Review - The Drop by Mick Herron

The Drop (Slough House)
Mich Herron
John Murray, 1 November 2018
HB, e 104pp

TRANSMISSION BEGINS+++

I received this short report through the usual means (brown envelope through letterdrop, handoff, no contact with operative making drop - although I suspect that originating officer was codename YASSINE - recommend congratulations for excellent work).

Have reviewed contents. File contains extensive background information compiled by operative codename HERRON concerning SLOUGH HOUSE, alleged outstation of REGENT'S PARK to which deprecated operatives are consigned.

Suspect new recruit to SLOUGH HOUSE following events recorded in file LONDON RULES.

Recommend opening new file and close consideration of report at earliest opportunity upon wider distribution, currently scheduled 1 November.

TRANSMISSION ENDS+++

Well. I didn't expect this book, didn't know it was coming out, but I'm SO glad that John Murray sent me a copy.

The Drop is a novella set in the world of Herron's Slough House stories - home to the Security Service's misfits, dropouts and no-hopers (Herron's argument that people like this couldn't just be sacked, and need housed and occupied seems frighteningly plausible).

The book isn't about Slough House itself, or its collection of off-the-boil assets, though its subjects could well belong there - Solomon Dortmund, a retired spook pottering around Marylebone in his decline and ex agent John Bachelor, kept on the payroll to look after those like Dortmund, ensuring they have what they need and don't speak to the wrong people.

The joke is that Bachelor's life is in a spin and he's virtually homeless, resorting to bunking down in the ready room at Regent's Park, HQ of the Service. So when Dortmund thinks he's witnessed a drop and reports it to Bachelor, it's not exactly item number one on Batchelor's to-do list.

In many ways this is a gentle comedy of spy manners, as much about our times as it is about putting one over on the opposition. There is a real agent in play here, actually a double agent, and the way they're being handled shows old alliances shifting, the spooks looking to an uncertain future and trying to get pieces in the game with a very different Europe taking shape.

As intelligence analyst Lech (or Alec) notes "...whereas the general attitude among the boys and girls was that right would ultimately triumph, something in [his] bones sang of doom, or whispered along with the chorus... [he] couldn't entirely suppress the fear that sooner or later... they'd all fail, that their home skies would look down on cataclysm."

Against that doomy background, Herron weaves his normal spell, albeit on a smaller scale and with lower stakes. No other writer I've come across has honed a voice so well to portray a world, developing a vocabulary redolent of the closed world - "...the older knew that Spook Street, like Watling Street, runs backwards and forwards in time"as well as a wicked streak of dry humour -

" 'It was felt that Batchelor wasn't up to the job"

'Why?'

'Because he wasn't up to the job.' "

- and a disturbing insight into character. Batchelor briefly considers suicide, rejects the idea, but knows the thought will come back "...he knew that a seal had been broken, and that he'd be forced to dip into this dark jar again in the future, probably at night."

It's a book about how one is never, never out of the spying game. Even as new contests, new opportunities are born - and new fears - the old players are still in the game, if barely. and when one of them departs, " [he] had finished his journey. This had started many years before, very far away, and ended where the floor began."

One journey ends, another begins. Elsewhere in London is a fresh spy, one who, Herron suggests, will rise to the top of the game: "She was good at this, he registered... Whether she'd had this story up her sleeve, whether it had actually happened, whether she was improvising: didn't matter, she delivered it like a natural."

Endings and beginnings. Mostly there's no room here for the grey and grime of Slough House. But as Batchelor observes, leaving his refuge at Regent's Park early one gleaming, snowy morning, it doesn't stay like that for long. The grey and grime soon shows through and then your feet are soaked in slush.

If I read this book right there's one person who's soon going to get a nasty introduction to that slush, and I'm looking forward to reading more about them in Herron's next book.

Recommended if you want a little gift for Christmas to get a friend or loved on hooked on this series. Or perhaps if you want a little pre Christmas gift for yourself.

Blogtour review - The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond

The Golden Orphans
Gary Raymond
Parthian Books, 30 June 2018
PB, 155pp

Many thanks to Emma for inviting me to take part in the tour for this intriguing book.

Many years ago (the early 70s), when I was very young, my parents went off for a holiday in Cyprus. This was before the Turkish invasion of 1974, but not long before - they came back reporting hearing gunfire out in the countryside. It was close enough to the events that I can still remember my mother reacting to the news: "that's where we were!"

Forty years on, all that seems very remote - to me sitting here in England. But the reality is a divided island, displaced people and abandoned towns and even cities - alongside the hedonistic tourist trade.

Raymond embraces both these contradictory strands in his story of a painter summoned to the island for the funeral of his former mentor, Francis Benthem. In an opening scene reminiscent of Harry Lime's funeral in the The Third Many, Benthem is laid to rest with minimum ceremony, the only other attendees being a Russian businessman and his family.

Gary Raymond

The Graham Greene vibe in the book - appropriate for a divided community plagued by "grifters, gangsters and wide-boys" - is then skilfully  intercut with something I found reminiscent of the games with reality in John Fowles' The Magus, as our unnamed (I don't think he is ever identified) artist is drawn into the pulsing nightlife and confronts the nature and history of the island. Commissioned to - what exactly? - by Prostakov, the Russian who buried Benthem, our protagonist soon finds himself out of his depth.

There is a great deal going on in this book, though it's perhaps only apparent in hindsight just how much. On top of the divisions on Cyprus and their impact - such as the presence of those "Golden Orphans" - there are overtones of people-smuggling, organised crime and violence. But it's hard to pick out who the angles are - if anyone is? - until the dramatic climax.

If then. I still wasn't sure at the end what all the factions were that had been in play - which is probably realistic given the history and nature of the island itself - but what is clearer is the impact on the narrator who seems to be at a crossroads in his life and relationships. As much as the drink and drug wrecked young people in the clubs of Napa, he seems to have come to Cyprus to find a place apart from his life. Offered, perhaps, an escape he doesn't seem able to accept that (unlike Benthem). In the end I felt this narrator to be the most intriguing mystery of all (we get hints - such as his ability to "...embalm myself in morally complicated environments...") and one who isn't resolved, leaving the reader to assess what will happen next.

Raymond's writing is sharp - while this is s short book without a lot of time to develop his characters (apart from that central enigma of a painter) he repeatedly skewers a mood or setting ("there is nothing more accurate than silence") never more so than when describing the abandoned city of Famagusta, left as on one afternoon in 1974, the city my parents told me about when they returned from their holiday/

A fascinating novel about a fascinating place, with much more in it than the apparently short length would suggest.

You can buy the book at your local independent bookshop (including via Hive (UK)) or from Amazon UK, Amazon US, Waterstones, Book Depository, for NOOK or for Kobo. And probably other places besides.

Review - Someone Like Me by MR Carey

Cover design by Duncan Spilling

Someone Like Me
M R Carey
Orbit, 8 November 2018
HB, 512pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley (thank you loads Nazia!)

Someone Like Me is an intriguing mix - supernatural horror, but one that also wonderfully captures the graininess, the hard dilemmas and nagging constraints, of ordinary life; an abusive ex-husband, compromises over healthcare due to the limits of insurance, the need to earn a living in tough times.

Set in Larimer, a suburb of Pittsburgh, it's a step away from Carey's previous UK focussed books, both the fungoid zombie chronicles of The Girl With all the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge and the spooky prison drama of Fellside - though perhaps closer in atmosphere to the latter). Overall it put me in mind of Lauren Beukes' US inner city horrors The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters.  As in those, the city almost takes on the attributes of a character, throwing out bizarre paradoxes and horrors as the dark secrets of an overgrown motel in a forgotten part of town reach out to downtrodden single mother Liz Kendall and troubled teen Fran Watts.

Carey's writing is at its most chilling, though, as he brings to life in the reader's mind Liz's thoroughly unpleasant husband - her ex-husband as she keeps having to make clear - Marc. A plausible, manipulative and violent man ("Once you give yourself permission to treat the person you're supposed to one like shit on your shoe, you don't ever rescind that permission") he wore Liz down until she was only an echo of the woman he married, and despite divorce, she isn't free of him yet - his shadow hangs over much of this book.

Carey's portrayal of this man is meticulous and convincing. It's done largely through the effect on her and her kids, showing how she was changed form the person she had been ("It was the first time Liz gave up something that turned out to have been part of her own identity. A lot of surprising things faded away... her self-confidence, her sense of humour, even part of her sex drive.")

In extremis, Liz finds the ability from somewhere to fight back against Marc. But once awakened, the part of her that was able to do that just doesn't want to go away again. It - she - has plans of her own. Liz seems caught between two cunning, and ruthless personalities, either of which could destroy her or at least, her way of life. She begins to doubt her sanity, but help isn't easy to get and how much can she actually say faced with a police investigation and upcoming court battle against Marc?
While Liz has welcome support from neighbours and a police officer BeeBee, that unwelcome support from the other part of her, the one with an agenda, throws everything into jeopardy.

I really, really enjoyed Carey's portrayal of hard working, long suffering Liz,  doing her best to bring up Zac and Molly ("Zac in particular needed to be saved from [Marc's] influence, from having that poisonous macho pantomime in his line of sight every day of his life"), just about making ends meet on a low salary, having to cope with so much but never giving up. Indeed the extent of her tenacity, her love, would be hard to overstate and I can't explain why - I won't reveal what's actually going on here because a large part of the book is devoted to untangling that mystery. Liz's son Zac teams up with Fran to get to the bottom of it, because Fran's closely bound up with it too. If Liz is suffering violence and abuse in the present, Fran suffered in the past when she was kidnapped as a child. Still beset by nightmares and hallucinations, she to has tried to rebuild her life, assisted by Dr Southern at budget therapy sessions covered by her kidnapper's medical insurance.

Fran has other help, too - Lady Jinx, an armoured, sword wielding fox who's come from a kids' TV programme. Jinx is a delight to read. The way that Carey interleaves her with mundane conversations and activities, has her provide a running commentary on events and - at times - shows her as genuinely sad, wounded and grieving, is  masterpiece of writing. Jinx is as real as any other character here, even while Fran knows that she is "just" a part of her unconscious. And there are others too - like Beth, who has been through things you wouldn't be able to imagine, can never go home, and wants a place to be safe and live her life. I also liked Fran's dad, a sensible man doing his best to bring up his daughter after his wife's death.

While perhaps seeming a little slow at first (after the immediate blazing opening) this is a book to cherish and linger over: Just pay close attention, enjoy the texture of Carey's writing and take in the story - whether the daily routine of Liz's life, insights on race and high school (Zac is white, Fran in black, which features in their relationship's ups and downs), policing, life on the edge of poverty,  or just the gradual construction of the trap in which everyone here is caught. Watch for that - you'll see it closing but you might not see it... if you get my drift.

Relax and take all that, and more, in, as the sense of menace gathers and the tempo quickens, because once things pick up... just wow. You'll be clenched tighter than a clenched fist. There is danger - physical danger, moral danger, risks to relationships, risks to reputations and real damage that will take time to heal - if it can ever heal at all. Mysteries do seem become clear, but at the end, a shadow still seems to hang over Liz and Fran, and I wonder if they can ever really get clear of it?

An excellent book all round, certainly up with the best of Carey's writing to date and possibly a shade better.

Review - I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher

I Only Killed Him Once (LA Trilogy, 3)
Adam Christopher
Titan Books, 10 July 2018
PB, 224pp

I'm grateful to Titan for a review copy of this book.

This review first appeared on Shiny New Books here.

This is the final outing, as far as I'm aware (though it would be nice to have more), for Ray Electromatic, Adam Christopher's wise-cracking, Chandleresque robot detective and hitman. Ray's investigations (and assignments) are made more difficult by the fact that his memory tape only lasts for 24 hours. After that he shuts down, to be awoken by the sultry Ada, his computer-embodied secretary to "another beautiful day in Hollywood, California", with a fresh assignment and no knowledge of what's gone before.

Ray was first introduced - as detective - in Made to Kill, where, apart from cracking the case, he discovered his true nature as a killer. The pattern of revelations as to Ray's background continued in Killing is my Business (no spoilers!) so with the present book we're primed, perhaps, for the focus of the case to be on Ray, what he is, where he came from - and what his future will be.

While the stories are set in the late 50s or early 60s, some years after an attempt at introducing human-like robots - of which Ray is the last - has been dropped, Adam Christopher beautifully evokes the noirish detective classics of the 40s, both in setting and language:

"They say you should never start with the weather, but look, it was a dark and stormy night and I don't care who knows it".

I Only Killed Him Once is peppered with references to the classics, from the idea of having a man come through a door with a gun (but who, Ray wonders, said that?) to men in black suits to the diner late at night where Ray observes his latest target through the rain. (There is a repeated focus on looking in and out of windows - of various sorts - which made me thing of Edward Hopper's paintings).

There are other, more recent, references too:

'"Work of art, that is" he said. "Frame that; you could hang it in the Louvre."

"Somewhere in the back," said Philip from the memory machine.

"Hey, who cares, still the Louvre."'

I wouldn't want to give the impression, though, that this book is only enjoyable for its allusions, like some kind of puzzle. There is much more to it. I loved that way that Ray struggled with his memory limitations, still recognisably the same character even as he tells his story in a recurring, continuous present. I liked his being the same character but developing (and challenging the idea that you make a robot once, to do a  certain task perfectly, and it never changes). The curious relationship he has with Ada (who is a whole other mystery) is touching. A book like this could so easily become just a challenge - write a Chanleresque detective story who protagonist is a robot - but Christopher does so much more than that.

While, to a degree, this story is wrapping up loose ends and bringing a conclusion, Christopher gives us a good meaty plot, plenty of action and a lot of mystery. Great reading, and full of ideas, this is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy and recommended whether you like SF, crime or just want to see how the two come together.

Blogtour review - Trap by Lilja Sigurðardóttir

Trap (Reykjavik Noir, 2)
Lilja Sigurðardóttir (Translated by Quentin Bates)
Orenda Books, 18 October 2018
PB, e 230pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne for inviting me to take part in the blogtour and for letting me have an advance copy of Trap.

This is the sequel to Snare, picking up the story with the two women Sonja and Agla far apart - Sonja has fled with her young son Tómas and is hiding out in Florida - perhaps as much from her feelings about Agla as from her ex husband Adam. Agla in turn is sunk in misery, mitigated by booze and drugs, at home in Iceland. (I loved the portrayal of the ,lovesick Agla, pining for Sonja).

But things don't last that way for long.

Pretty soon Sonja's back home in Iceland - without even the chance to buy some warm clothes - and is again under the thumb of ex husband Adam "the slave driver" for whom she's required to smuggle drugs into the county.

And Agla's pulled herself out of her slough of despond. She knows she'll do some time in prison for the financial scams she took part in, but not much - a lot of the truth never came out - and she's cheered by Sonja's return, so sets about a new tranche of financial chicanery to dig herself out of the hole the first lot got her into...

I really enjoyed this pacy, well constructed novel and its three women protagonists, the third being María the police investigator who's been looking into Agla's past misdeeds. Each is, in a different way, subject to the wants and whims of powerful men - Sonja, to Adam, and the appalling Mr José (a drugs boss who keeps a tiger in his basement) and a collection of thugs and goons they employ to carry out their narco crimes, Agla to the executives in the bank she used to work for and María to her male colleagues and superiors who seem to be playing games and using her to go where they wouldn't dare tread.

Each, in their various ways, plots to get out and to get free. 

It's only though when Sonja meet Mr José's glamorous wife Nati that the chain of events begins that might shake things up.

This is a really fun book. The characters, especially Sonja, are driven from one tight corner to another with thing just seeming to get worse and worse. They make some terrible mistakes, but on the whole they're smart and sharp, doing the best they can. That makes for a satisfying and tense novel. But this book has an emotional punch too - a whole flurry of punches coming at the reader from all directions. There's Sonja's desperation at being sucked back into cocaine smuggling. There are the various relationships - Agla's desperate desire for Sonja, revealed in the blundering ways she tries to restart their romance; Sonja's protectiveness for her son; even Bragi's (the corrupt Customs man) need to make his wife's last days as comfortable and safe as he can.

And there's also the seething, scalding rage that Sigurðardóttir directs at those who trapped Iceland in the financial scandal - Agla and her ilk, but mostly the higher ups who were never brought to justice. It's not that the book is filled with rants, but we see how everyone's been hit by the crash, and what it has wrought. While the drugs smugglers portrayed here are undoubtedly evil men (mainly men) there's a question left hanging about whether others, who are no less evil and have probably caused more damage, aren't getting away unscathed.

As ever, Quentin Bates' translation conveys the story clearly in English while leaving a hint of the original, so you recognise that the story's set abroad - a difficult balance to keep.

I'd strongly recommend this book.

You can buy it here from your local independent bookshop via Hive, here from Waterstones or here from Amazon. Other suppliers are also available.

Do look out for other stops on the blogtour, there are some fantastic reviewers here!

Review - The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files)
Charles Stross
Orbit, 30 October 2018
HB, 454pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book (thanks Nazia!)

Stross's Laundry Files are now, I think, his most numerous and long lasting series, running to eight or nine novels (with The Labyrinth Index) and several novellas and short stories (depending how you count the stories in The Atrocity Archives, the first book).

While always having at its centre The Laundry itself, the UK's occult service ("occult secret service" would be a tautology, no?) which is lovingly portrayed with all its bureaucratic quirks and terrors, the books really come into their own in disassembling and rebuilding the Lovecraft mythos to fit a world of coders, geeks and cubicles. Stross has lots of fun with this (and with geek culture more generally) but there's no disguising the cosmic horror that increasingly hangs over these books.

As The Labyrinth Index opens with a particularly chilling execution scene, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is active and the Laundry has fallen, with the Black Pharaoh, N'yar Lat-Hotep, assuming power as the UK's Prime Minister. The New Management is in charge, the lesser of two evils, apparently. Well, at least it's a change from the previous Government, and should liven things up? They can't really be that bad?

I mean, things can't get any worse, can they?

Can they...?

I really take my hat off to the way Stross has followed through the logic of power politics to root his Lovecraftian singularity in a firmly credible, modern day setting. The world of the Laundry Files is not all crazed cultists in the woods but well-financed televangelists, crooked bankers and, of course, venal politicians. Very much like our own. And over the series the cast of characters in these books has expanded to reflect this, Stross introducing not only new human members of the Laundry staff but elves, vampires and superheroes too, all of it plausibly done with explanations for everything rooted in the idea that computation is magic.

In The Labyrinth Index, the Prime Minister commands His servants to investigate why the US President has gone missing. A complex, if desperate plan is devised to infiltrate the United States (with the US equivalent of the Laundry referred to as the Nazgûl, the line "One does not simply walk into Mordor" can be deployed unironically...) The activity here is underpinned by the usual meticulous degree of research, and it could, you know, all perfectly well work, given the premise of computational demonology.

Central to all this is Mhairi, the PHANG who did actually appear in The Atrocity Archives but then faded from sight for a while. She has the central role in this book, as Baroness Karnstein, the new PM's fixer but is supported by, for the first time, pretty much everyone we've met so far (including an elven vampire necromancer who's on the autistic spectrum. Great to meet you, Marisol!) In fact almost the only regular characters we see little of are Bob, who has new responsibilities as avatar of the Eater of Souls, and Mo. Hopefully they'll be back again soon but in the meantime it's good to see this story told through other eyes. Mhairi is an engaging lead, concealing a fair amount of her history from us but also clearly wracked by shock and guilt that she has to consume blood to live.

Guilt is fairly widespread in fact as the very act of submitting to N'yar Lat-Hotel takes its toll, even if He is a relatively sparing Lord. In the USA the Black Chamber have taken a different tack, and for once it's hard to argue that our friends in the Laundry are on firmer moral ground, even if the entity they deal with seems less far reaching in His evil. All choices are bad, everything leads to ruin, seems to be the subtext.

But while the world merrily rattles off to Hell in its accelerating handcart, we can still have some fun - the bone violin plays a good jig - and The Labyrinth Index serves plenty of that up, whether you're into a solid, clever plot, sly humour with a point (there's a running gag about the problems in the US - when people go to sleep, they forget who the President is, allowing his enemies to write him out of reality. So there are plenty of allusions to those who know what's going as being "awake"... but not everyone wants to be awake...) or just excellent storytelling.

At the same time, the book moves us forward into Stross's Apocalypse. The tipping point in this universe was reached, I think, a couple of books ago, but so far it hasn't been clear what exact form the catastrophe might take. Now things seem to be getting clearer, and the pace picking up.

In short this series shows no sign of tailing off, rather it seems to be getting stronger and stronger. I really can't wait to see what Stross serves up next.

Review - Hallowdene by George Mann

Design by Julia Lloyd

Hallowdene (Wychwood, 2)
George Mann
Titan Books, 18 September 2018
PB, 332pp

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Hallowdene.

In the sequel to Wychwood, Elspeth Reeves, ex London journalist returned to her roots in rural Oxfordshire, is back with a new case to investigate.

The idea of meddling archaeologists digging up something they shouldn't and unleashing dark forces isn't exactly new, but Mann handles it with aplomb, delighting in the conventions while subtlety twisting them. He gives us the eccentric villager warning of what will happen, sketches the background to the dig and brings in a whole host of rivalries and disputes that will cloud the picture - an argument over land, money problems, a rather nasty old man who won't keep his hands off waitress Daisy in the tea room, a rebellious daughter, and so on.

All in the pristine heart of rural England, overseen by the somewhat bemused DS Peter Shaw, Elspeth's sometime boyfriend.

If that makes you think of a certain long running ITV cosy crime series, I'm sure it's meant to and I mean that as no criticism. The tranquil village setting is just right to give substance and background when things begin to get dark and Mann creates a genuine air of uncertainty over just how far there really is a supernatural threat - in that respect the book is perhaps rather more nuanced than Wychwood - so the police investigation feels as though it has a real purpose, and isn't just a lot of bumbling coppers who should get out of the way so that the real facts can unfold.

It's also quite a page turner - I finished the book in a single day - and has some surprises up its sleeve before the end.  Elspeth's relationship with DS Shaw gets some focus as she weighs her options and is tempted back to the Big City by a friend with a job offer - both she and DS Shaw, who has a prospect of promotion, need to work out where their priorities lie (I'll let you guess what happens!)

The only reservation I had was the "ancient pagan traditions trope" (they are so often neither ancient nor pagan...) which I always find a little annoying - but let's be honest, it's so rife in popular culture that there's little point getting picky.

In all, then, a solid addition to what's clearly shaping up to be a series, somewhat pared down compared to Wychwood and with a creepy sense of ambiguity. This certainly deserves its place on your pre Hallowe'en reading list.