#Blogtour #Review - The Burning Stones by Antti Tuomainen

The Burning Stones
Antti Tuomainen (tran David Hackston)
Orenda Books, 24 October 2024
Available as: HB, 276pp, PB audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788329

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

Anni Korpinen is the star saleswoman at sauna stove maker Steam Devil.

But is Anni also a serial killer?

All the facts seem to suggest it. Anni's colleagues have her down as a cold-blooded killer (albeit one who employs hot steam for her murders) and local police chief Kiimaleinen is determined to make charges stick. 

Only one person believes in Anni's innocence - herself. But can she really hold out in the teeth of the evidence?

The Burning Stones was a fun book to read. It's described as comedy crime, but I think the truth is more nuanced than that - while the story does have its humorous aspects, it's a very dark humour, and the comedy arises from a desperate human predicament. The crime we see is also very, very gruesome. And the eventual revelation of who the killer is and what their motives are points less at human wickedness but at small, rather pathetic and plaintive motives - certainly compared with the nature of the killings. So it's equally a rather sad book, the record of a few days that turn Anni's world upside down, stressing all her relationships and breaking some behind repair. 

I enjoyed the way that Tuomainen throws the burden of proving her innocence on a woman who manifestly has no special talents in that line. As she repeats several times, she is a saleswoman (though a very good one) not a detective. Anni's attempts at tracking down the real killer often seem apt to land her in more trouble, and there's a murky secret in her past that makes it hard for her to be frank with (possibly) sympathetic policemen who might be willing to help - so she's very much on her own, surrounded by colleagues who mistrust her and who, lets be plain, all have questions to answer themselves.

Anni does though have one resource to fall back on - the peace she gains from her regular sauna sessions and swimming in the local lake. Many times in the story she retreats to ponder matters in the steam. But might even this, her understanding of the uses of the sauna, be evidence of her guilt? 

A real mystery, an involving and enjoyable story with well drawn and plausible characters and a tale with ratcheting tension, as Anni waits for that knock on the door, this is a book I'd strongly recommend. It's also a window onto Finnish sauna culture which was enlightening to say the least! I'd never, for example, heard about the concept of a "bumlet" (you'll just have to read the book!) I think that David Hackston's translation is brilliant here, it's as though Tuomainen is deliberately posing challenges, using colloquialisms, songs and jingles, technical terms and very specific language for which, clearly, there are no direct English equivalents and which require words to be created. Hackston deals with all this and more with aplomb and gives us a very readable text besides.

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

#Review - Dark as Night by Lilja Sigurðóttir

Dark as Night (Áróra Investigates)

Lilja Sigurðóttir (trans by Lorenza Garcia)
Orenda Books, 10 February 2024 
Available as: PB, 241pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788367

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Dark as Night  to consider for review.

I've become addicted to Sigurðóttir's fast-moving, involving series featuring Áróra and her group of friends and colleagues - Daníel, Helena and, of course, Daníel's tenant, drag queen Lady Gúgúlú.

In Dark as Night, all their lives are about to be shaken up and some answers given - though not perhaps ones we'd welcome. Áróra is still searching for her missing sister, but now news comes of a child who seems to be dead Ísafold reincarnated. And Gúgúlú has vanished din the night, leaving no word - but three menacing strangers are on her track. In both cases, Daníel finds his status as a policeman of little help.

Plus, Áróra's behaving erratically...

I love the moment in a series when he writer can trust the readers, and the characters, knowing that if things get a little strange, the latter will continue to enchant the former. The Áróra we see here isn't someone who, met for the first time, you'll necessarily want to know more about, but we have come to understand and like Áróra and so will be patient with a woman who's been through a lot. Similarly Gúgúlú has been a great support to Daníel while remaining on the margins of these stories so it's good to learn more about here, and indeed to learn things which rather blow open the nature of these stories. As to the latter, I felt there was always a bit more going on than the standard price procedural and it's good to have that confirmed, although I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers. 

Through all this, the relationship between Áróra and Daníel continues to intrigue the reader and deepen at the same time. It's not an easy one - while she may be on the side of the angels she doesn't always play by the rules, and has her own secrets, which are straining things here - but a sense does come through of two people who are at bottom devoted to one another and that each will do anything for the other. (Given the kinds of threats which arise in Sigurðóttir's Idecalnd, the latter is perhaps more a matter of when, than if, some great sacrifice will be needed).

Lorenza Garcia's translation is excellent in what must have been a challenging task given the nature of some of the content, and I would love to ask a few questions about how certain things were tackled!

For more information about Dark as Night, see the publisher's website here.

#review - Lights Out by Louise Swanson

Lights Out

Louise Swanson
Hodder, 5 September 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529396140

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

In Lights Out, Louise Swanson strikes the perfect balance between a 'high concept" thriller and a study of relationships and psychology.

Taking place, like many of Swanson's stories written both under this name and as Louise Beech, in Hull, the story is rooted in the everyday but transcends that ordinariness by having external forces impose something weird on the local population - in this case, a power outage every night, intended to save energy. Reminding me somewhat of the power cuts of the 70s, which I lived through, it also evokes the dislocation of the Covid lockdown and some of the social strains and tensions that emerged than and since (while I think not intended, I also saw some resonance with this summer's riots). So, while the main device is invented, it also feels close to recent experience.

At the centre of things is Grace, for whom the loss of light on these dark winter evenings is a huge deal because she has a terror of the dark following some murky events in her childhood (which will gradually be revealed). It doesn't help that a prowler is abroad, assaulting women when the lights are off - and that someone (whether or not the same intruder) begins to enter her house at night leave odd presents and messages. Creepy or what?

So things get very menacing very early on. In other hands, this could go very wrong - where, exactly, do you go next with the story? - but Swanson knows how to wind up the tension still further, and then stiller further, if that makes sense. There's an almost palpable strain - a kind of mental keening - as Grace attempts to balance her day job (and sometimes night - she works shifts at a hospice) with her fear of the dark, to maintain her relationship with an (obviously no-good) husband, a domineering mother and that abiding mystery (an element of which is that her dad went missing when she was a kid). Honestly, at times I had to put the book down and just BREATHE, so tense does it get. But I never left it sitting there for long.

A book with a strong sense of how hurts from the past can fester - a major theme is the need to remember and confront, and to resist the easy solution of forgetting - and of how parents can mess up their kids' lives (they may not mean to but they do) this is also a taut, nailbitting thriller yet has many tender moments. You'll be rooting for Grace, I guarantee. This is Louise Swanson at the top of her game.

For more information about Lights Out, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans

Small Bomb at Dimperley
Lissa Evans
Doubleday, 5 September 2024
Available as: HB, 309pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857528292

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Small Bomb at Dimperley to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Small Bomb at Dimperley sees Lissa Evans returning to 1940s England with a new novel set just after the end of the Second World War. It’s a standalone, not part of the same sequence as Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and V For Victory although many of the same themes are here. We see the improvisational quality of life, especially for those on the margins (here, a woman who has to make her way through a world that doesn't want to admit she exists - or wouldn't if it knew that she was a single mother). We see people making do, adapting, living the hands they've been dealt. 

And we see them triumphing in odd, unexpected ways - even remaking themselves, admidst the societal dislocation and change of the war years and the immediate and postwar. 

Also evident is Evans’s ease with the setting and atmosphere as she unfolds her story in a decade that now seems so remote and different. It's only twenty years before I was born, but so much seems strange. It's not just distance in time, but a particular moment. The war is over, the future has not yet begun. A tide of change is poised, an Empire about to be dismantled - but it hasn't begun yet. The country is balanced, many wishing for a return to older ways, others already taking advantage of the new. I say Evans does this with ease, that isn't really fair, it must of course have  have taken fearsome amounts of research, of empathy, but to me the story feels very real (as did her earlier novels).

 

Small Bomb at Dimperley is set in rural Buckinghamshire. It's imbued with the rhythms and incidents of  a vanished world: ploughing competitions, knackers’ vans, market days that fill country towns with animals and farmers in damp tweed, a decaying country house, a decaying, cash-strapped gentry. The story follows the minorly aristocratic family which lives in that house and which has, due to an accumulation of deaths, ill-advised investments, and social change, come to the end of its financial road. They now face having to sell up. As a reader I had mixed feelings about that. These country houses and estates were often built on cleared villages, using wealth earned from exploitation abroad. Irene, ("My Lady") the dowager of the family (one of the dowagers - it's complicated) almost invites the thought: serves her right, as she looks down on the lower orders and plots an entitled future by marrying Valentine off to an heiress. 

Almost invites it. The redeeming quality of Irene is her tender care for her son, a young man who has a learning disability. The matter of fact moments between the two as they live their days are very touching. And Ceddy - Cecil - isn't a token figure here, he is a vital part of things.

Also appearing are Valentine, the reluctant heir to Dimperley, invalided out of the Army to manage the ruin that has been made of the family's finances and Zena, a no-nonsense young woman employed as secretary to eccentric Alaric. (He's writing a history of the family, which nobody will read). Zena has in effect found refuge at Dimperley, as will Priss and Kitty, Valentine's nieces, back from evacuation in the USA and full of modern ideas about showers and deodorant. Their mother, Barbara, occupies an uneasy space between Irene's disapproval and the adolescent scorn of her daughters. 

This is a gallery of smart, opinionated characters though they probably need an entire country house at their disposal or they'd all murder each other by page 2, and it isn't that sort of book at all. As it is, they have some space and Evans honours them all, pulling off what I always feel much be the most difficult trick a novelist can, persuading the reader to be interested in, and even sympathetic to, people who in real life one would avoid on principle. This is how we enter minds and hearts and begin to understand and appreciate others. This is the wonder of a great storyteller.

Small Bomb at Dimperley is a vivid, active book whose pages simply fly by. It has a subtle perspective combining as it does the outsider's critique of a society and a family - Kitty, Zena - the staunch traditionalist's defence of both - Alaric, Irene - and the pragmatism that just wants to keep the show on the road (Valentine, Barbara). It's not a social history, but at the same time, does tell us something about that pivotal time, about the choices that were made then, and about how they have cascaded down the years to influence the county we live in (well, that I live in) today.

There's also romance, a certain degree of growing-up, and a few shocks and surprises.

It is a wonderful read, great fun, and, in an undemonstrative way, rather moving.

For more information about Small Bomb at Dimplerley, 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 Small Bomb at Dimperley from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones. Other online retailers are available.

#Blogtour #Review - Living is a Problem by Doug Johnstone

Living is a Problem (Skelfs, #6)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 12 September 2024
Available as: PB, 276pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788268

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

Living is a Problem sees the Skelf women - grandmother Dorothy, mother and daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah - perhaps face their toughest trial yet in this series. And if you've been following the brilliant #SkelfSummer recap of the previous 5 books, you'll know that's saying something.

The challenges that confront the three here don't arise, at least not directly, from perplexing mysteries. If you've read any of the earlier Skelf books you'll know that the family are undertakers in Edinburgh, but also private investigators. Naturally, the latter role can create complex scenarios to unravel, and there are some of those here. The funeral of an Edinburgh gangster, disrupted by parties unknown. The grave of a child disturbed. A missing woman, a refugee from Ukraine.

For once though, these cases are "solved" fairly straightforwardly. There isn't a lot of subtle detecting. But in these books, and never more so that in Living is a Problem, just establishing the facts is only the beginning. The harder part of the Skelfs' work only begins after that. The cases aren't really "solved" till parties are reconciled; difficult decisions made; compromises reached. Because it's not really about the crime, it's about the opposite of crime, to paraphrase the title of the last book, The Opposite of Lonely. Peace is not the same as the absence of war. How will the networks of people affected by all these events learn to live with themselves - and with each other - after what's come out?

That question hangs heavy over Living is a Problem from the start. The Skelfs, and their associates - Archie, Brodie, Thomas - still have to reckon with the events of the earlier books. Dorothy's and Thomas's relationship has been particularly strained after the dangers and violence in The Opposite of Lonely. Thomas has taken things hard. The antagonists in that book, corrupt police Webster and Low, have been taken down, but continue to exert a malign influence. Hannah, knowing that her father was a wrong'un, still mourns him and the life that she and Jenny might have had if he had been a decent man. It's complicated. Living is a problem, as Scottish band Biffy Clyro sang, Because Everything Dies. To which I might oppose Bruce Springsteen singing Everything dies, baby, that's a fact, But maybe everything that dies some day comes back. (Sorry, I am going to work The Boss into any review I can, of course I am). 

To be less oblique, the funeral side of the Skelf business might seem like the last word in finality - what is more final than death - but this book teases the idea that due to our interrelatedness, death is not the end. A dead child affects the living, and how we deal with the death may be important. Or how we fail to deal with it. Death has a way of fossilising, of sanctifying, from Old Dead White Guy statues in Edinburgh which belie the deeds of those men (they are always men) to the trouble of living with the legacy of a war hero in the family to dealing with unacknowledged grief.

And that is really the essence of the Skelf books. It may be convenient to see them as crime fiction, because I'm not sure there's a label for what they really are - moral fiction? human fiction? Something like that? Whatever it is has at its heart the wonderfulness and the sadness of being human and the need to be on the side of those in need. That's what the Skelfs are about and long may they continue it.

For more information about Living is a Problem, 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 Living is a Problem from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones. Other online retailers are available.

#Review - The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Seventh Veil of Salome

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Arcadia, 6 August 2024 
Available as: HB, 312pp, audio, e   
Source: Purchased
ISBN(HB): 9781529431001

The Seventh Veil of Salome is a clever juxtaposition of the story of Salome, daughter of Herodias who is the wife of the tetrarch Herod Antipas in first century Palestine, and Vera Larios, a Mexican actress in 1950s Hollywood who has been chosen to portray Salome in a sword-and-sandals epic.

The background of the historical Salome is one of power politics involving Ancient Rome and its client states. Rome is expanding its influence but not yet ruling absolutely. Its allies and collaborators therefore need to tread carefully, and Herod is concerned about a fiery preacher who been denouncing his rule (and morals). Salome, however, by Jokanaan...

Larios also inhabits a complex world. She has come into an increasingly paranoid Hollywood, a place  stalked by the House Un-American activities Committee and still subject to the Puritan moral hypocrisy of various self-appointed censors but also one, haunted by racism (Larios, as a Mexican, is firmly an outsider and looked down on). Things are starting to change as the studio system declines, but this uncertainty only makes everyone even more insecure. Gossip sheets exploit this, trading in innuendo and stereotypes.

Beyond this dichotomy, the book is structurally fascinating since the film Larios is involved in is clearly the same "story" as that which the Salome sections tell (for example, some of the dialogue echoes). But the story is being rewritten as the book progresses (in a late episode, we hear the screenwriter describing the closing scene as he would have had it, the studio bosses having insisted on somethings else). The historical Salome's life is not, therefore, fixed, but mutable, a matter of contention and at the mercy of those same prejudices, Puritan constraints and political and commercial imperatives that rule Hollywood itself. That's appropriate for a character being portrayed by another woman, Vera, who is in turn manipulated and (mis)represented by family, publicists, witnesses, and the Press.

Witnesses? I use that word because while there are lengthy narrative sections where the camera follows Vera (if I can use that analogy) of Samole, there are also interventions in the voice of the many characters who play a part in this story - other actresses and studio figures, for example, and people who were lucky or unlucky enough to witness the events - and they all have their own spin, often informed (again) by prejudice and jealousy. 

Vera has - as soon become evident - stepped into a nest of vipers, with others convinced that she doesn't merit the part - or that she doesn't, morally, deserve it. A Mexican? Surely not! The outworking of jealously and resent meant in an industry that embodies whim and fashion is both fascinating to see unfold and awful to anticipate, giving a real edge of noir as scenes unfold in seedy hotel rooms and down-at-heel diners, all leading up to... well I don't want to be spoilery... all leading up to the inevitable conclusion in the final reel. As a nasty chain of events unfold, innocents will be caught up, reputations ruined and the truth left to wither.

All in all and exciting, complex and atmospheric novel with a steely core of accusation.

For more information about The Seventh Veil of Salome, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell et al

The Witches of World War II

Paul Cornell (words), Valeria Burzo (pencils), Jordie Bellaire (colours)
TKO Studios, 25 July 2023
Available as: PB, 160pp, e
Source: Purchased
ISBN(PB): 9781952203183

The Witches of World War II tugs at one of the many loose threads of that conflict - persistent rumours that alongside the familiar heroism, sacrifice and application of industry and science to winning the war, alongside the more shadowy departments of unorthodox warfare and military deception, the Allies used even stranger means - notably witchcraft.

You don't have to accept the supernatural or the power of magic to see that this is something that could really happen. Deep in the layers of psyops, it would surely have registered that at least some high-ranking Nazis fervently believed this stuff, and that very belief could be used against them. 

That paradox is at the heart of The Witches of World War II. Cornell has assembled here a crack team of practitioners and theorists from the occult world of the first half of the 20th century, and posed a "what if...?" about their potential use in warfare, and beyond that, about the nature of their own beliefs and the power of belief itself. Cornell acknowledges, as does the Afterword by Prof Ronald Hutton, that this group never actually met (unless the records of that meeting have been even more than carefully weeded) but we might imagine similar characters carrying out the actions described here, some of which are based on those persistent rumours...

So the premise is intriguing. That wouldn't though be enough, without Cornell's excellent story and its interpretation by the brilliant comic artists here, to produce the immersive and fun narrative that The Witches of World War II is. I felt it captured the spirit of that dangerous time, all done in muted khaki, green, brown and grey, as it introduces us not just to the would-be witches themselves but also to their world. That world includes the would-be upper class Quislings and fellow-travellers who would have sold their country out at the drop of a hat, if they could. Against these fifth-columnists, our hero, Doreen Valiente, shows steely nerve as she negotiates a maze of mirrors, never sure who is going to back her and who will betray her. 

A sceptic herself, Doreen encounters dangers including a curse that can only affect those who don't believe, and slippery customers like Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed Wickedest Man in the World. (Who, exactly, believes that they are themselves wicked? I was reminded of the "are we the baddies" sketch...) The double crosses, hints of things below the surface build tension, with the poignancy of Doreen's lost sweetheart giving the story real bite by reminding us that this isn't all some fantasy, that regardless of the occult and its reality or otherwise, real people suffered and died in those years.

With a complex plot, many twists and turns and layers of deception, it all makes for a rewarding read, with just that hint of mystery as to what really went on...

For more information about The Witches of World War II, see the author's website here.