The Final Act of Daphne Devine (The Great Deception, 3)

Syd Moore
Magpie, 8 October 2027 
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780861541645

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

The Final Act of Daphne Devine sees our heroine Daphne face her greatest test yet as she struggles against the evils of Nazism in the Second World War.

Readers of the earlier stories will recall how Daphne was recruited in SOE's - the British clandestine warfare organisation formed by Churchill to "set Europe ablaze" and specifically into section W, focussing on deception and especially, on countering the Reich's use of the occult. Or, on manipulating its belief in the occult. Which is what military deception is: the point isn't to make your enemy believe something, but to make them act in certain ways. Whether or not, in Moore's universes, there is any reality to the supernatural, is kept rather mysterious - though you may find an answer in the fact that this is the same world as that of her Essex Witch mysteries.

Anyway. In The Final Act, Daphne has been smuggled into Germany with the aim of placing a certain book - a certain Grimoire - in the hands of a senior Nazi. She's accompanied by Jack, her former lover, which tightens tension as there are things and experiences they're both carefully not going into. As an agent, their lives are in danger, something Moore underlines in an authorial voice hinting at trials to come. One fears for both, and also for those who are - at great risk - helping them on their mission. Moore's at pains both to expose the utter evil of the Nazi regime but also to point up those with courage who simply will not stand for what's being done.

Moore also, in this instalment of the series as in the previous books, takes what I think is a rather brave and unusual approach to constructing her story and narrating Daphne's experiences. We're used, I think, to secret agent derring-do, to stories with a bit of the James Bond pixie dust where the hero (generally a hero not a heroine) is basically freed of constraints (both operational a moral) and cost a swathe of destruction through their enemies. I think perhaps that freedom is what attracts certain readers. But Moore isn't having that. Rather she shows us just how controlled, how restricted, an agent must be on this kind of mission. You're almost without help or support in foreign territory, how are you going to survive other than by sticking to the plan and accessing what aid has been arranged?

And once cut off from that, facing the risk of capture and death, you absolutely are NOT free to fight a war on your own terms - as Daphne discovers.

In these circumstances it's not racing hell that will save you. it's minute observation, understanding those around you, knowing how to take advantage of the smallest opening, the merest hint of a way through. 

It's the ability to carry on with that Great Deception - something daphne's rather good at, as it happens.

And as her fate bears her on, that's exactly what Miss Devine does, making allies where she can, using enemies where she can,  drawing on what she learned in her stage career, what she's learned as part of Section W, leaving her mourning for losses and betrayals till she can conduct it in safety. Facing stomach-churning danger and terrible reverses, Daphne presses on with her mission, then bends her escape plan to serving some further good purposes, carrying news out of Germany about further heinous crimes that aren't yet widely known. It's epic, exciting stuff - because, not in spite of, the fact that Daphne's choices are often terribly limited.

Along the way, Moore shows us plenty of courage and opposition whether in Germany itself, Belgium or France, showing good-hearted people of all sorts simply doing there best - the most any of us can aspire to.

A gripping read, strongly recommended.

For more information about The Final Act of Daphne Devine, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Ring The Bells by CK McDonnell

Ring the Bells (Stranger Times, 5)

CK McDonnell
Transworld, 15 October 2026
Available as: HB, PB, 496pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: HB 9780857505392, PB 9781804993378

Ring The Bells is the 5th book in the Stranger Times series, now out in paperback in time for you to get for a friend who might enjoy a bit of weird Manchester - or your self, to read as the nights draw in. I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy to consider for review. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - The Butterfly House by Teresa Solana

The Butterfly House (Barcelona Nights, 2)

Teresa Solana (trans Peter Bush)
Corylus Books, 12 September 2026
Available as: e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781917586283

I'm grateful to Ewa for sending me an advance copy of The Butterfly House to consider for review and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

The Butterfly House is a detective novel, focussing on DI Norma Forester of the Barcelona police, following from Black Storms, the first in this series. Norma is not your traditional rundown, haunted detective marinading in drink, rather she's a happily married middle aged woman. Well, mostly happily married. As readers of the first book will now she has an occasional lover, David. It would be overstating things to say that in The Butterfly House she's feeling guilty, but she doesn't want Octavi, her husband, hurt. This subplot somewhat distracts both Norma and David in The Butterfly House, alongside the unease arising from it being their daughter, Violetta, and her lover Gerard who discover a dead body outside the Butterfly House itself...

I loved Norma and her family. This group, which forms the backdrop to much of the story, is diverse and raucous, we see grandmothers, aunts and stepchildren, many of them occupying the same capacious apartments (Norma is from a comfortably off family) and bickering genially throughout the book. There are darker currents, in particular the rebellious behaviour of Violetta and suspicion about Gerard  but nothing so dark as the gruesome murder.

I should mention that Octavi is the local chief medical examiner - and he's also got his hands full with So husband and wife and both busy in this book, their personal and professional lives and criss-crossing with guilt, pressure to solve the murder and sheer exhaustion building as the story climaxes. A theme the book shares with its predecessor is the importance of the police seeming to be effective in the eyes of politicians and press - rich that with Gerard and his fellow squatters firmly in the frame for the murder, any delay by Norma in arresting and charging him looks like favouritism.

Solana uses this book to highlight the underbelly of a bustling and well-known tourist city - the book is set during the downturn of the early 2000s, with many of the characters here hard-up, and others on the take or bending the rules just to get by. How far you can justify that is a recurring theme, one that Norma debates with her colleagues (just as she's rather defensive with her daughter, who despises the "Mossos", the police, who in turn make no bones about their disdain for the squatters and students who occupy some of Barcelona' crumbling mansions). We see desperate people, as well as those who have done well for themselves. It's not clear how Raquel, the murdered woman, fits in here.

I felt that Solana was really enjoying herself with this book as she threads back and to between the crime with its forensic evidence, red herrings and unexpected twists and the complex relationships in Norma's family, against a theme of compromise, deception and necessity. And I really enjoyed myself reading it. Norma is a strong central character - though possibly at times her instincts as a mother don't serve her well in navigating this maze - and someone I want to hear more about, so I hope that more book in the series follow in English. 

Peter Bush's translation serves the story well, giving it in perfectly clear English while maintaining the author's voice and the slight sense of "otherness' that comes from the story being set in a foreign country.

A book I'd recommend.

For more information about The Butterfly House, see the tour poster below, or the publisher's website here. 

You can buy The Butterfly House from Amazon.

Review - The Crooked Medium's Guide to Terror

The Crooked Medium's Guide to Terror

Stephen Cox
Independent, 12 September 2026 
Available as: PB, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN: 9781068164439. 

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of The Crooked Medium's Guide to Terror to consider for review.

This is the second volume of Cox's series featuring Mrs Ashton, the crooked medium of the title (though she's now more honest than she used to be, I think "crooked" is still probably reasonable) and her companion and lover Mrs Bradshaw ("Braddie"). The two women make a precarious living in the Spiritualism racket that flourished in the 19th and early 20th century, with a sideline in burglary (though this may now be in their pasts). In Terror, their living is slightly better, than in The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder, since Ashton has found a patron (an Earl no less) who supports their work (though this outrages Braddie's Socialist principles). So the two women are not quite so much up against it here, nor so close to being enmeshed in scandal, or even arrested, as before, though they are still not secure, or respectable. Their love must still, of course, remain hidden with Braddie treated at times as a servant to allow them to fit into the rigid patterns that society allows. The price, in stress and fear, that this inflicts is a running theme in the story, Braddie suffering most (Ashton herself is often maddeningly uncomprehending).

The Earl's patronage aside, Ashton's new attitude of honesty - and to a degree the two womens' prosperity - may also reflect that, due to the events of The Crooked Medium's Guide to Murder, she has acquired more of a genuine insight into the spiritual realms, along with a spirit guide who readers of that book will recognise. (That detail apart though, the books could be read entirely as standalones - though you'd be missing a treat if you didn't read the first book too).  But she still doesn't really understand the rules, and in this adventure Braddie and Mrs Ashton will encounter others who have both more understanding and more psychic power than she does.

It all starts when Mrs Ashton is retained to investigate the death of a carpenter, David Gittens, who leaves behind a heartbroken (and pregnant) lover. There turns out to be a disturbing psychic aspect to this death, which is not the only supernatural cause for concern in London. A seance held in fashionable society, and involving the new darling of Spiritualist circles, Madam Moray (a woman for whom Ashton undoubtedly feels some mild jealousy) goes catastrophically wrong as well, and Mrs Ashton, the former crooked medium, is well placed to investigate whether it was all fakery, or whether something rather nasty may be stirring.

The story spirals from here into an agreeable and action-filled blend of opportunism, dark forces and endangered reputations. The family of Lord Hanbury, father of Tommie, best friend to Ashton's protégé Maisie, is enmeshed in the affair and indeed threatened. Maisie herself fell in with Tommie - a young woman of independent mind - at the posh academy to which she was admitted as part of the fallout of the first book, and she's making use of the opportunity for education. Ashton though misses her lieutenant who was always able to marshal assistance for investigations from the London street kids. Maisie is, however, in exactly the right place to provide an inside track to goings on in the Hanbury household.

And she'll need that, because mysteries abound in this complex, fast-paced story. Both spiritual and mundane evil are afoot. At the heart of it all is a very human quest for retribution which has drawn something much darker to its aid - a darkness that may have its own allegiances and motives. Mrs Ashton's instinct is to look for the good everywhere, and to trust to redemption and forgiveness. Madam Moray, by the end of the story, is less sure and issues a warning. 

With hints of other unseen hands in play, and the potential spiritual defence of the country itself at stake, I can see all sorts of ways this dilemma may play out. Cox has rather brilliantly identified a psychic vulnerability for the empire on which the sun never sets - the decidedly iffy lives and pasts of its foremost statesmen, and it seems as though, despite Braddie's disdain for empire and power, the two investigators are going to be drawn back to that arena.

I loved this book. Not only do we get a sort of Buchanesque thriller (washed of the more dubious aspects of the 1870s - 1930s "shocker") but in Mrs Ashton and Mrs Bradshaw we see the dilemmas of two women with a love that can't be declared openly. We see not only their happiness but the strain they're under, their jealousies, and fears of abandonment, of separation. 

In many ways this is an outsider story - it may feature lords and earls and the top brass of Scotland Yard, but Ashton's world is one of ex-boxers, of thieves, of a Chinese magnate who may have power and wealth but is stranded between "respectable" society and his own nation, of the whole disreputable Spiritualist movement, riddled with frauds and existing on the whim of fashionable society. It's a cause for concern that an upcoming production at the Savoy Opera is to lampoon both Ashton and Moray - acceptability to polite society can be hard-won and easily lost. That outsiderness adds a distinct frisson to the action, with the protagonists risking much as they go about their business.

Recommended, and I'm keen to see what comes next in this series!

For more information about The Crooked Medium's Guide to Terror, see the author's website here - and if you want a copy (you should!) you can also find links there to buy the book, both from online retailers and some bookshops.

Blogtour review - Ghost Notes by Doug Johnstone

Ghost Notes (Skelfs, 8)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 13 August 2026
Available as: PB, 257pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917764377

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Ghost Notes to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour. That's really appreciated.

I always enjoy Johnstone's Skelfs books. Ostensibly mysteries, the rich setting - three generations of women operating a business in Edinburgh as undertakers and private investigators - gives Johnstone vast scope to explore personal histories, dilemmas and relations. So much so that the crime aspect almost vanishes and instead you have these women, living their lives, coming to terms with who they are, facing challenges, and reflecting on youth, age and change.  Every page is a joy, every train of thought a delight. And of course the location, Edinburgh, adds its own layer of wonder too.

In Ghost Notes, we are three years on from Living is a Problem. Things have changed. Nothing has changed. Thomas, Dorothy's anguished policeman boyfriend, is now in prison and won't respond to her. Maybe the ghost notes are the letters returned, unanswered, from Saughton Prison?

Hannah, Dorothy's granddaughter, and Indy, are married and settled, but about to come under pressure when a bad boy from Indy's past resurfaces. Maybe the ghost notes are things that haven't been spoken between them?

Jenny, perhaps a bit maturer now but still wild and restless, is about to confront a case involving blackmail and adultery that will make her examine herself in more depth than she's perhaps comfortable with. Blackmail letters - well, emails - those could be ghost notes, too?

And there's also the rogue AI that's whispering dangerous messages into the ears of the bereaved, offering easy words that are very different from the ways that the Skelfs try to aid those mourning loved ones - and which may lead to some very bad consequences. Another kind of ghost note, perhaps - one that sets off a crisis at the graveside as the book opens. (I love Johnstone's graveside set pieces, as necessary to these books as the actions sequence that starts a James Bond movie).

None of the "cases" that the Skelfs face in this book is, in itself, very complicated, perhaps - as detective stories they are fairly simple. But as moral studies, ethical mysteries, psychological challenges, they are all formidable. I'm struck by the themes of life and death, of forgetting and remembering, here. Humanity is complex, and we play with human emotions and attachments at our peril. In this book Johnstone juxtaposes the eternal - those neutrinos that Hannah learns about, barely interacting with us at all - with the very mutable flesh that is subject to no end of shocks and will come, at the end, to its end. It's not just our bodies that pass away. Dorothy remembers her life in California, half a century past. Jenny recalls her raucous youth in the Edinburgh of the 80s. Hannah uses the wind phone to call her rotten dad. Rotten, but the only one she had. Each of the Skelf women is living with her younger self - or selves - and as they go about their lives, they can't help but relive the layers of life that are encoded in Edinburgh's streets.

That's true even as the undertaking business transforms the treatment of death for Edinburgh's citizens. This must be a slightly speculative aspect to the book, but I really hope there are now - or will be soon - undertakers in Edinburgh and everywhere else doing water cremations and composting funerals (I would LOVE to be composted!) and regenerating derelict railway sidings into woodland.

Don't take all this talk of death as suggesting that Ghost Notes, and its companion books, are gloomy. Far from it. They are honest, peopled by the most brilliantly drawn characters I have read for ages. This is a series that's growing and benefiting from the depth of character that the preceding books and stories provide. Johnstone has created a rooted set of protagonists. You know how they'll behave, how they'll move and breathe and have their being in a recognisable but strange city - but they still conspire to surprise, they feel like real people, Dorothy with her drums, Jenny tempted by the drink, Hannah more comfortable than before but still, perhaps, uneasy.

Really, really enjoyable. But you'll know that if you're following tis series. If you're not, you should read them in order, but that will be a treat!

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

Review: Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson

Our Noble Selves

Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 10 September 2026
Available as: HB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529937824

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

I have recently been listening to Kate Atkinson's earlier novel, Transcription, which has been dramatised for Radio 4. It's a story of wartime espionage and peacetime consequences, set between 1941 and 1951 and I was struck by athematic unity (at least in part) with Our Noble Selves.

The later book is set wholly during 1951 and is focussed on the Festival of Britain, which took place in that year, but it looks back to the war in two respects.

First, the main character, ex-journalist Harry Flynn, has landed up in his rather non-job as part of the team preparing the Festival after spending most of the War as a prisoner of the Japanese, working on the infamous Burma Railway. ('"Was it absolute hell?' Flynn shrugged. 'Others had it as bad.' He was thinking of Evans. Of almost every returning soldier since Troy and Thermopylae.' In the manner of his day and age, Flynn doesn't want to recall the horrors that he underwent, although they occasionally creep through in his dreams (he depends on drink to limit this) in something of the same manner as the flashbacks in Transcription. In her Afterword, Atkinson says that she originally intended to make more of these events but cut them back because she wanted to make the story lighter. It is true that it's lighter than Transcription, but I also feel that this choice fits better with the reality that such awful events were often ignored for decades.

It also fits with the whole ethos of the Festival - designed partly as an enormous party for a war-weary country, partly as a bold vision of the future, showcasing British living, manufactures, the Empire (as it still was) and modern design. Atkinson gives us extracts from Festival guides and maps, conveying the epic scale of the event and some of its subjects. The book is peppered with extracts from the catalogue of goods available, with supplier names and details. It's a fascinating glimpse into what now seems like a vanished culture.

The second overlap with Transcription is that while the action is set in the present (ie 1951) events are very much driven by unfinished business from the war. This is a time when everyone still wants to move on, to forget about it. (Though as Flynn shrewdly comments, 'A few years later and they start wanting to remember again. A few decades later and they're wallowing in it.') Yet, there are reputations to be protected, grudges to be satisfied, enmities and differences that still fester. Such things have a way of shaping events, as we will see.

An amusing feature of Harry Flynn is that he's apparently very attractive to women. While he doesn't really seem to understand that, he's willing to go along with it and, at the start of the book, he's found himself a wife - hoping to settle in a boring suburban home with his little family and their dog. The nightmares put paid to that, and one day, Flynn just walks out of an increasingly fractious relationship, eventually landing his job at the Festival. But the ladies still have an eye for him, and so when a woman working at the office disappears after meeting him, she's assumed to be 'Your French girlfriend', a misconception that he struggles against through most of the story.

Worse, Flynn comes under suspicion, the plot building up with coincidences, trickery and ever more-desperate attempts by Harry to clear his name by working out what really happened - in the teeth of the police, who see him as a wrong 'un, and a cast of washed-up war heroes (and some villains) of the sort who gradually pickled themselves in whisky in London bars though the late 40s and 50s. There are some truly dreadful people here, with dreadful secrets to persevere, who don't welcome Flynn's probing into their affairs. It makes for an effective thriller plot, leavened with humour and Atkinson's absolutely, steel-sharp observations of manners and gift for drawing character.

We also actually get quite a shrewd perspective on the Festival itself. Largely inaccessible to us now except through old guides and newspaper photographs, it is often portrayed in idealogical terms as a brave future vision - and of course there is that element. However Atkinson does gently show how much of what was on display was backward, not forward looking: the model rooms on show for example informed by class and gender prejudices which seem distinctly antediluvian to us now.

In all, Our Noble Selves (the title comes from a military toast and does rather capture the slightly self-satisfied tone which Atkinson imputes, whether fairly or not, to the Festival itself and the wider Britain of 1951) is a fun read, jostling with life and with characters who are a joy to spend time among. I'd strongly recommend it.

For more information about Our Noble Selves, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston

The Someday Garden

Ashley Poston
HarperCollins HQ, 16 June 2026
Available as: PB, 378pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9780008769284

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

The latest of Ashley Poston's romances-with-a-supernatural-twist takes us to Maine, where Sophie Drear is on loan away from the New York Botanical Gardens to give some TLC to Lilymoor. Lilymore is a renowned garden on the coast, which has become rather neglected since the death of the owner's (Eula's) husband Henry. Projects were left unfinished, parts of the gardens have been closed off - and now Eula is talking about stepping back and passing the place on to her nephews.

Sophie has been feeling frustrated, stuck,  and alone and working at Lilymoor gives her a chance to consider her future direction. The gardens' two hundredth anniversary is approaching, and the place needs some love - as does Sophie. She sets to work to clear the mysterious vines that are choking the hedge maze, the damp which is destroying the wildflowers, and the general decay of it all.

Lilymoor, however, proves to be a strange place, whether it's Damnit, the murderous goose who prowls the grounds, the legend that you can hear the voice of your truest love in the grounds, or the way that the garden resists being quite, well, tamed...

For Sophie, it's the place where she keeps finding a strange blue door that later just, well, isn't there. 

And it's the grumpy man who's in the half-finished garden behind that door.

Dripping with romance, longing and loss, The Someday Garden is the story of Sophie's summer, a summer in which she reflects on her future, her life, her friendship with Harriet ("Harrie") who writes lists of untranslatable words (Poston gives one to each chapter as a heading). 

Poston's books are loosely linked - I saw references here to the family undertakers of The Dead Romantics, the publishing world of The Seven Year Slip (did we meet Juliette there?) and the seaside music happy of Sounds Like Love. But they are not sequels, and I think it's more important that they are linked thematically. Each takes a "what if?" and makes it really - whether the idea of a time slip to allow an opportunity to meet a potential lover, a little town where dreams can come true, or hearing a loved one's voice in one's head. Poston takes these ideas seriously, showing up the potentialities but also the dangers. In The Someday Garden, the idea truly embodies the themes of the novel: being stuck, unable to move on, literally trapped. Sophie is in such a state, but so, in reality, is the garden. She hasn't come to Lilymoor to find love, indeed she's resisting that idea, she sees it as a betrayal, but it may be that finding it will free not only herself, but the garden.

The Someday Garden is a beautiful book, both in its themes and in Poston's down to earth, rooted, yet allusive prose. Horticultural language abounds - "I could barely take root anywhere",  lovers see the world around them "changing and growing and become, again and again, as we shucked off our leaves and burrowed our roots".  About Lilymoor: "There was a surety in the sound of this place. The promise of a sprout, the slowness of a bud unfurling." Rootedness is important, but so is growth. And growth may require painful changes - rooting out those vines, drying that bed, weeding and seeding and waiting.

It's a book that accepts pain and loss, and knows that they will never simply be healed - but at the same times, also knows that to hold onto them stunts growth.  As I said, a beautiful, moving book and one I strongly recommend.

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