Knitting

Finishing all the partly read books isn't my only aim for the new year, I really want to use up some of the excessive amounts of yarn I've collected - first up has been a couple of cones of Jameisons DK that I'd already made jumpers from (Donna Smith's Peerie Leaves pattern which I made twice last year and really like). It's hard to judge exactly how much yardage I'd got left on either cone but I got a version of Mary Jane Muckleston's Lower Leogh in a grey colour I had a little bit more of. I'm using a rag-tag of leftovers and odd balls of DK to make a purple version which will hopefully be a little bit longer in the body and sleeve and narrower in the neck than my first attempt. If the yarn holds out...

Lower Leogh is an outsize, short, and boxy jumper written for spindrift or jumper weight. I'm also outsize so just switching to the stitch count for the smallest size for the body and guessing for the sleeves worked reasonably well. I'll make a few adjustments for this second go, but there's not much to change - mine doesn't have the positive ease of the original, but that doesn't really suit me anyway - a long body with short legs isn't the perfect vehicle for a boxy top. 

At the moment the colours for the Fairisle strip are causing me some concern - for jumper number 1 they worked well enough. Not what I would have chosen exactly, but when we drove through wintery Northumberland last week I could see them reflected in the landscape and I liked it. For jumper number two I'm well outside my comfort zone with a truly startling combination for me of magenta, gold/yellow, and purple. I'm not sure I'll ever love it, but I won't see it much when I'm wearing the jumper and it is achieving my aim of using things up.

The reason my stash is so out of hand is a desire to avoid exactly this situation and have enough of any colour I like for any eventuality. I don't have a lot of DK though and what I do have is mostly leftovers from Christmas stocking colour schemes. I spend a lot of time worrying about colours for Fairisle and there is at least a sense of freedom in just having to use what I've got. 

Helle and Death - Oskar Jensen

I'm in the Scottish Borders at the moment (lovely) where I had planned on doing a fair bit of dog walking whilst I had a dog at my disposal - that worked to both our satisfaction for all the time I had access to him, and also a lot of reading and knitting. I have done a little knitting and next to no reading. Never mind. 

I'm still on a mission to finish up a whole lot of half-started books from the last year, and at least I've done one of them with Oskar Jensen's fiction debut 'Helle and Death' which I hope will be the start of a series. I asked for a review copy of this through work more or less on a whim and sort of forgot about it. When it turned up I wasn't overly excited, but started it over lunch anyway and was instantly hooked. 

Oskar Jensen is an academic currently based at Newcastle but with what sounds like fingers in lots of pies including writing an infuriatingly good murder mystery whilst working on the scholarly stuff. The immediate appeal of Helle and Death (Helle is Dr Torben Helle, a Danish art historian) is that it takes time to be a little bit funny/tongue in cheek, and for the consistent references to Golden age crime - if you know the books they give a couple of clues. 

The set up is a country house party in deepest Northumberland organised by Antony Dodd, the guests are a group who became friends in halls of residence during their first year at Oxford. It's a good ten years since graduation and they've all moved on, but Anthony made a fortune in tech before disappearing and there's an element of curiosity bringing them all back together. 

During dinner on the first night Anthony reveals he's terminally ill, the next morning he's found dead. At first it looks like a suicide, then it looks like it might not be. Unfortunately there's an epic blizzard, nobody is going anywhere, and one of these old friends might be a murderer. So far so good and even if it was just the country house set up with some mildly funny jokes and a lot of references for the Golden age fans it would be more than enough, but the relationships between the characters raises this book to something more.

Jensen does a splendid job of capturing the dynamics between a group of people who shared 3 extraordinary years of privilege before going their separate ways - the people who still like each other, and those who really don't. The tensions between them as they compare careers, the jealousies that haven't quite gone from undergraduate days, along with the new ones, and a whole lot of other old feelings for one another. The 30 something age bracket is smart too - that point where youth is definitely behind you and you really start to wonder where your life is going. It's enough to make me care about the characters which is relatively unusual and why I'm hoping for more. 

Impossible Creatures - Katherine Rundell

I've been desperately trying to finish a jumper whilst the weather is so cold, partly to wear partly because it's nice and warm having it on my lap whilst I knit. It's currently soaking prior to going on the board and I'm looking at the pile of read books that have built up.

Impossible Creatures is one of a lot of books that I started late in December and took a while to finish - mostly because I kept getting distracted by other books and life. It is the Waterstones book of the year and has picked up a few other titles along with overall glowing reviews. I'm here to add another one to the pile. I really liked this book - not quite as much as my colleague who described it as being akin to rediscovering the excitement of reading for the the first time - but a lot. It is very definitely a children's book (9-12) but the sort that anyone of any age could enjoy if they like a magical adventure, and a really lovely book to read together with children.

For anyone old enough to remember when Harry Potter first became a thing, I got the same kind of buzz from Impossible Creatures. They're nothing alike beyond both having a collection of mythical creatures and being quest based, which is a lot of books, but there's an alchemy at work in both that pulled me in. I still like the first 3 Harry Potter books a lot, but they're very much of the 1990s, sensibilities have moved on since then. This is an excellent place to start if you want a fantasy adventure for younger readers without the baggage.

Comparisons to Philip Pullman are fair, though I think Rundell preaches less - I'm in the fence about Pullman. I admire his writing much more than I enjoy it. Overall though, she's a writer who's been around for a while, she has fiction for children, and non fiction on John Donne and endangered wildlife for adults. She's her own woman who doesn't need to be compared to anyone, but read on her own account. 

Impossible Creatures tells of a boy who is pulled into an adventure in an archipelago of islands hidden from the rest of humanity - they are the last home of magical creatures. He meets a girl who can fly as she flees a murderer. Together they make friends, evade enemies, and battle to make things better. Christopher and Mal are perfectly imperfect - easy to like, and easy to believe in. 

I've seen a few children's books hailed as instant classics, some of which I've not much liked, this one feels like the genuine article to me. I hope it's the one that makes Katherine Rundell the household name she deserves to be. 

My Top 10 Books of 2023

Before the year gets any more advanced or I have any new connectivity problems here are my top ten books from the last year. I didn't read as much as I have in previous years, and for various reasons the quality was overall a bit patchy as well - I wanted light and easy books, but they don't often make much of a mark on my memory so I haven't had any whittling down for this list. 

Holly Black's The Stolen Heir is first up because it's from January last year - there's no ranking here. I like Holly Black, she's one of the few Young Adult writers I've found who transcends the classification to write books that I think anyone can enjoy if they enjoy strong, emotionally complex, female characters (and male ones too), folklore, quest-based plots, and a slow burn enemies to lovers romance. I don't doubt there's any number of other writers doing it just as well, but as a middle aged woman there's a limit to how much time I want to spend finding out. Holly Black is good, this book was fun, and I'd recommend her to anyone wanting to start with YA or looking for anything on the above list.

Dark Rye and Honey Cake by Regula Ysewijn is an instant classic. Festival food from the lowlands - it's a treasure trove of beautiful images, impeccable historical research, and delicious things. There are not enough superlatives to describe this book, there are a lot of reasons to buy it. Honestly a masterpiece and a benchmark for what food writing can be. If there was a ranking this would be my book of the year - it's genuinely special and I need more people to buy it so we can enthusiastically bake things and talk about them together.

Sally Huband's Sea Bean is a book I fell hard in love with. Dr Huband moved to Shetland with her husband and young child about a decade ago at about the time she developed chronic health issues. This is a deeply personal book - partly at the insistence of her publisher, which isn't always easy to read. It's a brave thing to lay out some of these details for anyone to read. It's also beautifully written, and felt very true to me in its portrayal of island life - it was certainly a version of it I recognise and relate to. There's a lot of pressure on women to be quiet about a lot of our experiences - I'm slowly learning not to be - this book was a reminder that there are things worth sharing, and that when we do we're all stronger for it. 

Legends and Lattes - Travis Baldree. I'm very new to the concept of cosy fantasy, though I suppose you might describe early Terry Pratchett as such. Some people do it better than others, Travis Baldree does it particularly well, this book is a perfect comfort read. It's funny, gentle, and undemanding with real heart to it. I liked the characters, I cared about Viv's coffee shop, I craved a cinnamon bun. It's been big on Tik-Tok and lives up to the hype. It won't be for everyone but for me it was the right book at the right time and an absolute gem.

Maud Cairns' Strange Journey was an expected delight - I have a lot of respect for the British Library Women Writers series and this one came with excellent recommendations. It's a genre defying book - not quite sci-fi/fantasy, but what else can you call a body swap book? It was very good on female relationships and the class divide with the 2 heroines slowly coming to trust each other. Funny and wise.

Stone Blind - Natalie Haynes. Haynes has been on my radar for a while, 2023 was the year when I really started reading her. Stone Blind is angry, spikey, funny, and compelling as the Medusa myth is slightly reimagined. Greek retellings are still big and show no sign of diminishing - I have not found anyone doing it better than Haynes for my money. 

Jade Linwood's Charming is another one that sort of fits into cosy fantasy, but with added extra feminist retellings of Fairy tales in the mix. I don't think I expected much of this one, but I ended up getting a book I really enjoyed. I liked that the characters were flawed, the way they built their friendships, and what Linwood does with Prince Charming. In a year that I needed books that made me smile it delivered.

Roast Figs and Sugar Snow - an updated with added recipes Diana Henry classic. I've liked this book for a very long time, it's now even better with an exceptional new sausage recipe. It also has the most decadent brownies I've ever had the pleasure of eating in it. An absolutely wonderful cold-weather cookbook. 

Slavic Kitchen Alchemy by Zuza Zak is recipes, folk stories, legends, remedies, and kitchen philosophy. It's very good company and certainly deserves more attention than it's had in my bookshop. I really like it and will be spending a lot of time with it over the coming year. I'm especially looking forward to some of the foraging it's encouraging for the autumn. It's more than the sum of its parts which is saying a lot.

Wild Shetland by Brydon Thomason was an unexpected treat from the Shetland Times. It's a proper coffee table extravaganza of Thomason's Shetland wildlife photography. The images are beautiful, it's also a lovely book to read. A record of the island's wildlife as it is now, and a little on how it's changing. Important as well as beautiful. 

What a Week

New Year got off to a fun start with 5 of our team of 10 testing positive for Covid and feeling ill with it. Covid's no joke so I'm lucky I wasn't one of the 5 - it helps that I'm vaccinated, though it hasn't stopped mum getting it again. Happily this bout is so far milder than the one that landed her in A&E after she vomited blood on the back of a severely upset stomach. She lost almost 2 stone and hasn't yet regained any of that. 

Current guidelines say stay away from people for 5 days, after which even if you're still testing positive you should be sufficiently low risk (but crucially not no risk) in terms of passing it on to other people. In jobs like mine that's considerable pressure to be 'sensible' and come back in. With quite a low uptake for the vaccine even amongst the eligible, and high rates of infection around, this feels like trouble for the future. 

On the upside I've had my first weekend off since Christmas when I had such a bad cold (successive tests assure me not Covid) that it was all a bit of a blur. This has been the most festive I've felt this season - the weather has been seasonally cold, the Christmas lights are still up around town and looked pretty against a clear sky, there was lots of Poirot to watch, I finished a book and made progress on some of the others that I've half read, and the jumper I started last week is coming on well too - just maybe I'll finish it in time to go on holiday (unlikely but I can try). 

I cooked nice food, slept a lot, and although it's been short it's actually felt like a holiday. Appropriately yesterday was the day that the island of Foula celebrates Auld Yule - for this purpose they stick to the Julian calendar. Maybe I should adopt that too - it would be one way of dealing with the rush of retail at Christmas.

The recipe I cooked was Marian Armitages's version of Bacalao from 'Food Made In Shetland'. I've been reading round this a bit. The key ingredient is salt cod or stock fish, baccala in Italian. There's a simple Florentine version in Russel Norman's Brutto which sounds great, but I went for Marian's Portuguese inspired version, I believe it's made a lot in Spain too. Salt cod is an acquired taste - the smell isn't precisely unpleasant but it's very strong. I like it best in this rich, tomato-based stew full of peppers, onion, garlic, olives, and potato. It's a great winter dish - colourful and comforting. I've been told Morrisons does a good salt cod, and I think I'll be making it a lot more.

A books of the year list will be up soon. 

Happy New Year

We're still both suffering somewhat with the cold - for Doug it's day 3 or 4 of being down with it, but his work is closed so he's able to rest up and it's not hit him too hard. I'm more like day 9 or 10 and it just won't let me go. A good sleep today has probably helped - or at last it's helped me get over the hours of fireworks last night that reached a crescendo around midnight and were like nothing I'd ever heard. 

There will be no New Year, New Me nonsense (we have to do a display at work for this, and I can't honestly think of a worse time of year for it, concentrate on getting cosy instead) but I think I might have a new tradition. I like to make a loaf of bread on New Year's day - I don't always do it, but it's a good way to kick things off. This year I made a soda bread inspired by Sheila Gear's mention of a yule bread in her book 'Foula, Island West of the Sun'. I couldn't find any mainland memories of this, or recorded recipes in old books of Scottish recipes. 

In the end, I contacted the Foula heritage group to see what they could tell me - a soda bread, flavoured with caraway, sometimes with raisins added especially in more recent times, and baked on a griddle. F. M. McNeill has recipes for something similar in The Scots Kitchen (1929). I looked at a lot of recipes, but in the end I adapted the soda bread I usually make - mostly because it makes a manageable quantity. It's taken a couple of attempts to come up with something I really like but I've got there.

The next thing is to practice my bannock making skills - cooking on a griddle is a skill I haven't yet mastered. I think the trick is in not overheating the griddle - it needs to be warm enough to cook on, but to bake all the way through it has to be cool enough not to burn within a couple of minutes. My bannocks tend to end up overly crisp on the outside and a bit chewy in the middle. 

Cooking in the oven is more successful and for this quantity, I make 2 small loaves, Soda bread freezes well, but doesn't keep much beyond a day otherwise. I like the simplicity of this recipe, it makes a great breakfast still warm from the oven and spread with good butter. The carraway flavour is great, as is the touch of sweetness from sugar and raisins. The carraway also gives a golden kind of colour which makes sense of why people suggested saffron as a flavouring. Saffron isn't impossible, but it's expensive and I'd argue a more challenging flavour. One of the things I like about this version is its simplicity. It's festive but in a very unpretentious kind of way. 

400g of plain flour, a level teaspoon of fine salt, a level teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, 2 dessert spoons of sugar, 2 teaspoons of carraway seeds, and around 400g of buttermilk or live yogurt and a good handful of currents. Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and make a well in the middle. Add most of the yogurt (not easy to find buttermilk around here) and mix quickly until you have a soft dough - when I add all the yogurt at once it's always too much. Shape into a round and score the top. If cooking in an oven preheat to about 200 degrees fan, bake for about 5-10 minutes, and then turn down the temperature. Bake until golden in colour and has a hollow sound when tapped. If you want to cook on a griddle roll until about a centimeter thick cut into rounds or triangles, and bake for around 5 minutes on each side.

Peri-menopause and Fibroids

I've dithered around writing about this but as the year comes to an end it's been such a big feature, especially of the last few months, that I think I probably ought to if for no other reason that one day I'll hopefully be able to look back and think about how glad I am it's over.

There are a lot more books available on menopause and women's health than - well, ever, I suppose. It gets talked about more on television, and advertised more on social media - at least if you're a woman of a certain age, and most of my female contemporaries will make comments about their hot flushes and brain fog. There's a lot of talk about HRT - who it's working for, who's still struggling to get the right balance with it. But really I don't think much has changed. 

My mother, along with a lot of her contemporaries/sisters/the mothers of my teenage friends had a hysterectomy in her early 40s. It seemed to be the go-to option in the 1990s around here (they would all have been seeing the same handful of GPs, and referred to the same hospital) so there's a lack of family experience to call on. Even if that wasn't the case I'd have been away at university. Then home concentrating on jobs, a relationship that seemed serious at the time, and a busy social life when mum hit that age - I wouldn't have been paying any attention. When my grandmother hit that age my mother was living at the other end of the country raising a young family. Generations aren't gatekeeping this stuff, but we're not necessarily listening to each other either.

Regardless of vaguely progressive policies from employers (we have an App, how great are we!) the reality is still that a lot of women fear for their jobs - juggling teenage children, a suddenly unpredictable body and mind, a potential range of serious health issues that are embarrassing enough that nobody wants to talk about them, and added anxiety about sick leave, making mistakes, and being forced out of the workplace - it's not fun. My work is fairly good - mostly because there are a few middle-aged women around who are sympathetic and supportive. My previous job would have been impossible. 

I don't think the majority of my peri-menopause symptoms have been too bad - the weirdest ones are indigestion, splitting nails, an increased risk of static electric shocks, a need to write a lot more lists to remember what I'm doing, and so far manageable hot and cold flushes. Which is good because my GP hasn't been amazing about it so far. After several appointments with the practice gynecologist who insisted I was too young at 48, and then said any tests would be inconclusive at my age I did end up on an expedited endometriosis pathway. Expedited it still took more than a year to get a hospital appointment. It was not a good year due to extremely heavy periods that closer and longer.

Eventually there was an appointment with an examination and 4 attempts to take a biopsy sample. They failed and I had to go for another appointment for a hysteroscopy which is a perfectly foul procedure involving cameras, a lot of water, and entirely ineffective pain relief (they suggest you take paracetamol beforehand). It's painful, invasive, and undignified - nobody is much inclined to listen - medical opinion has been that a coil would fix everything but nobody (and my god have they tried) has managed to fit me with one. Despite making it very clear that I would not consent to another attempt the consultant was still offering to try until he had to admit that the position of the lemon-sized fibroid they found would make it impossible. 

He did get a useable biopsy sample, it instigated 7 weeks of heavy bleeding that landed me in A&E, I didn't get a blood transfusion but it was a very close thing. My iron and hemoglobin levels have not yet properly recovered. During all this I got a handful of contradictory letters. An appointment to have the fibroid sliced out - they will only do this under a local anesthetic here, then a letter to say it couldn't be done in one go so it was;t an appropriate treatment (relief). I can't have a hysterectomy because of previous scar tissue and other issues that haven't really been explained, there's a thing where they put miniature nails into the fibroid and hit it with an ultrasound but this often doesn't work depending on how firmly or otherwise the fibroid is attached - they have no idea how it'll go until they actually do the procedure. 

A chemically induced full menopause was an option but apparently, that's brutal until the right mix of HRT can be worked out. In the end, I was prescribed a newish drug that should mimic menopause but also has, I guess, an HRT element to it. I have started taking it today - side effects include initial heavy bleeding which I'm honestly terrified of. To me, that means floods of blood and clots every 10 - 15 minutes that make doing anything almost impossible for the 2 or 3 hours a day it often lasts and leaves me desperately tired and emotional as well as anemic. The interim pills I was prescribed have not been agreeing with me though, I have a follow up appointment in March to see how the first 3 months have been and a work week which should provide reasonable toilet access (this is the major consideration at the moment, and very hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced this sort of bleeding). It has to be now.

All of it makes me angry about the lack of research, lack of options, and lack of understanding for women in my position. The only place where there's much discussion of the new medication is Mumsnet - it's inconclusive but on balance encouraging - it might work, or at least if it doesn't do everything it promises it might do enough. we're half the worlds population, and a significant proportion of us will not sail through menopause. We deserve better treatment and we deserve it now. 

Happy Solstice and Basler Brunsli

I love deep midwinter and proper dark - I wouldn't mind it being a bit colder but at least it; 's saving me some money on heating, and the solstice seems like a natural time to celebrate - more so this year as my day off has fallen on it. I've been sorting out the last bit of Christmas preparation and that feels right too - this year's business is essentially wound up for me now (personally, not at work sadly).

I might read the first chapter of The Dark Is Rising tonight and follow it through in real time again, or I might not - I'm not putting any pressure on myself to do anything more than deal with the day job until New Year. 

The biggest job of the day has been bagging up all the Christmas biscuits I've been making over the last week or so ready to be given out to people over the next couple of days - lots of them for work. I was having a quick bedtime look through Anja Dunk's Advent book last night (for the rum and oatmeal truffles that a friend really liked and which I made today but not very well I think, I don't love them) when I saw the recipe for Basler Brunsli/ spiced chocolate hearts, an originally Swiss biscuit that has apparently been adopted with enthusiasm in Germany.

I can see why. I made them because they're gluten-free, something my repertoire lacks. I'm going to be adopting them with enthusiasm too. They're quick, simple as long as you have a food processor, delicious, and they keep well.

You need 200g of dark chocolate, 250g of ground almonds, 75g of light brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 tbsp of Kirsch or brandy, 2 egg whites, a pinch of fine sea salt, about 2 tbsp of demerara sugar, and some icing sugar for rolling them out with.

Blitz the chocolate in the processor until it resembles coarse sand, and everything else apart from the demerara and icing sugars, and mix until the dough comes together. This is a sticky dough but it doesn't need much handling so it could be worse. Divide your dough into 2, generously sprinkle some of the demerara on your work surface and roll the dough to about 1 cm thick. Cut with a smallish heart cutter - Anja's recipe says it makes 50, I got 30 so I think I was using a larger cutter but I'm okay with that, and place on a baking tray about 1cm apart. They don't spread much which is also nice. Carry on with the second half of the dough and then the leftovers. 

Bake for about 15 minutes at 130C fan oven (which is what I have) 150 conventional. They're ready when they feel dry-ish to touch but are still soft. They firm up as they cool. This is a chewy, crunchy, biscuit with a deep chocolate flavour nicely complimented by the cinnamon and fudgy demerara notes. They're not overly pretty and I like them as a potential mince pie alternative if mince pies aren't your thing but you still want to do a bit of baking. Mostly though they're great with my coffee and looking forward I see this as the fate of any plain easter chocolate that comes my way. 

Suddenly At His Residence - Christina Brand

This is my second nomination for Cross Examining Crime's reprint of the year. I wasn't totally convinced by the first Christina Brand I read, but I really liked 'Suddenly at His Residence', maybe because I was ready for her style and characters, and maybe because this was a slightly earlier book with slightly different mannerisms. 

Sir Richard March's grandchildren have taken their various leaves from blitzed London to gather at Swanswater, the family home for the anniversary of their grandmother's birthday. When she was alive Sir Richard was happily carrying on a suburban sort of an affair with Belle, whom he's now married too. She is tasked with maintaining Swanswater as a shrine to Serefita who had been a glamourous, though maybe not overly talented, ballet dancer.

The grandchildren mostly lost their parents in the First World War so Sir Richard and Belle also stand as parent figures, and for Peta, daughter of the eldest son there's the chance of a sizable inheritance which is making her hopes of a romance with the young family solicitor complicated. There's also Philip, married to Ellen, who's having an affair with his cousin Claire, and Edward, Belle's grandson who has worked himself into the belief that he's got serious Freudian issues to resolve.

Not then a particularly happy family party that gathers. Their various squabbles and the revelation of the Philip/Claire/Ellen situation to an outraged Sir Richard has him deciding to change his will as a matter of urgency. Unfortunately by the morning, he's dead and the new will is missing. The family are forced to concede that one of them is guilty and there's a nerve-wracking time finding out who, and what their motivation was.

I liked this so much because almost everybody is unbearable with the possible exceptions, in my opinion, of Ellen, Stephen, and maybe Belle - the outsiders in the March family. They bicker, suspect each other, plot, come together to protect each other, and generally behave as a family does. Except that one of them is a murderer. Their manners and actions are as callous as you might expect from the same generation today (although a relationship with your cousin would be unacceptable) and the ending is appropriate as well as dramatic - if heavy on the symbolism. 

In short it's a book that really resonated - and heavens, would it make a fabulous change to another Agatha Christie adaptation. I will watch the new one, I'll enjoy it, but we don't really need it, whereas here we have a plot and a set of characters that really do lend themselves to the darker interpretations of Christie we keep getting. 'Suddenly at His Residence' has a genuine emotional punch beneath it's flippancy and I loved it. 

In A Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes

It turns out that it's almost exactly 13 years since I first read 'In A Lonely Place', it's stayed with me ever since, and after this summer's reprint, I've been recommending it to anyone who stands still long enough at work. Kate's reprint of the year awards has been the perfect excuse to revisit. 

Dorothy B. Hughes is a fabulous writer of Noir who deserves the same kind of recognition as Raymond Chandler, but hasn't yet got it. Her books are available, but not in a collectible smart set, or even reliably in paperback. As 'In A Lonely Place' is easily available right now, and also quite short it's a very good place to start though. 

It’s not without faults; the end is sort of rushed and not entirely convincing but basically it’s a thrilling, chilling, very hard-boiled, and nicely twisting story. It opens in the middle of a sea fog with a man watching a woman thinking about how he might approach her, how she wouldn’t be scared – at first. This is Los Angeles in 1947 and a serial killer is on the loose, every month a girl is raped, strangled, and dumped and he’s clever enough to leave no traces. This is the situation when two old war comrades meet, Dix Steele and Brub Nikolais. They flew together in the air corps – for one man the war was the high point of his life and he’s come out without a job or purpose. The other has put it behind him, is married, and an up-and-coming detective. I can’t say anything else without giving far too much away and hope I haven’t done so already.

From the very first page, it seemed clear who the guilty party was going to be, it also seemed equally likely that this was a red herring – which Hughes is a mistress of. She's very capable of wrong-footing me which is something I love in this context. Atmosphere and the ability to create a palpable sense of tension are her other strong points - reading that opening scene as a woman you immediately know how the girl in the book feels walking down a dark street becoming aware of a man's step behind her in the fog. If I ever doubted how his pleasure in her fear is described the internet has since proven over and again that she was spot on. 

It was a slightly different world when I first read this book, I'm not sure I fully appreciated how Hughes captures the misogyny of her anti-hero but it really struck me this time. As a reader I was constantly aware of his mood, his anger, the threat he poses - it's a masterclass.

This is a dark, tense, entertaining read which provides an excellent antidote to seasonal gaiety. You will not regret giving Hughes a chance, it's a perfect bit of Noir. There's also a film version with Humphrey Bogart which is worth searching out after reading the book. It's different but still good.