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Home Before Dark

Not for insomniacs

Charles Maclean
Hodder, 471pp, £12.99,

Digby Durrant

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Digby Durrant reviews three thrillers

Back in England, Ed visits his house in Wiltshire. His dead daughter’s dog is run over and of course it’s Ward’s doing. Ward has synaesthesia, which means among other things that killing affects him in unexpected ways. When he runs over the dog he experiences the flavour of candy floss in his mouth. He has a very sweet tooth. The reader may be excused an irreverent laugh here: there are very few in this book. The horrors ahead are manifold and scarcely believable. Gird yourself and don’t underestimate Maclean.

Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card opens in Istanbul in the middle of the 19th century when its power was on the wane. The Sultan wants the Bellini painting of his illustrious ancestor Mahmut II which he’s reliably informed has been seen in Venice. The Sultan sends for Yashim, a eunuch, a master of the martial arts who speaks five languages and can fix anything. Yashim’s first move is to send Palewski, who is nominally the Polish ambassador but has nothing better to do as Poland wasn’t at the time officially recognised as a state. ‘How ghastly !’ he says as he gazes at Venice in all its beauty from his gondola. A moment later he sees a dead body float by which might seem to confirm his first reaction.

Soon Paleweski is invited to a party to meet the mysterious beauty, Carla d’ Aspid d’Istria, during which he feels ill and totters home to bed to find a naked girl in it who gives him a warm welcome and cures his hangover with hot soup. Recovering from an excess of bison-grass vodka he learns that the head of a fellow guest at the same party has been found on a church’s altar lying in a communion plate. But the strangest of all the strange things here is the explosion of feeling between Carla and the eunuch Yashim. She discovers he fences as well as she does and when she goes berserk, spitting and kicking and punching probably out of frustration, and he skillfully crushes her, she declares her love for this formidable eunuch. And, she says, he possesses the Bellini. Or did. It’s missing. Will they find it? The answer comes in the postscript. It’s always good to go to Venice but at this stage of its history it’s better seen from an armchair.