This true-life crime novel, ‘Catching Thunder: The Story of the World’s Longest Sea Chase’, is the dramatic account of Sea Shepherd’s 110-day long international pursuit of the pirate fishing vessel Thunder.

Sea Shepherd is a group of activists committed to fighting illegal fishing led by the Swedish-American captain, Peter Hammarstedt. Their ship Bob Barker is trawling around for the ‘Bandit 6’, a list of six vessels fishing illegally in the Southern Ocean. At the start of their adventure, they come across Thunder, a vessel with an INTERPOL purple notice, and wanted by several governments around the world. This is the start of the ever-longest chase at sea, lasting 110 days, and crossing three oceans. Behind the scenes, INTERPOL and various countries’ fisheries management watch the chase, collaborating with Sea Shepherd in unconventional ways behind closed doors.

The book takes us from the once state of the art fishing vessel’s birth in 1969 in Ulsteinvik, Norway, across the oceans, and to Galicia, Spain, where unscrupulous mafias have specialised in the illegal fishing and whitewashing of Patagonian tooth fish, a lucrative species of cod icefish also named the “white gold of the ocean”. A criminal business extending across several jurisdictions, and including a web of tax havens, insurance companies, and ship registries, facilitates this lucrative poaching.

The product of a three year investigation taking them to four continents, the Norwegian investigative journalists Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter, have produced a book which is both a page-turner and a highly impressive documentary account of their work.

Chilling in places, with many situations hovering on the edge of extreme danger, one admires Sea Shepherd but also yells at them for the reckless peril they subject themselves to. Hammarstedt knows that the world and their donors are watching, and giving up is no option. This is both bravery and stupidity, but in the end a deep passion for protecting the oceans wins through, one that is hard to disagree with.

The book depicts how the international system fighting illegal fishing still has a long way to go if it effectively wants to get rid of the mafias out there, who are exploiting valuable ocean resources. In a really exciting fashion, the book highlights the problem of illegal fishing that has profound impact on communities across the world, but is largely unknown to the majority of people.

The takeaway is that combating environmental crime requires greater international cooperation than is the case today, and meanwhile, environmental NGOs are filling the enforcement vacuum left by inadequate government action. They take great risks to do so, risks that should not be required.

Catching Thunder will be out in English in March this year.

It’s been a while since I’ve read a book in the Rebus series, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed them. The books are set in Edinburgh, which is a character in its own right. Ian Rankin knows the city well, from the posh part with the big houses and lawns to areas so rough that any visitors stupid enough to wander would have a pretty low chance of survival.

There is excitement about the new Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, and a disused building is being renovated to house it. Inspector John Rebus has to act as police liaison as the building falls in his jurisdiction. Rebus is not happy about this. However, things start to get interesting when, during a guided tour around the building, he finds a body walled up in a blocked-up fireplace. It’s been there from the late 1970s, and no one can identify it. Soon another, fresher, body turns up in the building—that of Roddy Grieve, who was standing for the Scottish parliament as a Labour MP. Grieve comes from a prominent family, so the Chief Constable wants all the stops pulled out.

Then a tramp commits suicide, and when the Rebus’s team look into his death, they find that he had £400,000 in a building society, and a false identity. Rebus suspects that the three cases are linked but his superiors are not so sure. Of course, this doesn’t make any difference to Rebus, who is convinced he is right. He manages to circumvent the bosses’ interference with a little help from Siobhan Clarke, who used to work with him and is now part of another team. But the Grieves, who are eccentric and manipulative (and have a few skeletons in their cupboard), complicate things for him. And if that wasn’t enough, his old nemesis, the gang boss Ger Cafferty, is out of prison.

I like the way Rankin paces his books—he keeps up the tension but allows space for the characters to develop. Rebus loves rock, drinks too much and can be utterly cynical. Naturally, his personal life is a mess. Among the people Rebus trusts is Siobhan Clarke. She knows him well and is one of the few people who can stand up to him. She tries, not always successfully, to stop him breaking too many rules.

Set in Darkness is quite grim and doesn’t end with all the loose ends tied. But there is a healthy dose of black humour running through it. One of Cafferty’s thugs “had black hair so badly cut it looked like an ill-fitting wig, and a nose which hadn’t so much been broken in the past as thoroughly dismantled.” The pathologist jokes that he works in the dead centre of the city.

This book won the 2005 Grand Prix du Roman Policier in France. If you haven’t discovered this series yet, you should. They’re a delight.

When I mentioned to a friend that I enjoyed Susanna Gregory’s medieval whodunits, she lent me the entire series of novels set during the time of Henry VIII with a hunchback lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, as the main character. Having just finished the first one (although strictly speaking, Dark Fire is the second in the series), I’m glad she did.

Dark Fire is a historical novel that is also a murder mystery, set in London during the last years of Henry VIII. The king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves is a disaster, and he wants to divorce her and marry Katherine Howard. But there are fears that the marriage to Howard will take England back to Catholicism, with dire consequences for Protestants and those who had defied Rome.

The novel takes place in 1540, the hottest summer of the century. Matthew Shardlake takes on the case of Elizabeth, a young girl who has been accused of killing her cousin. But Elizabeth will not utter a word, either to Shardlake or at her trial, and is condemned to the press, an inhuman punishment for those who will not plead.

In the meantime, Thomas Cromwell, Shardlake’s old master, is losing favour with the king. Cromwell arranged the marriage to Anne of Cleves and would stand to lose his position and very possibly his life, if the king married Katherine Howard and went back to Catholicism.

Cromwell promises the king Greek fire, a legendary substance used by the Byzantines to blow up ships—a fire that could burn on water. The formula had been lost for centuries but had been found in London, and the substance had been secretly recreated. Cromwell wants Shardlake to help him find the Greek fire in time for a demonstration planned for the king in ten days. He “persuades” Shardlake by delaying Elizabeth’s sentence.

But people connected with Greek fire are being brutally murdered. Shardlake has not only to find the formula and expose the person behind the killings but also unravel the mystery surrounding Elizabeth. He is helped in this by Barak, one of Cromwell’s men sent to help—and keep an eye on—the lawyer.

C.J. Sansom’s fine eye for detail brings Tudor London alive: the noise and commotion of the streets; the narrow, warped wooden stairs in a badly built, lopsided house; the expensive red and green wallpaper on the walls of a senior barrister’s office; and the bottles of herbs and spices and musky smell of a Moorish apothecary’s shop. I  could feel the heat and the smells that came off the river at low tide.

The characters are engaging. Shardlake, because of his disability, is an outsider and a loner with a strong sense of justice. Barak seems like a thug at first but Sansom slowly reveals the man behind the tough exterior: a loyal man who, like Shardlake, cares for those hard done by.

Like the best of historical novels, Dark Fire immerses the reader in the period—a time of turmoil and uncertainty, power struggles and religious strife. Not that different, then, from ours.

Rachel takes the train to and from London, like any other commuter. The train always stops at the same signal, opposite a house with a young couple. She is fascinated by them, this perfect couple, whom she calls Jess and Jason (who are, in reality, Scott and Megan). The house a few doors from theirs is the one Rachel and Tom lived in before their marriage broke up, and where Tom now lives with his new wife, Anna and their young child. One day Rachel, looking into Scott and Megan’s house sees something that does not reconcile with her picture of the perfect couple. Then one night Megan disappears. A night when Rachel was in the neighbourhood drunk. She wakes up the next morning with cuts on her head and no recollection of what happened.

Rachel narrates a lot of the book. She is an alcoholic dealing with (or not dealing with) the breakup of her marriage and their inability to have a child. In spite of her regular commutes to London, she does not have a job; the commutes are to fool her flatmate. She is desperately lonely and obsessive. Her narrative does not spare the reader the details of her alcoholism: the blackouts, the vomiting, the shame. The other narrators are the two women, Megan and Anna, one dissatisfied with her life and the other smugly content about hers.

There isn’t a single character in this book who is likable. But the story is so compelling that it’s hard to put down, even though it’s often difficult to be inside Rachel’s head. As the story progresses, you realize that nothing—and no one—is what they seem. And that’s what makes this book so good: the gradual unpeeling of layers until you get to the truth.

Maybe this is nitpicking, but I wish it had been called The Woman on the Train, which is far more accurate. This title makes me think of Gone Girl, to which it has been compared. This title gives the impression that Paula Hawkins was trying to ride the bandwagon of Gone Girl’s success, and there really was no need for it. The Girl on the Train is perfectly capable of standing on its own as an excellent crime novel.