Review catch-up including no. 20 of my #20BooksofSummer2025 & #WITMonth2025: Roig, Vassell & Armitage

Some shorter reviews to help reduce the height of the pile of books I’ve read but haven’t written up yet. First my latest read for WITMonth which is also my 20th of my 20 Books of Summer. Challenge done!

The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig, translated by Julia Sanches

The Time of Cherries was first published in 1976, and newly translated from the Catalan last year. It is the second part of a trilogy following three generations in the Eixemple district of Barcelona, telling it mainly through the eyes of the women in the middle-class Miralpeix family. I’m told that the books stand alone, and indeed, this middle volume is regarded as one of the gems of Catalan literature.

Natàlia Miralpeix, has returned to Barcelona after 12 years abroad in London. She had decided to lodge with her aunt Patricia, rather than with her brother Lluis and his wife Silvia – for they are housing her father and she can’t share a house with him. At this stage, we don’t know why she left or fell out with her father. Even life with Aunt Patricia has changed during her self-imposed exile – she’d sold off her garden for a building plot and the lemon tree was gone. But it also remains the same but under different rule – she’d left as a Communist had been executed, she arrived back to an anarchist being garrotted by the dictatorship. One section takes us back to the time before she left – she’d taken up with a younger student, Emile, a Communist, and got involved with rallies, spending a night in jail. She’d ended up pregnant and with Emile in prison, she had a botched abortion – a difficult to read scene – before fleeing away. But Roig also tackles the more everyday lives of this family – but adds a twist! Silvia who ignores her husbands infidelities, ensures she runs a perfect house to make him stay – and while Lluis and her friends’ husbands are at the football, Silvia and friends have a Tupperware party – which ends up more role-playing Anne Summers than banal kitchenware.

Sadly though, I found it hard to engage with this family, although I obviously sympathised with Natàlia’s plight. My knowledge of Spanish politics of the period is virtually non-existent and I lacked the background to understand those sections better. I much preferred all the generations in the modern Barcelonian family in Teresa Solana’s Black Storms. And that’s my 20 Books of Summer complete!

Source: Review copy from last year – thank you! Daunt books, paperback original, 224 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.

A Deadly Inheritance by Charlotte Vassell (Caius Beauchamp #3)

We were introduced to Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp (say it as you read it), part-Jamaican, foodie and not grumpy, in Vassell’s first novel, The Other Half. In this novel, Caius discovers a body on his morning run – and is thrown into a world of toffs – she should have been at the Bullingdon Club-alike birthday party of Rupert Achilles Courtney Beauchamp (Beecham). The Other Half was a breath of fresh air in terms of crime novels for being full of comedy and skewering Vassell’s targets. Caius and his team proved able and likeable and I wished for more.

Sadly, I missed out reading the second mystery in this series, The In Crowd, in which something significant happened to Inspector Caius. It’s complicated, but it turns out that his Jamaican grandfather inherited a baronetcy and is a true Beauchamp (Beecham) after all – so Caius is now the heir to the title, not Rupert – who turns out to be the illegitimate son of the Rt Hon Lord Arthur Hampton, and has persuaded the Met Police to set up Caius and his team as a special investigations unit. Vassell tells us all this in a dramatis personae before the novel begins, but although I really enjoyed A Deadly Inheritance, there were a lot of references back to the previous case in which all these family trees were investigated.

As the novel begins, Caius and girlfriend Callie, a milliner, are on a luxury steam train trip to Bath. Brunch will be served soon. Callie is observing the other passengers, trying to work them out, including a grandmother and her knitting daughter – she gives the grandmother her card when she admires Callie’s hat as they embark for the return journey. Two days later, Hampton gets Arthur called to a double murder in Barnes – a old woman in her bed, but also her assumed assailant, a man in black, or was he a burglar? It turns out that the old lady was the grandmother from the train, and the man was the steward, the grandaughter lived with her grandmother but was out at the time of the murder. Cue a very complicated family dynamic as we meet the granddaughter’s awful sister – a new-age influencer of dubious character and much shenanigans over the will.

Very enjoyable, but you need to have read the second volume first, and I didn’t find it quite as comedic. However, I will definitely read more Caius mysteries though, he’s such a great character, and the dynamics of a working class family being elevated to the peerage is good fun.

Source: Review copy – thank you! Faber paperback original, 400 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.

The Cut by Richard Armitage

This is the second thriller from Armitage and totally different to his first, Geneva, reviewed here. While I enjoyed the plot of his medical thriller debut, I did have some reservations about the logistics of all the travel around the titular lake and what the Matterhorn had to do with it all being so many km away.

His second novel, stays close to home in the fictional Midlands village of Barton Mallet. The story is told in two roughly alternating timelines separated by thirty years, 1993 and 2023. The prologue teases us with hints of how the 1993 strand ends. It’s after the school prom, everyone is in fancy dress and dispersing into the night. A 14-year-old boy is up in the ‘Crows Nest’ of the old Blackstone Mill, filming things, when he see something – a girl in white is trying to escape from a figure in black, climbing up the old water wheel. He shouted, but he was seen, and couldn’t escape. The attacker took his camera and laid him out.

One of them had gone to jail for the death of Annabel Maddock – but his thirty year sentence is over. The whole village is on tenterhooks in case he returns home. None more so than Ben Knot, who had been Annie’s boyfriend. Knot is now a successful architect, although his firm, based in Sweden is in some financial trouble. He lives in a self-designed and high security house in the village with his partner Dani, and two teenaged children from his former marriage, Nate and Lily. When a Hollywood producer sends his team to the village to scout for his ‘found footage’ horror film project (cf The Blair Witch Project), Nathan gets cast as the lead, and there’s a part for Lily too. Ben isn’t sure about the film, but Dani persuades him that it’s the thing to get Nate out of his bedroom! But as it goes on, Ben becomes more and more concerned – the events in the film seem to be mirroring those from thirty years ago…

This psychological thriller was a bit slow to get going,, but the early chapters set in 1993 build up portraits of Ben and his group of friends and frenemies back in the day, especially poor Mark, known as Marcello because he lugged his instrument everywhere, whom most of the others bullied for being gay. From about halfway through, Armitage starts to ramp up the suspense as the past catches up with the present and the film takes that nasty turn. The past and present seemed to blur into each other so keeping track got harder. Was it unnecessarily complicated? A little, perhaps, but it was also increasingly page-turning to see if my suspicions were right.

Source: Review copy – thank you! Faber & Faber hardback, 288 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.