Blogtour review - The Wee Small Hours by Rosa Temple

The Wee Small Hours
Rosa Temple

Island Dream Books, 31 October 2025
Available as: PB, 322pp, e   
Source: Review copy
ISBN(PB): 9780993338113

I'm grateful to Anne Cater for sending me a copy of The Wee Small Hours to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

About the Book

A cosy small-town romance about sleepless nights, unexpected friendships, and finding love when you least expect it.

Annie Lambert hasn’t slept properly in years. Her remedy? Moonlit walks through her quiet Herefordshire town, where secrets linger and stories whisper in the shadows. When her mother returns to Australia, Annie inherits the crumbling family home—and a place in the Monday Afternoon Knitters Circle, a trio of spirited seventy-somethings determined to fix her life stitch by stitch.

Suddenly, Annie’s small-town world is anything but quiet. A homeless man and his loyal dog become her closest confidants. A charming ex-footballer arrives as a new client. And her rugged builder seems to have more than bricks on his mind. As romance sparks and renovations begin, Annie finds herself tangled in more than just yarn.

But when old wounds resurface and the knitting club’s secrets threaten to unravel, Annie must decide: can she mend the lives around her while finally stitching together her own?

The Wee Small Hours is a heartwarming novel about second chances, found family, and the healing power of connection—even in the loneliest hours.

About the Author

Rosa Temple writes feel-good contemporary fiction with plenty of romance and romantic humour. Her novels celebrate love, friendship, and the messy, magical moments that make life worth living.

She is the author of four self-published titles: Sleeping With Your Best Friend, Natalie’s Getting Married, Single by Christmas, and Dear...Anybody? As well as three romantic comedies published by HQ Digital: Playing by the Rules, Playing Her Cards Right, and Playing for Keeps. In 2022, Simon & Schuster UK released her uplifting novel The Slow Lane Walkers Club, a heartwarming story about community and second chances.

Rosa Temple is the pen name of Fran Clark, who also writes emotive women’s historical fiction.

She lives in Herefordshire, where she leads a community choir, teaches vocals, and occasionally performs soul, jazz, and Latin music. She writes every day, usually with herbal tea and banana bread, and is always trying to improve her piano skills.

Website: https://www.rosatemple.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosatempleauthor/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rosatempleauthor

What I thought

There's something appealing about the idea of being up late and alone, don't you think? Just you and the late-night radio, perhaps, alone in your room, an island of light. Or wandering the streets, able to explore and linger where you couldn't by day. It's a magic evoked in music, such as the song which gives this book its title. In the sight of a lit window set against the darkness. Or in the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

Not so much fun, though, if you're alone and awake because you can't sleep. The romantic dream of solitude is more of a nightmare if you suffer insomnia, if you know you're going to spend hours lying awake and the next day drained, unable to function properly because of your lack of rest. 

This is fate of Annie Lambert, heroine of The Wee Small Hours. Annie lives with insomnia, roaming around Ross on Wye, her home town, in the dark rather than lie sleepless in bed. In the c course of her wandering Annie makes friends, such as homeless Dez and his dog, Phoenix. She passes the shuttered and dark houses of her friends. Living alone, Annie  disturbs no one with her comings and goings. Constantly warned it's not safe, it's not wise, she nevertheless continues.

Annie still lives in the family house - the rambling, old, cold family house - which is freighted with memories after her mum and sister (whose coats still hang in the hall!) decamped to live in Australia. Seemingly content with her life, shuttling between the Monday afternoon knitting circles, work as a physiotherapist, and home, Annie remains, however, both single and sleepless.

Everything turns on its head, however, when one of Annie's clients turns out to be a celebrity... and an attractive handsome one at that. Is something about to happen between Annie and Reef? 

This book was great fun to read. Annie's an appealing central character, portrayed very well - an anxious woman, concerned that she might have inherited her mum's depression, suffering from sleeplessness but still trying to get on with her life, willing to try different things. For example, Annie took up drawing and painting during lockdown and is pretty good at it, though she's formed a habit of rejecting praise or compliments. She also plugs away at her knitting, despite being very bad at that, enjoying the company of Bea, Judith and Rhiannon, septuagenarians who have their fingers on the pulse of things despite some long-held animosities - and who are united in their goals of supporting Annie.

So when Reef comes into her life, Annie has baggage (as does he) but nevertheless the two try to develop their relationship, interrupted as it is by his busy schedule. Annie bonds especially with Reef's son Noé and all seems to be going well until... well, I don't want to indulge in spoilers, I'll just say there is a distraction for Annie. 

Everything comes to a head over Christmas. I loved the way that Temple allows Annie a joyful celebration with her rackety collection of friends even while hinting that all may not be well with her. Real life is like that, we can have fun and entertain worries and doubts at the same time. It’s not all yes and no, the world s full of maybes and possibles. And we can flap between alternatives, trying on possibilities as Annie does multiple dresses in one key changing room scene. That scene is, I think, quintessentially Annie - her anxiety balanced with her willingness to try new things and not just take what she's offered.

The central characters here are engaging and feel real. Annie's dilemma is I think one of not being able to trust herself amidst conflicting pressures - not least the mix of good, bad and plain flaky advice provided by the knitters - while being continually undermined by that pesky insomnia. She has, though, a shrewd eye for what's really going on, perhaps being better at sorting out others's lives than her own.

For more information about The Wee Small Hours, see the author'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 Wee Small Hours from your local high street bookshop or online from Foyle's, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Slow Gods by Claire North

Slow Gods

Claire North
Orbit, 18 November 2025 
Available as: HB, 422pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9780356526188

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Slow Gods  to consider for review.

After three books telling the story of what happens at home while Odysseus is adventuring, Claire North still has something to say about the gods - though here they are not Olympian deities but mighty computer systems, going about their inscrutable business across the galaxy. One, in particular, is referred to as "the Slow" because it eschews faster-than-light "arc travel". But one might equally accuse them of being "slow" to act against injustice and oppression in human affairs, which are illustrated in the opening sections of this book by the sad story of Mawukana na-Vdnaze. 

Maw has the misfortune to be born in the polity known as the Shine, a nakedly exploitative territory that works its common people to the grave to support the small minority who are Shiny - possessed of an indefinable mix of wealth, flair and assertion which gives them a passport to success. 

Maw does not have Shine, and his fate follows from that, leading him to a transformation ("I am a very poor copy of myself") which makes him, in the eyes of some - including himself - a monster, a ghost. 

The focus of the book is, in part, how Maw deals with that monsterdom, and seeks to be, if a monster, then a monster on the side of the angels - whether that means resisting the Shine, or working hard on the crisis of his time, the foretold collapse of a binary star system. When it occurs, this supernova will create an intense expanding shell of radiation and extinguish life for hundreds of lightyears. This will obliterate many of the Shine worlds, but also the planet Adjumir, on which a galaxy-wide rescue effort focusses.

I loved the way that North describes Adjumir and its people - "describe" is perhaps the wrong world, they conjure it up through stories, songs, language and the behaviour of the Adjumiris and especially Gebre, a spiky archivist who Maw meets on his rescue mission. Throughout this book we get snippets of history, turning into laments for what's been lost, for the fractured lives of exiles in the Adjumiri diaspora.

There's also haunting love story between Gebre and Maw, who only meet on two occasions - a fusion of duty, desire, loss and inevitable fate which gives the book its core, and a core of steel.

Entwined about that core are conspiracies, plots, secrets and lies, as well as the reprehensible behaviour of the Shine authorities. They see the threat of the coming supernova and refuse to act, indeed suppressing knowledge of it in their territories. (Thank goodness no nation today would act like that, ignoring a planet-killing threat for their own selfish convenience!) 

Through all this, we see Maw's gradual coming to terms with what he is and what he's done. This is often through the exploration of the myriad languages of the Galaxy and their customs and social structures, particularly a diverse assembly of genders (expect multiple systems of pronouns). It's a slow awakening for him, the dry tones of the editorial Maw writing this at some later point in his life counterpointing the passion of what he did and said in his story (and we're warned, this won't always be a reliable account). He's a character who finds it hard to forgive himself for some terrible things, something that, perhaps, allows him an insight into the otherwise inscrutable minds of the gods. I recall the frequent pleas in the Bible to a mighty God who yet permits suffering. How long, O Lord, how long? How long will the unrighteous prosper? How long will the innocent be oppressed? Rescue your people! Reveal yourself before the nations in your might, and cast down the evildoer!

A question we, in our day, might well ask...

Slow Gods gives a hint, a flavour, of the true complexity of that prayer, and of what it might take to answer it. Because there's always a cost to action - as Maw discovers one awful night on Adjumir. And it does so in a warm, generous narrative where monsters and failed, imperfect beings may contemplate their own very essence and deeds and seek redemption, even if - as suggested in a coda to the story - that seems to obliterate justice. 

Slow Gods is an enthralling, intelligent and absorbing story which revives the genre of space opera and adds North's distinct tone of moral questioning. A brilliant book. Buy this one as a present for the SF nerd in your life, and if that's yourself, just buy it!

For more information about Slow Gods, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Black as Death by Lilja Sigurðardóttir

Black as Death (Áróra Investigates, 5)
Lilja Sigurðardóttir (trans by Lorenza Garcia)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: PB, 225pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788848

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Black as Death to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I read this excellent book with a degree of sadness because it is the last in the Áróra Investigates series. Of course the set up - Áróra has returned to Iceland to look for her missing sister Isafold, so her adventures from book to book, that quest aside, are somewhat secondary - meant that once the mystery of Isafold was solved, Áróra would probably move on. 

In the previous book, Dark as Night, Isafold's body was discovered so I knew what was coming. But I'm still sad!

At least - fortunately for the reader, if not for poor Isafold and her sister - some doubts remained about the circumstances of her death, so there is at least this final part to the sequence. And in tying them up, Sigurðardóttir gives us a final, spectacular conclusion to the story, a book to keep you reading till into the night as we hear Isafold's sad story in her own words, even while Áróra and her friends and colleagues struggle to join the dots.

Be warned - if issues of domestic abuse and coercive control are triggering for you, you may prefer to look away, because Isafold's story is, sadly, an example of this. While that was implicit in what we already knew, the chapters in Isafold's voice here are harrowing, the more so, I think, because we already know the outcome. What we don't know, of course, is exactly how she, her abusive boyfriend, Björn, actually died. The solution to that will tie into a present-day narrative that Áróra & Co unravel, a mixture of money-laundering, smuggling and criminality in the shadier parts of the city. It's a gripping and complex tale in itself - a generous gift really from Sigurðardóttir because now she's built up her protagonists (Áróra herself, Daníel, Helena and of course the fabulous Lady Gúgúlú) into such real and complex personalities, frankly I could just read about them all day, I don't need plot, all I need is to see these wonderful characters revolve around each other.

As they do. All their stories advance, and they're all left on cliff edges (though not perilous ones). We want to know more, and maybe one day we will.  The book would be compulsive if that's all there was to it. But as I said, there is more, the crime plot here murkier than ever, the twists handbrake-grade and the peril (for some) real. For her last adventure, Áróra really has something to get her teeth into - which is good for her because otherwise the sense of loss, of guilt, that now catches up with her might be just too much. Certainly her normal distraction - lifting weights at The Gym - isn't enough any more, so she throws herself into the case.

Perhaps too much...

All in all a magnificent ending to this series and a fantastic crime novel. And one well served by Lorenza Garcia's translation, giving us an English text that hums along. I'm so grateful to translators who provide a window into other languages and cultures, as Garcia does here.

For more information about Black as Death, 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 Black as Death from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (always Smith's in my heart!) or Waterstones.

#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.