rose71

Archangel, Robert Harris
This was a weird one, interesting in some ways but a bit cheap in others. I read it all the way to the end because I wanted to know what happened next, so to that extent Harris succeeded at the key goal of the thriller writer, but I didn't care at all about any of the characters, I did not ever feel like I would mind that much if they were killed, which is a bit of a problem in a thriller. And the twist at the end sort of made sense of that, but it also cheapened it: it was a particularly weak type of twist which made the story all feel a bit pointless. But it was a good look at Russia in the Yeltsin era, the worldbuilding was by far the best bit of this.

Warriors for the Working Day, Peter Elstob
A semi-autobiographical novel following a tank commander from D-Day to the spring of 1945. This was fantastic, I couldn't put it down, and I also learned a whole lot about tanks which I've never really known much about before. The story is intensely focussed on one particular tank crew, from training through to the invasion of Germany. There's a huge amount about the mental strain they're all under and what being at the sharp end of the invasion of Europe does to a person. We start with our hero, Michael Brook, watching his experienced commander Donovan apparently utterly cool and always doing exactly the right thing under fire - but with sections inside Donovan's POV where he knows he's cracking up and can't take much more. By the end of the book, after serving in and then commanding a tank from the Normandy landings to the far side of the Rhine, Brook is in the exact same position as Donovan was. As a portrayal of how war takes young men and crushes them either mentally or physically or both, it was absolutely fantastic and obviously written from life. Brook is extremely young, something that's emphasised by the fact that his girlfriend back home is still at secondary school. The author's portrayal of sex and women was deeply strange in general, it gave me the strong sense of someone who has never even heard of the word 'kink' but has a whole raft of unexamined ones. The mother/son incest implied very briefly at one point was, um, unexpected. But fortunately there wasn't too much of any of that, and there was a tremendous amount of deeply fascinating and incredibly readable tank adventures and vivid realistic descriptions of soldiers gradually coming apart at the seams.

Want You Gone, Chris Brookmyre
An intense and fun thriller. This is part of a series about Brookmyre's hero Jack Parlabane, investigative journalist and all around trouble magnet, but it stands alone fine, in fact better than the previous one in the series I read. I enjoyed this but I also found the process of reading it really stressful, the characters are under so much pressure and some of it is very deeply familiar kinds of pressure. One of the lead characters is the main carer and responsible person for her younger sister who has Down's, and having to get to the special school to pick her up each day and avoid disruption to keep her sister on an even keel is a key part of the character's life. So a story about someone dealing with that at the same time as being in a thriller plot did press a lot of my buttons. And the carer details were - well, not perfect, but acceptably good enough that I wasn't annoyed by it. It's a computer hacking thriller at core, which isn't necessarily something I'd have gone for, but this leaned into the social engineering side of hacking, our hacker character is superb at ringing people up and convincing them that handing over their login credentials is the natural and obvious thing to do. The overall plot is our heroes being blackmailed into committing a heist, so there's many layers of tension, both the many problems of carrying out the actual heist and then the question of who's blackmailing them and why and how they're going to get out of it. I spotted the Big Bad as soon as they were introduced and long before the heroes did, the author leaned a bit too hard on the narrative there, but nonetheless the reveals are all very satisfying at the end. Extremely readable, many points for a respectable portrayal of a carer as the main character, very high tension all the way through.

The Cliff House, Chris Brookmyre
A fun thriller of the 'we're trapped on this island with no way off and a killer on the loose' variety, set on a hen weekend on a luxury island getaway where the interpersonal dramas between all the various guests suddenly take a much more life-threatening turn. Like the other book, I spotted one of the bad guys immediately, but there were some twists I didn't guess until they showed up. An almost entirely all-female cast, which Brookmyre does an impressive job with, and the unravelling of everyone's secrets is done really well. A great page-turner but with less of the high-pressure agony of the previous Brookmyre, and a deeply satisfying ending.

***

And finally, for the Bigglesy among you: you may know that there was a plan for a film adaptation of Flies East called Biggles Sweeps the Skies; the film was never made but a script was written and is at the BFI. And now the intrepid onefellsloop has been to the BFI archives and read it, and has a wonderfully detailed write-up of it which will explain how when Biggles and von Stalhein first come into conflict, von Stalhein takes off all his clothes.

Biggles Sweeps the Skies information