phil Parhatka and worried about the direction her new relationship with Hamish, owner of a small chain of coffee shops in Edinburgh and a cottage up north. He does perform a useful function here though by identifying a mysterious male in a photograph of Ian Auld found in James’s French apartment. This is David Greig, once an enfant terrible artist, who committed suicide not long after Ian Auld’s disappearance. When Karen learns six well-known Scottish paintings were stolen from the Scottish Office and replaced by forgeries in the years immediately prior to the Toy/Lib Dem coalition government she begins to join the dots.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for “amn’t I?” “There were a handful” (there was a handful,)  “James’ message” (James’s.)

Vintage, 2000? 568 p. First published 1961. (The publishing information page gave this edition’s date as 1994, but the author information page states he died in 1999 so it must have been some time later.)

How to approach a novel whose title has contributed a concept to the world’s lexicon of phrases? Indeed, a novel whose cover describes it as “One of the great novels of the century” and was no 99 in the recent Guardian list of 100 greatest novels ever, thus spurring me on to retrieve it from my tbr pile. That makes it 34 of those 100 I have now read. (It made no 8 in the readers’ list.)

And how will it conform to the great novelistic concerns of love, sex and death?

Well, Catch-22 is a war novel, so that’s death ticked off – though not often directly. Fear of death, yes, (the background to the eponymous catch,) but not death itself. Sex is certainly alluded to, but in a perfunctory way, and there is precious little love displayed in its pages. Some of the characters say they’re in love but the reader may beg to doubt it.

War novels have a head start in the importance stakes. They do tend to be taken seriously, as Kate Atkinson noted.

War is, of course, a deadly serious business; but it is also at its root utterly absurd and non-sensical. In Catch-22, Heller has chosen to lean into that absurdity. Heavily. At times so heavily it tips over into farce.

The text is full of digressions, repetitions and conversations which circle back on themselves or have characters repeating to each other what each has just said. It is decidedly non-linear with the narrative sometimes jumping from one scene to another mid-sentence. Scenes from main character Yossarian’s training and the island of Pianosa where he is based in the ‘now’ of the novel slide into each other without demarcation. Character descriptions tend to the grotesque and few of them impress as real people. The treatment of women is perfunctory and off-hand. The overall impression is of a surrealistic collage which goes thoroughly overboard at times with such character names such as Major Major and A Fortiori.

But it is not really so much a novel of war as of the US military mindset. Colonel Cathcart’s desire for promotion (or publicity,) the rivalries between senior officers more important to them than the war itself. Cathcart’s continual raising of the number of missions his charges must fly before their tour ends and they can be sent home is the proximate cause of bomb-aimer Yossarian’s refusal to fly any more, his natural fear of being killed not then being evidence of the insanity which would ensure his withdrawal from combat. Quartermaster Milo Minderbinder’s black market activities – supposedly to benefit all the soldiers on the base – with his fingers in every pie imaginable plus a few more, extend even to dealing with the Germans and undermine the war effort in other ways.

The novel does undergo a mood change halfway through chapter 39 (out of 42) when the narrative becomes more sombre and it is from here on that Cathcart and Colonel Korn suddenly show more perspicacity and cunning than up to that point.

I can’t decide whether this is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (a phrase I have purloined in a bid for comic effect) or the most annoying novel I’ve ever read.

I think I lean towards the latter.

Sensitivity note: the word ‘nigger’ appears – as do ‘kike’, ‘wop’ and ‘spic’.

Pedant’s corner:- “the educate Texan from Texas” (that’s where Texans usually come from,) “a bus depot blazing with red and yellow lights” (wouldn’t they have a blackout?) “clefted chin” (cleft chin,) receptable (receptacle,) german (x 1, elsewhere, as is proper, German,) “threw this arms about” (his arms,) “and order him” (and ordered him.) “Now She sat” (she,)  “how many times she’s packed his bags” (he’s packed his bags,) “like most of all” (Liked most of all,) mispronounciations (mispronunciations,) “Dr Stubbs’ fault” (Stubbs’s.) “‘Another country heard from’”  (elsewhere this phrase is rendered as another county heard from.)

Tor, 2025, 123 p.

Rose House was deceased architect Basit Deniau’s greatest creation, “curled like the petals of a gypsum crystal in the shadow of a dune” in the Mojave desert. Rose House is the house where he died – and his mausoleum, his compressed remains fashioned into a diamond displayed on a plinth. It was left in his will to Deniau’s one-time student turned critic Dr Selene Gisil. Only she can have access – and only for seven days a year.

Rose House is a haunt, embedded with artificial intelligence. Selene hates it so much she left after only three of those days and fled to Turkey to pursue her career there.

Rose House has just telephoned China Lake Police Precinct to inform its officers there is a dead body inside it, as it was legally required to do.

The novella Rose/House is a locked room mystery, whose subject matter lies at the intersection of Science Fiction, horror and crime. A locked room (or locked house) to which the police cannot gain access.

A neat premise, certainly, and a book densely, even philosophically, written.

So, how did someone gain entry to Rose House only to be killed? And how can the police solve a crime or even assess the scene in such a restricted building?

To Detective Maritza Smith – forced to identify as the inanimate China Lake Police Precinct in order to gain entry along with Selene, recalled from Turkey – the house has a pervading sense of menace. To the reader it comes across like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Martine handles all this well. But the novella’s setting in the late 22^nd century seems much too far off.

Pedant’s corner:- “which oughtn’t have surprised her” (oughtn’t to have surprised her,) “Torres’ offer” (Torres’s,) “amongst Los Angeles’ most distinguished” (Los Angeles’s,) “sat in the back seat” (seated; or sitting,) a sentence ending in ‘did they’ but without a question mark, “chile enchilada” (chili enchilada,) putrescene (putrescine – used later.)