#Review - Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

Death at the Sign of the Rook
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 22 August 2024
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857526571

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

The appearance of a new Jackson Brodie novel is always an event to celebrate and Death at the Sign of the Rook truly lives up to expectations, culminating in a classic country house murder with all the expected ingredients - a retired Major, a vicar, a dowager and, of course, in Brodie himself, the renowned amateur sleuth.

At the same time, it's none of those things. While the murder itself evolves as a kind of play within a play (literally - Burton Makepeace House, cut off by the blizzard, is hosting a murder mystery weekend and we're treated to scenes in which the band of itinerant performers, the literal murderer(s), and all the guests who have assembled for the event, get hilariously confused) it is also commenting on, and being shaped by, events of the early 21st century. 

An aristocratic family on its uppers. 

A soldier injured in Afghanistan and facing a bleak future. 

A vicar who thinks he's gone down the wrong path. 

A middle aged couple anxious to wring every last penny form their mum's estate.

And Brodie himself, surveying it all with a jaundiced eye.

As the husband of a priest, I was particularly taken with the Vicar, Simon, a man whose backstory included the same theological college my son is currently studying at. I was struck by his dilemma, his sense of futility, of a moment of revelation that maybe wasn't - but also by his history which blends an awkward suburban past, a career in the TV industry and that moment of revelation in a York church. I recently read Atkinson's Normal Rules Don't Apply, a book of loosely linked short stories, and recognised Simon as totally belonging in the collection of rackety, slightly loner-y figures encountered there. (I would point out, though, that true vicarly mastery isn't the ability to surreptitiously glance at a watch, as Atkinson suggests. That is too obvious. The thing is to place oneself in a room so that one can easily spot the clock face, a much less obvious action. At least, so my wife tells me, and I never doubt the word of the clergy).

The book struck other chords with me too. Like Ben, the ex-Major, I have a great-uncle who died at Monte Cassino. That probably goes to show more the scale of that battle than anything about Atkinson aiming her writing at me, but I found it a telling detail. I loved Ben, the kind of diffident character who suffers fools gracefully and downplays his problems. He's currently living with his sister and her wife, the former a vet who takes in waifs and strays and has "an abundance of Labradors" (how can you have too many?) Ben might be one of the strays himself, perhaps, but when he steps onto the stage as The major in the denouement he's far from a waif, and equally far from the doddering Major of the Golden Age detective mystery that Atkinson's subverting.

This kind of telling characterisation - knowing, subversive, but still affectionate - is a highlight of Atkinson's books. With Brodie at the centre of the story, it might be tempting to focus on him and have everyone else a supporting character but Atkinson gives plenty of time and space to the others, drawing out their stories and creating fully rounded figures who then behave in fanstastically complex ways. Any could easily carry a book of their own, and I rather hope some will. Which isn't to say that Bodie himself is neglected, quite the opposite. Entering the story via those avaricious siblings who report that their mum's priceless Renaissance painting ("Woman With Weasel") has gone missing, Brodie soon spots that a similar theft has taken place at Burton Makepeace, allowing him to involve a reluctant DC Reggie Chase (hooray!) and to explore the history of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times.

There is simply so much going on in this book, often not directly concerning crimes - while there is a blend of murder and art theft here, in many respects they're almost incidental - but rather, people. And yes, people do sometimes commit crimes, but there are much more interesting things to say about people, and in particular about this bunch of peculiar people who assemble one snowy night to enact a murder...

I'd strongly recommend Death at the Sign of the Rook. I knew I would!

For more information about Death at the Sign of the Rook, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Houses of the Unholy by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

Houses of the Unholy

Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips 
Image Comics, 27 August 2024
Available as: HB   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781534327429

I'm grateful to Image Comics for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Houses of the Unholy to consider for review.

I recently went to see Arthur Miller's play The Crucible at the Gielgud theatre in London. This story of mass delusion leading to a literal witch-hunt is a deep part of modern culture but it was the first time I had actually watched it. The parallels with the McCarthy political purges are well known, but I didn't know until I read this graphic novel that it also prefigured a more literal form of witch-hunt that actually took place in the USA in the 1980s, a couple of decades after Miller's play appeared. (My lack of knowledge of this perhaps reflects a deep gulf between the pre Internet age and now - something like this would, of course, be all over social media and impossible to miss. But in the 80s I, and most people, were not online).

The parallels are, as depicted in Houses of the Unholy, close. Young kids, pushed by peer pressure and fundamentalist-minded parents and authority figures such as therapists and clergy, denounce teachers, youth workers and others. The whole thing snowballs. Reason sleeps. Those falsely labelled are ostracised, lose their jobs and sometimes take their own lives. In the backwash, when a degree of common sense is reasserted, there is guilt and retribution. Lives are damaged or lost.

In Houses of the Unholy we first meet Natalie Burns checking in at a remote motel. She pays in cash and asks for a cabin isolated from the others. Is she up to something, or does she just want a bit of peace and quiet? Of course it's the former, and the story soon takes a dark turn, resulting in attention form the local police and a driven, maverick, FBI agent.

Learning more about Natalie's background, we gradually understand how she got caught caught up in the 80s panic, and what she feels she has to atone for. The stigma of those events wrecked Natalie's family and her brother spiralled off into online conspiracy fandom. She herself cannot forget what she did - but nor can she properly distinguish the false memories from the true ones. At first seeming a rather unpleasant character, Brubaker and Philips do build sympathy for Natalie as the story continues, showing how she, too, was a victim in all this and what she has done to rebuild her life.

Agent Paul West, who begins by arresting Natalie but then offers her a deal if she'll cooperate, is a bit of a classic loner, apparently working an angle that he shouldn't be. We learn little about him until later in the book, partly because his attempts at bonding with Natalie are pretty much rebuffed. Endlesss car journeys in frozen silence are more suitable for a graphic novel depiction than they are to prose. and Houses of the Unholy makes excellent use of panels without speech as well as using background colour to animate the mood - a cool blue for the frequent noir-ish, nighttime scenes, red when we scent evil, particularly for flashbacks to the 80s. It's a compelling and addictive story, weaving together both the aftermaths of the 80s panic and a modern strand of apocalyptic, End-Of-Times fear that's pointed up later in the story by a distant warning siren (we never learn what it's warning of) as well as our heroes encountering unnatural disasters such as floods and wildfires.

All in all an excellent horror-tinged tale that ends on a note of real uncertainty, blurring the boundary between human evil and the supernatural. Great fun.

For more information about Houses of the Unholy, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Ninth Life by Stark Holborn

Ninth Life (Factus Sequence, 3)

Stark Holborn
Titan Books, 23 July 
Available as: PB, 416pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803362984

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

Ninth Life is a return to the universe of Ten Low and of Hel's Eight - a future dominated by the militaristic Accord, which ruthlessly exploits its colony planets for raw materials, assisted by various warlords, gangster capitalist federations and oligarchs. Opposition has arisen on the mysterious but especially harsh world of Factus with its spirits, the probability-bending Ifs, who are able - sometimes - to turn likelihood on its head. Also featuring are the Seekers, with their semi-religious trade in organs and blood.

Ninth Life follows the career of ex General Gabriella Ortiz, originally a child soldier and a former hero of the Accord. Gabi featured in the earlier books, and her arrival, dragged from the wreck of a crashed spacecraft, nods to that. Here, though, her story is given in full - although it's contradictory to say that because as the narrator of Ninth Life makes clear, he has limited, uncertain sources and somebody is trying to erase his work.

Military Proctor Idrisi Blake himself is as much a character here as Gabi. We see his understanding of, and sympathy with, the former general turned pirate and rebel develop as his researches proceed. The framing is complex, with at least two different timelines for Gabi and numerous witnesses and accounts used to substantiate her career, but it's made more so by a fourth wall breaking effect where she seems at times to be directly addressing Blake. Failing to heed the often repeated instruction not to listen to her, Blake falls more and more under Gabi's spell, as do most of those she encounters and as, I am sure, will most readers.

Yet Gabi remains something of a mystery. Through a series of battles, fights, escapes, downfalls, injuries and betrayals we learn a lot about her origins, motivation and fears - but less about her intentions. Hers has been a life with loss (you'll know that if you've read the previous books) and she's suffered both betrayal and failure, but even so, everywhere she goes, everything she does, seems to align with some unstated purpose. It's less than clear how far she knows and understands this herself (the asides to Blake suggest that she does) and how far she is is actively cooperating with it or how much she is being drawn along. The best I can put it is, the Ifs, who are an important part of this story, will offer their help but only on their own terms, and there is a cost. Gabi is clearly paying that price, but we don't know - and I don't think she does - how far she is being given fair weight in exchange for her coin.

All in all a heart-pounding and exciting story with a core of steel. As ever Stark Holborn is superlative in bringing alive these actively hostile, dead-end-of-the-galaxy locations, places which make each day's survival a heroic act and every character, therefore, a hero. They're like the desert environs of the typical Western raised to the power 100.  That will be familiar from the earlier books, but the story has now expanded beyond that Western-in-Space metaphor to a whole new level of weird, anarchic, punkiness that is just a glory to read.

I'm not sure if there will be more in this series - the ending is I think deliberately unclear - but if there are I will be delighted. Holborn's books provide something - a spice, a feistiness - which, while impossible to pin down, is I think unique in current SF and which I just can't get enough of.

For more information about Ninth Life, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Prey by Vanda Symon

Prey (Sam Shephard, 6)

Vanda Symon
Orenda Books, 15 August 2024
Available as: PB, 278pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 97819116788220

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

There is a particular comfort in returning a well-loved and long running series - none more so than with Symon's books featuring New Zealand detective Sam Shephard. Over the course of five stories so far, and now a sixth, we've seen Sam progress from a reckless, not so say rash young woman working in a remote town as the only outpost of law and order to a detective in Dunedin. In the last book, Expectant, she was heavily pregnant. In Prey, Sam is the new mother of Amelia, just returned to work, and Symon usefully explores the ups and downs of this - the tiredness, the child who won't be put down when one wishes to eat or take a bath, the nappy changing... there's a particular incident of a "poonami" that I think all new parents will relate to (we have curtains that never recovered). 

All this as Sam is tasked with reopening an especially tricky cold case. DI Johns, also know as The Boss and by a host of less repeatable epithets, has asked her to pick up an investigation form 25 years ago, the murder of a priest on the cathedral steps, no less. It's a case which requires particular tact as Johns is connected to it himself. And it's one which awakens dark memories for Sam from her own early life.

If you're a regular reader of this series you'll know already that Sam is at her best when up against it: every problem here - the lack of forensic evidence, pressure from her superiors, vanished witnesses, that creeping miasma of unease that she feels as she climbs the cathedral steps - just spurs her on to try harder, find new angles, try different things. So as the story unfolds, Sam's re-examination of witnesses, her unpicking of evidence and her posting of awkward questions are just wonderful to see. Symon has a rare skill, the ability to make a situation visible. Without dropping any clunky hints or telling you the answer, she creates, in the reader's head, a kind of hologram, a grasp of all the angles and possibilities. Here, mediated by Sam, we begin to see the strains and tensions that, decades before, led to murder - and their imprint on the witnesses being re-interviewed in the present day.

It is though a nasty, unedifying picture that unfolds, with an apparently loving and supportive community riven by jealousy, judgementalism and old-fashioned patriarchy. As Sam gets deeper into things, she increasingly wonders why she was asked to reopen this case, whether she was ever meant to solve it, and if she does, what the cost may be for all concerned?

All in all this is a taut, compulsive and involving read, a book I more inhaled than read. Weaving together two serious themes, relating to parenting an infant and caring for a teenage daughter, it challenges us as to what is really important in putting a child's needs first - rather than just paying lip service to that - and shows how secrets can undermine the most loving of relationships. (The family of the Revd Mark Freeman in particular seems to have raised the keeping of these to an artform, one matched only by Sam's ability or prise out the truth from reluctant witnesses.)

Prey is another great instalment in this series from Vanda Symon. As I said above, it was marvellous to meet Sam again and to see how her life is changing. But above all this is a scorching and immersive detective story.

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

#Blogtour #Review - The Friend Zone Experiment by Zen Cho

The Friend Zone Experiment

Zen Cho
Macmillan, 8 August 2024 
Available as: HB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 978-1035046089

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Friend Zone Experiment to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Renee Goh has an enviable life, growing her own Instagram-friendly clothing business, Virtu, dating a Taiwanese pop star and living in a posh London flat left her by her aunt.

But she's estranged from her family, ends up working extremely long days and has just been dumped by the boyfriend. So it's perhaps not suprising that when she bumps into another ex, Yap Ket Siong, at a V&A do, she spends a night with him. Surely they can just remain friends? 

Unfortunately, there is unfinished business from their previous breakup - business which touches on Renee's father's desire to hand on his own firm, a major conglomerate based back home in Malaysia, to one of his three kids. Renee could be back in the fold, all she has to do is impress father (and outdo her very competitive brothers...). But what might the impact be on Ket Siong - and should she care? Suddenly that friend zone begins to look more like a very unstable fence to sit on, with passion one side, cold hard business on the other and perhaps, murky secrets on both.

The Friend Zone Experiment was a terrific read. Renee is an engaging main character, a woman who knows what she wants, is basically together and organised and definitely not ready to get pushed off course by romantic currents. And yet, at some level, she is still hurt by what happened between her and Ket Siong ten years before. As is he. Renee doesn't, though, know the full story - and I enjoyed seeing that teased out, with flashbacks and revelations. Yes it's one of those scenarios where people are hiding things for each others' supposed good, where there are misconceptions and assumptions (cue Renee's judgy but supportive pal Nathalie). Beneath all this are the bones of a thriller plot involving kidnap, stolen documents and murky secrets - but Zen Cho has the confidence to leave that sketchy and focus on the impact of events on her cast of appealing characters. 

Did somebody say "appealing characters"? I have to mention Ket Siong at this point, of course I do, he is the epitome of an appealing, no downright attractive, character - certainly to Renee, despite what he did ten years before. An honourable, somewhat tortured soul, he spent years putting duty ahead of self - as, in a slightly different way, has Renee. She was brought up learning that business and money always comes before family, with the result that her rebellion against a highly patriarchal father has been expressed by... founding her own business and working night and day at it.

With those secrets from the past reaching out, will Renee and Ket Siong be able to sort out what's real and what's imagined, satisfy the constraints of duty and love, and, above all, keep those they care for safe? Deftly plotted, fun to read and with great heart, The Friend Zone Experiment keeps us guessing, serving up thrills, excitement and a powerful, tearjerking finale.

Strongly recommended, whether you've read Zen Cho's earlier fantasy works such as Sorcerer to the Crown, The True Queen and Black Water Sister - or not.

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

#Review - Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

Lake of Darkness

Adam Roberts
Gollancz, 25 July 2024
Available as: HB, 320, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399617673

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

In Lake of Darkness, we are introduced to a medium-to-far future human interplanetary society of a Utopian bent - and to the thorny problem of evil, which seems to have been eradicated but proves tenacious. 

This is a world of abundance, permitting its members to do pretty much what they want, subject to some basic rules about consent. Effectively people devote themselves to hobbies, forming "fandoms" that act in common to pursue goals. These goals range from art projects to the pursuit of pure science to exploration. We see an attempt by one man to be the first to walk on the surface of the planetary core (Roberts addressing the technical difficulties this presents in some (convincing) detail). The aim is basically status, earned by the acclamation of one's fandom. This is seen as a healthier approach than accruing resources or power.

It's all done with the help of AI, which undertakes the real work. This allows a staggering level of achievement, but it all feels a little empty. The people we meet here reminded me of those in EM Forster's The Machine Stops - they sustain a lively degree of chat and engagement with one another but it all feels brittle, shallow, with the real action taking place elsewhere. Representative of this is that nobody can read, everyone relies on the AIs to translate historic documents, resulting in a whole layer of ignorance and misunderstanding arising from the failure of sounds to represent or differentiate underlying ideas. 

It's also a short-attention-span society, one where those AIs don't just speak texts but summarise and recommend them too. As a result the adults in this book are contradictory, at the same time both erudite and childlike. When things begin to go wrong, when the system is challenged, nobody is really able to pull together a response (another echo of Forster, I think?)

In Lake of Darkness, what goes wrong is slightly mysterious. It may be a threat from an Ancient Evil which meddling scientists have unleashed from its prison (cue a great deal of speculation about who or what would be capable of constructing this prison and the paradoxes it builds into the universe). Or it may be that the evil has been loose and ac time for aeons. Or it may be that both things are true, with the evil (possibly not the right term, really) representing a part of humanity that the Utopia has suppressed. We are reminded that there are laws of balance and conservation in the Universe and that therefore, at least in the long run, certain things may be impossible - such as firewalling off areas of experience and motivation. Or, putting it another way, some things may be certain, such as human traits and behaviours surviving.

As presented to the reader, this paradox is framed in terms of the event horizon of a black hole. A couple of futuristic ships arrive, capable of FTL travel, to investigate black hole QV Tel but madness and obsession will soon destroy their crews. There is a great deal of debate, both among the characters of this novel and from the narrator (or narrators - the way the book represents how it is being told is twisty, reminding me of Tolkien in its insistence that it is being translated - but from what and to what and by whom is unclear) about whether it might be possible to communicate with whatever life might exist within a black hole. This apparently abstract point of physics, indeed, motivates characters to extremes, up to and beyond murder. (I enjoyed the way in which Roberts uses his apparently consensual society to show an individual with aberrant views can impose this on the wider culture - the grounding in consensus meaning that there are no real checks in place. It all reminded me of a version of social media gone septic. Sorry, gone even more septic). 

This question engages real, unresolved issues of physics but it also, I think, represents the gist of the book. The existence of black holes poses a puzzle whose solution allows for real choices in the design of the universe - it's left deliberately uncertain whether it is this fact that drives a succession of characters in this story to defy, indeed trample, the norms of their civilisation, or whether they have indeed been affected by some kind of serial taint that derives from the black hole itself and is being communicated through society, thereby posing a deep contradiction.

This is a novel of ideas, that debate about the nature of reality coming over as more solid that the rather insipid characters who fail to face up to its consequences. And, just to be clear, by "insipid" I don't mean these are badly or weakly drawn characters, I think Roberts depicts them just as he intends to, they are insipid members of an insipid society which has forgotten things about itself that it ought to to have help on to.

Overall, a riveting and strange book, alive with alternatives and a haunting sense of the past and the future debating with each other.

For more information about Lake of Darkness, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre

The Cracked Mirror

Chris Brookmyre
Abacus, 18 July 2024
Available as: HB, 497, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780349145792  

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

The Cracked Mirror is a story with many layers. As described in the blurb, it unites a tough LA detective, Johnny Hawke,  with a seemingly genteel Scottish spinster, Penny Coyne (yes, I know!) a librarian who solves crime in her quaint village. Penny would never break a rule (she know the sorts of consequences that can follow) but she does have some surprises for Hawke (who is of course, Mr Rule Breaker, always at odds with his own boss, and with a string of dead partners behind him).

Each is presented in their own segment, which has its distinct title ("The Cracked Mirror" being one). Hawke is working on a high-stakes murder at a Hollywood film studio, but is about to be suspended and thrown off the case when strings are pulled by those with, well, pull. Coyne investigates a death at a local church, which she solves before moving on to a Society wedding - to which she's been invited, but doesn't know why. Indeed, this isn't the only instance of Penny's memory proving unreliable - an experience shared by Hawke, planting seeds of there being something unsettling going on even before the two, improbably, meet in one story.

Which is where things go REALLY weird. What has so far read as basically a pastiche of two different crime genres, if an entertaining one, then pivots to become something all its own. It isn't an oddball crime story in which the two mismatched detectives have to work together and earn each others' respect. Or rather, it is, it can't avoid being that, but that's almost incidental, it provides some fun but it's not the point. Unfortunately I can't say what the point is without being spoiler, so you'll just have to take it from me, Brookmyre is on top form here and if you think the story as presented is fiendish, well, you've seen nothing yet. This book simply bowled me over.

It wasn't just the way that Brookmyre maintains the structure of the two, very different, narratives - using it to show events from two quite distinct perspectives - while fusing the whole thing into a powerful, engaging and much more distinct unity. Yes, there are cracks here which we will eventually understand once we know what's going on, but those cracks also make sense in terms of the frames of reference of Penny and Johnny. Unlikely events which befall our hapless protagonists do have their own logic, but as they happen, the vividness of Brookmyre's writing sweeps the reader up so were less concerned with the why, as with the "how do they get out of this?"

No, it wasn't just that. I found these characters growing on me. The more I learned about who they were, the more heart I saw this novel had. Behind the different brands of detective genius which the two display (with Penny, especially, showing great ingenuity even though apparently out of her comfort zone in the LA sunshine) there's a real sense of loss, of burned bridges and deep hurt, which drives them to behave as they do (whether to step over the line, or treat it as a religion) and which makes them, in combination, a formidable force.

Come for the high concept, stay for the vivid, relatable characters and their strange world.

Overall, a fun and rather tricksy novel that kept me guessing although - when I went back and thought about it - Brookmyre played a straight bat and left enough hints to work out what is happening. Also, a book that plays some wonderful games with genre conventions and the reader's expectations.

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