As a fan of The Great British Bake Off and some cosy crime, I was drawn to the synopsis of this being a murder mystery tied into a television baking show.

Six keen contestants gather at the remote Vermont home of Betsy Martin for the recording of Bake Week. Betsy is known affectionately as “America’s Grandmother” for her many best-selling cookbooks. What few people know is that she needs the regular proceeds of the program to survive and fund repairs for Grafton, her crumbling ancestral mansion.

The format of the popular show is going through change, however, with the introduction of a new male co-host, Archie Morris, and Betsy feels her position is threatened. The story is told through the points of view of the six contestants as well as Betsy and it is clear not all is going as it should before someone loses their life.

This was an easy enough read, but the use of so many points of view and not having the principal murder occur until the last quarter of the book makes it a slow burn. With perhaps the exception of the older contestant Lottie, who has a justified ulterior motive in being at Grafton, these are all unpleasant, self-centred characters with few redeeming features or warmth and when a certain individual gets their comeuppance there is no surprise. Again, there is the usual problem with many books of this genre having a rushed and somewhat confusing ending.

The publicity comparison with the skilled work of author Anthony Horowitz borders on impertinence. The descriptions of the recipes, baking processes and dialogue are all a blatant rip-off from scripts of the GBBO. Betsy’s character is a reflection of ageing cooks such as Martha Stewart or Mary Berry, while Archie Morris seems to be a combination of those other real food celebrities, Paul Hollywood and Gordon Ramsay.

A pity the story didn’t have more originality and a stronger focus on the narrative, with maybe just one or two points of view to carry us along rather than the overly fruity mixture that it is.

The best I can say about this cake is that it: “Fails to rise and has a soggy bottom.”

(Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC.)

Two stars


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On 12 October 2002, an Islamic terrorist group attacked the Indonesian island of Bali: 202 people would die in the explosions which ripped through the Sari Club and Paddy’s Irish Bar in the beach resort of Kuta, with 88 victims being Australian. One of the survivors was a nurse, Therese Fox, who came to be known as the “Miracle Woman of Bali”.

“She had sustained a fractured skull and had suffered burns to 85 per cent of her body. Around 65 per cent of them were serious third degree full-thickness burns.
The heat from the explosion had been so intense it had calcified her elbow joints, and melted the skin from her face, hands and feet.”

Specialists said that she was the most severely burnt patient they had ever treated. No-one expected her to survive and yet against all the odds she did.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombings as Therese wandered dazed and disoriented looking for her missing friend Bronwyn, several individuals came to her rescue including two Australian schoolteachers, Cath Byrne and Rada van der Werff – who is a cousin of mine.

I had been aware of some of Rada’s story previously, but not until I read this extraordinary book did I come to appreciate the extent of her selfless and devoted involvement in the aftermath of the bombings with all their horror and devastation, how she and Cath cared for the survivors and the subsequent tight bond she formed with Therese and her family. (In spite of her own personal tragedy, Rada has found strength in devoting her life to humanitarian work with survivors of disasters and I am so proud that she is part of my family. I hope she writes her own book some day.)

Therese is an heroic and admirable woman whose fight to live in order to be reunited with her children demonstrates her indomitable strength and how the human body is capable of repairing itself. It has been truly humbling to learn about this amazing woman.

At the time of reading this book and writing the review, a warts-and-all expose by a privileged and self-absorbed prince is making millions. If you want to learn about how real ordinary families deal with issues in the face of immense tragedy, mental health breakdowns brought on by loss and emotional heartbreak, then spend your money on this book instead.
 
Five stars
 
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Big W Australia
 
 
PS     On a practical note, the book does need tighter editing to fix spelling and grammatical errors and reduce areas of repetition. They don’t detract from the overall power of the story and perhaps these minor issues will be corrected in any future edition.

 
Unsolved true crimes often make compulsive reading. This book explores the life and death of a young soldier, Warwick Meale, who was found severely bashed under a bridge over a creek in Townsville, Queensland, on 15 August 1944. He later died in hospital.

Written by his nephew who grew up with considerable curiosity about his uncle, this book delves into the possible motive for the murder, i.e. that Warwick was gay in an era when homosexuality was unacceptable and that he may have been the victim of a hate crime.

In spite of an intensive investigation by Queensland police and detectives from other States, no-one was ever charged with the crime although there were similar assaults on, and murders, of servicemen around the same time. Likely suspects include members of both the Australian armed forces and the US Navy.

The book is well-researched and frank about hidden homosexuality in the ranks during the War. It also brings to notice the frustrations and obstructions that civilian police forces came up against when dealing with military and naval authorities in tracking down likely suspects.

The author’s own experiences growing up and coming out as gay are intertwined in the book but apart from family suspicions (unspoken about until fairly recent times), one photograph of a small boy playing dress-ups and a single query in an investigative document, there was never any absolute proof that Warwick was gay and that he might have been killed for making an unwelcome approach – which was the motive in the brutal murder of another soldier, Jack Lloyd, whose attacker confessed.

There are areas of “creative non-fiction” with imagined conversations which are always problematic in the historical context but the research is thorough, the writing is impassioned and the narrative flows well. It is an interesting exposition on the hidden layers of society in a very different era, but being based on an assumption that can never be proved it fails to be totally convincing.
 
Three-and-a-half stars.


Dymocks Australia

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The island in question is Crete, with narratives set both in the present day and earlier during World War II and into the 1960s.

Angie (Angelika) lives in England and is planning her wedding to Nick. Her big dream is to have all her family there but her mother Poppy has been estranged from her Cretan family for decades and refuses to explain why. Angie decides to visit Crete and see if she can bring about a reunion but no-one in her ancestral village of Amiras wants to tell Angie what happened and it’s an ongoing battle to get her relatives to open out.

As she works hard at breaking down the defences, her grandmother, Maria, relents and begins by telling her the story of what happened in Crete during World War II and the atrocities committed by the Nazis, although the reasons for Poppy’s departure many years later take much longer to establish.

This is a slow burn of a book as it switches between the past and the present revealing secrets one by one and ultimately the reasons for a devastating family feud. The earlier chapters detailing the confronting tragedies of World War II are strongly written and feel authentic as they are largely based on fact (as shown in the author’s notes at the end). However, the last third of the story set in contemporary times descends into a soap-opera plotline that is both implausible and labyrinthine. (Perhaps it comes with the territory as Crete is the site of the famous original Labyrinth of King Minos at Knossos.)

The inter-related Greek characters all have similarities with their stereotypical fiery temperaments and keeping track of who’s who can be tricky. Angie gets tiresome as she bustles about trying to force revelations from her mother and others, all of whom would rather let sleeping dogs lie. She admits to herself early on that she leads an easy, shallow and self-absorbed life compared to the stoicism and endurance of her family, but this gets repeated far too often. The ending turns into such a farce that it diminishes the exceptional telling of the earlier World War II story which is powerful enough to have been the basis of a thrilling novel in its own right.

(This book starts out so well before deteriorating into light-weight fluff that giving an overall star rating is difficult. Four stars for the excellent serious chapters based on truth, one star for the rest.)


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Dymocks Australia