Ticket to Ride [Hardcover]

Janet Neel's return to fiction is long over-due. Her Francesca Wilson/John MacLeish series ended (or stalled out) in 2001. The first three books in that series - Death's Bright Angel, Death on Site, and Death of a Partner - are very high on my list of 100 Best Mysteries. In those books, brilliant, spikey, hawk-like Francesca Wilson's expertise in matters financial and political provides both interesting backgrounds replete with vivid characters and the gravitas to balance the exploits of a Scotland Yard lover/husband. Death's Bright Angel gives us music, the textile industry in Thatcher-ridden England, and Francesca's biological and work families. With the exception of her mother, treated by all her children with great love and patronizing kindness, Francesca dwells entirely in the world of men. Her four younger brothers, her colleagues at the Department of Trade and Industry, and her occasional friends are all male. Neel crafts a main character at home in this world, neither a damsel nor an honorary man. Francesca's perspective as a civil servant brings both wit and insight to what might otherwise be bland material. In Death on Site, we learn about the finances of London construction sites and of Everest expeditions, as characters climb Scottish mountains and urban scaffolding. Death of a Partner introduces us to the ins and outs of lobbying firms and takes us back into music, with two of Francesca's singing brothers and her godson in the foreground.

The great strength of these books - besides the well-drawn witty characters who catch our hearts and brains - is the logical link between MacLeish's investigations and Francesca's job. Never, in these first three books, do we feel the force of coincidence bludgeoning us into acceptance. Ironically, this authorial success may have been the death-knell for the following four books in the series. Having joined Francesca and John in matrimony, Neel is obliged to keep both of them gainfully employed on common ground, a hard task to sustain.

As if recognizing the problem, Neel now gives us Jules Carlisle, a newly qualified solicitor with an impeccable middle class present built upon a trailer trash (caravan-dwelling in Brit) past. While Jules' work is primarily in criminal law, her firm specializes in immigrant cases. In Ticket to Ride, we are educated about the immigrant issues in the UK from the varied points of view of Jules, her adoptive mother (a member of the House of Lords), agribusiness, and MI5. Among other excellences, Neel's novel offers a dazzlingly succinct, if trenchantly EU, summary of the run-up to Srbrenica and attendant horrors.

Neel is the rare writer who can quickly define a number of varied characters, staying true to their agendas and speech patterns throughout pages of dialogue and action. The Welsh social worker, the East Anglian gentleman farmer, the Baroness, the Serbian legal eagle, all come across distinctly and credibly. The plot gets moving quickly, only to drag a bit after the first hundred pages. Persevere, for soon, all details in place, Neel ratchets up the tension around the end of the second century and keeps readers breathlessly turning pages, beset with genuine fear for these people we suddenly know so well - all this with exquisitely literate prose, no manipulative italics or clumsy sentence fragments.

Rather than threatening her characters and readers with a made-to-fit evil genius who appears only at the end of the novel, Janet Neel has the gift of writing villains who are wholly likeable, charming and sympathetic, even, until the very moment they reveal themselves to be coldly ruthless.

So read Ticket to Ride, then treat yourself to the first three of Neel's novels.

Being the most recent qualified solicitor at Jenkins Associates, Jules Carlisle handles the cases when everyone else is on vacation. Potential client Serbian Mirko Dragunovic discusses with Jules his belief his brother is one of eight dead men found on a nearby beach. When Jules suggests telling the police, he says he is an illegal economic migrant before handing her a vial of his AB type blood to be tested and compared to the victims.

Jules knows she needs senior help, but all are away including Mr. Jenkins visiting Slovakia. When the cops catch Mirko, she comes down to the station to act as his lawyer. The police believe that her client has a connection with those suspected of committing the homicides besides a victim with AB blood. Even stranger is that Mr. Flowerdew, the farmer who employed Mirko when he was legal three years ago, has a deep interest in the case that he says is altruism. Besides she also believes Mirko is hiding something that Jules believes could prove deadly to the Serbian expatriate not realizing the same holds true to her as the future lies in the numbers.

TICKET TO RIDE is a terrific investigative tale with a strong British legal thriller subplot to anchor the inquiry. Jules is a fabulous protagonist struggling with a client who does not totally add up as she believes he hides a key fact from her, but seems sincere anyway. Besides the link to the beach deaths, Mirko also represents those leaving war torn or impoverished nations for a chance in a G-8 nation though in his situation it means ignoring his Biochemistry Masters degree. A final twist adds to a pleasurable entreating story.

Harriet Klausner

This one is first rate. It ties a plot about illegal immigrants in Britain to the personal and family story of the young lawyer-heroine. The author herself is a member of the House of Lords, and the tale includes two women peers whose wisdom and humor is an additional but non-distracting part of the tale.