Review - What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher

What Stalks the Deep (Sworn Soldier, 3) 

T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 30 September 2025
Available as: HB, 192pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy and bought
ISBN(HB): 9781803369716

I'm grateful to the publisher for  giving me access to an advance e-copy of What Stalks the Deep to consider for review.

In this, the third part of kis adventures, Alex Easton, former soldier (and still suffering from that) in the army of Galicia, an obscure Central European country where military service (ie being a 'Sworn soldier') determines gender, gets to visit the USA.

Easton answers a call for help from Dr James Denton, who shared an earlier adventure with Easton. Denton's cousin has gone missing in a disused coal mine. Now Easton suffers from claustophobia, so of course he feels duty bound to assist his friend despite the weird, supernatural goings-on down the mine...

What follows is a fun, if creepy, exploration of a mystery that brings with it danger, exploration in cramped, inaccessible tunnels, revenge, prejudice and an ethical dilemma. The book reminder me in a sense of a Doctor Who adventure. At the risk of slight spoilers, I'd say that whereas in the previous parts of this series, Easton has confronted outright, malign, evil of a supernatural or at least fantastical sort, here the "monster" is a more nuanced being. That's important. because it presents, as I have said, a moral dilemma. But Easton's experiences in What Moves the Dead and What Feasts and Night, overlaying kis PTSD (to use the modern term, the one used here is 'soldier's heart', an older version of the same thing) have made kim defensive so there's a personal challenge here too: hitting out is an all too common reaction to stress or danger.

(And that might also apply to other characters in this book).

Plus of course, there's that fear of enclosed places to overcome...

An intelligent, scary book which is a good addition to this series.

For more information about What Stalks the Deep, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Whisper in the Wind (Sunder City, 4)

Whisper in the Wind

Luke Arnold
Orbit, 29 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 377pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521626

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Whisper in the Wind to consider for review.

I recently suffered a clash of fictional worlds when I came across Luke Arnold, writer of this fantasy noir series, playing the lead role in a TV version of Scrublands, the first book in a detective series I am also reading. I hadn't realised Arnold was also an actor. I am very impressed that he finds time to keep Sunder City rolling along too.

I had in fact thought this series was paused with the last instalment. At the end of One Foot in the Fade, Fetch Phillips, Man for Hire, had hung up his metaphorical gumshoes and settled down to run the café - more of a greasy spoon - that he inherited from his friend Georgio. No longer will Fetch suffer from interfering in other peoples' business, chasing for the magic that he helped to banish from the world. Not Fetch.

The trouble is, a man will pick up entanglements. When a nameless news sheet editor begins circulating a samizdat journal in Sunder City, thumbing a nose at the authorities, and a series of outrages begin for which a bunch of kids congregating in Fetch's café may take the fall, he is leaned on to un-retire. (To make matters worse, someone seems to know the secret of Fetch's role in ending magic, and to be willing to reveal it...)

What follows is a baffling, dangerous chase though the back alleys and gilded boardrooms of Sunder City, and a still more baffling and dangerous chase though the moral landscape of Fetch's mind. There is a sense that, having thought he was out of the game, had evaded the difficult choices and found himself a role in the shadows, he's now being challenged to step back into the daylight to atone for what he did and make the best amends he can. That dynamic may have been what was driving Fetch in the earlier books, but he was always satisfied in the end with little achievements. Now, he faces more difficult choices. 

It's interesting to see how this character, who Arnold has developed into a complex but well-rounded man over the space of four books, gradually realises the magnitude of what's at stake. Starting by acting to keep himself out of the limelight, he realises that is no longer longer viable. Only through the network of friends he builds up as that decision crystallises does he find the strength to do that must be done. Establishing that network takes him to new places and sets wheels in motion that, one trusts, may lead to real change in Sunder City. But it's at a cost for Fetch's comfort and safety.

Whisper in the Wind is a complex fantasy mystery but also a mystery with a very creaturely (I won't say human because, well, not every person here human) focus. It's a book with great heart, and moves the Sunder City series on to new places and new things. I await the next part eagerly!

For more information about Whisper in the Wind, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

Charles Stross
Publisher, 27 January 2026
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

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

The Regicide Report is the final volume (at least for now?) of Stross's Laundry Files sequence, something that, in my view, has grown into a SFF phenomenon. Over the past two and a half decades I've followed the story of Bob Howard, necromancer, demonologist and computer nerd, through books that began as stories "in the style of" a series of espionage masters, mutated into treatments of classic monsters from horror, and ended up as pretty scathing criticism of UK politics.

Where is the endpoint of all that? In whose name is the espionage carried out out? On whose secret service are Bob, Mo and their colleagues engaged? Who is the most scary monster in the pack? What is at the summit of politics and public administration?

Why, the monarchy itself, of course. So, in a book which I think could probably only have been published following the death of Our Late Queen, here is the apotheosis of the Laundry, its endpoint (literally) as the unspeakable horror which has consumed the British State turns its baleful attention on the Crown itself. And on the billions of person-years of worship and belief that it has accumulated.

Written according  the normal convention of the series (Bob Howard writing his classified work diaries - but we finally see how and why that exercise is being undertaken) The Regicide Files gives us a complex plot hanging on the dilemma of the Laundry and its duty (enforced by geas) to both the current PM (that nameless horror, who was, in truth, the lesser of two evils - as PMs so often are) and to Her Majesty. 

Long-buried External Assets are being awoken, there's trouble afoot at the Palace and Bob's required to wear a fancy suit and shiny shoes. That last may be the thing he worries about most.

This book has all the notes I love in the Laundry Files: the fiendish plot (fiendish in at least two senses of the term), the dry humour, check-ins with most of the vast array of characters Stross has given us to date and a tight, action-filled narrative.  I don't know if this was planned in advance, but it's a story that derives real heft from the recent death of Elizabeth II and indeed probably couldn't have been published before. If you thought that the Royal funeral in 2023 was a big production, well, just look at THESE funeral games... 

I feel this book provides very much the ending that the Laundry (the series, and the institution) deserves. Bob and Mo get plenty of time (I've missed them in the past few books) and development but we're left guessing about just how events will proceed as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN unfolds and what role the Laundry will play in that. (I'm blurring some detail here so as not to spoil, but I will note that - as evidenced by Bob's being at large to write his casenotes, some form of normality does continue, albeit the warped version of the New Management)

Strongly recommended to long-haul Laundry fellow-travellers. If you haven't read these books yet then no, really this isn't the one to begin with but you have some fun in store if you go back and begin with The Atrocity Archives.  

(It was also fun to see Stross adroitly sidestep issues of continuity in the series...)

For more information about The Regicide Report, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Ring the Bells by CK McDonnell

Ring the Bells (Stranger Times, 5)

CK McDonnell
Bantam, 9 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 496pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857505392

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Ring the Bells  to consider for review. Given the seasonal bent of this book, I should really have reviewed BEFORE not after Christmas, but my reviews have been a car crash recently so perhaps just take this as a hint to buy it for someone NEXT Christmas!

You actually might not think of McDonnell's Stranger Times series as providing potential for a Christmassy story. The titular, Manchester based newspaper, which operates from a decaying, closed-down church, and chronicles the eerie and the unexplained is produced on a shoestring by a cabal of eccentrics and misanthropes. Attempts by the staff to inject a note of goodwill or cheer into proceedings tend to fall flat, even if the team general end up saving the world by the last page.

The books so far have tended to explore the seamier side of supernatural life leaving little time for wonder and cheer. Most of all, the editor, Banecroft (who is surely some sort of cousin to Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses) lives on cynicism and booze and would, one thinks, likely sit up by the fireplace with a shotgun ready to scare Father Christmas right back up the chimney.

So, as the storyline here develops, it's fun to imagine how the coalescing evil - which is clearly going to coalesce into something rather Santa-shaped - will both ring all the Christmas bells and threaten the known universe. That does happen, I didn't anticipate how, and the knowledge of it doesn't in any way lessen the fun and the fear when it does. I will say that there were possibly Prathcettian overtones to the theme here that belief in itself is a power to be reckoned with, but McDonnell also plays subtle games with the usual seasonal redemption arc which should make us question the transformation of an evildoer into the Chrismassiest person ever. Here, even the wrongdoer has his doubts about that trope.

A couple of sub-plots are though perhaps worth as much attention as the main story. Christmas is a time for family, and as far as we know, Manny, the mysterious Rastafarian printer who makes sure that each week's edition of the ST gets to its readers, has no family (other than the strange entity which imbues him). In this story, we find out more about Manny's background. It's a very affecting and sad story, giving him a central place he deserves after four books of being rather at the margins (or perhaps, in the basement).

There are also developments in the world of the Founders, the entitled and wealthy clique who try to control the magical world. Given that places at that table tend to follow the "dead man's shoes" rule, it's perhaps no surprise that competition is ruthless but Ring the Bells sets us up I think for a future battle Royale to fill a pair of those shoes (only given the likely contenders, they'd better be killer heels, not just any old shoes.

An entertaining and fun addition to this series, showing the value of an ensemble cast which keeps things fresh by always providing new corners and angles to explore.

For more information about Ring the Bells, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Shy Girl by Mia Ballard

Shy Girl

Mia Ballard
Hachette, 6 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035437924

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

"Shy Girl" actually contains three stories. The first, and longest, is about a woman called that - "Shy Girl" - and the abuse she suffers. The others, which are thematically similar, don't feature her, although one is a prologue of sorts. All three though are covered by the author's warning as to how disturbing the themes of the book are, which I would take seriously.

Illustrating that, "Shy Girl" is not the main character's given name - that is Gia - nor one she adopts for herself. It's the name given by her abuser, and renaming her is far from the worst thing he does to her.

The story is told fairly straightforwardly in three parts. In the first, Gia describes her awkward life, her difficult mother and how everything seems to just have gone... askew? Off course? Gia seems to be motivated by a desire for certainty, for safety, for exactness, perhaps to balance a deficiency, a lack of love and nurture. But this only takes her so far. One day, her exactness deserts her and she can't do her job any more, so poverty soon sets in. But there are deeper roots to her problems than the loss of her job. "I've been depressed" Gia states "for longer than I've been unemployed". All the same, economic trumps emotional well-being. To pay the rent, Gia tales to a sugar-dating website which leads her to Nathan.

This opens Gia into the power of her abuser. The second act of the book is very dark, basically a story of control and coercion, enforced by violence and threats of violence. I'm deliberately avoiding detail here both because of spoilers and in order not to repeat potentially triggering ideas. The story is though - I think - a compelling account of how one man dominates and abuses a woman. Ballard shows Gia's transformation into Shy Girl gradually. At every step, you think, it must end here. Surely not...? But it does not end and the reader is manoeuvred into a sort of complicity with Nathan - the final depths of whose manipulation doesn't actually become clear till almost the end, when he shows how he will have the final word, that even if Gia finds a way to tell her story, it'll be his version that is believed. In some ways that's the most chilling moment in the book, setting up Gia's final transformation - and revenge.

To mention that revenge isn't, I  think, a spoiler - if you follow the link to the publisher's site below you'll see the book described as a "harrowing tale of survival and revenge" - and it is visceral, but it depends on the transformation, the drift, that has befallen Gia. I didn't quite know what to make of it. In some respects it was only the prospect of this that made reading the earlier parts of the book bearable. But equally, what happens is fantastical - the restoration of a kind of wild justice not one that will redress the inequalities and power structures of the real world.

An absorbing and thought provoking read and one of the creepiest stories I've come across lately.

"Shy Girl" itself is joined by that sort-of prequel, "Before", and by a third story, "Harold", which takes a different take on the fantastical to show a woman dominated in the private domestic sphere by a male narrative such that the inertia and mysogny of the outside world will side with him, not her. It ends less happily than Shy Girl, though perhaps "happy" isn't the word I should use here. I think both stories in the end are about the power of the ability to frame the narrative and where denial of that power can lead.

For more information about Shy Girl, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle

The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle
Bantam (Penguin), 15 January 2026 
Available as: HB, 432pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857509956

I'm grateful to the publisher for access to an advance e-copy of The Devil in Silver to consider for review.

The Devil in Silver is the story of Pepper, a man who is rubbing along just about OK until he picks a fight in a car park, and ends up being dumped in a psychiatric ward by the police officers who attend. (There's less paperwork for them that way). Thus he's introduced to the Kafkaesque world of New Hyde Hospital, dosed with powerful meds (and if he won't take them, why that means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?) and effectively "disappeared" from everyday life with no appeal rights and no advocacy.

LaValle does an excellent job of portraying the broken system that has Pepper in its grasp. Broken, in that nobody gets the help they need. A system, in that it grinds on. Apart from him and the other patients - sketched with a degree of tenderness and insight I think - that system also has the staff firmly in their place, weighed down by reams of paperwork and a defunct computer system designed by banks to cheat their customers.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, there's a monster on the ward, and patients keep dying. Or vanishing.

Pepper realises that he has to get out of this place, but who can he trust to help him? 

A magnificent, sad, and funny book that ranges here and there in its focus and gives us, for example, potted intros to Vincent Van Gogh and to the US silver rush of the 1840s as well as the thoughts of a narcissistic rat which lives in the abandoned part of the hospital, The Devil in Silver balances deliciously on the edge of naturalism and of fantasy. Is there really a monster at large in the hospital? Can we trust what Pepper - not to speak of the other patients - report about that, or anything else? Driven by a rage against the sheer unfairness of it all - take Loochie, for example, a young woman trapped ion the ward since she was 13 because she needs help and her family can't cope - LaValle creates a readable and involving story that visits some very uncomfortable place.

The book is also mindful of wider social dis-ease. While Hyde is a token system, it sits amidst a wider broken, or breaking, system. The inmates' 24 TV picks up news broadcasts pumping out disinformation and hate. There is a reference to "41 shots". With inmates like Pepper in the ward on a fall premise, the question does ask itself, should some of those... out there... not be.. in here?

It's a book that doesn't offer easy answers. Yes, some mysteries are resolved here, sort of, and Pepper achieves a victory of sorts in what he sets out to do, but the authorities are practised and containment - that's their who thing - and the most heinous scandals fade from the news feeds quickly, as here.

An unsettling and troubling read, but one with tremendous heart and deeply memorable characters.

For more information about The Devil in Silver, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Bone Raiders by Jackson Ford

The Bone Raiders

Jackson Ford
Orbit, 10 August 2025
Available as: PB, 465pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356523804

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Bone Raiders to consider for review. 

I loved The Bone Raiders.

Jackson Ford wrongfoots his reader almost from the start (I can't say more because spoilers) in a story of raiders, vainglorious empire builders and giant fire breathing lizards.

The Rakada are the most ruthless, vicious and pitiless raiders in the grasslands known as "the Tapestry". They wear their enemies' bones for ornaments, and often get their plunder without having to fight because of their fearsome reputation. But even the the most ruthless, vicious and pitiless raiders are suffering as a new Khan centralises his people from their scattered communities - so handy for raiding - builds a mighty army, and wages war on the raiders in general.

And the Rakada are about to do something that makes that war personal to them, not general at all...

It was fun seeing how this scenario played out, in a vaguely East Asian themed setting of the khan vs steppes nomads and roving brigands. It was even more fun though seeing how things are driven from the tight knit band of women who constitute the Rakada. For all their fearsome reputation, there are only a handful of them left, and it's clear they will only survive if they try something new. But the only suggestion seems impossible and will lead them into greater and greater danger. Sayana is determined to do what's needed, but it's hard, given complicating loyalties within the band, quarrels between lovers, the need to be loyal to the leader - and the cussedness of giant lizards. (Giants lizards are a theme).

Behind these issues is the uneasy knowledge that - whatever the rationalisation - the Rakada's way of life depends on theft and murder. Ford's characterisation of them is a triumph here. The Rakada women are appealing characters, vivacious, interesting people with rich and developed relationships. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motivations - a cold and absent father, a lost family, a passionate love - and these make for a complex and ever shifting power balance between them.

But they are also, as I have said, killers and thieves - indeed, successful killers and thieves as we are reminded every time they put on their bones for a raid. How do you set that against the fact that their leader enjoys to relax with a bit of tapestry, or that they make sure to accommodate the member who needs to communicate in sign?

Ford never shies away from this complexity. Sometimes he shows how the Rakada try to dodge the issues. Sometimes he gets dark humour from it. But it's always there, and it exacts a price. 

This moral depth and - I don't know, texture? chewiness? - marks The Bones Raiders out, I think, from much fantasy, of whatever stripe, and means I look forward to reading the next book when it comes.

For more information about The Bone Raiders, see the publisher's website here.