Geneva by Richard Armitage began as a potential industrial espionage / medical ethics novel but became a cheating husband and his mistress thwarted by the clever protagonist with the unlikely help of an FSB agent – quite the plot twister.

Sarah Collier is a retired Nobel scientist and the wife of Alzheimer’s researcher, Daniel, and daughter of an Alzheimer’s patient, is invited to endorse a potentially life-changing piece of medical technology, the Neurocell, developed by Switzerland-based laboratory owned by Mauritz Schiller. In the weeks before the visit to Geneva, Collier suffers from the early stage symptoms of Alzheimer’s and a scan confirms her and Daniel’s worst fears. They travel to Geneva where Sarah is to confirm her highly-coveted endorsement for the Neurocell technology and so make the technology attractive to Schiller’s potential investors. The presentation is managed by the ultra-efficient Helen Alder, supported by the exiled Russian head of security, Pavel Osinov.

The story is interspersed with occasional posts from the medical ethics blogger Terri Landau, who foretells possibilities, good and bad, of the new medical technology that the Schiller Institute is on the verge of creating.

The story is told occasionally from Sarah’s and Daniel’s perspectives. Sarah tells of her anxieties associated with Alzheimer’s and with endorsing new and potentially dangerous medical technology. Daniel tells of the difficulties of being a husband of an Alzheimer’s patient and the profound changes to his and his family’s life. Other chapters and written in the third-person, recounting the plot of Helen Alder, Maurice Schiller and Pavel Osinov in their preparations for the presentation that is vital to the Schiller Institute’s financial survival. In these chapters we learn that Helen may not be as reliable and honest as Maurice thinks she is, and Pavel may in fact be working for another master. And to avoid blowing the suspense of the plot, I’ll stop there.

The characters are well-constructed and the relationship between Daniela and Sarah especially is crafted carefully. The suspicions relating to Helen and Pavel are very carefully and slowly revealed so that the reader is kept guessing for some time.

The plot’s pace is consistent and kept my attention throughout. As with all good suspense/thrillers the last few chapters are fast read of tense action and insightful dialogue.

Murder on the Farm by Kate Wells is the story of Julie Gray who discovers a dead body on her farm. As she investigates, more bodies appear and the investigation becomes more dangerous and closer to home.

Setting a murder-mystery on a quaint English countryside farm felt refreshingly different but at times, forced.

The plot is well-crafted with sufficient clues to keep the reader intrigued and invested in the ‘puzzle’ of the mystery. The characters are mostly well-created and credible to give the whole story a high degree of credibility.

I enjoyed reading this book but there was an underlying feeling that the setting didn’;’t really match the crimes.

Killer Waves by Brendan Dubois was a thoroughly good read, as good as anything on the current bestseller lists. It is a tightly-plotted story that ticks along at a cracking pace. The characters are credibly flawed, believable and likeable.

Retired Department of Defense analyst Lewis Cole was obsessed with the current Space Shuttle mission to be awake and outside as the shuttle passed overhead. It was also the right time to see the lights of cars in the nearby seafront  reserve. And of course, even though it’s the middle of the night, he investigates and finds two local police officers at the scene of an apparent suicide.

As part of his retirement from the DoD, Tyler has a job as a journalist and so he sets about investigating what he decides was not a suicide, an opinion partly formed by the arrival of a team of federal agents claiming the deceased was a drug courier.

Cole is bullied by the Feds into helping unravel a WW2 secret involving a German U-boat and a small cargo of nuclear fuel.

An intriguing and feasible plot which unfolds at a good pace, characters that are sufficiently credible and likeable to cheer for and turn the page to ensure they survive and succeed.  

Rusted Souls by Chris Nickson is the story of Chief Constable, Tom Harper, his last three cases and his home life with his adult daughter Mary and his wife Annabelle who is struggling with dementia, and his impending retirement.

A tightly-knit gang of 4 ex-WW1-soldiers are robbing jewelry stores and kill a civilian in the process. As Harper’s staff close in on the gang, one is found dead, executed by the others for causing the civilian death. Another is injured and hospitalized during a botched getaway.

A gang of shoplifters are headed for Leeds and Harper assigns the case to an up and coming detective who manages the situation through careful planning.

And Alderman Thompson asks Harper to find the person or people who are blackmailing him over a stupid dalliance with a much younger woman.

This is the last book in a long series during which the characters are thoroughly crafted, their relationships feeling authentic and sincere, and the post WW1 Leeds setting as genuine-feeling as possible, the author attending to such details as the current politics, fashions and the emotions of the families of returned and killed soldiers. It’s a masterpiece of detail and accuracy. The story is suspenseful and feels very real.

Calico by Lee Goldberg is the story of Detective Beth McDade, set in Barstow California, and her most recent homicide case, a seemingly homeless/indigent man hit by a mobile home on the night of a thunder and lightning storm and a large explosion at the nearby military base.

The Mojave Desert doesn’t seem like the best location for a life or a detective/crime story. Beth is visited by a previous acquaintance from the LAPD who is investigating the disappearance of a man last known to have been driving in the area of Barstow. Just as Beth’s investigation gets intriguing due to some odd results revealed by the coroner, the author takes back a hundred years or so to the mining town of Calico, not far from the present-day Barstow.

What promised to be a straightforward crime story set in an unusual location, now becomes a most intriguing and, at times, difficult to fathom story of time travel. The night of the storm, it seems, a rip in time appeared and at least one person traveled back in time and another traveled through the rip, forward in time. The story now lives in two times: Beth’s story, attempting to gather evidence to support her bizarre theory that the corpse dug up on a building site is that of the man from LA who was last seen just two weeks ago – and the story of that man’s life a hundred or so years ago in Barstow where he landed after falling through the rip in time.   

The plot has been carefully constructed such that this story, unlike most time travel stories, feels plausible. The characters are sufficiently flawed to be real people that we can identify with and cheer for and they relate to each in what feels like a real manner without it feeling forced or deliberate.