#Blogtour #Review - The Reunion by M. J. Arlidge and Steph Broadribb

The Reunion

M. J. Arlidge and Steph Broadribb

Orion, 5 September 2024

Available as: PB, 304pp audio, e   

Source: Advance e-copy

ISBN(PB): 9781398716575

I'm grateful to the publisher for sgiving me access to an advance e-copy of The Reunion to consider for review, and to Tracy and Compulsive Readers for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Oh this one is very good. 

It's set in the town of Whitecross, somewhere in the English Chiltern Hills. I think I know where the real Whitecross is - that isn't of course its actual name - and the authors bring to life the character of this district, protected for its natural beauty and riddled with twee little villages, but also full of new housing estates and also surpsingly deprived town centres where depressed youth find an escape in the time honoured ways: drink, drugs and sex. 

This is Jennie Whitmore's world. Jennie never left Whitecross: her dreams of doing so shattered when her beloved friend Hannah vanished as they were on the cusp of escape. Instead, Jennie has hung around, and decades later she is a DI in the same town. Interesting - did she simply lose heart and never leave? Or, unconsciously, did she hang around, choosing a career that might one day give her an opportunity to find out what happened to Hannah? If so, she is still shocked when that possibility crystallises. This occurs suspiciously soon after her unwise experiment of joining in a school reunion. (Personally, I stay away from such things). Has the reunion jolted something among the little group of "friends"? Or was the clock already ticking?

The resulting investigation will see Jeannie throwing away beliefs she's held for three decades, taking uncharacteristic risks, and running into danger. I found it absolutely gripping how she justified, and undertook, an investigation she absolutely shouldn't be part of (her closest friend!) and the effect that doing so has on her relationships with her colleagues (she hardly has any friends). The impact of what is discovered, and Hannah's way of opening it up, will shatter the little group who see themselves as Hannah's mates from all those years ago, bring secrets into the open, and change Whitecross for ever.

It will also change Hannah's life. This is not a story - at least I don't think it is - that can kick off a series of small-town mysteries. I can't see Hannah returning to this dark Midsommer any time soon. Too mush will have changed. I did though find myself desperately hoping that things would turn out well for her in the end, I don't recall a recent main character I've so wished would come through unscathed - though this seems increasingly unlikely as the story proceeds...

Arlidge and Broadribb are at the top of their game (their games?) in this collaboration, a book that demands to be read in a single sitting if you can possibly manage that.

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

#Review - The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Banner

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank

Megan Bannen
Orbit, 4 July 2024
Available as: PB, 380pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521923

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of The Undermining of Twyla and Frank to consider for review.

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank is set in the same world as The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, which wowed me last year, and is a fantasy romance in the same vein.  

And, yes, we do bump into Mercy Birdsall and Hart Ralston and their circle again here, although they're not the main characters in this book. That would be Twyla Banneker and Frank Ellis. They are partners, Tanrian Marshals employed to police that strange space, once a prison for gods, that opens from the island of Bushong, part of the Federated Islands of Cadmus. Now, after the events of The Undertaking of Hope and Mercy, the drudges (zombies) that threatened Bushong from Tanria are gone, and some are even questioning the need for the Marshals. But there are other threats in Tanria, and assets there to be guarded, as Twyla and Frank are about to find out.

I loved this book. The comfortable relationship between middle-aged Twyla and Frank - work, but not life, partners - is realistic and well portrayed, their lives to this point sensitively sketched with all their pluses and minuses. A failed marriage. A dead spouse. New lives rebuilt, the best made of things. Children to nurture and see over the threshold of adulthood. The backgrounding of hopes and dreams in the face of practical concerns - money, health, family. As a result we have two beautifully drawn and largely content characters...

...who are about to have their cosy world turned upside down in a blaze of conspiracy, murder - and dragons.

It was both moving, and hilarious, to see how Twyla and Frank cope with the various eruptions into their lives that follow from what's brewing in Tanria. These are both large and small. There's the fact of a totally unexpected and previously mythological species of creature. There's crime. There are new colleagues - in this case a dangerously sexy scientist who upsets what turns out to have been a carefully balanced relationship that only survived by not asking certain questions, not thinking certain things. But, it seems that relationship rested on certain assumptions, and once these are challenged it's clear that for Twyla and Frank, nothing will ever be the same again.

Oh, and just who's trying to blow the pair up?

In some ways, Twyla and Frank have very ordinary lives. In some ways, they are very extraordinary people. But once the balance of the ordinary is upset, will they ever find it again? Will they even want to?

STRONGLY recommended. More like this, please.

For more information about The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze by Tom Mandrake, DJ Ben Ha Meen and Mellow Brown

Purple Haze

DJ Ben Ha Meen and Mellow Brown (writers), Tom Mandrake (artist)
Titan Comics, 27 August 2024
Available as: HB, 128pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787731899

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the graphic novel's blogtour.

From the publisher

This is a pure rock and roll space opera featuring the legendary Jimi Hendrix as you’ve never seen him before. 

Fully sanctioned by Experience Hendrix L.L.C.; Authentic Hendrix, LLC - this is the first ever full-length graphic novel inspired by the music of the legendary Jimi Hendrix – arguably the world’s greatest guitarist. 

This 21st Century psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll odyssey sees Jimi Hendrix embark on a quest to the very centre of the universe in search of a magical talisman powerful enough to unlock the incredible latent power of his music so that he can share it with a universe starved of the rock ‘n’ roll by a tyrannical intergalactic force hellbent on silencing all music from the universe and enslaving all life. 

What I thought

Space opera. Rock opera. Seemingly unrelated genres which the collaborators behind this graphic novel nevertheless pull together with aplomb. The result is great as an example of each, but put together, something much more.

Yes, we get zoomy spaceships, vivid alien worlds, combat and awesome vistas, that genuine sense of wonder that space opera must deliver. But we also get what is actually - so far as such a thing is possible - a pretty vivid visualisation of a musical high (is that a thing? I think it's a thing) as the central character here, Hendrix, takes to the stage on a galaxy-crossing tour. Lyrics stream by in a kind of diagetic cloud. The music ignites in the intense shades of a fiery sun, blazing across the page. At once, deeply SFnal, deeply musical.

But, as I said, there is more here too. The story finds Hendrix, mysteriously, playing on an endless tour in this far-future dystopia. The how and why of that's never explained, but that doesn't actually loom large in the story and it doesn't really matter. Rather we have this guitar hero pushing his message of peace and brotherhood in a galaxy embroiled in brutal war. He's doing all he can, he thinks.

But of course he's not (I had vibes here of Springsteen's No Surrender "There's a war outside still raging/ You say it ain't ours anymore to win" and there's a moment of realisation with attempts to coop the tour  for sinister purposes, a moment of truth and decision which leads to a fascinating quest. The ultimate test here is then very much one of those "surely there must be another way?" setups where, behind the spaceships and the zooming, the point is that the hero must, will, reject the constraints imposed on them and do the different thing. The Kobayashi Maru moment, in Star Trek language.

And who better, in such a moment, to use their humanity, their sympathy, their courage, than Jimi Hendrix?

A fine graphic novel with a powerful, beating heart. Recommended.

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

#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.