First thoughts
Steph Harker is travelling through security at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when the pins holding her shattered leg together set off the alarms.
She’s taken into a perspex box to be searched, leaving her son waiting outside — and then she witnesses him being led away by the hand of a man in uniform.
Thus begins the 26th novel from best-selling author Val McDermid. And if you think it sounds tame, then you’re much mistaken. As Steph tells her story to the FBI it becomes clear that Jimmy isn’t her child — and that her close relation with a reality TV star could hold the key to the identity of his abductor.
This is a standalone novel and although it is written with McDermid’s customary flair for characterisation, the subject matter is a little different from her usual fare. Be warned, though, the final pages contain more twists and turns than a king-sized corkscrew.
Philida is the latest novel from Andre Brink, one of South Africa’s most celebrated writers,
The eponymous heroine is a slave in 19th century South Africa, where the abolishment of slavery is tantalisingly almost at hand. Philida has borne four children fathered by her owner’s son, Francois Brink. When he reneges on his promises of freeing her, she attempts to seek legal redress. This results in life-changing and unexpected consequences for both.
Brink writes beautiful prose peppered with evocative descriptions of historic and often tragic Cape life. This is made even more effective when his acknowledgements at the end reveal that Philida was an actual slave who served the author’s very own ancestors.
However, the book is missing a meaty storyline, which, with a lack of suspense, means it is sometimes boring.
It takes a brave reporter to explore and tackle the issue of sex trafficking, which is exactly what Mexican investigative journalist Lydia Cacho is.
Over five years she put her life in danger as she travelled around the world, visiting Turkey, Japan and Burma to try to uncover some of the most harrowing tales from kidnapped victims as well as traffickers themselves and those who have saved and protected the innocent children and women who are smuggled into countries and abused as sex slaves.
Cacho had to flee a Cambodian casino run by Chinese Triads, where girls under the age of 10 were bought and sold, and under a false identity, grabbed coffee with a Filipino trafficker in Cambodia.
A nun disguise also allowed her to walk through one of Mexico City’s most dangerous neighbourhoods, controlled by powerful smugglers.
Informative and compelling, while at times shocking, Cacho’s book proves why this topic needs to be addressed by governments and authorities immediately.
These mini-biographies of four famous modern “Elizabethans” — Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger — contain enough vitriol to float a battleship.
Piers Brendon, a Fellow of the Churchill College, Cambridge, is a prolific author of outspoken books and seems to delight in courting controversy. He certainly knows how to despise. His latest work is a sequel to his best-selling Eminent Edwardians and he writes with an apparent determination to pulverise his subjects.
Their real or perceived failings are mercilessly dissected in elegant, rapier-sharp prose. For good measure, a mini demolition job on the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is thrown in too.
Vicious gossip, especially about one’s betters, is horribly alluring, however. Readers of this book will find it compulsively readable.
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