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.

I really enjoyed reading This is How We End Things by R.J. Jacobs, a crime-thriller set in a Psychology Department of a US university and most of the story’s characters are either researchers or participants in a study into the effects of stress and deception. During the university break, one of the researchers is found dead in the supervisor’s office and a few days later, the supervisor is also found dead. As a snow storm shuts the town down, the town’s detective and the campus cop interview all of the suspects (knowing they are all experts in deception/lying) and eventually chase down the killer in a dramatic end scene.

The story is well-paced, the characters are credible and likeable, the setting is most-intriguing and adds an interesting dimension to the detective’s investigation and witness interviews. The ending caught me by surprise. I wholly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a crime thriller, interesting characters and well-crafted character relationships/interplay.

The Baghdad Betrayal by Robert Charles is a ripping yarn set in Iraq at the start of ‘the invasion’ and focuses on the UK SAS’ involvement in securing UK citizens and interests.

Mark Falcon (ex-SAS, now ‘journalist’ happens to be the right person in the right place to do a favour for his former boss, Colonel Harry Killian who needs to rescue an Iraqi military defector. ‘The West’ is poised to invade so Falcon’s window for the rescue/extraction is small.

Falcon is also to get British businessman’s son out, but, because it seems a story always needs a romantic thread, young Richard Campbell won’t leave without his Iraqi girlfriend, but she won’t leave without her father’s permission and her brother won’t let her anyway and as it turns out, the father is also the defector. Time because scarce as the invasion starts, Campbell and his girlfriend are captured by the Iraqi secret police and then and what’s with the defector who made it safely to London sneaking himself back into Iraq. It’s money of course.

This is a story about the old stories of UK business tycoons and their military associations as much as it is about religious and political (and money) intrigue in Iraq. It’s an exciting story, would make a great movie and is well worth reading if only to reinforce the cynical view that all wars are really about money. Highly recommended.  

Body on the Estate by Diane M Dickson is the story of Detective Inspector Jordan Carr and Detective Sergeant Stella May are investigating a break in that becomes a murder that then becomes a multiple murder in Liverpool.

The victim, Julie Scott, lived alone on an estate where the neighbours are generally not well-disposed to helping with police inquiries. Needless to say DI Carr’s superior officer wants the case resolved quickly so that his superiors are happy. The case quickly becomes complex as Julie is found to have been an employee of a large financial firm and friends with a temp. secretary at the same firm. When they return from Spain, Julie finds her house has been broken into and trashed.

After the break-in becomes a murder investigation Carr and May find voodoo dolls in the house and their inquiries reveal that Julie has an ex-husband, a son who passed through the foster care system, and a missing laptop. And then the local computer repair person is attacked in his home.

The investigation pivots from suspect to suspect, but lacks evidence but in the end dogged police work solves the case.

The characters, police and public, are well-developed and they related well to each other, with a feeling of reality. The plot/police investigation ticks along with sufficient clues for the reader to reach at least a possible solution.

Highly recommended.   

Vermisst by Jonathan Nicholas is the best book I’ve read for a long time. Vermisst (Missing) is the fictionalised account of  Paul Goetz, a WW2 Luftwaffe fighter pilot who left school to become an air force mechanic, trained on the French coast as a pilot and was transferred to the Russian front where he fought with the Luftwaffe until a crash-landing led to his capture.

The second phase of Goetz’ story is his survival in the Russian POW and political prisoner system until his release in the 1950s.

It is a detailed account of Goetz’s time in the Hitler Youth before the outbreak of WW2 with interesting perspectives on the news and propaganda of the time. His time as a mechanic is described in detail as his perception of the heroic pilots. The accounts of his pilot training are both scary and fun in equal measures as are his early flights as a wingman out over the Channel, including the first of several crash-landings.

The accounts of both the planes and the relationships with his fellow pilots are fascinating in their complexity and at times their luxury which is soon seen in grim contrast to his life after being captured. One has to suspect the descriptions of his imprisonment, although not lacking in adversity, deprivation and deaths is somewhat less well-described even though he seemed to spend more years in this situation than on active duty in the Luftwaffe. The most poignant moment for me, in this rather long book, was when Goetz read a letter from his childhood friend’s mother informing him of his parents’ death in an air raid; he only received the letter many years later and just before his release.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was a refreshingly new voice ad perspective on a well-told story.