Reality TV contestants in way over their heads

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2024 (814 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A truly vile reality TV show lies to contestants that they’ll be competing to survive in the mountains of Wales. No, not remotely close — they’ll be betraying each other to reveal life-destroying secrets while under threat of actual torture. Any chance someone gets in a snit… and someone gets murdered?

Clare Mackintosh’s A Game of Lies (Sourcebooks, 308 pages, $26) pits rambunctious, cantankerous and unorthodox detective constable Ffion Morgan against despicable scoundrels while having to treat people she’s known all her life as suspects.

Never mind being on the job with her ex and the English cop from the other side of the border, with whom Ffion could get something serious going if they weren’t such hardheaded, obstinate — that’ll get dealt with, maybe. Just enjoy a terrific mystery.

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Twenty years before her literary stardom, Jane Austen — sorry, Miss Jane Austen — sleuths the murder of a Belgian tradeswoman who had the effrontery to be bludgeoned to death in a great manor and thereby spoil a grand soirée for the local gentry.

Miss Austen investigates by committing innumerable social gaffes, blundering a swath of destruction through polite society and both suspecting and accusing pretty much everybody of being a murderer — while, two years after the French Revolution, the upper class surround themselves with footmen, maids and cooks, lord it over the peasants and marry off their daughters to perpetuate wealth.

Jessica Bull’s Miss Austen Investigates (HarperCollins, 368 pages, $25) isn’t a particularly engaging whodunit — neither biting social commentary nor an explanation for Austen’s success two decades hence. So if you’ll forgive the impertinence, what’s the point?

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A ne’er-do-well up to no good under cover of darkness gets kabonked with a blunt instrument and then hurled into a vat of fermenting ale — one of those write-offs, sadly, is a tragedy — in J.R. Ellis’ aptly named The Brewery Murders (Thomas & Mercer, 268 pages, $24), published September 2023.

Noting the plural in the title, we soon learn this quaint Yorkshire town has two competing breweries run by a squabbling brother and sister, their father appearing to have taken his secret recipe for the world’s best-tasting beer to his grave.

For the love of all humanity, find that recipe and solve the murders, pub regulars throughout Yorkshire implore decent copper DCI Jim Oldfold in this quite enjoyable whodunit that won’t appeal to homophobes or anyone who believes families can’t be repaired.

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An impoverished woman faces the gallows after ostensibly beating her slimy boss to death with the heel of her shoe, bringing together an honest cop, a newspaper reporter turned into iconic radio voice and a woman of dubious past in colourfully corrupt 1929 Vancouver to try to save her.

John MacLachlan Gray’s Mr. Good-Evening (Douglas & McIntyre, 320 pages, $35) is Vancouver noir at its best — money launderers mixed with the upper class, imported hit persons and scoundrels galore, along with Winston Churchill, Al Capone and a charlatan strongly resembling a real-life B.C. cult leader.

Gray has scripted a dandy, complex and darkly humorous tale of the edges of a moribund empire.

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In deepest Northumbria, 10 young Icelandic camping tourists find a skeleton stuffed in a barrel; nearby lies an 11th Icelander, a waste of oxygen bludgeoned to death, with a vile history of victimizing one of the 10.

D.C.I. David Stone and detective sergeant Frankie Oliver are immersed in sleuthing galore, from Newcastle all the way to modern-day Reykjavik and Second World War POW camps for Italian prisoners.

Author Mari Hannah does a marvellous job of bringing terrific characters to life in Black Fell (Orion, 417 pages, $20), a superb police procedural.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons those scenes of magnificent Wales near Llandudno in the PBS post office scandal series could lure anyone into the Welsh hills — himself included.