Breakfast At Libraries

I listened to John Harwood's The Asylum as an audiobook, on my iPod. When I listen to audiobooks I tend to choose children's books, crime fiction, books I've read before, or historical fiction, and The Asylum is a Victorian-set tale of mystery and suspense.

I don't believe in ghosts, the Devil or demonic possession but I find people who do - or rather, people who make a living out of them - endlessly fascinating. Help For The Haunted by John Searles is the story of Sylvester and Rose Mason, who make their living performing exorcisms and delivering lectures on the subject, and their daughters.

The elder daughter, Rose Jr, is named after her mother and the younger child, Sylvie, who narrates the story, after her father. That may give you some idea of what sort of people the Masons are: it's clear that they expect their daughters to share their beliefs and values, no matter how inflexible they might be. This hasn't necessarily been a problem for kind, studious Sylvie, but the rift between the rest of the family and Rose, whose behaviour is not only challenging but at times borders on the sociopathic, has been growing painfully by the day.

One night, the errant Rose calls home late at night to arrange a desperate meeting with her parents at their former church, setting in motion a series of events which leads to their deaths before the altar.

What follows is hard to categorise. There are elements of supernatural horror, of psychological thriller, of murder mystery, of family drama and of a coming-of-age novel as 14-year-old Sylvie tries to make sense not just of her parents' murders but of the strange family life they led in the years preceding them, and of her parents' dangerous and sinister work. What's real and what isn't? Who is leaving mysterious packages of food on the doorstep for Sylvie and her sister? What is the significance of the old ragdoll locked in a rabbit hutch in the basement?

Sylvie is a perfect mix of resourcefulness and vulnerability, with that characteristic combination of intelligence and naivety so often seen in exceptionally bright teenagers. Torn by conflicting loyalties and neglected both by social services and by manipulative, unpredictable Rose, who at barely 19 is now her legal guardian, Sylvie is in a horribly difficult situation, and it's hard not to want to reach into the pages of the book and give her a hug. Being generally eager to please and grieving for her parents, the memory of whom she is understandably reluctant to sully with her investigations, Sylvie isn't naturally tough or feisty, which makes her quiet determination all the more admirable.

John Searles also does a fine job with the character of Rose. She's callous, disruptive and spiteful, yet far from two-dimensional, and the more we learn about her the more we can understand her. The supporting characters are gratifyingly complex, particularly the Mason parents themselves, who we visit in flashback throughout the book, Sylvester's troubled brother Howie and journalist Sam Heekin, author of a controversial book about the Masons and their work. Murder suspect Albert Lynch and his 'haunted' daughter Abigail are also fascinating, if not a little a disturbing.

It's the ending that stops Help For The Haunted being a five-star read for me. It's certainly gripping, and in a way, oddly satisfying, but it's also rather rushed and appears to have an irksome plot-hole (I don't know if John Searles has ever experienced an injury that entails being slumped on the floor with a leg bent out at an unnatural angle, but if he has, I'd like to see how the hell he achieved what he makes his afflicted character do next).

Despite this, Help For The Haunted is a compelling, sometimes unsettling and often moving read that questions how much any of us really know about the people closest to us.

The Deaths begins with the discovery of a series of murders by a coffee delivery boy. Yes, the characters The Deaths, by Mark Lawson, order coffee for their expensive espresso machines from a subscription-only coffee supplier, clamouring for ‘limited edition’ runs of ever more expensive bespoke blends. They’re those sorts of people. And really, that’s what this book is about: a certain type of person. Despite opening with a murder and spending the rest of the novel in flashback until the identities of the deceased and the motive for their murders are finally revealed, The Deaths isn’t really a mystery novel as such and the murder plot is simply a vehicle for a dark social satire.
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I’ve read reviews which have talked of The Deaths being a satire on the affluent middle-classes but – by my standards at least – these people strike me more as super-rich than simply affluent. The four couples around which the plot revolves, known as The Eight, own ponies, enormous detached sandstone houses with annexes for live-in nannies and own up to four cars apiece including a 'shopping Beetle'. All their many children are at private schools and only one of the women – Emily, a GP who also seems to be the only character who isn’t entirely repulsive – has a job. Oh, except for Tasha, who ostensibly runs a party catering business but whose clients seem only to consist of other members of The Eight.

As you might have guessed, The Deaths is not a novel about people you’d want to spend an afternoon with unless you had money to burn and a lack of any social conscience. The Eight move in the circles of bankers, tycoons and QCs. They’re hideous snobs and thinly-veiled racists; they’re loud, socially competitive, superficial and spiteful, and Mark Lawson pulls no punches when it comes to lampooning them.

The satire is exceptionally sharp and well-observed and often laugh-out-loud funny as Lawson picks apart the values and lifestyles of The Eight, allowing us to examine them in forensic detail. There are times when it begins to wear thin, though. For instance, it’s funny to learn for the first time that Jonny Crossan, a barrister whose father was a member of Thatcher’s cabinet, refers to a bowel movement as ‘a Smedgewick’, but less entertaining on the fifth or sixth mention. It’s also the case that when Lawson steps out of the adult characters’ viewpoints and writes as their teenage offspring, the characterisation is much less successful and cringingly far off the mark.

The Deaths lacks subtlety of tone but is extremely readable and peppered throughout with neatly inserted hints, clues and red herrings that keep the reader guessing until the final outcome. I actually found that I frankly didn’t care which of the characters was dead on any emotional level, simply because they are to some degree interchangeable anyway, right down to their matching Australian au pairs, children with names like Henry and Josh and Plum, and their large-dog-small-dog combos (a dopey gundog and a scrappy terrier apiece) and I could feel almost no sympathy for anyone’s plight, such as it was. However, this certainly didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the book, which I found gleefully and grimly entertaining.

The Son-In-Law is the story of three children, Scarlet, Theo and Ben, their grandparents Hannah and Freddie, and their father, Joseph. The complicating factor is that four years ago, Joseph killed the wife, mother and daughter who linked them all together. The children have been living in calm middle-class domesticity with their grandparents ever since while Joseph serves four years of his prison sentence. But now Joseph is a free man again, and is intent on rebuilding a relationship with them.