Paperbacks reviewed by Brandon Robshaw: From The Wrong Girl to The Last Goodbye

The Wrong Girl, by Laura Wilson. Quercus £7.99

If you have already encountered Laura Wilson’s DI Stratton detective novels, then you’ll know that she writes excellent mystery novels with a strong sense of place, era and character, and a humane voice that’s perhaps too rare in crime fiction.

Her stand-alone novel The Wrong Girl amply confirms these gifts. The chief dramatis personae are: Dan, a former roadie for the 1960s band Weather Ship Tango Delta, who’s found dead on his bed one day; his sister, Janice, now in her sixties, who had a baby when just a slip of a girl and was pressured into giving her up for adoption; Suzie, Janice’s now grown-up daughter whom Janice has never met but who’s been lodging with Dan in the Norfolk village of Repshall; Molly, Suzie’s nine-year-old daughter; Joe, former lead singer of Weather Ship, former lover of Janice, and apparently an acid casualty; and Magic Malc, a creepy old hippie who haunts the woods outside Repshall.

When Dan dies, Janice goes to Repshall to see the daughter and grand-daughter she’s never met; and Joe lives just down the road .... While Janice struggles to come to terms with her past and her new present, Molly is convinced she is not Suzie’s daughter but a child who was abducted several years ago – she looks exactly like the computer-generated pictures of how that child would now look. And then Molly disappears ....

This haunting yarn about old regrets, old sins and old secrets is told mostly from Janice’s viewpoint and occasionally Molly’s. The sense of how lives entwine, come apart, and grow together again is extremely well done.

It is genuinely unsettling with a series of well-timed revelations. But Wilson cares for her characters and would never subject them to gratuitous horrors just to titillate.

The Ugly Game, by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert. Simon and Schuster £9.99

How the hell did the 2022 World Cup ever end up in Qatar? This impressive piece of investigative journalism explains all.

It’s the tale of the Qatari billionaire Mohammed bin Hammam’s plot to land the World Cup for his Emir, involving massive bribes and shady voting deals, with collusion at every level of Fifa – making a mockery of Sepp Blatter’s claim that Fifa had the best ethics structure in the world.

The action takes place over several years and five continents, in private jets, five-star hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants.

There’s a wonderful cast: Michel Platini, Franz Beckenbauer, and the American Fifa official Chuck Blazer with his pet parrot trained to shout out “You’re a dope!”

As we know, Bin Hamman’s plot succeeded, but at a cost; he himself is an outcast now, while 13 of the 24 Fifa committee members have been banned or fined or investigated, and Blatter himself has resigned. Still, as things stand, the World Cup is going to Qatar.

The Last Goodbye, by Matt Potter. Constable £9.99

We all fantasise about writing the perfect resignation letter, don’t we? To justify oneself, excoriate one’s boss, stand up for principle and achieve one’s freedom, all in a single bound, is a most attractive option.

Matt Potter has collected some real beauties: from Roy Disney’s accusatory missive to the Disney Company, to Robin Cook’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger resignation to Tony Blair, Rebekah Brooks’s self-justifying letter from Newscorp to Che Guevara’s self-dramatising resignation letter to Fidel Castro.

It’s a marvellous idea, but Potter’s commentary tends to be over-explanatory and his prose is stuffed with dead and often ill-assorted metaphors.

Girls Will Be Girls, by Emer O’Toole. Orion £8.99

This is a memoir about growing up in Galway, about wanting to be thin and feminine, about questioning what it is to be feminine, about attending a mass nude photo-shoot, about showing off armpit hair on This Morning, about reading Foucault, Judith Butler and Naomi Wolf.

About how porn affects sex (not positively), about conversations with Aristotle, about friends and boyfriends, dressing up and dressing down, getting a Hollywood waxing (ow), about doing a PhD, and, generally, about trying to destabilise the rigid confines of gender.

It’s written in a bouncy, lively style, occasionally a bit sententious, but generally likeable and sensible. My two teenage daughters would like this.

Touch, by David J Linden. Penguin £8.99

David Linden shows touch is our most basic, most important sense: the one that makes us human.

Perhaps it is best thought of as more than a single sense, for we have many touch receptors to distinguish pressure, roughness and smoothness, heat, pain, vibration etc.

There are observations on itching, on tickling, on orgasms. And there are some good anecdotes, such as the couple who tried to see if they could read Braille with their genitals (they couldn’t; but tongues would work).

However, some sections are less easy to follow, using fairly dense technical vocabulary.

The best popular science integrates folksy and science-y bits, but here they don’t cosy up to each other quite enough.