#Review - A Spy Like Me by Kim Sherwood

A Spy Like Me (Double 0, Book 2)

Kim Sherwood
Hemlock Press, 25 April 2024
Available as: HB, 384pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008495435

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

In her followup to Double or Nothing, Kim Sherwood returns to the world of the Double 0s, the Section still being threatened by the mysterious organisation know as Rattenfänger. James Bond, 007, is still missing, and the focus shifts to Johanna Harwood, 004 who is determined to track down and rescue one of her disappeared lovers - while mourning another, killed lover, who died during the events of the previous book. 

Meanwhile, Moneypenny has concerns there may be another traitor in the Section...

Like its predecessor, A Spy Like Me captures, I think, the essence of the James Bond universe while refusing to be too deferential to trivia. So, the story is set more or less in the present, taking place a couple of years ago, but with references back to canonical Bond details (such as the the murder of his wife, a plot point that gives Johanna an unexpected source of help when she 'goes rogue' in search of him). Other events and settings are unashamedly modern, such as the prevalence of human trafficking and terrorism. Through it all we get the same mix of high living - the super-rich of the 2020s being perhaps even less abashed at flaunting their wealth than those of the 1950s and 60s - and intrigue, with violence never far from the surface. There are confrontations on Crete and in Venice that could easily be set pieces in a Bond movie, for example, an an ease with fast cars, guns and exotic watches.

And there is a twisty, complex plot, weaving the personal - like Johanna's motivation to recover James - and the political - terrorist outrages finances by dark money and taking place on a regular timescale - that gives the reader just the same sense of a countdown, a final date with evil, and of the risk of being distracted, of going down a rabbit hole in some glamorous resort, as in the original books. 

Sherwood's writing is also sharp - 'Welcome to Dubai, home of ex-pats, concrete and money' 'This woman smiles when she's told to smile because it may never happen and it could be worse, though it's already happened and it couldn't be worse' - and the absence of Bond doesn't diminish, rather it enhances, the shadow he casts over this book, forcing him into everyone's consciousness: Conrad Harthrop-Vane, for example, who's no fan, notes Bond's remark that 'this "country-right-or-wrong business" was old-fashioned in 1952' and that Bond 'is defined by his purpose' (note is, not was). Harthrop-Vane isn't the only one to speculate about Bond's character, personality, purpose or meaning, everyone has a go at one point or another, resulting in this allegedly two dimensional figure (I don't think that but it has been said) being fully alive and drawn as complex and active even when out of sight. 

Returning form those depths, this book is also fun. Sherwood drops plenty of references to Bond book and film titles and also allusions such as to a 'golden revolver' or having 'all the time in the world'. There are sideplots that take their time to join up with the main action, and surprise sprung. All I all, entertaining, nail biting and fun, with a bite of real world issues. It ends on a monster of a cliffhanger, and left me impatient for Book 3, which presumably though I'll have to wait another couple of years for!

Strongly recommended.

For more information about A Spy Like Me, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Trials of Empire by Richard Swan

The Trials of Empire (Empire of the Wolf, 3)

Richard Swan

Orbit, 8 February 2024
Available as: HB, 544pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356516479

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Trials of Empire to consider for review.

Well, here is the end of the Empire of the Wolf trilogy. 

And. It. Has. Been. A. JOURNEY. 

Not only for Helena, Sir Konrad and the rest - though they have both travelled endlessly, and developed across the books - but also for the reader, as Swan, like a magician, has revealed ever deeper layers of story to us. 

To recap, in Justice of Kings we pretty much had straight fantasy - Judge Sir Konrad Vonvault and his small party of retainers travelling the Empire and administering justice. Yes, Vonvault had access to one or two magical powers, used to help establish the truth in his more tricky cases. Yes, there were machinations from the religious order the Templars, who seemed a bit too zealous for everyone's good, leading to outright, if limited, rebellion. But overall - except for a couple of incidents  - this seemed like a military-oriented fantasy. 

Then in The Tyranny of Faith things got weirder, with cosmic horror overtones, and some episodes taking place is a sort of netherworld - but the accent was still very much on the threat to the Empire. (From the framing of the story as the memoirs of Helena Sedanka in her old age, we already knew that it did in fact fall, the issue would be how and when).

Now in The Trials of Empire - WHAT???

Again, here, Swan seems to be pivoting this trilogy, which is now clearly about the danger of those dark magics, an existential peril to the universe from... well, I think it's probably safer not to name that entity, you never know if it might be listening? We still see the coils of politics and religious fanaticism, which are centred on the militant priest Bartholemew Claver. Fortuitously I recently read Three Fires by Denise Mina, an account of the renaissance priest Girolamo Savonarola - a man who really did take over governance of a city (Renaissance Florence) and imposed his own authoritarian rule, designed to usher in a literal City of God. The parallels between this figure and Claver - both starting out as sincere, if austere, churchmen, both denouncing the religious authorities as lax, both playing on popular disquiet with the civil powers and on prejudice, both eventually corrupted by power - are striking and I think show how Swan has really got under the skin of his rather unattractive antihero and the potential route to power of such a person. (The parallels with modern politics also write themselves).

In Florence, however, there was no Vanvault. 

There was no Helena. 

Both play crucial roles here, indeed Helena probably the greater one. There is a concern throughout this book that Vonvault himself will be tried beyond what he can bear and fall victim to the dark magicks which alone, it seems, can provide a means of fighting back against Claver. And indeed we see him make some evil choices and cosy up to some dubious allies. At the same time Helena has to walk her own path, and faces her own darkness. I'd felt throughout this series that she might be capable of a lot, and it's wonderful here to see her come into her own as it were, not as an adjunct to Vonvault but as a player in her own right. And not as an improbable result of a moment's choice, but as the culmination of a process of gruelling challenge has tested and strengthened her, if at some cost (at one moment in this book Helena is chained to an executioner's block, the axe about to fall, and that's rather the least of the dangers she faces in this story).

If we see Helena face danger, we also see her develop as a person, see her juggle her attraction to Vonvault and her concern for ethics and principles - something she learned from him - and grow up in the process. As well as that, she's learned to be a redoubtable fighter. All this may however not be enough when she has to confront that darkness, which she must of course do alone, the more so as Vonvault seems to have gone astray himself.

The later part of the book therefore crystallises some moral dilemmas when, confronted by seemingly inevitable defeat and unstoppable evil, the two need to consider what is and is not justifiable. And what is and is not justice.

Readable from first page to last, exciting, with twists, surprises and betrayals, this final volume of Swan's trilogy finishes the story in grand style.

For more information about The Trials of Empire, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Alien Clay

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tor,  28 March 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035013746

I'm grateful to Black Crow PR for sending me a copy of Alien Clay  to consider for review.

Before Nineteen Eight-Four was published, George Orwell played with many of its themes in his other writings, especially his regular newspaper columns. In one of these he wrote something to the effect that even the strictest of totalitarian regimes would have, for a time, to respect natural laws: when designing a rocket, one had to proceed on the basis that two plus two equals four, even if the Party decided that the answer was five. 

But only for a time. Complete power would dissolve this need, and in his new book Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky gives us a world - worlds - past that point, where the natural, as well as the social, sciences are expected to toe the line of The Mandate, the cabal that runs Earth now. The problems that leads to when they encounter alien life - truly alien life, not Star Trek style bipeds with funny faces - is a focus of this book. The narrator, a respected academic who's been purged for unorthodoxy, is condemned to a penal colony on an alien world, Kiln, where the effort is on to portray the missing race that constructed strange, ceramic towers now overrun by jungle, as a human analogue.

For humans, it's basically a death world, the alien flora and fauna aggressive, adaptive and dare I say it, subversive. Protective gear and decontamination are essential, yet only provided half-heartedly - after all, the workforce is expendable, and destined never to go home. Even the ships that bring them are minimal, as cheap as will serve, breaking up on arrival. Life is then brutal.

It's a tough gig, and Arton Daghdev, thirty light years from home, is hampered in his task by doubts - doubts about who betrayed him, doubts about who he may have betrayed, doubts about who he can trust now. That's how they get you, he tells himself several times. That's how we get you. In another parallel with Nineteen Eighty-Four, it's understood that, cornered by the Mandate, everyone will crack. And this is equally true of the invasive, ineluctable wildlife of Kiln, a tour de force of invention that Tchaikovsky manages to make both truly alien, almost incomprehensible, and therefore deeply threatening - but also, precisely because it so different, also utterly beyond the silly political games being played out by the invaders from Earth. It's a long time since I read SF with such a strange native flora and fauna. As I said above, it's not people in elaborate costumes, it's not life as we know it, Jim, it's - well, simply weird, challenging the human sense that we "are the first of things". I won't try and describe it both because that would rather spoil the story and because I'm not sure I can. You'll have to read the book to find out what's going on here.

What I will say is that Tchaikovsky is not only playing with exobiology here, he's also riffing off parallels between revolution - its failure modes explored at length - and that alien life, he's studying the powerful and their failures of imagination, their inability to understand that the world will not be what they wish, because they wish - in a salvo that could be aimed at climate denialism and species destruction we see here the ultimate consequence of that failure and it's not a safe or pretty story.

At the same time, Daghdev himself (the g is silent) is a fascinating study, a figure who gives away very little of his past - his story leaking out rather than being set down - and whose relationships and likely behaviour in his new setting are mysterious. The novel is as much a discovery of him as it is of Kiln - and what a novel it is, one I'd strongly recommend, deeply compelling form the first page to the last.

Alien Clay draws an eerie parallel between Arton's radical past, with its "revolutionary sub-committees" and the roiling, baffling array of alien life to be found on Kiln.

For more information about Alien Clay, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Simul by Andrew Caldecott

Simul (Momenticon, 2)

Andrew Caldecott
Arcadia (Jo Fletcher Books) 18 January 2024
Available as: HB, 384, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529415476

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

Simul is the second part of the story that began in Momenticon. Almost impossible to summarise, it features a near-future world destroyed by pollution. Only small islands of inhabitability survive amidst the Murk - a toxic substance that erodes pretty much anything that isn't heavily protected - or very lucky. 

These protected zones tend to have been engineered, in particular the domes operated by two companies - Tempestas and Genrich - organisations with different ideas about how to preserve humanity. In Momenticon, the story started in another dome, one built to house a museum of art, and we met Fogg, its Curator, who rather drove that story. He plays much less of a role in this book, although he does appear as do many of the characters from that earlier book.

Others of the protected areas appear to be fortuitous, the result of freakish weather patterns or other features

The cast is extensive. Though the author provides a handy list, it took me a little time to work myself back into knowing who was who - that was perhaps made harder because many of the characters don't come across as very different people, and the story, told in short chapters, flits between them and between locations (travel is possible on airships, though perilous). As I've said, Momenticon was much more focussed on Fogg, so at first I did feel a bit more adrift among new people, scenes and plot developments (there are a few flashbacks). It's rather one thing after another as these people - some loveable, some roguish but nearly all very archly peculiar, if that makes sense - race to achieve very different objectives. 

To do that they will need to unpick an extensive history, since almost nobody here really understands what is happening (or has happened) and why. A new threat has emerged as Nature - infuriated by the way she has been treated, or perhaps merely irritated by this gallery of eccentrics - strikes back, carrying out new attacks on both flesh and on metal. It is a threat that nobody expected, but to which all respond in ways one would expect. Some try to co-opt the menace as a new weapon, others to find a defence, still others, a means of counter-attack. Crossed with all the conflicting motives, hatreds and misunderstandings that were set up in Momenticon and develop in the first part of Simul, that makes for a pretty exciting conclusion where - I don't think this is a spoiler - the villains (more or less) get their comeuppances and the heroes (more or less) their just rewards (although a few fall by the wayside). 

It is maybe a bit less satisfying the more you try to understand what's going on and exactly how it came about. There are so many rabbits pulled out of hats that Watershed Down could well be in production somewhere in the background. However I don't think that most readers will worry too much about doing   that but will rather be enjoying the rush of events, and the particular, peculiar atmosphere of a Caldecott novel.

The cover design, illustrations and map (by, respectively, Leo Nickolls, Nick May and Nicola Howell Hawley) are evocative and intricate.

More information about Simul is available at the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz

The Kitchen (Chastity Reloaded, 2)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 11 April 2024
Available as: PB, 226, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788077

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Kitchen to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

It's SO GOOD to see Chastity Riley return. She must be the most morose woman in noir and, confusingly, every minute spent with her is a joy. Which may be a strange way to welcome what is a very, very dark story.

In this one, Chas is winding up a difficult case, a particularly distressing instance of trafficking which has left its young women victims especially traumatised. Getting her head round the ins and outs, Riley is convinced that the perps will go away for a very long time. We see her coming and going, doing her courtroom thing, as another case looms, one in which young men - possibly, abusive young men - have been dismembered. Somehow Riley can't work up her normal head of outrage over that.

Throughout the book, we are also invited into the head of another woman - or perhaps,  a series of women, it's not made clear - each short episode another example of abuse by men. It could be that this is a series of events befalling by one girl/ woman - the subject is growing older as they proceed - or it could be a potpourri of everyday outrages. Either alternative points at a grim reality. 

Closer to home, one of Riley's own circle also suffers, perhaps stoking her fury further.

As the city swelters in unaccustomed heat the resulting behaviour of its residents is mercilessly described and dissected in Riley's sardonic internal monologue, which remains as sharp as ever, indeed knife-keen when it comes to the abuse suffered by women. There is a sense that in The Kitchen events are especially aligned with Riley's sensibility. It's as though, attuned to the unheard vibrations of her familiar Hamburg, Riley now finds herself in such sympathy with them that she and the city are in resonance, in such harmony that she encapsulates and articulates the pain suffered by Hamburg's women as well as the deep sense of injustice when nothing is done about it. The fact that those doing the nothing are often Chas' colleagues only heightens the tension. Surely, one feels by the end of this story, some revelation must at hand? 

While of course some of Riley's usual gang do feature, the sense of her leading her crew is rather muted. She feels much more on her own than normal (and that's saying something, I know). Yes, Klatsche is around, Riley both reaching for him and pushing him away. Yes, her team are at work. But there's a muffled quality to Riley's work here, she only really seems to sharpen up when she's catching up with retired Faller, who's taken to sitting outside an old lighthouse ostensibly fishing. There seems to be a deep communication between the ex-colleagues, though at a level that isn't put into words for us, the readers.

So, as ever, Chastity Riley makes her murky way though the murky city, navigating by tapping into the strange rhythms and currents of nighttime Hamburg, a kind of pilotfish for her more orthodox colleagues, feeling what they don't feel and suffering wounds that they don't, or won't, see. Deeply alone, even more so than usually, hers are the insights that will crack open the case, and on her shoulders will fall the moral the moral decisions that will result. How does she bear it? Drink and cigarettes, in the main, it seems.

I'd strongly recommend The Kitchen. It isn't a nice book - you just have no idea! - but it is a neat one, an intense story deftly communicated by both author and translator (Rachel Ward is on top form here, conveying the little sallies and the flavour of Riley's deceptively stable but not really narration).

For more information about The Kitchen, 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 Kitchen from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

The Sleepwalkers

Scarlett Thomas
Scribner UK, 11 April 2024
Available as: HB, 288pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy and purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781398528406

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

In The Sleepwalkers, Scarlett Thomas dissects a relationship (or rather, allows it to dissect itself). Newlyweds Evelyn and Richard are on a Greek island where his mother, her mother-in-law, has booked an idyllic (...supposedly...) hotel for the honeymoon. However, fissures are apparent from the very start, with Evie resentful of Annabelle's machinations, which both required the wedding to be brought froward and had them kicking their heels in a cheap hotel until their room at Villa Rosa become free. Moreover, it's the very end of the season, the island is visibly closing down day be day, and the locals say bad weather is coming. And Evelyn feels that Isabella, the owner of the hotel, is slighting her, talking past her to Richard, flirting with him. It may be true - the partial account that Evelyn gives certainly supports that, but then Richard's (also partial) account doesn't, or may not. Possibly he, a man flattered by Isabella's attention, isn't seeing, or doesn't want to see, what's going on. 

Their relationship is hardly built on sold ground - there is the Thing that happened at the wedding, some scandal or a revelation so seismic that of course Evie and Richard won't discuss it at all. 

Reflecting that fractured relationship, we get instead partial accounts of their final 48 hours on the island, letters written by each to the other, sound recordings, scraps torn from a hotel guest-book and other remnants. Some are incomplete, meaning that sentences break off or whole pages are absent:

"I knew he liked my innocence, and so I wore my

'Slut!' he said, pulling my hair and"

The whole is assembled into an archive letter and offered for our enlightenment. The list of items is given at the start of the book, a list that the reader may assume will guide then through this volume, but it will lead you astray. Apart from the items marked as missing (such as the set of photos) others are absent, or given out of order, or simply incomplete. So from the start we're in unreliable narrator territory, the narrator - or curator - of the story being Evie, who's compiled the documents in this particular case for reasons that only gradually become apparent.

Evie is, as becomes clear, somewhat obsessive, not only about Isabelle but also for example about the "beautiful people", a group of mysterious tourists on the island who are, seemingly, not just beautiful but wealthy, privileged and annoyingly, well, unavailable. With Evie's obsessions and Richard's wandering eye, and the secret they're not talking about, this is an enclosed, almost gothic, atmosphere, with trouble clearly brewing. 

But the book is so much more than that. Always good at exploring and analysing the expectations placed on young women (if I can write "young women" without sounding about 150) here Thomas really takes the gloves of to expose stresses, pressures and tensions - as well as predatory males.

I love the way that Thomas presents this story, a many-layered, collusive telling that, in effect, makes everybody a biased witness. It's just revelatory to see the different, self-justifying, partial accounts which it is tempting to try to resolve, perhaps, into a single narrative - even though doing so involves taking sides, making choices, judging, aligning, excusing. Here the bonus is that both Evie and Richard also dodge backward and forward, explaining their earlier lives to try and account for their more recent actions. Sometimes this seems to the point, sometimes it seems to meander. Sometimes one ostensible form of writing gets taken over for another purpose, for example when Evie's attempt at a playscript (she's an actor and writer) veers off to explore a painful episode of her earlier life. (I would give a context warning here for rape references).

The focus is often on the impossible demands, indeed the regular treasons, inflicted on women by men. There are some awful examples cited, from the life-wrecking inflicted on the unfortunate Chloe to a background of trafficking on the holiday island to a sober law professor sitting down a distressed student to tell her not to pursue her allegations against a couple of young men. 

The fault line there is that between Evie and Richard, each of whom has secrets both from others and from themselves, the fragmentary structure of the book an ideal way to peel the layers back and reveal all (but also, due to the teasingly incomplete text, not all).

In keeping with the ravelled, incomplete and biased selection of sources we're presented with, the conclusion is also left teasingly unclear. This is a story that blends troubled personal relationships with possible criminal conspiracy, the two acting and reacting in unpredictable ways, and there are various ways we can imagine it resolving - few of them however good.

It's a complex, engaging and passionate story, in many respects a tragedy, the story often carried by what isn't said, by who isn;'t there, by letters that can't be found and things that aren't talked about. Silences can speak volumes, don't you think?

Strongly recommended.

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

Noise Floor (Vinyl Detective, 7)

Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 19 March 2024
Available as: PB, 376pp, audio, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN(PB): 9781803367965

The Vinyl Detective is back!

I was afraid that, with the coming of The Paperback Sleuth, the Detective might take a bit of a rest but happily it's not so (though I want more of Cordelia's adventures too - and equally happily, I think another instalment is coming later this year).

This time, the nameless Detective and his pals are investigating the disappearance of Lambert Ramkin, a wealthy DJ and techno creator who was big in the 90s. Hired by Ramkin's wives (plural) to track him down, they soon realise that danger is stalking them... 

Does Ramkin want not to be found so much that he's threatening their lives? 

Or is that somebody else?

As with all of this series, much of the fun is simply the joy de vivre of the Detective, his girlfriend Nevada, their friend Clean Head and of course, Tinkler. I'm quite pleased that Tinkler's gradually moved from being just irritating to definitely loveable, if still irritating. The book is punctuated by their enjoyment of lunches, dinners, drinks and other substances and every mission to recover Ramkin includes details of hotels, trips to nice towns and plenty of gossip.

Those details really make this series come alive and are essential to a Vinyl Detective novel, and there are enough of them to satisfy although I felt that Cartmel had pared things back a bit compared to previous stories, both in the day tripping and in the plot. This is very much focussed on recovering Ramkin, rather than being a quest for rare vinyl which then takes an odd turn. There is a kind of side-plot involving creating a "Village of Vinyl" inspired by Hay on Wye, the original "town of books" but that doesn't feature much until the final part of the story. That made it easier to focus on the main issue - which for me counterpointed the lighter bits and made them more enjoyable.

At the same time we don't escape the dark side of things. Somebody seems to be riffing off The Magus, and there are decidedly weird events here including en entire time-slipped 90s rave, complete with police raid at the end. (If you've read Fowles's book you'll get the comparison). And, while most of the book is Stinky Stanmer-free, he isn't wholly missing and manages to do the dirty on our heroes as always. (Yes, I know, but you'd miss him if he never showed, wouldn't you?)

Stinky does though get his comeuppance in an action filled conclusion.

All in all a cracking instalment of this series and this should be high on your "To Read" list.

For more information about Noise Floor, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore

The Grand Illusion (Section W, book 1)
Syd Moore
Magpie, 4 April 2024
Available as: HB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780861541607

I'm grateful to Syd Moore and to Magpie for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Grand Illusion to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

The Grand Illusion - set during the Second World War - takes place in the same world as Moore's Essex Witch mysteries (we meet Septimus!) It isn't I think a direct prequel - but this is the first of three, so who knows where things will go...

Daphne Devine is assistant to stage magician Jonty Trevelyan. Adept at being cut in half, tied up, and handling concealed doves, she's about to face a whole new scale of challenge as she and her boss are recruited to a shadowy branch of the UK's Security Service. In the first half of the book we're shown a bewildering number of different activities of Section W, with the two unclear exactly where they fit. I rather enjoyed this tour d'horizon, which creates an authentically wartime sense of barely-controlled chaos, of being sent from pillar to post and back again. Are they engaged in valuable work or is everyone just going round in circles? 

It's a world where the brilliant and war-winning plan may sit on the same table as the bonkers and time-wasting one. Indeed, they may come from the same pen, on the same day. There is a sense of near panic, of a nation and Government which are, behind Churchill's stirring rhetoric, ready to try anything that may bring victory, or avert defeat.

So we see elaborate deceptions, suited to a stage illusionist. These are things it's known took place (although my understanding is that some of the details have never been revealed). We also see more troubling plans - ostensibly directed at a known weakness of the Third Reich, its obsession with occult ritual and pseudohistory. Playing on such a weakness might seem wise, and again, Jonty's and Daphne's talents in illusion and deception might boost the effect of that, but is there more going on here besides? We are in the Essex Witches universe, after all.

Gradually, and teasingly, Moore creates a setting filled with distortions and red herrings, one where it's not clear just who is manipulating who. What matters more, illusion or reality? Is the febrile wartime atmosphere perhaps fertile ground for thinkers who are normally marginalised? Might they use it to their advantage, even if ostensibly what's going on is simply psyops? Just who is falling victim the that "grand illusion"?

Questions, questions - with some answers, but many, teasingly, withheld.

Everything that has happened may have a rational explanation. Or there may be other stuff going on. As tempting as it may be to rush through this book to the conclusion, it bears careful attention though because I think there are some clues... and I'll be looking forward to future novels in this series for some of those answers.

Turning to the characters, I loved Daphne. Trapped by circumstances in a difficult corner - her family connections make her an objection of suspicion to some, and give the Government leverage over her so that in many respects she's not free to say "no" when the Ministry comes knocking - she plays a difficult hand well. Even though those around her frequently underestimate her capabilities (being female, they often don't seem to expect much of her) she continually steps up and sees the way through. Jonty and the others are perhaps a bit less-well defined, but as Daphne is the focus that works fine for me. What does come through, as external circumstances get more desperate, is a rising sense of internal tension in Daphne. She's clearly being swept to some major trial or crisis and she responds to that knowledge, but Moore gives little away and while there is a respite by the end of the book I didn't think that matters had come to a head. In a story with plenty of menace, threats and talk of spies, Fifth-columnists and collaborators it isn't clear whether the threat is of espionage or the supernatural, or both, and I suspect there is more of it to come. 

I'm really looking forward to the next part of this series!

For more information about The Grand Illusion, 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 Grand Illusion from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Tainted Cup

Robert Jackson Bennett

Headline, 6 February 2024
Available as: HB, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399725354

I'm grateful to Headline for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Tainted Cup  to consider for review.

In The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett delivers not only a deviously plotted murder mystery in a fantasy setting, but in Ana and Kol, two of the most gloriously realised fantasy characters I'd met for a long time.

The book imagines a complex, sprawling Empire, dedicated to defending its territory against incursions by massive creatures from the deep ocean. Every year, the seawalls grow larger. Every year, more massive "bombards" are constructed, more soldiers thrown into the fight. 

Nor are the Titans the only enemy. This is a world that wants to kills you, a world prone to plant-based "contagion", made worse by human tinkering and genetic experiments - like the one that has resulted in the death of an aristocrat, a death we see Kol making his way to investigate at the start of the story. This will bring him into conflict with a haughty family, a conflict around which much of the rest of the story revolves. This is a hierarchical world where massive accumulations of wealth exist and where patronage in the Legion and the regional administrations is a fact of life. Kol and his boss Ana have to contend with this, and it's only the tip of the politics that is behind events here.

Closer to home, another fact of Kol and Ana's lives is her condition. Ana is neurodiverse in a way not precisely specified, and which doesn't necessarily map onto categories we're familiar with, but one of the results is an extreme sensitivity to stimulation such that she needs to spent time isolated - for example shut in her travelling trunk - rather than risk being overwhelmed. When we meet her at the start of the book it's soon established that she hasn't left her home for some months. This condition seems related to her ability to process huge amounts of information - there were definite Sherlock Holmes vibes somewhere her, I felt. All of this makes Ana'a and Lols task of investigating crimes harder and easier: generally Ana will send Kol to gather facts which she them draws inferences form, but in such a hierarchical world that can put him in danger and the gem for them is rather up when news of a new crisis requires the two to travel to another city on the edge of the Empire. 

How they tackle that - and the mutual support and understanding needed, which necessarily places a lot of weight on Kol's junior shoulders - is a vital and absorbing part of this book. 

But it's all vital and absorbing. Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Tainted Cup, see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - The Red Hollow by Natalie Marlow

The Red Hollow

Natalie Marlow
Baskerville, 28 March 2024 
Available as: HB, 307pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399801843

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

William (Billy) Garrett and Phyll (Hall) are back, six months after the events of Needless Alley, for another investigation in the 1930s Midlands. In this story, though, Marlow moves away from the noir-ish atmosphere of the earlier books, with its dark, smoky cityscape and its themes of political and economic corruption, and gives us something more like a classic 30s murder mystery in which a group of people are stranded in a remote country house. The sense of place is equally strong. But so is the sense of cloying evil - reminding me of Sherlock Holmes's comment that the vilest crimes take place in the countryside.

The story opens with a call for help. Phyll's brother, Freddy, is being cared for in a private asylum in the village of Red Hollow "out in the county" (though within a short driving distance). The fees for this have swallowed up the family money, explaining why she's been so desperate for cash and now its proprietor, Dr Moon, asks her and William to investigate strange disturbances and a death that have taken place. The unspoken deal is this will cover some of the fees.

So Phyll and William venture out into the woods, and soon find themselves out of their depth, The surviving patients - including Freddy - put the strange events down to the legendary man-hating "mermaid" which is said to haunt the local lake. This creature recurs, in folkloric allusions, a carving in the local church, and as part of the family backstory of Lady Pike, who owns the Hall but has been forced to let it out. her family has, it seems, many eminently hateable men in its lineage.

A phantom mermaid can't, however, have been killing and mutilating patients, even if the weather has taken a preternatural turn for the torrential, stranding Phyll overnight. Fretting alone in Birmingham, he calls on his old gangster friend Queenie for help. Then the fun really begins...

This is an exceptionally creepy, tense novel, mainly focussed on the events of a single night during which William, Phyll, Queen and Moon, joined by a ragtag collection of patients and the fearsome dowager Lady Pike, sustain themselves variously by copious amounts of drugs, drink and tobacco. There are gruesome deaths (the local vicar is bludgeoned in the first few moments). There are disturbing visions. And there is a tangled plot bringing together the unspoken secret of Red Hollow Hall, modern gang violence and of course the shadow of the War. 

As to the latter, this book is soaked in the backwash of the Trenches - most of the male characters played some part and it shapes their hopes and fears, their responses to, especially, the kind of stress they find themselves under here. This is very much an asylum where the patients are in charge - indeed Moon himself struck me as a man who could easily be on either side of the padded door, as it were. So, be assured, the switch to something that at first sight looks like a cosy Golden Age mystery doesn't mean that Marlow is going soft on us, indeed the opposite is true. Nor, in the end, are we free of political or at least social commentary with two very different historical trends - the stifling hand of the aristocracy, and the dark stirrings of organised crime - surfacing. (Or perhaps, not so very different trends, isn't aristocracy just gangsterism which has forgotten its roots?)

Plot strands wrap together - the delusions of the patients, that relentless fear of something evil in the dark, the decline of the Pike family in the face of coal mines and clay pits eating up their land and dissolute fathers and sons eating up the estate, Queenie's uneasy sway over the Birmingham underworld, and more.

It makes for a messy, compromising, affair, one that nobody comes away from with clean hands, but which is a fascinating, nail biting read and one I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Red Hollow, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Nobody's Angel by Jack Clark

Nobody's Angel

Jack Clark
Titan Books, 13 February 2024
Available as: HB, 224pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781803367477

I'm grateful to Titan Books for sending me an advance copy of Nobody's Angel to consider for review.

Nobody's Angel is a gritty crime novel set among nighttime cab drivers in 1990s Chicago. Eddie Miles, the focal character, crashed his family and destroyed all he loved. He ended up scrabbling for work in what is obviously a waning sector. All the talk is of the glory days of the cab trade, but the present day reality is reflected in many scenes where Eddie cruises for business amongst abandoned building and rundown malls, glad to get a trip that yields a few dollars. 

Written only a few decades ago, it's sobering how much of this book is now effectively a period piece - depicting a world with no mobiles, no Uber, one where smoking in cabs or cafés is unremarkable. And a world - consider this a content warning - where racial epiphets which would be unthinkable today are casually deployed. For example,  the n-word is used in the cab drivers' banter, as is the p-word (although I think the latter may be less taboo in the US than the UK). There are also sexist assumptions about women (we see no women cab drivers). This is where the plot kicks off. Amongst the bleak depictions of nights spent driving round the city, avoiding certain districts, avoiding passengers from certain groups, jostling for trade with the other cab drivers, Eddie ponders two series of killings - one of young women, another of fellow drivers. The drivers are seen as victims deserving of sympathy, the women as sex workers who no doubt got what was coming.

Despite that, Eddie does show some humanity (and to his own cost) when he comes across the aftermath of an assault, and this draws him into a desultory attempt to investigate both series of murders. He is, though, as he points out at the end of the book, nobody's angel and redemption seems in short supply on the hostile streets of Chicago with Eddie walking away form one opportunity (though perhaps he will still make some progress in locating his estranged daughter?)

A raw book about, often, bitter, damaged people, and one I enjoyed as giving an insight into a world very alien to me. What I enjoyed was the detail, the war stories told by the cabbies in the back room at the Golden Batter Pancake House and the scenes depicted by Clark - stories of eccentric passengers and their bizarre behaviour, stories of feuds and conflicts between the drivers, hair-raising driving and all the variety of life that a teeming, diverse city holds. These are interspersed with extracts from the Chicago Department of Community Services rulebook for cab drivers, showing just how close to the line the drivers come (and how often they cross it) in their professional lives. All of this, unfiltered, is perfect slice-of-life stuff (my favourite episode was Eddie's visit, with a customer, to a heavily shuttered dive bar in a part of town he clearly regards as a dangerous ghetto but where he and his customer find fellowship and a warm welcome).

I'm so glad I read this book, I would point out that the rather raunchy cover isn't actually representative of the content (for the most part) though it will get you some glances reading on your morning commute!

For more information about Nobody's Angel, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - What Feasts at Night by T Kingfisher

What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, 2)

T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 13 February 2024
Available as: HB, 176pp, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781803369686

What Feasts at Night is a welcome sequel to What Moves the Dead, as T Kingfisher returns to the Sworn Soldier Alex Easton, citizen of a Ruritanian tinged Balkan state of Gallacia. Easton is the Sworn Soldier, an action which means that ka adopts a special set of pronouns used in Gallacia for such military folk. (Gallacia has many sets of pronouns including for example some used only for God and others for priests).

As we saw in What Moves..., Alex has come back from the wars with a case of "soldier's heart", what we would call PTSD and this book, like the previous one, eloquently chronicles kas struggles with that.  What Feasts... will, unsurprisingly, bring Alex, kas batman, Angus, and their friend, the British mycologist Miss Potter, into a new confrontation with monsters as they plan a holiday in Alex's remote hunting lodge in the backwoods. 

I felt the story in this book was more straightforward than the previous one, with less of a feeling of conspiracy and active evil and more of an air of sadness and dislocation, the monster more an obvious victim than an active evil. Kingfisher has fun with tropes of the sub-genre - the villagers shunning the afflicted location, worries about pitchfork-wielding mobs, conspiracies of sience about what might be happening - all blended with redoubtable locals (the cook/ housekeeper referred to as "the Widow" and her son, Bors) and a creeping sense of menace because of course we, the readers, are allowed to know just slightly more, or at least, believe slightly more, about what is coming than the protagonists). Being more straightforward doesn't make it any less entertaining - although I could have wished that Miss Potter was a bit more central to the action, as in the previous book - rather it adds resonance because the fungal related events of the previous book lurk in the background, as does Alex's trauma in the war, but this story isn't a recapitulation of that. 

Rather, I think, we can see Kingfisher here having fun exploring a slightly different subgenre of classic horror - hopefully that will continue into future adventures of Alex, Angus and Miss Potter in more drippy, depressing parts of Gallacia.

For more information about What Feasts at Night, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Collapsing Wave by Doug Johnstone

The Collapsing Wave (The Enceladons Trilogy, 2)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 14 March 2024
Available as: PB, 257, e, audio   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB):  9781916788053

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Collapsing Wave to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's blogtour via Random Things Tours.

The Collapsing Wave is the sequel to The Space Between Us - the title comes from the quantum mechanical notion of wavefunction collapse, when an observation resolves an experiment into a known state, but it also cleverly alludes to events in the story. It picks up events six months after the end of the previous book, which was hopeful, if ambiguous, but now everything seems to have gone to s***. Ava, who escaped from her controlling, abusive husband, is now on trial for his murder and has been separated from her newborn daughter, Chloe. Lennox and Heather, who also bonded with the alien they called sandy, have been kidnapped and are being held in what I will emphatically state are illegal circumstances at a secret US facility on Loch Broom, where the Enceladons (Sandy's people, refugees from the moon Enceladus) are being studied (read: tortured).

The first half of the story is therefore pretty rage-inducing with the wicked and the venal going about their business pretty much unmolested. It didn't do my blood pressure much good, I can tell you, and I would love to have a few minutes in private with Turner, Gibson or Carson: cowards and bullies all. In contrast, as ever, our heroes are somewhat conflicted, unsure of their best course of action, and hampered by little things like moral scruples, empathy and guilt. ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity").

In a sense it doesn't help that the gifts the Enceladons bring are all about empathy, and sympathy, about a way of being and living that challenges the cult of individuality. They therefore represent a threat, whether the humans know it or not, that is more fundamental and insidious than the "invasion of the little green men form Mars" trope. The example of a better way of being implicitly judges Earth's ways, and shows the current greed-driven model of society, growth and progress to be wanting. In this respect, I find Johnstone's story to be rather like a reverse Gulliver's Travels - just as Jonathan Swift pitilessly highlighted the faults and failings of his own society by taking a specimen of that society and comparing him with various idealised nations, so Johnstone brings a benign, cooperative creature to, ultimately, shame us and our doings.

It won't end well. It can't end well. Our heroes are imprisoned, dark deeds are afoot and the resistance, if I can use that term, painfully weak and fragmented. (One of Johnstone's themes is how supposedly democratic social media simply floods the channels with a deluge of lies, confusion and conspiracy theories, swamping the truth. There is some interest in what's going on in that secret base, with a peace camp of sorts outside, but I can't help feeling that in the high days of activism there'd have been telephone trees and samizdat-style newsletters getting the word out, and successful raise on the base to challenge the authorities). 

But.

BUT.

The dark powers we see don't, can't, possibly imagine the strength of an alternative social model. Imposing pathetic labels on things they don't understand (they call the sea creatures from Enceladus "illegals") they fail to understand what they are dealing with, leaving some, slight, margin for a ragtag group of the wise and the just to succeed. Maybe. If the first half of the book was enraging, the second is really, really nail-biting  and I will say NOTHING about what goes on here and what might happen in the next book.

I should assure you that The Collapsing Wave isn't just a moral fable, though it is a powerful one. It's a novel of characters too, with each member of the little group an individual who has lived a lifetime and has the knocks to show for it. Even Lennox, who is "only", 16 has been through stuff. You can read this book for the protagonists alone who are, every one, fascinating, quirky, real and loveable.

All in all, a superlative novel with great moral force, an urgent book, I think, in view of world polictis and the state of the planet. A cosmic, world-shaking novel form Johnstone, one I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Collapsing Wave, 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 Collapsing Wave from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Relight my Fire by CL McDonnell

Relight my Fire  (Stranger Times, 4)

C K McDonnell
Penguin, 25 January 2024
Available as: HB, 528pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 528pp

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

Back in the Manchester world of The Stranger Times, the team have problems. Infernal powers have taken an interest in Vincent Bancroft, and while one might expect him to just tell them his diary's full, he actually comes across here as very vulnerable, in part because of action he took in an earlier book.

I enjoyed seeing Banecroft as something other than the grouchy, wisecracking boss of previous stories. It may have seemed as though, really, he had all the answers and was always three steps ahead of everyone else - but as is made clear that's not necessarily the case.

What Banecroft is still set upon is protecting Stella (who herself begins to seem a much stranger and more complex person than we have released yet). He'll do that, even if it means the unpleasant psychopomp in the floppy hat who's been shadowing him gets to carry him away to perdition. Why is Stell in danger? Well, she was I the wrong place at the wrong time, specifically, she nearly got fallen on when a young man who thought he could fly (he sort of could) fell from the heavens.

Why he was up there to begin with, who is pulling the strings and how it all connects with the appearance of Manchester's loneliest ghoul, you'll just have to read this book to find out. I found this one to be a little bit of a reset (not too much of one!) with a ore self-contained story and, as I said, a slightly different approach to Banecroft, that would I think make it an easy place to get into this series if you haven't been reading them (though if you don't then read the first three books you are seriously missing out). The same mixture of crime and the supernatural, with more emerging about the hidden world of the Folk, this story has a buzz and focus that's al of its own - as well as some extremely nasty and singularly driven characters, who might presage new alliances in future.

Overall, a story I really enjoyed and one which shows this series is firing on all cylinders.

For more information about Relight my Fire, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Three Fires by Denise Mina

Three Fires

Denise Mina (Narrated by Jonathan Keeble)
Polygon, 3 August 2023
Available as: HB, 128pp,  audio, e   
Source: Audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9781846976384

I have to say, I never expected to find myself reading a biographical account of a medieval Italian friar who became the populist leader of Florence in the 15th century. Such is the talent of Denise Mina, at not point did I find myself thinking, hang on, what IS this?

Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar who had a vision of the world as corrupt, unjust and fixated on fripperies. His was the hand behind the original "bonfire of the vanities", when "trash" such as fine Renaissance paintings were burned as irreligious, irrelevant distractions. (This is one of the three fires referred to in the title). It's hard to argue that society, and the Church, of the time were not corrupt and Savonarola had a fine line in denouncing Popes and secular leaders alike, including speaking up for the poor. He also preached antisemitism and homophobia, whether from conviction or to provide scapegoats to ease his way to power, is hard to tell. Perhaps that distinction doesn't matter, but it does I think beg comparisons with authoritarian populists of our own day, a comparison that Mina makes explicitly towards the end of the story. Less explicitly we have by then already seen Girolamo exploit the communications technology of the day - the church pulpit, but also, the new art of printing which meant that his message, unlike that of earlier firebrands, was preserved for posterity.

Mina makes an excellent job of putting this divisive and consequential figure into his historical context, happily using anachronistic reference points such as referring to him as an "intel" in the episode where he clumsily fails to court an heiress marriage to whom his family relied on for future prosperity. She also depicts the times that Savonarola lived in, and some of the awful things he saw and experienced in the fractious Italy of the 15th century. It is clear that it was an age apt to produce hellfire preachers and millennialist sects - while these had hitherto been repressed or co-opted by the Roman Catholic Church, the coming of printing would end its ability to do that.

All in all a fascinating is often horrific story (it does have its moments of humour, too!) The audio is excellently delivered by Jonathan Keeble whose, who I last heard narrating a thriller about climate change so his career seems to be focussing on apocalypses and fires - but it has just the gravitas needed for such topics.

I would recommend this book, even if you think you have no interest in medieval Italy. 

For more information about Three Fires, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff

Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case
Author Elsa Drucaroff, translated by Slava Faybysh

Corylus Books, 5 March 2024
Available as: PB, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298937

There's a war outside still raging

You say it ain't ours anymore to win...,

- Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case to consider for review, and to Ewa for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

This really was something new for me - an intense thriller, based on real events and featuring as its central character a real person. Rodolfo Walsh was an Argentinian author, who in the 1950s and 60s wrote classic mysteries. He also originated the true crime genre with an account of a massacre carried out by the country's dictatorship in the 1950s. 

Set in the 70s under another military regime, Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case sees Walsh, who was also a political radical, forced to investigate his own daughter's disappearance - or perhaps she survived? - at the hands of the military. For fellow UK readers, this is the same dictatorship with which the UK ended up at war over the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas in the 1980s. While that was towards the end of their rule, in this book they have only recently come to power and are busy disappearing their opponents, their imagined opponents and basically anyone (hair too long perhaps? Studying something suspicious at uni?) who even looks as though they might be an opponent. It is a scar that Argentina still carries, and here we see the wound inflicted: Walsh's experiences here act as something of a microcosm of the suffering that took place.

It's a busy novel, following, first, the military, then, Walsh and the opposition organisation of which he's part, but also a retired colonel with whom he's acquainted. In the gaps, as it were, we see individuals' stories, both of horror - the pregnant woman dragged off to a secret prison - and heroism - the conscript who spies for the rebels. One can't say too much here, because Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case deals in ambiguity. In a truly tense thriller, we are aware of the possibility of double and triple crosses, of ruses and - a nod to the mystery writer at the centre of things - of red herrings.

It would be wrong though to see this is simply a thriller. There is plenty of action, and there are tense scenes with lives hanging by a thread, but at its centre Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case has a truly human perspective. It focuses on the dreams and nightmares (sometimes they are blurred), the lost hopes and the very present fears, and the passions of a group of very believable and empathetic characters.

Aside from Walsh himself, his wife Lila and his daughter Vicki we see army conscripts becoming aware of the horrors being carried out by the regime, and the moral choices they're forced to make - collaborate? Look the other way and try to forget? Resist? We see young people forced to flee the country, and older ones finding their own loyalties divided. There's the dilemma faced by an opposition out of its depth. Everywhere, there is the military, dragging young people away, raging at a political, cultural opposition it can't understand, an opposition that is less about armed resistance than simply about being something else.

In the time period of this story, that rage at the modern world carries the day, despite heroic, desperate but totemic acts of defiance. In the longer run, as we know, it did not, does not and will not triumph. We don't see it but the dictators fall, while the writings of figures like Walsh are still available to speak to us - and their lives and stories can be told by writers like Drucaroff.

All in all, this is a marvellous book, both tense and beautiful, full of hope but so sad. 

The transition by Slava Faybysh is vivid and readable, taking one immediately to the centre of things and capturing the vivid pace of events.

Elsa Drucaroff was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She is the author of four novels and two short story collections, in addition to being a prolific essayist. She has published numerous articles on Argentine literature, literary criticism and feminism.

Her work has been widely translated, but Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case is Elsa Drucaroff’s first novel to be translated into English.

Slava Faybysh translates from Spanish and Russian.

For more information about Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case, 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 Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour - #Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

Fathomfolk

Eliza Chan

Orbit, 27 February 2024,
Available as: HB, 420pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356522395

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for sending me a copy of Fathomfolk to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I have been known to describe books as "immersive". In the case of Fathomfolk, the term really comes into its own because it is, literally, about immersion. Most obviously, there's immersion in water - in the world of Fathomfolk, the waters have risen and most land has been drowned. Humans coexist with sentient sea creatures - the marine peoples of multiple cultures' myths and legends, from East Asian water dragons to mermaids to kelpies to sea witches,  and many actual marine species too. All these are united by their ability to "water weave" - manipulate the water magically - and some also have the ability to shapeshift.

But there are other sorts of immersion here - immersion in different cultures, immersion in work and family and also, romantic immersion in another person. All of these mix, and not always comfortably. If you think the magic of the sea people all sounds wonderful and magical, well it is, but still all is not well. The inundation of the land was the outcome of war between humans and sea peoples, and the latter - the fathomfolk or just Folk - came off worse in this. They are oppressed by humans, who are polluting the oceans and dominating the Folk, treating then as lesser mortals subjects to constraints and controls and prejudices. In the city of Tiankawi, where most of the action in the book takes place, we see the patterns of coexistence in a prejudiced society played out. The focus is on Kai, a sea dragon ambassador from one of the Folk havens and on his partner Mira, a siren and poster girl for diversity. Mira has recently been promoted tocaptain of police but increasingly, as this book proceeds, suffers the tensions and paradoxes of being distrusted by both the dominant society and by the Folk. Mira therefore endures immersion in another sense, genuinely neither a person of the sea nor or the land.

Others in the story also play ambiguous roles, though it would be wrong to say too much about them because spoilers. But we see dilemmas both in the "opposition" to the dominant humans (through a somewhat self regarding sect of revolutionaries) and in those who seek coexistence, as well as those who simply put themselves first. There are also city politics inn play, as well as secrets of going back to Tiankawi's foundation. At times it seems as though everyone's playing a part, everyone's putting on an act. This affects the relationship between Kai and Mira, undermining who they are and exposing issues of privilege and accommodation (Kai, as a dragon, is seen as being at the peak of Folk society which of course has its own hierarchies and prejudices).

Eliza Chan deftly weaves together these multiple strands of the story, gradually expanding the scope form the personal and the immediate to the cosmic and delivering some real shocks as she does, not least in the last few pages which show a narrative that's really going places. 

While the configuration of the world in this story is different form our own, it's easy to see the book as a glimpse of a future affected by global heating, as well as a commentary on prejudice, race and migration  (in a devastating scene, a ship full of sea asylum seekers arrives at the city's docks). It's written in a loosely East Asian setting (albeit, as a I said, the geography is unrecognisably different) which applies both to the human aspects and the Folk.

Eliza Chan portrays the diverse and complex city of Tiankawi as a truly vast and multilayered place, creating distinct and parallel cultures both above and below water and convincingly bringing both to life. This above water/ below water concept feels like it ought not to work yet by the end of the story  it feels completely natural. The city's peopled by vivid and credible characters, with even the villains having their sympathetic side (such as being driven by family ambition, rather than simple love of power). I thought one or two of the secondary characters such as bookish Eun might have had more attention, but I think it's clear there are more books coming so hopefully they will get that at some stage. 

All in all a beguiling and, yes, properly immersive novel. I'd recommend!

For more information about Fathomfolk, 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 Fathomfolk from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Pillar of Ash by H M Long

Pillar of Ash (Hall of Smoke/ The Four Pillars, 4)
H M Long
Titan, 16 January 2024
Available as: PB, 336pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803360041

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of Pillar of Ash to consider for review.

This is the fourth and final part of what I still think of as the Hall of Smoke sequence, the first part of which introduced us to the formidable warrior priestess Hessa. Subsequent volumes followed the world-changing events which she triggered - indeed I should say worlds-changing events, as gods and goddesses were overthrown, empires clashed and ancient truths uncovered.

Now, as we reach the Fourth Pillar upholding HM Long's world, Hessa steps back and the action focusses on Yske, her daughter. Yske is very unlike Hessa: she considers herself a healer, not a fighter, and has no wish to leave her comfortable hut on the mountain and seek excitement. A bit of a Bilbo Baggins, perhaps, she nevertheless joins a company of adventurers travelling East - mainly, it seems, to look after her brother, Berin rather than from any desire to travel.

Unlike in previous books, the quest is driven this time more by curiosity than by crisis as rumours of a great Tree circulate, and also of something stirring in the Unmade space beyond the world. The East of the Hall of Smoke worlds is little visited: it proves to contain unknown peoples, monsters and, of course, mysteries. And while Yske, Berin and the others didn't travel to confront a great peril, it seems that one is heading for their world - and it has its roots in the strange powers and spirits that Hessa knows so well.

I enjoyed this book, though I have to say that I enjoyed the second half most. An avowed non-warrior is a difficult fit in the Eangen culture of fighters, and for most of the first part of the book Yske's distinctly not at ease, out of place in the somewhat martial company and tending to get the blame when anything goes wrong. Several times I felt she might have been justified in just telling them to **** off, and going back home - after all she only joined the expedition because she was asked, because of what she could contribute as a healer, yet here she is being continually cold-shouldered and devalued because she's not a fighter.

All this changes once... well I can't say exactly what, can I, that would be spoilery, but I will just say that Yske has strengths, knowledge and resourcefulness (and alliances!) that she is able to reach for when things get really tough. It was especially pleasing that, while there is plenty of combat in the book, most of the important action is about building alliances, negotiating, and bringing together unlikely forces against a common threat. Yske proves to excel at all those things and it's great to see how, once she has some freedom of action, she reframes the challenges that face the party to skew away from combat.

In showing what happens next, Long completes the picture that's been building right from the start of Hall of Smoke, a picture which - it's now clear - still had significant gaps. The result is a satisfying conclusion to the whole sequence, adding balance and wholeness to this series of books. 

A good end to this series, a series which has never been less than great fun.

For more information about Pillar of Ash, see the publisher's website here.