More summer reading

I'm not technically on holidays but most of the people I need to talk to are. This means that, after a tedious day of not getting much done, I go home to find that there's nothing to watch on television* and have heaps of mental energy left for books. But all I feel like reading at the moment are the sort of things people read at the beach. Good holiday reading. Comfort books. Nothing wrong with that I guess.

The other day, I read Barry Maitland's latest Brock and Kolla called Spider Trap.

I've talked about this series before, here about Babel and here about No Trace. Brock and Kolla are old friends by now and it's good to see them still fighting the good fight. Brock gets the chance to revisit cases from much earlier in his career in this book.

Spider Trap is set in a part of south London with a large West Indian community. Maitland does a fantastic job of bringing this neighbourhood and its inhabitants to life. We go to street markets and a dance hall and hear about the Brixton riots from the 1980s. One of the characters is an MP so we also get a tour of the Houses of Parliament and a ringside seat at an unfeasibly exciting committee hearing!

The weather is usually bad in this series. I don't know if Maitland summers in the Mediterranean so only sees English winters. Maybe crime only happens in bad weather? The only other unusual thing about this book is that the publishers use the image of a spider as a section break. This was realistic enough to make you catch your breath if you saw it out of the corner of your eye. At one point, my Beloved reached over my shoulder to brush one off the page. Not for the arachnophobes.


* I know there's tennis on but I have real trouble watching it. Unlike cricket and soccer, I used to play tennis and when I look at the shiny blonde hair and brown limbs of the grunting women slamming the ball at each other, I inwardly hear my father saying when I was 15 "you know, you could play like them if you'd only take it more seriously." Of course, if I had listened rather than doing my homework, getting an after school job and seeing boys, I'd probably have retired with ruined joints and skin cancer by now