An Unwanted Guest

Shari Lapena returns with her third novel, An Unwanted Guest, following the unprecedented success of The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in the House.

Lapena has taken an Agatha Christie template and weaved a fast paced thriller that this reader read in less than two days when on holiday.

On a cold wintry weekend in upstate New York, strangers from varying backgrounds all descend upon the Mitchell's Inn - a remote lodge where there is not great phone signal nor wi-fi.  The blizzard like conditions have led to an understaffed hotel being manned by the father and son team of James and Bradley.

From the get go, it seems a lot of people are keeping cards very close to their chest; the Christie like method of taking six to ten strangers put them in an uncomfortable situation and then let murder commence leads to the thriller taking shape before our eyes as one body appears after another in the polite atmosphere.

Lapena has crafted a winning formula perfect for these times; a thriller centred upon a mad cap 48 hours in the wilderness with the harsh reality of nature having a debilitating effect on proceedings leaving people reliant upon their wits and survival streak.  Characters are dependent upon being able to connect with the outside world, yet they have tried to escape the rat race for various reasons.

These same characters are knee-jerk in their reactions and behaviour, jumping to conclusions from the defence attorney David who was arrested for murdering his wife to Candice who may or may not be writing a real fiction novel on crime.

Lapena writes with such relish the scenes of people talking in confined spaces that once the body counts starts to add up, other writers may have got lost amongst her character's own hysteria, yet Lapena never deviates from the narrative rounding things of with a denouement that is both satisfying and startling.

Some critics may suggest that the ending comes too soon, yet in these hysterical times of constant moral panics; Lapena has been deliberate in treating the characters with respect instead of mere cadavers.

An Unwanted Guest is out in Hardback from 26th July from Bantam Press.

My thanks to Transworld Publishers for the review copy.

Two Tribes

Journalist and Liverpool football fan, Tony Evans, has a new book set for release from Bantam Press. Two Tribes focuses on the 1986 FA Cup final between Liverpool and Everton, the first time the Merseyside clubs met in the showpiece final at Wembley Stadium.

In 1986, the eyes of the world were upon the two Liverpudlian clubs, a year after the Heysel Stadium disaster; a tragedy which had far-reaching impact upon the cultural and sporting landscape for years to come.

Evans has brilliantly constructed a time machine and cultural artefact looking at the cause and effect of the Heysel tragedy and why it might have happened, not blaming Liverpool fans as many tried to but focusing on the political landscape in the United Kingdom where a toxic environment of anti-government resentment led to protests upon the football terraces.

Evans' notes that hooliganism had been ripe in the football stands for many years not just in English stands but European ones when teams visited.  He notes that two weeks before Heysel, Everton played in the Cup Winners' Cup final in Rotterdam without any incident.  The contrast between the two was vast, partly because Liverpool was the best club side in the world at that moment, more of a spotlight was thrown on them and their fans.

Ultimately, the tragedy at Heysel was blamed on English supporters, with a blanket club ban on English sides in European competition for five years. This led to teams missing out on being in the best club tournaments, mainly Everton who won the league twice and could not play against the continental best.  This led to certain players moving to Continental Europe - Gary Lineker, Glenn Hoddle, Chris Waddle - to extend their careers.

Another reason led to things changing was the advent of a new money windfall as the 'Big Five' attempted to get more live football on television screens; broadcast companies would not feature live football apart from cup finals and major international tournaments for fear of broadcasting fights on the terrace rather than the beautiful game.

Evans makes good points on this influx of money and how it would change football and those who play it; the drinking culture is incorporated into a chapter on Frank McAvennie who helped West Ham to third in the first division when Liverpool won the double.

But for all the money, there is still a feeling that the clubs love their fans but are negligent to their safety as Heysel and the fire at Bradford were eerie harbingers to the ultimate tragedy of Hillsborough which was three years away.

It is important Evans states that football mirrors society at vital times in history; football during the mid-1980s was a place away from government where people seeked freedom from the monotony of social angst. 

Today we live in a world of isolationism, breaking away from Europe and selfishness; on our football fields we think our league is better than everyone else's yet our teams struggle in Europe and players are paid fortunes whilst fans are asked to pay more and more for a product that rarely delivers. 

Yet there remains in football a tribalistic mentality - us v them - that underscores many who watch the game, and seen at the London Stadium two weeks ago when West Ham fans made their bitterness known to the owners of West Ham United barraging them with chants from below as they sat in exulted seats.

Through the microcosm of one momentous year in English league football - from drunken footballers periously sitting astride the tenants of amateurism and professionalism; the Full Members' Cup in the absence of European competition - culminating in the coronation of one of England's greatest club sides, Evans has crafted a wonderful book that is part keepsake, part social comment, part football lore but fully brilliant.

Two Tribes is out from Bantam Press in Hardback from Thursday 22nd March.

My thanks to Thomas Hill at Transworld Books for the opportunity to review.

Hotel Scarface

Released on 25th January in paperback by Bantam Press, Roben Farzad's book tells the story of the Miami Cocaine Trade that helped inspire Brian De Palma's classic 1983 movie, Scarface which starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana.

In Miami, December 1979, you have to watch your back at the Hotel Mutiny on the Coconut Grove.  A fiery explosion of cocaine is going to blow over South Beach with bullets, blood, flash cars and immigrants fighting for a piece of the pie; amidst the political changing landscape of a new presidency under Ronald Reagan with the omnipresent shadow of Fidel Castro abounds.

Expertly researched and featuring an abundance of interviews with those who survived the bloodbath and the mountains of drugs; it paints the picture that this was the a lifestyle of lavish debauchery, high flyers with fast cars, sailboats and sexual orgies in penthouse suites.

Farzad has done a great job in his research and in plotting the story chronologically, making head and tail of all the characters involved would drive many a script editor mad, yet Farzad keeps the chapters short and full of incident to keep you involved with them; even when some fall by the wayside due to circumstances be it lead poisoning, overdoses or lost at sea.

For fans of true crime, crime fiction, Scarface, Wolf of Wall Street,

Hotel Scarface is out on Paperback from Bantam Press/Transworld Publishers on 25th January for £14.99RRP

Streets of Darkness

Born and bred in Bradford, A. A. Dhand is a befitting example of write what you know. Dhand has written a gritty and gripping thriller for his first book entitled Streets of Darkness, featuring a new anti-hero Detective Harry Virdee. 

Harry (or Hardeep) is suspended when we meet him, yet enlisted to help with a murder enquiry off the books to save his career. Harry has a lot going on in his life, his Muslim wife is expecting their first child and his marriage is a question of contention as Harry is a Sikh and mixed faith marriages are frowned upon in general especially in such a sub-contential bastion as Bradford is. The mixing of faith, religion and politics is one of the key storylines running in the book.

A A Dhand, the author of Streets of Darkness

The book is being pitched as a mix of the questionable hero like Luther and the hard nose naturalism of The Wire, and in Dhand's prose he does not hold back writing very graphic descriptions of drug use and violence seemingly paramount within the day in the life narrative. 

Mixing many tropes of the thriller genre - race against time, rivals from different backgrounds having to work together and put differences aside, are you on the right side of the law - Dhand writes with a crispness and pace that is good to see in a new British writer following in the footsteps of Lee Child, who many think of as a naturalised American.

Dhand writes with intelligence about religion and respect to his home town yet never wavering from his zest for character and narrative.  He has a keen eye for observational detail in characters be they periphery or central, and can inject little details such as when Harry sneezes when he enters a disused boxing gym due to the swirling of dust, a small detail that is sometimes overlooked in bigger thrillers on page and screen.

The film rights have already been optioned, and if they can find the right actor of Muslim hertiage then perhaps they can have a great series or film on their hands. My call to play Harry would be Arsher Ali, while he plays socially awkward characters or insecure souls, he has a bit of recognition in terms of his appearances in Line of Duty and The Missing, and if he can beef up a bit then he has the range to do Harry justice.

Arsher Ali is Harry Virdee

Streets of Darkness is both page turning and can leave you wincing at the bleakness of human nature, but in this day and age it is good to see a book that is entrenched in reality and not sugar coating such matters as inter-racial marriage, race hate crimes and political corruption.

Streets of Darkness is released by Bantam Press on 16th June for £12.99 in Hardback and £7.99 on Kindle

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/publishers/transworld/

Fifty Years of Hurt

Henry Winter, five time Football Writer of the Year, is one of the most recognised football journalists of recent times thanks to frequent appearances on Sky's Sunday Supplement and BBC 5 Live.  His knowledge of the game is second to none, yet few would know of his love of the game and the national team.

His new book, Fifty Years of Hurt, may change any loose assumptions of a writer being not in love with his nation's best XI. Winter is eager for you to know he has seen the last 244 England internationals, and even saw some games off his own pocket when he was between jobs at the Daily Telegraph and his new employer, The Times.

Henry Winter

Winter has always come across as a well spoken, articulate intellectual about the sport; an admirer of the great purveyors of majestic football from our own Paul Scholes to the continental mastery of Xavi and Andrea Pirlo. Yet Winter is a disgruntled fan, one who is embarrassed that his nation has only won the World Cup once, only reached semi-finals of a major tournament four times and are seemingly always taking two steps back such as the woeful 2014 World Cup performance in Brazil proved.

Yet the author is full of hope and optimism for the near future, perhaps Euro 2016 is one tournament too soon for the new breed of zestful youth at Roy Hodgson's disposal in the guise of Harry Kane, Eric Dier, Dele Alli and John Stones; but he sees that the full influx of a plan of action culminating in the centre piece of St. George's Park in Burton is coming to fruition for a new golden generation.

Winter's book takes us on a journey from the halcyon sepia toned triumph of Wembley 1966 to every failure since. He speaks to great English players and asks why it is they failed at that certain tournament, and when we did have success why did we not kick on from there and build upon it as Spain and Germany have done in recent times claiming the ultimate prize in the sport, the World Cup.

The author attempts to dissect and pin point a problem as to why we fail at the game we love so much, a game that hosts the most watched domestic league in the world, a league where a team rated as relegation favourites can win the title convincingly. 

England's greatest day - 30th July 1966

This is a great premise for a book, yet at times the book comes across as more enamoured with the great players he is interviewing than getting to the crux of the matter. As a reader, I was expecting a more technical evaluation of the problems we have with our national team in the vein of say Jonathan Wilson whose Inverting the Pyramid is a keynote book for any football lover. I was expecting how changes of formations and styles of play have left us standing still, failing to qualify for tournaments whilst Germany never do.

Instead the book sometimes reads like a hard luck story for the national team, where all we needed was a little bit of luck and avoid playing a phenomenal talent at the peak of his powers and we might have won. If only Alf Ramsey did not take Bobby Charlton off when 2-0 up against Germany in Mexico 1970 or Gordon Banks did not have a dicky tummy? If only we did not have to play Argentina and Diego Maradona in 1986 we would have won? If only we knew how to take penalties? If only our players had stronger metatarsals?

England have encountered bad luck over many years

At times it reads like a sob story when it really should not, England have struggled for years to harness creative players and build around them from Glenn Hoddle to Chris Waddle to Paul Gascoigne. These players were marginalised and used sparingly when they should be at the centre of a side. Now Gascoigne had his demons and injuries but it is no coincidence that when he was at the peak of his powers twice, twice we got to a major semi-final.

England have picked the wrong manager and then jettison one when they are getting results as Bobby Robson and Terry Venables can attest to, they hired Steve McLaren when he was only a good coach not a manager. They failed to use the great players of the past and pick their brains when things went wrong, the FA being a situation of upper class elite thinking of players as mere servants and beneath them.  This has led to the FA selling their soul to the Premier League, and having no power over events. Players get paid handsomely for playing 90 minutes a week and then retire not wanting to give anything back to the game, they would much prefer to sit in a studio and be critical than coach or train the next flock of talent.

Neville's ambition is absent in his peers

The chapter 'Pathways' is an interview with Gary Neville (most likely interviewed after his short term spell with Valencia) and he puts it in great perspective about his peers from the so-called 'Golden Generation'; 

'Look at Gerrard, Lampard, Carragher, Ferdinand, Owen, Beckham, Terry, Ashley Cole, Sol [Campbell] - how many of them gone into coaching? You're talking about a whole England team, the best players, and only me coaching, and I'm in televison as well.'

This is not to put the book down, as it is a page turning endeavour. The sort of book you can devour in just a few sittings and it is to Winter's credit and established persona that he can get such luminaries as Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer, individuals you suspect to be guarded to talk with such forthright honesty about the situation.

You could do without such chapters as 'In the Shadow of the Show' where Winter is watching a Premier League game in Los Angeles at 6am on a Sunday whilst on his gardening leave from the Telegraph. Its a nice angle to show the global reach of the League but you get the sense that the fact that football is being shown in LA is not the reason we left Brazil early. 

Nevertheless, Winter rights with a real passion and desire to see England succeed in this modern age, he wants to see a team be as admired by the tika-taka of Guardiola's Barcelona sides; yet perhaps the need for change might not come from a constitutional change as we have seen in France where there new footballing school ended in 1998 home glory during the World Cup, perhaps you need an individual with a vision to be the mainstay of the change of direction be it Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klinsmann, willing to bring something new to the party and stick with it. England had this with Glenn Hoddle, but then his personal views made his position untenable, England have never recovered and a chance was missed.

When will the years of hurt end for England? Winter may not necessarily have the answers but if people were put in charge of the national team with as much verve and ambition as him, then perhaps the hurt might not last for much longer.

Fifty Years of Hurt is published by Bantam Press in Hardback on 2nd June 2016 for £20.00. A perfect gift for Father's Day and a great read during Euro 2016 and to celebrate the anniversary of England winning the World Cup in 1966 on 30th July.