The fourth book in Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, Casting Off continues where the last book left off.  Originally, this was the final book in the series, the fifth only being published eighteen years later. I think that if I was reading this as the last book then I may have had more questions by the end (mainly relating to Louise and Villy), but I think that the other storylines were resolved satisfactorily.

Sometimes you can pick up a book in the middle of a series and read it as a standalone. I doubt that Casting Off would work if you hadn’t read the previous novels though. The family is too vast and so much has happened to them that, in spite of the potted history and family tree at the beginning, I don’t think a casual reader would find it enjoyable. As part of the series though I think this novel did most of what I wanted to.

We pick back up in July 1945. Rupert has just returned from France, years after everyone thought he was dead and months after he could have. Clary, who kept the faith that he was alive, feels that he abandoned them, and his wife Zoe feels guilt over the affair that she had while Rupert was missing (little knowing that the reason he stayed away so long was that he found love himself, in France). Older brother Edward finally comes clean to his wife Villy, and tells her about his mistress.

The daughters are now grown up and provide the main focus of the novel: Louise, still stuck in her loveless marriage; Polly still struggling to get over unrequited love for Archie, Rupert;s good friend; and Clary, embarking upon her own first love affair.

There is so much going on that it is a wonder that Howard manages to corral all of her characters into a format that makes sense. Having the book split into different sections (‘The Girls’, ‘The Wives’) makes it easier to keep a handle on whose point of view we’re looking from, though sometimes I found myself reading several paragraphs without knowing quite which character I was inhabiting which felt a little odd. Also, sometimes as a reader you want to follow a character for longer which isn’t possible with such a huge cast. I found that ‘The Outsiders’ sections were of less interest (apart from Sid – big cheer for her and Rachel finally sorting themselves out!). I’ve never cared much about Miss Milliment and I’d be happy enough if Villy’s sister Jessica and her whole family vanished. As much as I found Raymond’s storyline touching, it added nothing to the piece as a whole and I’d have much preferred Howard to use that space to go back to Louise and her strange marriage to Michael (and the hideous mother in law who was sadly quite quiet in this novel).

Verdict: definitely one for the fans. It ties up most of the ends but I’m glad there’s another book to go

1930s New York – a glamorous city where anyone can make anything of themselves if they have the ambition. Katey Kontent, the daughter of Russian immigrants, is New York born and bred. Her roommate and good friend, Evie Ross, is from a more well to do Midwest family. On New Year’s Eve, 1937, they meet a man named Tinker Grey in a Greenwich Village nightclub, a chance encounter that triggers an event that will leave them all irreversibly changed.

This is a novel which relies heavily on the charm of its narrator, and in Katey Kontent, Towles pulls this off. If I had a time machine and could choose a decade and a place from the last century to visit for a day, 1930s New York would be high on my list. Jazz clubs, gin martinis, fashionable women and young men waiting for their trust funds to pay out. Katey is far more of an observer than a participator, but this makes her more attractive to the reader (or at least to this one). It is the people who Katey meets who direct her year, so much packed in that at times I forgot that only a few months had passed. She finds herself moving in circles far above what she is used to, but never quite lets herself be seduced by the money or the notoriety of others.

If I have a complaint about the novel it is that it meanders rather a lot. The will they/won’t they element is also quashed from the start, a prologue which pairs Katey with a yet unknown husband. At first I thought that the main storyline would be about the relationships between Katey, Evie and Tinker. This is set up nicely in the first few chapters, but Evie and Tinker were then missing for months at a time. A more interesting character was Anne Grandyn, introduced as Tinker’s godmother but turning out to exert far more influence on him than Katey first thinks. Towles writes women who belong quite firmly in their time but still have agency. Anne singles Katey out as a potential protégé early on, as evidenced in a scene at the Belmont racecourse, Anne pointing out the young fiancée of a silver -haired multi millionaire:

-You see that thirty-year-old blonde next to Jake? That’s his fiancée, Carrie Clapboard. Carrie moved all manner of heaven and earth to get into that chair. And soon she will happily oversee scullery maids and table settings and the reupholstering of antique chairs at three different houses; which is all well and good. But if I were your age, I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to get into Carrie’s shoes – I’d be trying to figure out how to get into Jake’s.

Overall I feel there is slightly more style than substance to this book, but it was an enjoyable read nevertheless.

Emma Flint’s debut was longlisted for both this year’s Baileys Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, so I expected big things. Little Deaths is based on the true story of Alice Crimmins, a mother accused of killing her own children back in the 1960s. I enjoy novels based on true crime but think they work best where they show us more than we could discover from a Wikipedia search or from reading a non-fiction account of the same case. I loved Anna Mazzola’s The Unseeing, to give a recent example.

Ruth Malone lives with her two children, Frankie and Cindy, in Queens, New York. It’s 1965 and she’s recently separated from her husband. The pair are currently fighting over custody of the children.  She works as a waitress and has had several boyfriends, mostly married men who she met at work. One morning in July she wakes up to find the children missing. The police begin a search, canvassing the neighbourhood for clues and information. They find Cindy’s body first, then Frankie’s weeks later. The story is then split between following Ruth as she deals with this horrifying situation, and novice tabloid reporter, Pete Wonicke who is sent to cover the case.

Having had a quick glance online, it seems that Flint has stuck quite closely to the Crimmins case in terms of the timeline of events (though she does give us a concrete answer as to what actually happened to the Malone’s children). The novel is very well written, and well researched. Flint writes dialogue that sounds like a 1960s TV detective series, not always realistic but evocative of both era and location.  Occasionally though the characters came off as caricatures rather than real people, and I wished she’d done more with Devlin, the lead detective, who I found very two dimensional with his one track determination to punish Ruth for being a bad mother.

I really enjoyed the first third of the novel, but once the initial shock wears off and we move into the humdrum of Ruth and Pete’s lives over the following months, I had a problem with the pacing. The middle did slump for me, and Pete’s frenzied running around, desperate to find clues, was not as exciting as it could have been. The women were not distinct enough, and Ruth’s various boyfriends merged together. Too many conversations in bars or diners became tedious. While I appreciate that the real life case did follow a slow course, this is a novel and to my mind you can then do what you want with it. I also wanted more from the main characters. I wanted to know what drove Ruth to go looking for companionship with these men, even when she knew the police were staking out her house. It’s not normal behaviour and I wanted some understanding of what she was looking for in these meaningless encounters. We get a good sense that she is insecure in her body. She worries about body odour and makes sure the light is out when she brings the men home. I was waiting to discover more of her family history. There seemed to be issues between her and her mother, but it was skimmed over. A missed opportunity.

The novel examines the role of a woman, specifically one who is also a wife and mother. We get the gossip of the neighbourhood women who think Ruth’s a tramp and can’t sing her abandoned husband’s praises loudly enough. Devlin calls Ruth a whore because she doesn’t comply with his view of what a good mother should be. All of this is what was said of the real life Alice Crimmins and it all fits. What jarred for me by the end of the book was Pete. He becomes so obsessed by Ruth that nothing matters. He spends his own money on helping her and fantasises about sleeping with her. It’s written as though Ruth has some superhuman sexual power over men (apart from those who want to convict her, who are in a polar opposite mind frame). For me, the novel began to lose its strength at this point, and Pete became just plain creepy.

Rounding up, this is a very well written novel and is an enjoyable read. Just don’t expect any great revelations on gender roles or deviation from the bare bones of what was a fascinating real life murder case.