Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                                The Farm by Tom Rob Smith. "He drove me to the madhouse. He said this is where I belong, in rooms next to people howling like animals." "The Farm" follows a similar pattern to many of the Scandi murder/mysteries: picturesque villages and isolated farms with bleak landscapes, taciturn patriarchs such as Hakan who dominates Elise his wife, Mia his adopted daughter and the entire community. He thrives on this power. We have an amateur sleuth plagued by her own nightmares seeking answers to the disappearance of a vulnerable child. Are we talking about murder or abduction? Smith presents us with stories within stories, multi-layered. Fascinating. You might remember Smith from " Child 44" (2006) one of a trilogy, the first ever thriller to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize? Ridley Scott snatched up the film rights and the film has just been released (Autumn 2015)...

                          An Inspector Calls by J.B.Priestley. BBC1 Drama. 2015. "There are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths, still left with us, with their lives and hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness all intertwined with our lives and what we think, and say, and do." I feel as if I've grown up with Priestley's play and it's not just my northern roots. When I went into teaching in the 1970s it was on the syllabus and it was a good choice to cover in our limited time for O level and GCSE. It is, after all, a short play, easy to read and study so not a particularly great challenge for most students.  It's now 2015 and Priestley's play is still on the literature syllabus and I still come across it in my capacity as an examiner. This adaptation was by playwright Helen Edmunson who develops the character of Eva Smi...

                             The Ex-Wives by Deborah Moggach. "He was an outcast, shivering in the cold whilst all over Britain loving families sat beside the fire opening presents and playfully trouncing each other at board games." It's the 1990s and you will be plunged imminently into the painful and complicated woes of an ageing actor known affectionately as Buffy. Russell Buffery. Apart from the occasion when he wallows in self-pity, he is amiable but absolutely hopeless. He is 61 years of age, a has-been who views himself as a "discontinued model consigned to the scrapheap." If you are feeling uncomfortable with that what about this one: like "an old pit pony put out to grass?" Penny informs us that he has a “bottomless capacity for self-deception” believing everything he wants to believe. “ They have to tell lies and believe them.” Things seem to be looking up for Buffy when he meets Celeste, ...

                The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves. "I never used to think like that. I never used to worry. Is that what violent death does to the people left behind? It makes us victims too, of our own anxiety." D.I. Vera Stanhope is an excellent detective, meticulous and thorough in her investigations but so difficult as a boss. Ask some of the key players in her team: Joe Ashworth, her sergeant or Holly, even Charlie. With them she can be frosty and sarcastic with high and unreasonable expectations.  She finds relationships difficult and doesn't like people who make demands on her time. Vera admits to being more scared of people when they are alive than dead. She detested her late father Hector who seemed to despise Vera just as much as she despised him and informs us that she is haunted by him with mutterings in her head late at night. Her clothes are generally from Oxfam and her furniture is old. She knows she is...

                                           More Lost Causes? It was probably around about July 1981. I can't call it life-changing as an experience but it did cause havoc and shaped my life as I know it now. Pear-shaped perhaps? Something definitely went seriously wrong. I kept thinking that someone out there didn't like me very much and it was pay back time. It's still painful thinking about it more than fifty years later. A teenager, home in Leeds. I arrived at York University a bit reluctant to sleeping in student accommodation and having to tolerate self-catering and mixing with lots of odds and sods. It wasn't my idea of heaven. I had to apply for leave of absence and it was so close to the end of term when my timetable was light and I didn't feel so under pressure. I had been studying with the O.U. since my ex thought it unwise to pursue my M,Ed at this time. I ...

            A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart. "What should you wear in bed when you're waiting for someone to come and kill you? I decided on a tee-shirt and underpants as my battle costume." " A Parrot in the Pepper Tree" is another extremely entertaining and informative read , a fitting follow-up to "Driving Over Lemons." Lorca, renamed Porca , a Quaker Parakeet, not a parrot, makes his debut, besotted with Ana Stewart but wildly suspicious of Chris. We begin in Sweden with freezing temperatures of minus twenty-five degrees, six hours of non-stop late night driving, lashing ice and endless blackness. To keep himself awake and alive, Stewart resorted to practising his Mandarin Chinese which he had been trying to learn for years. Imagine being beset by a vivid image of death by freezing as he headed towards Norrskoy. He spent a month in these freezing conditions, shearing sheep to cover the costs of runnin...

                  Miss Carter's War by Sheila Hancock. "She could have had a lifetime of peace here with a man who loved her. When the hamlet gathered on Sundays to play bowles, her grandchildren could have joined those of their neighbours." Marguerite Carter was half-French. She worked behind enemy lines for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the second world war. Her mother was French, her father English and Marguerite had left France when she was 12. The Bletchley lot called them the Baker St. Irregulars. The story takes us through the 50s through to the millenium when Marguerite is a 24 year old teacher starting her first job at Dartford County Grammar, Hancock's old school. Marguerite, just like the writer, had a Messiah complex according to her close friend Tony Stansfield and Hancock's late husband John Thaw. She had a strong need to look after people being a busybody as she called herself. She hated idleness ...

        A Song for Jenny. T.V. Drama. Based on the memoirs of Julie Nicholson. "I am no bird and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will." Jane Eyre was Jenny Nicholson's heroine so it was fitting that quotations from Charlotte Bronte's classic novel and Shakespeare should be printed on the funeral pall of this beautiful 24 year old whose life was tragically destroyed in 2005. The drama was based on Julie Nicholson's memoirs bearing the same title, written in 2010 as a tribute to all of the 52 victims as well as her eldest daughter Jenny who was killed in the Edgware Road suicide bombing incident ten years ago on the 7th July 2005, a day permanently etched in the dark recesses of the Nicholson's memories. Adapted by Frank McGuiness, it's a deeply emotional journey in an attempt to come to terms with the tragic loss of such a young life for a family that would be permanently traumatised by it. "Our family is a ...