#Blogtour #Review - Secrets of the First School by TL Huchu

Secrets of the First School (Edinburgh Nights, 5)
TL Huchu
Tor/ Pan Macmillan, 16 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 382pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035055487

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Secrets of the First School to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's the endgame for Edinburgh Nights and for Ropa Moyu - rather literally in her case, as she's dead, banished to the Other Place. This series has gone from relatively low-stakes exorcisms of unwanted spirits, via scuffles over membership of the ridiculously self-satisfied Society of Sceptical Enquireres (the Scottish magicians' guild) and a knife-sharp portrayal every dreadful corporate exhibition you've ever attended, and the collapse of the Society's relations with magic in England, to a sudden bid for power by the ghoul Henry Dundas who wants to make himself King, God and goodness knows what else.

Huchu wove this destination from the beginning, it's clear, and one can only pity Ropa for having such a stern creator. She's faced here with the impossible. Get back from the Beyond. Find her missing sister, abducted by Dundas's cult. Defeat said cult, when the cream of Scottish magic has been destroyed, or bent the knee to a tyrant (depressingly current, that). Do this without upsetting the English Sorcerer Royal, a mercurial figure, or the King, who rules the country with the most extreme application of Divine Right. This is a hardscrabble UK, living on the edge of starvation after a financial catastrophe not unrelated to Ropa's granny, who is also dead - making things even harder for Ropa; just scraping together bare sustenance is too much for many.

Yes, we have seen Ropa do the impossible before, or seemingly, but will she be able to use her understanding of von Clausewitz, her laissez-faire attitude to rules, and her shaky grasp of magic, to repeat that? As Ropa moves from one crisis to the next, it looks less and less likely. Her ability to walk away from allies, to insist on going alone, always a liability, seems positively self-destructive now.

Yet, she persists.

To say much more about what Ropa does would be to risk spoilers, and I won't do that, but I will say that Secrets of the First School challenges her like she's never been challenged before. She will discover that her understanding of life, magic and of herself, her family and her allies, is about to undergo an earthquake. And she will have to draw on strange sources of power to defeat the Establishment in Edinburgh - and forge strange alliances, despite that habit of walking away from people. (Though, given what Ropa discovers here, trusting anyone is going to be hard).

How it all works out is great fun and the outcome turns not only on Ropa and what she does but also on the tainted roots of Scottish magic and the tainted fruit it has produced. Dundas is a magnificent villain, but he isn't a puzzling, lone, megalomaniac criminal in the manner of a James Bond antagonist. I think that Huchu is nudging us with that character, and his origin in Empire, finance and exploitation to see parallels with some equally tainted modern figures who have the arrogance to try and make the world dance to their tune. And who, I'll prophesy, will meet a not dissimilar fate.

It's a magnificent end to what has been a marvellous sequence of stories and, I think, more than that - not just a fitting end but a powerful and moving novel in itself, the best of the five (which is setting a high bar).

For more information about Secrets of the First School, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Secrets of the First School from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (they'll always be Smith's to me!) or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - The Winter Job by Antti Tuomainen

The Winter Job
Antti Tuomainen (trans by David Hackston)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 228pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788824

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda for sending me a copy of The Winter Job to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

December 1982, and with Christmas coming up, postal worker Ilmari Nieminen has no way to buy his beloved daughter the piano he's impulsively promised her. Following his divorce - Ilmari has issues with trust, which have torpedoed his marriage, as well as all his other relationships - Helena is the centre of his life. He can't let her down. he just can't.

So he takes on a delivery job. A rather strange one. He has to transport an antique sofa more than 1000km to the north of the country. In the depths of winter. In an elderly British van unsuited to Finland's ice climate. Moreover, he's determined to take diversions on the journey to settle old obligations.

What can possibly go wrong?

So begins one of the strangest road novels I've ever encountered. As if the task Ilmari has assumed isn't tricky enough in itself, there's something... off... about the sofa (and indeed, the whole job) from the beginning. It's soon clear that others want it too - a bruiser called Otto, whose way of dealing with opposition is to knock it down, shows up, as does a pair of bickering political activists, Anneli and Erkki, who want to sell the sofa to fund the Cause.

Oh, and Ilmari also bumps into an old schoolfriend, Antero, he hasn't seen for years (since accusing him of theft, in fact). Antero is down on his luck, and joins Ilmari for the ride. But he, too, has business to settle on the journey.

As winter closes in, and this disparate group heads north in their various rackety vehicles, the stage is set for drama, catastrophe and... friendship?

The Winter Job is highly entertaining, not least in the lengths that the three groups go to acquire, or retain, the sofa. There is violence, double crossing, coincidence and heroism here - to such a degree that it seems as though this unlikely McMuffin has driven everyone clean out of their minds. (At times I was getting distinct Ealing comedy vibes, but the violence lurking here has a real edge, there are some truly gruesome scenes). It's also really enjoyable to see how Tuomainen takes an unlikely scenario and manages to invest the reader in its truth. You won't doubt the commitment of anyone here to the sofa, or the possibility that all this could actually happen.

Above all, though, or perhaps behind all or beneath all, there's more going on here than some bizarre gameshow challenge. All the participants in the Great Finnish Sofa-Off feel, in a sense, lost. They lack friends. They lack trust. They lack something or someone to come home to. Even lone wolf Otto senses this, though he then goes about building friendship in a most self-defeating way. And on those long Finnish miles - sorry, kilometres - there's plenty of opportunity to reflect on what went wrong and how it may not be too late to put is right.

The Winter Job is fun when it's doing slapstick, but also profound and moving, a kind of collective dark night of the soul for Ilmari and the rest - but is it a night they'll all come through to dawn unscathed?

Read this book and find out!

The Winter Job is translated by David Hackston into a lucid and readable English version that must have been a struggle in places given a context and setting that would be clear to the reader of the original but much harder to set out for a foreign reader.  (it's great to see David given credit on the cover).

For more information about The Winter Job, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Winter Job from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (it'll always be Smith's to me) or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - The Space Between the Trees by Norm Konyu

The Space Between the Trees
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 21 October 2025
Available as: HB, 104pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/): 9781787746800

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan for sending me a copy of The Space Between the Trees to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Norm Konyu's new fantasy The Space Between the Trees brings his haunting imagery and heartfelt storytelling to the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

In 2022 a young couple, Meera and Mark are looking for a house, viewing a development that has been cut into the primeval forest. Something about it doesn't appeal - it's all a bit "Little Boxes" perhaps and despite the sylvan street names, the forest is nowhere to be found. Disappointed, they head home - which is when the fun really starts (for a rather special value of "fun") as, despite a clear road, they become lost.

The reader will have anticipated this from a short prologue set in 1902 and featuring a group of loggers who run into problems themselves. But the exact danger is left unclear. As in Downlands, Konyu plays games here with his setting.

And as in Downlands, I love the way that the threat creeps up on Meera and Mark. We've been given a hint in the prologue that something may be up, so I was expecting that journey into the woods to go wrong, but Konyu cleverly wrongfoots the reader as to what has happened and, of course, what will happen. Though Mark's story about the spooky forest where he grew up may give a hint.

Konyu's angular, understated drawing style is perfect for this - extreme horror doesn't need swirling imagery. I think it's fair to describe the atmosphere here as gothic, but by being rendered in clear, stylised graphics the creepy factor is dialled up because of a certain... incongruity? A contrast between what are very Modern graphics (in a mid 20th century sense) and the primeval, gothic mystery of the forest. The fate of the characters is slippery - they seem so solid, so well located in their clearly depicted, definite world... which then turns shifty and paradoxical as they seek to march from one frame to the next. It's like there is a magician performing in front of you, everything is visible, but then, wham! And where did that go? Look at the page again, can you spot the glitch... maybe...

I found that once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. It is perfect for devouring in a single sitting - and then going back to see what you'd missed. There's a richness - both of storytelling and of characterisation - that is belied by the plainness of the style.

And which would be undermined if I said anymore about what happens! This is a book to come to unsuspecting, as it were.

Like Meera and Mark.

In short, really, really enjoyable and I hope to read more by Norm Konyu soon.

For more information about The Space Between the Trees, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Space Between the Trees from your local high street bookshop or comic shop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (they can call it what they like, it'll always be Smith's to me) Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Like a Bullet by Andrew Cartmel

Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803367941

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Like a Bullet to consider for review.

The return of Cordelia Stanmer, aka The Paperback Sleuth (she's had cards made and everything) is always welcome. Unlike her counterpart in the world or rare record collecting, Cartmel's Vinyl Detective, Cordelia's got few scruples (she's certainly up for a bit of burglary) when it comes to securing down a rare, pristine paperback volume, so life is always exciting when she's around. These books are a third mystery, a third scavenger hunt, and, perhaps, the other third has a distinct flavour of mild hedonism, Cordelia employing her gains in the pursuit of pleasures both licit and... not. 

In Like a Bullet, Cordelia's been engaged by wealthy, retired rock star Erik Make Loud (known to those who've been reading the Detective's adventures) to locate a copy of the legendary 1960s novel Commando Gold. This is a book so rare that online wars break out over whether it even exists. How can she resist that challenge (and the promised reward for achieving it)? 

Especially since, on acquiring the previous books in the series, she finds them eminently readable (not really what she'd expected from an author called "Butch Raider").

As ever, though, Cordelia doesn't really know what she's getting into. Someone really, really doesn't want that book found. There's more at stake here than a musty, mouldering volume of war stories. Soon, she' dodging a very determined enemy... one very familiar with the kinds of techniques described in the books.

As ever, I had great fun with Cartmel's latest. Cordelia's a very distinct, very well-formed character, more of a loner than the Detective (while she eventually has to ask for help in this story from her ex hard-man landlord Edwin, she generally handles things herself rather than travelling with an entourage like the Detective). She's a planner, often (but not always) one step ahead of everyone else. She inhabits the same slightly raffish south west London. Cartmel also has a good eye for location and geography, mapping out backstreets, pubs and routes into and out of London, as well as giving us glimpses of the strange characters (never quite too strange to be believable) who live there.

An excellent addition to the series.

For more information about Like a Bullet, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss

The Second Chance Cinema

Thea Weiss
HarperCollins, 7 October 2025
Available as: PB, 320pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008769185

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Second Chance Cinema to consider for review.

Ellie and Drake seem very different, but complementary to one another - she a cataloguer of vanishing places, always on the lookout for the quirky, the picturesque, the vintage, he a construction expert, safe and reliable, always fixing things. So, in many ways an ideal couple.

As the two plan their marriage, however, both worry about secrets they are keeping. 

And then one night, as Ellie (of course) leads them off the beaten track, they stumble across a hidden cinema with its own, special, midnight show - The Story of You. Those secrets will be revealed, and the two will have to face some uncomfortable truths.

I adored The Second Chance Cinema. I always think there's something magical about a cinema, something liminal as one steps out of one's normal life for a while. The darkness. The anticipation. It's especially magical when you have the whole place to yourself - as though the world has, just for a brief while, bent itself around you. For Ellie and Drake, that's literally true as they attend showing after showing, taking each of them deeper and deeper into their backstories - and revealing their pasts to each other.

This is a brilliant way to tell how two people came to be who they are, and to expose the dilemmas and tensions they now face. Across the screen flit parents, siblings, childhood insecurities, teenage angst, lovers, breakups, and betrayals. "To know all is to forgive all" runs the old saying, but will that be true for Ellie and Drake? Rather, it seems likely that with more perfect knowledges comes judgement, misunderstanding and pain. Yes, you may see what happened to your lover on a certain night ten years before, but will you understand? And are they the same person now as they were then? Is it fair to judge them on that past?

As the showings continue, the revelations affect Ellie and Drake, with things done, or left undone, in the past reaching out and putting their lives and relationship in question. Ellie's fears that she can't recapture her best work, and Drake's frustration that instead of building lovely, bespoke homes he's working on cookie-cutter residential boxes, tangle with family tensions and past relationships to make this a complex but rich account of a couple's situation. At the same time there's a good sprinkling of magical Christmas sparkle and humour to lighten the more intense moments.

All in all I found The Second Chance Cinema a compelling read - Weiss takes her fantastical premise and grounds it sufficiently enough that it seems real, with the authentic consequences for Ellie and Drake. It is in some ways an unsettling story, with real challenges for the couple, but it's one I had to keep reading - a "what if" that I had to follow to the last page.

For more information about The Second Chance Cinema, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Cold House by AG Slatter

The Cold House

AG Slatter
Titan Books, 7 October 2025
Available as: HB, 160pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781835412541

I'm grateful to the publisher for  giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Cold House to consider for review.

Though set in modern Britain rather than her fantasy Sourdough world, in The Cold House Slatter explores similar themes to her recent fantasy novels - here we meet a woman left somewhat alone and struggling to understand her place in the wider world. Everly'd had her share of tragedy. there is a mystery about her early life which Slatter only gradually shares, and more recently, she's lost a husband and child. When we meet Everly at the beginning of the story, she reached the "attacking strangers in supermarkets" stage of grieving, something which rather shakes her out of herself and forces her to seek help.

Though the help proves to be a recommendation to get away from it all by spending a few days at an isolated, spooky house on a remote island. That leads Everly into a somewhat folk horror chain of events which moves quickly from the charming and quaint to the downright terrifying. As we learn how she handled those earlier, terrifying events in her life, the question looms: does that make her a survivor, or a betrayer? Will she be able to summon the strength to push through, or will things, this time, just be too much?

The Cold House is a cracking read, a short book but one with terrific pace. Slatter is perfect at judging what her readers need in the book, and where gaps will be filled in. That means we don't get reams of back information about Everly's harrowing earlier years, for example, or about the history of YYY Manor, just essential nuggets which are really quite enough. But there is a beautifully told account of Everly's very real distress and sense of dislocation at the start of the book (if "beautiful" is an appropriate word for a portrayal of such distress; I couldn't find a more apt one). 

The pace also feels natural, I think, as the book moves from an initial paralysing situation to exploration to that to a real, pounding, action-y conclusion as Everly's forced to fight for her own identity - and to choose who, and what, she will trust. Her quick decisions will result in lasting consequences and we have to hope that those will be results that she can live with. I felt that the ending contained a delicious ambiguity here, and wondered if things were, indeed, over? I suppose time will tell!

I'd strongly recommend The Cold House, if you haven't read any of Slatter's stuff before this standalone would be a good place to take the temperature, as it were.

For more information about The Cold House, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour Review - A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir

A Lethal Legacy
Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 20 September 2025
Available as: PB, 234pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586023

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of A Lethal Legacy to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Nothing has changed at Bjargarlækur for as long as anyone can remember – so are moves to bring change to this remote farm in the Icelandic countryside a motive for murder? Three elderly siblings have lived more or less peacefully in this isolated place their whole lives, until Brynjólfur is found dead in his own bed. Called on to help out at the farm, freelance journalist Alma is far from certain that the old man died a natural death. Determined establish the facts of the matter, she finds herself caught up in a vicious family feud. Sisters Klara and Thórdís are unable to agree on the future of the farm, just as others with an interest in the place circle hungrily around them. Echoes of missed opportunities, lost love and age-old crimes surface as a reckoning takes a bitter toll on those left behind – and Alma struggles to get to the truth.

Journalist Alma and her husband Gunnar have just embarked on renovating the wreck of a house they've bought. However a most dramatic call from daughter Gunnhildur summons Alma away to a remote farmhouse. (One of the minor delights of this novel is how - from off, as it were - Gunnar, left back at home, continually reports to Alma that he's found a new problem - the floor, the windows, the heating - that will require either a tradesman he can't find, materials they hadn't budgeted for, or indeed, a complete change of plan about layout. But he never loses his enthusiasm! It'll all be fine!). Gunnhildur, a nurse who needed some time away from things after splitting from her boyfriend, reports that the elderly man she was caring for alongside his two sisters has been found dead. She worries she may be blamed for mixing up Brynjólfur's meds, and asks her mum to come out and support Gunnhildur and her own toddler daughter Una.

This is Alma's intro to the isolated community at Bjargarlækur. Soon she's in the thick of investigating Brynjólfur's death, partly to help Gunnhildur - though dear Daughter happily scarpers part way through the story as Boyfriend has appeared again - but mostly, one senses, from a prickling of her journalist's thumbs and from sheer burning curiosity.

It's a tangled tale that emerges. The siblings were at war with one another. Brynjólfur and Klara, one of the surviving sisters, wanted to preserve the farm and turn into a museum of old Iceland. In a country that has experienced rapid change one can see why this might be worthwhile. (Another of the joys of A Lethal Legacy is the glimpses of that older Iceland that we get in the stories from the sisters and some of their neighbours. One is left in no doubt how much these remote communities were required to be self-sufficient, and the echoes of that run forward to some extent into the present of the novel, with the police remote and the authorities slow to intervene in the escalating situation).

The other sister, Thórdís, was though dead set against the museum idea. Complicating the picture is the presence of a younger couple to whom the farm has been let, and who may or may not be a pair of ne'er do wells. All sorts of accusations are thrown - Slaughtering the sheep! Selling the cows! Brewing moonshine! Behind them are suspicions they may have their eyes on the place, perhaps in a stitch-up with local authorities.

Once the possibility of murder is added to this mix of family dissension, greed and a gossipy local community - a great deal is to be gleaned from the local priest and the doctor - and Alma's shut in at the lonely, slightly spooky, house - one may well expect almost anything to happen. And there is drama. The sense though that something is rubbing under the surface is an even greater source of tension, the contrast with the bleak, static landscape and the changeless decades that the siblings have lived at Bjargarlækur only adding to this.

Is that impression of calm, of retreat, misleading though? 

At its heart a story of family secrets, A Lethal Legacy manages to be both truly Gothic, with the possibility that not everything going in totally natural, and also a fine, taut crime thriller. Alma's rather out on a limb in conducting any sort of investigation here and she lacks institutional backing to ask questions or poke around, having to rely on the sisters' goodwill (which is in short supply) and her de facto position as their nurse/ carer, to gather facts. 

As she does so it slowly becomes apparent that there is more going on here than you'd expect. With a parallel strand of the story focussing on possible past abuse affecting a member of her own family, and the differing attitudes of the sisters resulting in contradictory accounts of their earlier lives, there's a difficult jigsaw for Alma to assemble. She is, though, nothing if not determined.

I really enjoyed this story. The brooding, remote setting is a fitting location for dark deeds. Klara and Thórdís are magnificent characters, well drawn. Neither is exactly likeable - though by the end of the book one knows enough about them to forgive a lot - but they are a great double act. Alma is determined to reach the truth, at first to protect her daughter, but later, it seems, from sheer bloody-mindedness. And as I've said, the glimpses of Icelandic history and culture are fascinating.

As ever, Quentin Bates' translation sparkles, catching the very different characters of the individuals at the heart of this story through their speech - sometimes slangy and modern, at others more formal or even slightly outdated. He does this while navigating a lot of rather abstruse language describing funeral customs - wakes, lyings-in, funeral meats and such - laying clear subtle differences which matter to Klara and Thórdís. A lot of the background here would be known to the Icelandic reader and so it isn't explicitly set out, but the translation makes clear where everyone is coming from, as it were.

Great fun - and also in some aspects, very sad. I'd recommend this one strongly.

For more information about A Lethal Legacy, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy A Lethal Legacy from your local high street bookshop or online from Amazon.