Review - Like a Bullet by Andrew Cartmel

Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803367941

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

The return of Cordelia Stanmer, aka The Paperback Sleuth (she's had cards made and everything) is always welcome. Unlike her counterpart in the world or rare record collecting, Cartmel's Vinyl Detective, Cordelia's got few scruples (she's certainly up for a bit of burglary) when it comes to securing down a rare, pristine paperback volume, so life is always exciting when she's around. These books are a third mystery, a third scavenger hunt, and, perhaps, the other third has a distinct flavour of mild hedonism, Cordelia employing her gains in the pursuit of pleasures both licit and... not. 

In Like a Bullet, Cordelia's been engaged by wealthy, retired rock star Erik Make Loud (known to those who've been reading the Detective's adventures) to locate a copy of the legendary 1960s novel Commando Gold. This is a book so rare that online wars break out over whether it even exists. How can she resist that challenge (and the promised reward for achieving it)? 

Especially since, on acquiring the previous books in the series, she finds them eminently readable (not really what she'd expected from an author called "Butch Raider").

As ever, though, Cordelia doesn't really know what she's getting into. Someone really, really doesn't want that book found. There's more at stake here than a musty, mouldering volume of war stories. Soon, she' dodging a very determined enemy... one very familiar with the kinds of techniques described in the books.

As ever, I had great fun with Cartmel's latest. Cordelia's a very distinct, very well-formed character, more of a loner than the Detective (while she eventually has to ask for help in this story from her ex hard-man landlord Edwin, she generally handles things herself rather than travelling with an entourage like the Detective). She's a planner, often (but not always) one step ahead of everyone else. She inhabits the same slightly raffish south west London. Cartmel also has a good eye for location and geography, mapping out backstreets, pubs and routes into and out of London, as well as giving us glimpses of the strange characters (never quite too strange to be believable) who live there.

An excellent addition to the series.

For more information about Like a Bullet, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss

The Second Chance Cinema

Thea Weiss
HarperCollins, 7 October 2025
Available as: PB, 320pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008769185

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

Ellie and Drake seem very different, but complementary to one another - she a cataloguer of vanishing places, always on the lookout for the quirky, the picturesque, the vintage, he a construction expert, safe and reliable, always fixing things. So, in many ways an ideal couple.

As the two plan their marriage, however, both worry about secrets they are keeping. 

And then one night, as Ellie (of course) leads them off the beaten track, they stumble across a hidden cinema with its own, special, midnight show - The Story of You. Those secrets will be revealed, and the two will have to face some uncomfortable truths.

I adored The Second Chance Cinema. I always think there's something magical about a cinema, something liminal as one steps out of one's normal life for a while. The darkness. The anticipation. It's especially magical when you have the whole place to yourself - as though the world has, just for a brief while, bent itself around you. For Ellie and Drake, that's literally true as they attend showing after showing, taking each of them deeper and deeper into their backstories - and revealing their pasts to each other.

This is a brilliant way to tell how two people came to be who they are, and to expose the dilemmas and tensions they now face. Across the screen flit parents, siblings, childhood insecurities, teenage angst, lovers, breakups, and betrayals. "To know all is to forgive all" runs the old saying, but will that be true for Ellie and Drake? Rather, it seems likely that with more perfect knowledges comes judgement, misunderstanding and pain. Yes, you may see what happened to your lover on a certain night ten years before, but will you understand? And are they the same person now as they were then? Is it fair to judge them on that past?

As the showings continue, the revelations affect Ellie and Drake, with things done, or left undone, in the past reaching out and putting their lives and relationship in question. Ellie's fears that she can't recapture her best work, and Drake's frustration that instead of building lovely, bespoke homes he's working on cookie-cutter residential boxes, tangle with family tensions and past relationships to make this a complex but rich account of a couple's situation. At the same time there's a good sprinkling of magical Christmas sparkle and humour to lighten the more intense moments.

All in all I found The Second Chance Cinema a compelling read - Weiss takes her fantastical premise and grounds it sufficiently enough that it seems real, with the authentic consequences for Ellie and Drake. It is in some ways an unsettling story, with real challenges for the couple, but it's one I had to keep reading - a "what if" that I had to follow to the last page.

For more information about The Second Chance Cinema, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Cold House by AG Slatter

The Cold House

AG Slatter
Titan Books, 7 October 2025
Available as: HB, 160pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781835412541

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

Though set in modern Britain rather than her fantasy Sourdough world, in The Cold House Slatter explores similar themes to her recent fantasy novels - here we meet a woman left somewhat alone and struggling to understand her place in the wider world. Everly'd had her share of tragedy. there is a mystery about her early life which Slatter only gradually shares, and more recently, she's lost a husband and child. When we meet Everly at the beginning of the story, she reached the "attacking strangers in supermarkets" stage of grieving, something which rather shakes her out of herself and forces her to seek help.

Though the help proves to be a recommendation to get away from it all by spending a few days at an isolated, spooky house on a remote island. That leads Everly into a somewhat folk horror chain of events which moves quickly from the charming and quaint to the downright terrifying. As we learn how she handled those earlier, terrifying events in her life, the question looms: does that make her a survivor, or a betrayer? Will she be able to summon the strength to push through, or will things, this time, just be too much?

The Cold House is a cracking read, a short book but one with terrific pace. Slatter is perfect at judging what her readers need in the book, and where gaps will be filled in. That means we don't get reams of back information about Everly's harrowing earlier years, for example, or about the history of YYY Manor, just essential nuggets which are really quite enough. But there is a beautifully told account of Everly's very real distress and sense of dislocation at the start of the book (if "beautiful" is an appropriate word for a portrayal of such distress; I couldn't find a more apt one). 

The pace also feels natural, I think, as the book moves from an initial paralysing situation to exploration to that to a real, pounding, action-y conclusion as Everly's forced to fight for her own identity - and to choose who, and what, she will trust. Her quick decisions will result in lasting consequences and we have to hope that those will be results that she can live with. I felt that the ending contained a delicious ambiguity here, and wondered if things were, indeed, over? I suppose time will tell!

I'd strongly recommend The Cold House, if you haven't read any of Slatter's stuff before this standalone would be a good place to take the temperature, as it were.

For more information about The Cold House, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour Review - A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir

A Lethal Legacy
Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 20 September 2025
Available as: PB, 234pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586023

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of A Lethal Legacy to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Nothing has changed at Bjargarlækur for as long as anyone can remember – so are moves to bring change to this remote farm in the Icelandic countryside a motive for murder? Three elderly siblings have lived more or less peacefully in this isolated place their whole lives, until Brynjólfur is found dead in his own bed. Called on to help out at the farm, freelance journalist Alma is far from certain that the old man died a natural death. Determined establish the facts of the matter, she finds herself caught up in a vicious family feud. Sisters Klara and Thórdís are unable to agree on the future of the farm, just as others with an interest in the place circle hungrily around them. Echoes of missed opportunities, lost love and age-old crimes surface as a reckoning takes a bitter toll on those left behind – and Alma struggles to get to the truth.

Journalist Alma and her husband Gunnar have just embarked on renovating the wreck of a house they've bought. However a most dramatic call from daughter Gunnhildur summons Alma away to a remote farmhouse. (One of the minor delights of this novel is how - from off, as it were - Gunnar, left back at home, continually reports to Alma that he's found a new problem - the floor, the windows, the heating - that will require either a tradesman he can't find, materials they hadn't budgeted for, or indeed, a complete change of plan about layout. But he never loses his enthusiasm! It'll all be fine!). Gunnhildur, a nurse who needed some time away from things after splitting from her boyfriend, reports that the elderly man she was caring for alongside his two sisters has been found dead. She worries she may be blamed for mixing up Brynjólfur's meds, and asks her mum to come out and support Gunnhildur and her own toddler daughter Una.

This is Alma's intro to the isolated community at Bjargarlækur. Soon she's in the thick of investigating Brynjólfur's death, partly to help Gunnhildur - though dear Daughter happily scarpers part way through the story as Boyfriend has appeared again - but mostly, one senses, from a prickling of her journalist's thumbs and from sheer burning curiosity.

It's a tangled tale that emerges. The siblings were at war with one another. Brynjólfur and Klara, one of the surviving sisters, wanted to preserve the farm and turn into a museum of old Iceland. In a country that has experienced rapid change one can see why this might be worthwhile. (Another of the joys of A Lethal Legacy is the glimpses of that older Iceland that we get in the stories from the sisters and some of their neighbours. One is left in no doubt how much these remote communities were required to be self-sufficient, and the echoes of that run forward to some extent into the present of the novel, with the police remote and the authorities slow to intervene in the escalating situation).

The other sister, Thórdís, was though dead set against the museum idea. Complicating the picture is the presence of a younger couple to whom the farm has been let, and who may or may not be a pair of ne'er do wells. All sorts of accusations are thrown - Slaughtering the sheep! Selling the cows! Brewing moonshine! Behind them are suspicions they may have their eyes on the place, perhaps in a stitch-up with local authorities.

Once the possibility of murder is added to this mix of family dissension, greed and a gossipy local community - a great deal is to be gleaned from the local priest and the doctor - and Alma's shut in at the lonely, slightly spooky, house - one may well expect almost anything to happen. And there is drama. The sense though that something is rubbing under the surface is an even greater source of tension, the contrast with the bleak, static landscape and the changeless decades that the siblings have lived at Bjargarlækur only adding to this.

Is that impression of calm, of retreat, misleading though? 

At its heart a story of family secrets, A Lethal Legacy manages to be both truly Gothic, with the possibility that not everything going in totally natural, and also a fine, taut crime thriller. Alma's rather out on a limb in conducting any sort of investigation here and she lacks institutional backing to ask questions or poke around, having to rely on the sisters' goodwill (which is in short supply) and her de facto position as their nurse/ carer, to gather facts. 

As she does so it slowly becomes apparent that there is more going on here than you'd expect. With a parallel strand of the story focussing on possible past abuse affecting a member of her own family, and the differing attitudes of the sisters resulting in contradictory accounts of their earlier lives, there's a difficult jigsaw for Alma to assemble. She is, though, nothing if not determined.

I really enjoyed this story. The brooding, remote setting is a fitting location for dark deeds. Klara and Thórdís are magnificent characters, well drawn. Neither is exactly likeable - though by the end of the book one knows enough about them to forgive a lot - but they are a great double act. Alma is determined to reach the truth, at first to protect her daughter, but later, it seems, from sheer bloody-mindedness. And as I've said, the glimpses of Icelandic history and culture are fascinating.

As ever, Quentin Bates' translation sparkles, catching the very different characters of the individuals at the heart of this story through their speech - sometimes slangy and modern, at others more formal or even slightly outdated. He does this while navigating a lot of rather abstruse language describing funeral customs - wakes, lyings-in, funeral meats and such - laying clear subtle differences which matter to Klara and Thórdís. A lot of the background here would be known to the Icelandic reader and so it isn't explicitly set out, but the translation makes clear where everyone is coming from, as it were.

Great fun - and also in some aspects, very sad. I'd recommend this one strongly.

For more information about A Lethal Legacy, 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 A Lethal Legacy from your local high street bookshop or online from Amazon.

Review - The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Arcadia, date, 
Available as: HB, 354pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB): 9781529441703

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

In The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia deftly blends three timelines to produce a clever and suspenseful New England horror which is also fully aware of, and reflects on, the tradition of New England horror. It's not just, here is a seemingly innocent country of coasts and little towns where lurk horrors. it's, here is a country whose horrors have been written about. The implicit warning - Don't go into the scary place! - is turned inside out from the start, because for Minerva, the scary place is the point. (A point driven home by Moreno-Garcia's deployment of many modern horror authors' names as background: look out for the names of student halls, faculty, positions, awards and honours. See how many you can spot!)

In 1998, Minerva is a young graduate student at Stoneridge College, making ends meet by doing teaching jobs and supervising student accommodation. She's looking forward to some peace and quiet over the summer months to develop her thesis about cult horror writer Beatrice Tremblay, who herself studied at Stonebridge in the 1930s.

In 1934, Beatrice herself recounts the events which led up to the disappearance of her beloved Virginia - events which, decades later, she based one of her most celebrated stories on. 

And in 1908, Minerva's great-grandmother, Alba, who lives on a dull backwater farm looks forward to a visit from her beloved uncle Arturo and yearns to return with him to the bright lights of Mexico City.

Each of the three women - Minerva, Alba and Virginia - will learn dark truths about the hidden world and will have to find strength to face a haunting evil. To that degree, they're in a sense the same story, though with varying outcomes. Of course Minerva's and Beatrice's stories take place ion the same setting, with direct connections between the horrors they confront. But the stories are also very different, interestingly different, featuring women in quite varying situations.

Alba is at first naive, on the edge of womanhood and yearning for a life of glamour, as she perceives it. There's something a little too trusting about her, perhaps. Her natural rebelliousness at the chaffing rules imposed by her mother may, one feels, lead her into trouble and it's hard to be sure who her real friends are as a string of grisly calamities begins to hit the farm. To whom can she turn for help?

Minerva seems at first a more solid personality, her main difficulties when we first encounter her being a severe case of thesis block and her difficulty in accessing the private archives she needs to explore to learn more about Beatrice. When - through a fortuitous chain of events, even if one foreseen in a hint of not entirely usual powers - Minerva succeeds in persuading their dour guardian to led her read the notebooks and manuscripts that will open the way, Carolyn Yates still imposes a myriad of restrictions and limits. Carolyn, matriarch of the distinctly "old money" Yates family, also appears in her youth in the 1930s section of the book as a friend and confidante of Beatrice, albeit not perhaps the witness to events that Minerva would really have sought.

The third protagonist, Beatrice herself, is more of a witness, her later life writing horror perhaps an attempt to testify, to piece together just what happened in December 1934. (Or to atone for her part in it?) The disappearance of a young woman from college wasn't looked into particularly at the time, the blame, if blame there was, being directed at a young Mexican man. Historic prejudice joins the mix here alongside class attitudes and gender norms in twisting the direction of events (one wonders whether, if the love that may have been possible between Virginia and Beatrice had been able to develop, events would have taken quite the same turn).

To understand what is happening in each of the sections, you need to stand back and see the picture as a whole, to look for patterns. Minerva. once she realises the stakes, does just that, piecing together present day events with the wisdom of her Nana to meet the threat. Alba herself draws on reserves of courage to behave in ways her society wouldn't expect. And Beatrice, well, in her witness Beatrice warns and provides vital information.

As the threats mount in all three time periods, there is a feeling of doom - we know some of the outcomes, and there have been hints about some of the rest, so it can feel as though this is a predetermined road to death and loss. But Moreno-Garcia is adept at misdirecting the reader, or perhaps, letting their own assumptions disguise the truth, resulting a thrilling ending (or, endings) though with just a little room for doubt as to the future. 

She, herself, writes in the last sentence of her Afterword "I wear my bracelet against the veil eye pin my left hand."

Wise.

A gripping and exciting story. 

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

Review - The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

Megan Bannen
Orbit, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 388pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521947

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam to consider for review.

This, the third and I think final (pity!) of Bannen's fantasy Western romances, revolves around Tanrian Marshal Rosie Fox (who is also a demigod, and therefore immortal) and haughty, aloof inventor Dr Adam Lee, the man who invented the portals that give access to the magic-touched world of Tanria.

Always a bit error-prone, as we've seen before, now the portals seem to be failing completely, and Rosie and Adam may hold the key to restoring them. It's a shame that something - oh, say, unresolved romantic tension - is stopping them working together smoothly...

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam is, I think, the best book yet in this series (which is saying something, given how good The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy and The Undermining of Twyla and Frank were). Not only is there full-blooded, smouldering romance between Rosie and Adam, but Rosie's difficult backstory is sensitively shown. Just imagine being a demigod, daughter of a good-for-nothing trickster god and a sentimental but mortal mother. The passage of time means you'll lose anyone you ever get close to - first, your adored parent, then any lover, friend or colleague, all will go the same way. Apart from that abandoning father who always turn up just when he's not wanted.

Bannen has taken care to give this world, the archipelago of the Federated Islands of Cadmus and its surrounding continents, a true sense of reality and a history and culture - the last hundred years, which Rosie recalls, have seen development so that her memories of her early life with her mum have a sepia tinge, a kind of fin de siècle quality that evokes well both the rose tinted view we often have of childhood, and the quainter pleasures of a more gilded age to which modern day Cadmus looks back wistfully.

If Rosie's missing her mum, who died decades ago, she she's resentful of her dad, not least as she blames him for the grinding poverty in which she grew up (well, he is a Trickster).

This book is I think the most unapologetically "fantasy" of Bannen's three stories. As with Cadmus, she's so far sketched in and shown the mythological background to her works, and there have been a few divine or semi divine traces, but in The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam reality, at least in Tanria, begins to shift and it's all traceable to the doings of the gods and powers. There are obscure rules in play, debts and prices have been incurred, and Rosie's about to have to deal with the consequences, even though they're not her fault. As if her complex love life, and her difficult relationship with her boss weren't enough (each time Rosie dies on duty it's such a pain for her boss! Think of the paperwork and the H&S issues!)

At the same time it's thoroughgoing romance as the two bickering protagonists are forced together in a chi-chi rural destination retreat, albeit with some unwelcome colleagues for company. Unless they can work out what's gone wrong with the portals, none of them will ever get out!

All in all, great fun, with an ending I didn't see coming. I will be sad to have to leave Cadmus (though, hopeful to find my way back there one day).

Finally, now the sequence is finished, I'd just like to give credit to Lisa Maria Pompilio for her beautiful covers. Just look at them next to each other and you'll see a pattern - a brilliant interpretation of the themes of the books.

Hoping for more like this from Orbit!

For more information about The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam, see the publisher's website here. 

Blogtour review - The Great Deception by Syd Moore

The Great Deception (Section W)
Syd Moore
Magpie (Oneworld), 4 September 2025
Available as: PB, 328pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780861548PB

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Great Deception to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Sequel to The Grand Illusion, The Great Deception is Moore's continuation of the story of Daphne Devine. As prequels set several decades before her Essex Witches novels, I simply had to read to these book, and they don't disappoint.

The Great Deception finds Daphne assigned on a dangerous mission in Iceland as part of her work for Section W, the branch of Second World War British military intelligence tasked with all things supernatural - or potentially supernatural. Here, the ostensible target is a clairvoyant, Karlsson, who may or may not be able to foretell the future and may or may not be passing secrets to the Germans. Britain has occupied Ireland to prevent it being used as a German base, but the position of the island hangs in the balance, so anything that could tip things one way or another might be very important.

The story intrigues in a number of ways. First, Daphne herself, as Moore draws her, is a fascinating character, a very strong and strong-minded woman in an age which is still deeply, deeply patriarchal. The officers with whom she deals here are clearly not comfortable with an intelligent, assertive woman and even Septimus, who will be important to her future, doesn't treat her well. Yet Daphne persists. Next, this is a genuinely interesting and eye-opening exploration of a little known aspect of WW2. The whole occupation of Iceland, going rather against the grain of the early war, raises intriguing questions of power and collaboration which we normally see from a rather different perspective. The situation of Iceland itself is also interesting, a very poor country at the time and also a remote one but not, of course, subject to the same restrictions (or to attacks) as Britain itself so rather a haven for Daphne.

Finally, there's the whole magic/ supernatural angle. Books about WW2 magic are starting to appear in numbers, I think perhaps Syd Moore set a trend here, but readers of the earlier story and of course the Essex Witch novels will know that this author is then canny about how she uses the idea of magic. You never quite know what to believe - and that goes as much for Daphne as for us!

So when Daphne decides - and she does take the decision, in the end she choose not to trust the chain of command - that urgent action is needed, and forms her own small taskforce to undertake it, much of the focus in the story is on the material factors: the cold, availability of food, the strained relations between Daphne, her local contact Anna, their minder Björn and of course Karlssen. Daphne's forced to pick her way through what is a tense and thriller-y novel, chasing down leads and pursuing the truth - all while surviving threats from Nazi agents and the condescension of her own superiors.

Whether there's a real supernatural threat is another thing entirely, but even here, Daphne has her instincts which, we know, have guided her before. In the land of the Northern Lights, and approaching a a region rumoured to be the home of dark magic and of evil, anything may be possible.

I really enjoyed The Great Deception. It's a story with great drive - you WILL keep turning these pages - and very solidly located in its time and place, as well as having a real element of jeopardy and danger. Daphne's wrestling with guilt at some of the things she's done and at other she may have to: and there is business here that she darkly accepts she will have to deal with later, once the immediate danger is over. The story is also though, in places, very funny! 

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