“Another year of living, loving and laughing,” starts the Christmas round-robin email from the dreadful Celia Halliday, and it is immediately clear we could be in no other hands than Janice Hallett’s, and in no other place than Lower Lockwood. Hallett has, unexpectedly and delightfully, returned to the world of the Fairway Players from her debut novel, The Appeal. Time has moved on a few years in The Christmas Appeal (Viper), and the amateur acting group is putting on a panto to raise money for the church roof (which collapsed under the weight of a giant “bat patty”). Jack and the Beanstalk, to be precise, and new co-chairs Sarah-Jane and Kevin MacDonald are in the middle of a power struggle with former incumbents Celia and Joel Halliday (“may I remind everyone on the committee … that Joel’s name should always be followed by the letters OBE,” insists Celia). Meanwhile, a body has been found on stage. Lawyers Femi and Charlotte are sent a bundle of emails, police transcripts and texts to dig through, as they try to discover if a crime has been committed, and who was responsible. Rest assured that the beanstalk itself has a joyful starring role – as Sarah-Jane says, it needs to be a good one, because “when you can clearly see that a group has cobbled a beanstalk together and Jack mimes climbing it, well, the story loses all credibility”. Hallett is as good as ever at showing her characters in all their petty, ridiculous, warm-hearted glory. A Christmas treat.
In Jean Kwok’s The Leftover Woman (Viper), Jasmine has travelled to New York from her village in China, escaping Wen, the man whom she married aged 14. She is looking for her daughter, who Wen had told her had died, shortly after she was born five years earlier. Jasmine is jobless, moneyless, paperless and her dangerous husband is hunting for her. On the other side of the social divide is wealthy publisher Rebecca, who lives in New York with her beloved adopted Chinese daughter, Fiona, her brilliant husband, Brandon, and her Chinese nanny, Lucy. Kwok traces the fallout as their orbits begin to collide – Jasmine’s desperation is juxtaposed with Rebecca’s privilege. But not everything is easy for Rebecca, whose publishing career is on the brink of scandal. This element of the story feels superfluous, as does the plot about Jasmine’s childhood romance. Still, Kwok has written a compelling and moving mystery in which threads converge and dangers pile up.
I am a sucker for a dramatic opening scene, and Richard Armitage’s Geneva (Faber) opens with a corker: a woman running through the snow in the Swiss Alps, chased by a gunman. Will she fall? We then get into the nitty gritty of the storyline, which focuses on Nobel prize-winning scientist Sarah Collier and her family. Sarah has taken a step back from work – her father has Alzheimer’s, and she is scared that she is exhibiting some of the same symptoms; confusion, memory loss, blackouts. Her husband, Daniel, however, is keen she accept an invitation to a conference to endorse the organisers’ new neurotech, and eventually she agrees. Cue all sorts of shenanigans, as Sarah travels to Geneva, discovers the tech could help with her own diagnosis – and finds that many things are not exactly as they seem. Told from the perspectives of Sarah, trying to hide her confusion from the world; Daniel, attempting to be both carer and husband; and Terri Landau, a science blogger reporting on the new tech, Geneva ratchets up the drama to breaking point. This first novel from the award-winning actor is a rollercoaster ride and lots of fun, even if some of the characters’ motivations do occasionally strain credibility.
Just in time for Halloween comes Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Icelandic thriller The Prey (Hodder & Stoughton), in which we’re never quite sure if the evil facing our characters is real or supernatural. The plot moves between a group of friends from Reykjavik on an ill-advised trek into the remote winter wilderness; a search and rescue team on their trail; a man working alone at a radar station on the coast, plagued by a mysteriously ringing phone; and a man who discovers he might have had a sister he knew nothing about when a child’s shoe is found buried in his old home. Sigurdardottir is a skilled hand and ties all her threads and twists together neatly, but it’s her thrilling tale of a struggle to survive in freezing temperatures, under a sky that never seems to lighten, that provides the real chill factor here.
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