Blogtour review - The Stones of Landane by Catherine Cavendish

The Stones of Landane
Catherine Cavendish
Flame Tree Press, 14 January 2025
Available as: PB, 240pp, HB, 240pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787588912

I'm grateful to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of The Stones of Landane to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Firmly in the folk horror genre, The Stones of Landane sees a young couple, Jonathan and Nadia, arrive to spend a few days at a comfortable pub in the eponymous English village eating good food and drinking nice things while exploring the local stone circle - to which Nadia feels an inexplicable bond. 

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, as you'll have anticipated - but in this eerie, mysterious novel Cavendish adeptly keeps us guessing as to exactly what. 

This particular sort of prehistoric-focussed supernatural fiction must I think actually be quite tricky for an author to get right. A great deal has been written about the origin and properties of prehistoric monuments (The Stones of Landane takes in not only a henge-like circle, but also a long barrow, and an artificial hill modelled on Silbury). You can read anything from the driest of scientific archaeology to the enjoyable speculations of modern day antiquarians to frankly disturbing, Occult-tinged material. So almost anything could be going on here, and I'm impressed at how Cavendish stays grounded, as it were, and serves up a novel like this which is coherent in terms of plot, distinctive enough to merit a new story, and which lives up to the wealth of history and speculation that already exists.

I'd say in fact that she succeeds with rather a degree of aplomb in a tale that uses different timelines to suggest what may be going on without ever spelling things out. That also allows for rather interesting episodes set in the late Victorian period and the high (pun deliberate) flower power era, both of which show varying attitudes to women's role in society - rather a theme of the story, I'd say.

That, and a growing sense of peril and tension, accompany the gradual unfolding of a complex and at times, almost heartbreaking, narrative pitting individuals, who mostly just wanna have fun, against a millennia-spanning conflict where there may be a good and and evil but there's certainly precious little solace. Even victory here would have a bitter taste, I think, and my abiding feeling was wishing I tell the protagonists to jest get away while they can.

In all I found this a deeply engaging and fun story which at times put me in mind of Robert Aickman at his best - especially the opening section with the unsuspecting couple arriving at the rural inn. 

For more information about The Stones of Landane, see the publisher's website here.

You can buy The Stones of Landane from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz

Nightingale & Co
Charlotte Printz (trans by Marina Sofia)

Corylus Books, 15 January 2025 (e), 1 February (PB) (390pp)
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298982

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Nightingale & Co to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

From the Publisher

Berlin, August 1961.

Since the death of her beloved father, Carla has been running the Nightingale & Co detective agency by herself. It’s a far from easy job for a female investigator. 

When the chaotic, fun-loving Wallie shows up at the door, claiming to be her half-sister, Carla’s world is turned upside down. Wallie needs Carla – the Berlin Wall has been built overnight, leaving her unable to return to her flat in East Berlin.

Carla certainly doesn’t need Wallie, with her secret double life and unorthodox methods for getting results. Yet the mismatched pair must find a way to work together when one of their clients is accused of murdering her husband.

Nightingale & Co is the first in a cosy historical crime series featuring the sisters of the Nightingale & Co detective agency in 1960s Berlin.

What I Thought

I loved it.

Printz gives us a view of postwar Germany, and particularly of West Berlin, that was new to me. We may be familiar with le Carré or Deighton Cold War spy antics involving the Wall, prisoner exchanges on lonely bridges at midnight and the heroics of people trying escape the East.

We know less, perhaps, about the impact of the sudden construction of the barrier - the everyday inconveniences as families are suddenly split, people are cut off from their jobs or homes, and transport disrupted. And, connected with that, the porosity of Berlin before the Wall - a city where citizens could work in one part of the city and live in the other.

Behind that suffering is, of course, a deeper history as the generation affected by this was one that had also lived through the War - whose effects are often pointed out in this book with buildings still ruined and bullet holes visible here and there - and necessarily, under the Nazi regime before and during that. There are plenty of passing comments in this book about how people had accommodated themselves with that regime, and what they had then done after to distance themselves. As well as rumblings in bars and on street corners from those who rather liked the Nazis. The details are fascinating and reach into the present of this novel to, affecting the attitudes of the characters and their position in society.

Alongside those political themes, though, this book also does a very good job at delineating the personalities in this story, women (for the most part) living at a time of enormous change, which some of them welcome and others shun. For example, Ingrid, a saleswoman for the new contraceptive pill who is one of Carla's clients. Carla herself, whose life is dominated by her strained relationship with a domineering and controlling mother. And free spirit Wallie, who breezes into this story upsetting apple carts down every street. Wallie is something of a catalyst for events in the book, given that half-sister Carla is rather cautious and, one feels, left to herself would never take the steps necessary to resolve the two cases here (tracking down a missing American serviceman with whom Ingrid had fallen in love, and solving the murder of a prominent architect whose wife came to her seeking help with a divorce, and who then herslelf naturally falls under suspicion). Wallie, on the other hand, goes in with all guns blazing and seems adapt at everything from setting a honeytrap to spotting a tail. We can only wonder where she learned these skills. Perhaps it goes with the territory if you work the bar in a topless nightclub?

Above all, though, Nightingale & Co is a joyous, thrilling crime narrative that keeps the reader hooked from the first page. Carla is a rather atypical detective, at least by genre standards, and she's often juggling the dramatic - having to race across Berlin to interview a client in prison, contending with the dislocations caused by the Wall, chatting up contacts bin the American military - with the mundane - getting home in time for tea rather than face an earful from her mother, or rescuing her zany aunt from some scrape. It makes for a rich tapestry of life, and that's even before we see things from the perspective of the slightly chaotic Wallie who surely has some secrets of her own. (I should mention that until Wallie turns up suitcase in hand, Carla didn't know that her dad had another daughter in the East - so things are pretty tense between then as you can imagine).

It's all rendered in excellent, taut prose by Marina Sofia, including being clear about - but not intrusively - the points where the distinction in German between familiar and formal pronouns conveys shades of social distance that English has lost. 

In short, strongly recommended - and I hope to see more of Carla & Co in future.

About the Author and Translator 

Charlotte Printz is the pseudonym of a successful former TV editor with a penchant for writing gripping historical novels and screenplays. She is one of the founders of the Munich Writing Academy.

Marina Sofia is a translator, reviewer, writer and blogger, as well as a third culture kid, who grew up trilingual in Romanian, German and English. This is her first translation of a German crime novel to be published by Corylus Books

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

#Review - The Strandling by James Brogden

James Brogden
Aion Books, 2 September 2024 
Available as: PB, 365pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9798333565426

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of The Strandling  to consider for review.

Set in the present day, in a village on the East Coast of England which is rapidly being eroded into the sea, The Strandling has extremely resonant mythic themes as well as confronting present day issues including climate justice and religious intolerance.

Megan Howard lives a difficult life, looking after her father in a cottage that will fall into the sea come the next big storm. (And it is coming!) Her dad, broken by his wife's death, collects junk from the shore and it's left to Megan, who stopped going to school during the Covid epidemic, to try and persuade him to accept the Council's offer of new accommodation inland. 

Megan also does her best to take care of the scattered community living in and around the village, doing what she calls her 'rounds' visiting the old and the housebound who live in caravans on the margins of society. Her closest friend is probably her dog, Kelpy, who she rescued from the beach some years before. No-one else seems to care much for Megan, indeed many do not approves of her (in particular one of the local farmers hates her and Kelpy) - but she doesn't care much about that.

Yet is will fall to Megan, again, to step up when the local community is threatened by an evil from its past, and she may have the means to fight it.

If they'll let her.

Brogden's books always weave together the supernatural and the eerie and very practical, workaday issues. They make no bones about the presence of the weird - so here we see something very nasty emerge in an otherwise modern setting, a village beset by climate change and the kind of poverty that is increasingly common in marginal communities. Yes, there's a mystery about the 'something nasty' but Bogden shows it emerging, and something of its perspective (a perspective deeply interwoven with the reality of the place, with the drowned land under the North Sea and the drowning land that is still to be lost).

There is also a mystery about Megan (and Kelpy) who seem to be becoming the villages' protection, but we don't understand either although we see them go about their business. The story reminded me in some ways of MR James, with modern day people oblivious to the historical dangers and protections that surround them, and as liable to do the wrong thing as the right. The trouble here is, though - what is the right thing?

With many moments of danger, a salty taste of gathering evil and the ever real threat of the sea and the storms, it's hard to see how The Strandling won't end with carnage. My concern was, though, who would pay the price for that carnage?

The Strandling is a book that explores being folk horror but is I think in the end something even more complex and satisfying. 

Strongly recommended.

Review - The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door by HG Parry

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

HG Parry
Orbit, 24 October 2024
Available as: PB, 436pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356520322

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door  to consider for review.

I have been enjoying HG Parry's books, particularly how they address inequalities such as those of race, gender and colonialism, aspects of society that some strands of fantasy manage to sidestep (one might even say, some strands of fantasy seem to exist to do that).

In The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, set mainly in post Great War England, that means largely class prejudice, colonialism and patriarchy. 

Clover is a young girl growing up on a farm in Lancashire. When her brother is seriously injured on the Western Front, Clover determines to learn magic in order to discover how to help him. The magic she studies is largely the preserve of the upper classes, taught on a magical campus called "Camford" (it can only be entered from either Oxford or Cambridge). Overcoming considerable barriers merely to earn a place at Camford, Clover comes up against the reality of life as a 'scholarship witch', distinctly second rate among the gilded young things of post war England's magical elite, very few of whom are women and even fewer of whom are poor - or Northern.

Fortunately (or perhaps not as events turn out) Clover is taken up by the circle that follows Alden Lennox-Fontaine. There's a question about why they allow her such access, but Clover pushes that to the back of her mind - until she's forced to confront reality and ask what her fine friends really want.

I absolutely loved The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. Clover is a redoubtable and likeable personality, wrestling with real life dilemmas: different social circles, the pain of moving on from home to grander (maybe) things, class prejudice and guilt, and friendships. And, as then layers of truth are peeled back from England's magical world, there is the need to reckon with the crimes of the past and to admit that foundations of the glittering world - with which Clover is so enchanted - may conceal crimes and violence. As a metaphor for a colonial society it's compelling and rich.

But The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door isn't just a neat allegory for imperialism, it also features active, buzzing characters, a strong plot and an increasingly taut and thrilling denouement with Clover hunted by malign forces and forced to reckon up what she most values - and fight for it. And to recognise what may be lost.

All in all, an engaging and fun read with thought-provoking themes. I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files, 13)

Charles Stross
Little, Brown, 7 January 2025
Available as: HB, 224pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356524641

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

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do start her I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misuderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God... 

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Not so much political as, perhaps, Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's wettest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's harmless and don't read what he's producing. If they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with.

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really bad can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

For more information about A Conventional Boy, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Broken River by Chris Hammer

The Broken River (Ivan Lucic & Nell Buchanan #4) 

Chris Hammer
Headline (Wildfire), 2 January 2025
Available as: HB, 464pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035410774

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

The "Broken River" of the title gets its because it flows through a valley in New South Wales that was once ruined by uncontrolled gold prospecting. Trees were felled, farmland destroyed, the Indigenous population driven away, and the river itself redirected and channelled to serve human greed..

But the gold went away, as gold will. The Valley remains and is now peaceful - apart from ongoing friction between loggers and environmentalists. But it's not that which draws Ivan and Nell to the remote community, rather a prominent businessman has died under suspicious circumstances and the two are sent to investigate. Exactly why this death merits the attention of their high profile murder team rather than being left to the local police isn't clear, though...

I loved this novel. Hammer has established a winning formula with these books, dissecting the tensions and history of a small community where the shadow of the past is always, always shaping the present. Like previous books, the timeline moves back and forward, giving us glimpses of what set the modern day mystery in motion, but keeping the spotlight mainly on Ivan and Nell as they resolve them. The last book, Cover the Bones, also closely involved Nell whose family turned out to be involved with the mystery (but also, not to be quite the family she had thought). The Broken River builds on that family connection making the two books in some respects, I think, a little duology of their own within the series as Hammer tells us more here about Nell's origins. Given that Ivan's life has calmed down since his father's death, that is perhaps a logical development in the pairing. It's time to find out more about Nell. The past timeline has, perhaps, to strain a little to accommodate this but the drive of the plot, and the passion of the events and characters, easily carries the reader along in a story that's both exciting and baffling.

There is certainly plenty going on. The days of gold mining may, it seems, be coming back to The Valley, but, aside from the death that sets things in motion, there is a series of puzzles to be solved. Accidents, disappearances and coincidences surround the old abandoned mine. An inheritance is in play. There is a crooked lawyer who its suspected of enriching himself. And thugs from out of town seem to be taking an interest - what is their agenda? Will the new owner be the one who finally succeeds in turning this stubborn valley to profit?

The Broken River has a bit of everything - family passions, secrets, gangsters, and corruption in high places. Will Lucic and Nell be up to unravelling things...? Well, what do you think?

Marrying a fascinating setting with a vivid cast of characters, The Broken River is another excellent continuation to this series. And publishing these books in the UK in the dreariest time of the year is a stroke of genius (I write as I look out into the pouring rain) as we can live out all this drama beneath the heat of the Southern Hemisphere.

Again, the setting here is well realised and intriguing, helpfully illustrated by  another of Aleksander Ptočnik's maps (though to call these gorgeous 3D realisations "maps" doesn't really convey their nature very well). 

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