Reading up a thunderstorm

We’ve had a couple of dingy weekends, great for curling up on the couch with the thunder-sedated dogs and some terrific just-in-time-for-Christmas or summer holiday books.

There was no better reason to turn off the phone and tear my eyes away from the most chilling horror show on TV, the US elections, than a new Michael Connelly release: this one called The Waiting.

Connelly has created a whole library of beloved characters ‒ his best being the flawed but incorruptible Harry Bosch, closely followed by the Lincoln Lawyer, both hit TV series, Renée Ballard, another unfolding character, and Harry’s daughter, now up-and-coming LAPD officer Maddie. The Waiting has its tried and tested and crime ingredients: bureaucracy, politics, dirty dignitaries and dead bodies. Ballard, like Harry, has a troubled past which Connelly weaves out with each new book.

There are rumours of a spin-off Ballard series which makes sense if Connelly et al want to keep increasing their bank accounts. Harry is getting on (I keep wondering how Connelly is going to kill off one of his signature characters) as is the actor who made the detective his own, Titus Welliver. For now, The Waiting is a smart, twisty thriller that gets the team into lots of trouble with the big bosses, but also a wily crew with a few tricks up their own sleeves. They find a DNA hit on a 20-year-old case which points to a VIP with friends in high places. But even DNA can send investigators up the wrong path and put them in the crosshairs. What if that fallout can be diverted by solving the city’s biggest unsolved case in decades? Come on, Connelly, keep up, next one please.

Another ‒ entirely different ‒ favourite writer is Robert Harris, now adding Precipice to his bestselling list.

Harris is in the news as his book Conclave is the basis for the new Ralph Fiennes movie of the same name, which has been attracting high praise. The factional Precipice goes back to Britain as World War I looms and looks at the relationship between then prime minister HH Asquith and Venetia Stanley. Apart from being a rather tacky romance between a quite awful 26-year-old aristocratic woman and a pompous ass who’s twice her age, it’s also a story of state secrets and the class war before the real war. The problematic and odd young intelligence man (of course ‒ women were not allowed to vote, let alone work) tossed an unsolvable shred of a classified clue to keep him out of his bosses’ hair, turns out far more persistent and troublesome when let loose.

Its finale was a tad frustrating, but it was an intriguing and eye-opening portrait of how much society has moved on. A real jolt is the number of letters exchanged in a single day ‒ imagine a working post box.

The last one was a new author for me, but when I read the four-paragraph prologue, I knew to stop until I could make time to read it in one go. David Lagercrantz’s Fatal Gambit is an intricately teased out thriller, rich in characters and places.

I haven’t read much from the Scandinavian genre, which exploded with Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and Lagercrantz’s pedigree included being asked to write two to make five: The Girl in the Spider’s Web and The Girl Who Lived Twice.

Fatal Gambit’s “good guys” are an oddball pair of young woman detective Micaele Vargas and reclusive genius Hans Rekke, both having personal crises of their own, and his bad guys are seriously bad. And very, very clever which is always a terrifying combo.

All three earned their spots on my “to keep” bookshelves.