Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Ring the Bells by CK McDonnell

Ring the Bells (Stranger Times, 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Shy Girl by Mia Ballard

Shy Girl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - The Bone Raiders by Jackson Ford

The Bone Raiders

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

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

I loved The Bone Raiders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - House of Splinters by Laura Purcell

House of Splinters

Laura Purcell
Raven Books, 9 October 2025
Available as: HB, 349pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781526627230

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

House of Splinters is a bewitching ghost story, a return to the world of The Silent Companions and a prequel of sorts, its events set at the end of the 18th century and drawing on the same, early 16th century background, as a young couple, Belinda and Wilfrid Bainbridge, attempt to make The Bridge their home.

Ancestral taint is thick here. There is not only the history of witch Anne Bainbridge, but a vivid implication of the present-day Bainbridges benefiting from colonial rapacity. Wilfrid's black sheep brother has been employed by the East India Company. Belinda's father and brother are engaged in the West Indies trade, with all the implications of that. And Wilfrid himself is, with whatever handwringing, about to turn the villagers off the common so that he can enclose it for wheat.

That background of cursed wealth is reflected in a panoply of gothic horror that strikes the family and their servants. Belinda is already predisposed to fear the house, after events five years before when her sone was born there, and she soon recognises that its malice is particularly directed at her and her newborn, Lydia. But what is the cause of that malice, and can it be placated? 

I really enjoyed this book. A good example of the gothic is, in my experience, quite rare. It's not enough to deploy the trappings - the bumps in the night, the isolated location, the sudden scares - you need to build, and continually deny, that growing atmosphere of claustrophobia and suppressed panic. Purcell is one author who can reliably do this with her novels that leverage the position of women in a patriarchal society into a fraught sense of confinement (literal in Belinda's case with the use of that term as she approaches childbirth). House of Splinters is a brilliant example of that, Lydia unable to take the actions she needs due to matters of convention, money and status, not least the patriarchal headship of her husband (however nice a man he may seem to be).

I sensed a little touch here of Wilkie Collins in the way that Belinda's plight isn't only due to the supernatural, but she is also trapped by societal conventions and mysogyny, but also in the strength and resourcefulness she shows in seeking to protect herself and her children. And the novel ends on an eerie, threatening hint of what's to come in the future.

All in all, an exciting, frightening and atmospheric book, perfect for the dark nights.

For more information about House of Splinters, see the author's website here.

Review - The Echo of Crows by Phil Rickman

The Echo of Crows (Merrily Watkins 18)

Phil Rickman
Corvus, 6 November 2025
Available as: HB, 309pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9781786494627

It's generally acknowledged that there are more books out there than one can possibly read in a lifetime. As a reader, this might amount to a bit of a memento mori. My own attitude has evolved through a number of phases. As a very young reader, I wasn't aware that there was a body of books already written, and a cadre of authors writing more. I devoured what I wanted from the shelves, and didn't bother too much about where the supply came from. 

As I grew older (and, perhaps, once I had more money to spend) I became aware that some authors (PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens) were dead and gone and there was a finite supply of their work (explaining the song and dance around unfinished and rediscovered works - Edwin Drood, or the half-finished Arthur Ransom story Coots in the North). I also became aware that others were still alive and writing and emitting the hardbacks I could now afford, generally at the rate of one per year, creating anticipated events in my reading calendar.

And then, inevitably, one of those authors would die, leading to a sort of reading bereavement, the encounter with the last novel. Another sort of momento mori. Reginald Hill. Terry Pratchett. Graham Joyce. Ursula K LeGuin. Christopher Priest. You'll have your own list. Most recently, for me, it was Phil Rickman. But in Rickman's case - and consonant with his having chronicled the uncanny, the liminal, the not-quite-dead - I became aware a couple of months back that there was another book by him out, and this made me so happy.

The Echo of Crows is, clearly, the last book featuring Merrily Watkins, exorcist to the Church of England diocese of Hereford, dweller on the Welsh/ English border (and on other borders, too). Merrily's drawn into strange events in Longtown, a remote village where, fifteen hundred years ago, a local king was murdered. Huw Owen believes that there's evil abroad in Longtown, and, truly, there has been a modern murder too which Frannie Bliss and his lover Annie are looking into. Jane gets involved too, in a sub-plot involving hangings and their legacy.

It's a satisfyingly convoluted story, as ever, with links picked out between historic evils and current day concerns (the housing shortage, offcomers buying up property, the drugs trade) and framed around the contemporary church's love-hate relationship with the "woo-woo". Huw's on the verge of quitting, Merrily, as ever, is aware of the ambivalence of smooth archdeacon Siân and of the diocesan authorities to her special calling - but also of the appeal, to modern seekers of something, well, a little more rooted, than traditional expressions of belief. 

Convoluted, as ever, and dark, as ever, but perhaps not quite as dark? This superb series has never flinched from darkness, but in this final part, the threat (there is a sense of threat) is perhaps less directly focussed on Merrily, something coming for her, as it is an outcropping, a problem in the field to be dealt with. That's a positive, I think, and a choice, not Rickman running out of steam, and the result is a sort of psychological space here that allows The Echo of Crows to draw together, to a degree, threads that have run through this series: Merrily's spiritual struggles, Lol's career, their ambiguous relationship but also Annie's relationship with her dead father, her and Frannie's future, and Jane and Eirion's on-off whatever-it-is. 

No, Jane hasn't saved Ledwardine from the developers (yet) or solved the mystery of its ancient roots, but some mystery is always necessary, don't you think? And, in the end, The Echo of Crows seems to be saying that there is always more light to be found here, and we should keep searching for that.

May Mr Rickman rest in peace, and rise in glory. Until then, his books are an excellent monument to him.

For more information about The Echo of Crows, see the publisher's website here.