Review - The Essence by Dave Hutchinson

The Essence

Dave Hutchinson
Newcon Press, 9 December 2025
Available as: HB, 274pp, PB, 274pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781917735148

It's always exciting to see a new book from Dave Hutchinson and The Essence is one of his best. 

This was part of my Christmas present to myself for 2025 and I enjoyed it loads.

Michael is an economist, working for a covert branch of the UK Treasury. After he suffers a breakdown in the office, he's placed in a private hospital to recover. A spooks' hospital, you might call it.

Hutchinson's good on institutional shabbiness - the atmosphere of the hospital, a place with decent treatment, if uninspiring food, but a definite atmosphere of have been left behind in the late 20th century, is nicely evoked. So, on his discharge, is that of his office, on a shabby cut-through behind Oxford Street. 

He's also good when portraying Michael's struggle to retain normality and his measured steps back to independence, with the help of a social worker, Jo. The book leads the reader to understanding something of Michael's past, of what's missing in the cold little house to which he returns from hospital, without over-labouring its point. It's a nice, low key exploration of (part of) a life, taking drama and interest from everyday events and routines. 

Even without major incident, this part of the story was a joy to read. Major incident is coming, however, when Michael is unexpectedly sent to Amsterdam to investigate an issue with his office's Dutch counterparts. This is where the story slips, seamlessly, into what one might call "spook mode" although it's important to understand that Michael sees himself as an economist, not a spy. Nevertheless, he's forced to think differently once it emerges that he's sought after by various factions of an international conspiracy. They all believe that he has knowledge of something called "The Essence", a mysterious and contradictory supernatural phenomenon of which he's never heard. 

The story then takes Michael across Europe, both feeling and negotiating with the different flavours of "Essencehead" while trying to understand just what he's involved in - and why. For man who's recently been hospitalised with mental health issues, the sheer preposterousness of what's stumbled on seems a real danger to his grip on reality. But evidence mounts that the Essence is a real thing, and then Michael has to question why everyone things he knows something about it.

The Essence is a combination of thriller, horror and espionage that will transition in a heartbeat from the bizarre (such as the scenes with a certain dog) to the violent to the intense, all overlaid on a kind of fantastical road trip using the breath of Europe and engagement with its history to give solidity and heft to the incredible storyline.

And behind it all, there's something else going on...

This is a glorious book, great fun, gripping and satisfying. Recommended.

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

Blogtour review - Catherine by Essie Fox

Catherine
Essie Fox
Orenda Books, 12 February 2016
Available as: HB, 287, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9781917764421

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

It is, I think, 40 odd years since I read Wuthering Heights, in the early 80s when I was doing O level English lit. This wasn't one of our set books, but our teacher was keen to make sure we read much more widely. I remember that the introduction to the edition we read made much of the Brontës' father's "Celtic" ancestry as a factor in their romantic temperament - you don't get criticism like that today.

I tend not to re-read, so my memory of the events in the novel was hazy - ideal, really, for this retelling since it meant I wasn't looking forward for what I knew would come next.  It also meant my sympathies and appreciation of the characters could shift, uninfluenced by the later story, the perfect frame of mind to enjoy this version.

I think it's important to recognise that in the Wuthering Heights universe there are no absolute heroes and villains, and no "likeable" characters. Everyone behaves badly, everyone is worthy of sympathy. In that respect, and others, Catherine isn't a new story, it is proper Wuthering Heights but - and here's the difference - told by Cathy, rather than narrated, in hindsight, by Nelly Dean. Essie Fox uses a rather clever device to make this possible, one consonant I think with the subtext of the original novel and which handily telescopes the 20 or so years period that the story takes to unroll, and gives a real sense of immediacy and, well, jeopardy to the events - in contrast with the hindsight-tinted perspective of the original. (And we're spared Mr Lockwood, who isn't event mentioned by name, just - in one or two places - as "the tenant").

Fox also takes the opportunity of this being Cathy's own story to enlarge on parts that Dean is only passing on from Catherine herself - who Fox makes unreliable, or at least incomplete, in what she tells her maid. This gives some space to develop aspects about which the original book is silent. For example, Heathcliff learns the truth of his background and relates this to Cathy - something that is then a significant motivation for Cathy - but Cathy never tells Nell the details. In that respect, Catherine is therefore a retelling, not the retelling - other authors could make other choices. I do think though that Fox's choices are deeply true to the novel, and in taking over the book's characters, she captures something genuine in their relationships and history that makes this more than simply a glossing of the original. The people you'll meet here are vital, human, and true to Brontë's original.

All this makes Catherine more than simply a retelling, it's a rich story in its own right. There is tragedy here, and room for pity and empathy even with the apparent villains: like Wuthering Heights itself, Catherine is something of a gale of emotion and feeling - longing, lust, hatred, regret, jealousy - and if you're going to enjoy this book you need to be on board for that. It won't suit everyone! In my view, the power of Emily Brontë's original is here in Catherine, undiminished, but this retelling addresses matters which the climate of the mid-19th century could not allow, as well as revisiting aspects where modern sensibilities raise issues, or ask questions, which the original didn't.

Catherine is a grand, sweeping read which takes nothing away from the original novel - it is, as I said, only a retelling, not the retelling, I can imagine alternatives that take different paths, but what a retelling! 

I would recommend.

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

Review - In This City, Where it Rains by Lyndsey Croal

In This City, Where it Rains

Lyndsey Croal
Luna, 4 February 2026
Available as: PB, 129pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(9781915556691PB): 

In a modern city that is, and is not, Edinburgh, a young woman, Maggie, lives alone and sees ghosts.

Specifically, Maggie sees ghosts in the rain. They have little or no substance in the dry, so she mainly encounters them on the way to and from her job serving whisky cocktails in a basement bar. They have become familiar to her.

Nobody else can see the ghosts - until one day, somebody can.

And then, the ghosts begin to ask Maggie for help.

I loved the way that In This City, Where it Rains opens as a seemingly mundane story - what is more normal in Britain than a walk in the rain? - and then gives us a dash of the uncanny. We see Maggie's relationship with her boss Angus, who's missing his dead brother. Banter over tips, chat on a quiet evening in the bar. Then we see that Maggie perceives... something... in Angus's brother's favourite chair.

A dash of the uncanny. Then a bit more. And then In This City, Where it Rains goes full-blooded horror. Maggie finds herself, somehow, at the centre of a web of mysteries - and in danger. Is the prolonged rain actually natural? What lies beyond the city? And how does it link to the strange, decaying Tair House?

Maggie's existence in the city seems to take place mysteriously on two levels - she does the normal things that are needed to maintain existence in a service economy, and suffers the alienation attendant on that - expressed powerfully in the rain. Where are the rest of her family? What became of them, and what was the "accident" her granny told her about? 

Yet, at the same time, Maggie is sought, eagerly sought, by mysterious players in the haunted city. It's not just her life that seems to be on hold, there are others, only half-awake, who need her.

I really enjoyed In This City, Where it Rains. Both naturalistic and creepy, it's a story that (I write, as the rain pours down outside) powerfully inhabits its own metaphor, pointing both to a state of stasis and, perhaps, to awakening and renewal.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about In This City, Where it Rains, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

Christina Henry
Titan Books, 4 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781835412640

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Place Where They Buried Your Heart to consider for review.

As a reader I'm endlessly fascinated by the way that books reflect their authors' own worlds both overtly - a book set in the US will of course use different language and make different assumptions from one that takes place in the UK - and in terms of tropes, attitudes and lifestyles.

Take for example that idea of the scary old house in the neighbourhood. The run down place the kids dare one another to go into at midnight. That is very much a US thing, I think, I don't think it occurs much in UK writing (or indeed real life!  - I live in the UK and always have done). Perhaps this is because here a, say, 100 year old abandoned property is not really old. That is, it may be old enough to be squalid but not scary. Not far away will be an 800 year old church or a 500 year old Tudor cottage, and those are old old. 

Or it may be because we have less space and the idea of an abandoned mansion up on the hill is less plausible. Given house prices it probably won't be empty anyway.

So I approach a book like The Place Where they Buried Your Heart with interest, wanting to see not just how the story unfolds but how this trope works out in the context of the plot - how the idea is justified and where it leads, what it means in the context of a modern urban setting for there to be such a feature. And perhaps most of all, why the authorities don't just do something when kids begin disappearing?

In this book, Jessie Campanelli's life is entwined with such a house. It is her fear and her shame. Early on in the story, she suffers a loss when she dares her little brother Paul to go in the house, largely to get rid of him when she wants to sulk. Of course Paul vanished and Jessie is left with a burden of guilt. Henry then very subtly, very cleverly, shows us how that guilt warps Jessie's subsequent life and how Paul's loss breaks her family - first her father, and then her mother. Setting aside the fantastical element this is a very human story of loss and grieving and pain as we see the Campanelli family fail, and Jessie grow up, living in the same familiar neighbourhood as it changes and the old people move out and new people move in.

All that time, the empty house sits, untouched, waiting, malign. It's a like or there-not-there presence both in Jessie's life - at one level it haunts her, at another she puts it out of mind. The house is also present but not present in wider affairs: yes, Jessie's neighbourhood is gentrifying and the site must be valuable, but a string of... accidents... convinced everyone to leave well alone.

Except the kids.

And now Jessie's got a daughter of her own...

I found this a satisfying, fun and creepy novel on many levels. Jessie's a perfect t rounded character in herself, seeking to make something of her twisted life, a determined fighter who takes no crap from anyone - not her dead-end boyfriend, not that creepy house, not the few bad neighbours (there are many good, supportive ones). Watching her cope with grief and guilt is painful and sad, but she's a survivor.

A book I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Place Where they Buried Your Heart, see the publisher's website here.

Review - What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher

What Stalks the Deep (Sworn Soldier, 3) 

T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 30 September 2025
Available as: HB, 192pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy and bought
ISBN(HB): 9781803369716

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

In this, the third part of kis adventures, Alex Easton, former soldier (and still suffering from that) in the army of Galicia, an obscure Central European country where military service (ie being a 'Sworn soldier') determines gender, gets to visit the USA.

Easton answers a call for help from Dr James Denton, who shared an earlier adventure with Easton. Denton's cousin has gone missing in a disused coal mine. Now Easton suffers from claustophobia, so of course he feels duty bound to assist his friend despite the weird, supernatural goings-on down the mine...

What follows is a fun, if creepy, exploration of a mystery that brings with it danger, exploration in cramped, inaccessible tunnels, revenge, prejudice and an ethical dilemma. The book reminder me in a sense of a Doctor Who adventure. At the risk of slight spoilers, I'd say that whereas in the previous parts of this series, Easton has confronted outright, malign, evil of a supernatural or at least fantastical sort, here the "monster" is a more nuanced being. That's important. because it presents, as I have said, a moral dilemma. But Easton's experiences in What Moves the Dead and What Feasts and Night, overlaying kis PTSD (to use the modern term, the one used here is 'soldier's heart', an older version of the same thing) have made kim defensive so there's a personal challenge here too: hitting out is an all too common reaction to stress or danger.

(And that might also apply to other characters in this book).

Plus of course, there's that fear of enclosed places to overcome...

An intelligent, scary book which is a good addition to this series.

For more information about What Stalks the Deep, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Whisper in the Wind (Sunder City, 4)

Whisper in the Wind

Luke Arnold
Orbit, 29 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 377pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521626

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Whisper in the Wind to consider for review.

I recently suffered a clash of fictional worlds when I came across Luke Arnold, writer of this fantasy noir series, playing the lead role in a TV version of Scrublands, the first book in a detective series I am also reading. I hadn't realised Arnold was also an actor. I am very impressed that he finds time to keep Sunder City rolling along too.

I had in fact thought this series was paused with the last instalment. At the end of One Foot in the Fade, Fetch Phillips, Man for Hire, had hung up his metaphorical gumshoes and settled down to run the café - more of a greasy spoon - that he inherited from his friend Georgio. No longer will Fetch suffer from interfering in other peoples' business, chasing for the magic that he helped to banish from the world. Not Fetch.

The trouble is, a man will pick up entanglements. When a nameless news sheet editor begins circulating a samizdat journal in Sunder City, thumbing a nose at the authorities, and a series of outrages begin for which a bunch of kids congregating in Fetch's café may take the fall, he is leaned on to un-retire. (To make matters worse, someone seems to know the secret of Fetch's role in ending magic, and to be willing to reveal it...)

What follows is a baffling, dangerous chase though the back alleys and gilded boardrooms of Sunder City, and a still more baffling and dangerous chase though the moral landscape of Fetch's mind. There is a sense that, having thought he was out of the game, had evaded the difficult choices and found himself a role in the shadows, he's now being challenged to step back into the daylight to atone for what he did and make the best amends he can. That dynamic may have been what was driving Fetch in the earlier books, but he was always satisfied in the end with little achievements. Now, he faces more difficult choices. 

It's interesting to see how this character, who Arnold has developed into a complex but well-rounded man over the space of four books, gradually realises the magnitude of what's at stake. Starting by acting to keep himself out of the limelight, he realises that is no longer longer viable. Only through the network of friends he builds up as that decision crystallises does he find the strength to do that must be done. Establishing that network takes him to new places and sets wheels in motion that, one trusts, may lead to real change in Sunder City. But it's at a cost for Fetch's comfort and safety.

Whisper in the Wind is a complex fantasy mystery but also a mystery with a very creaturely (I won't say human because, well, not every person here human) focus. It's a book with great heart, and moves the Sunder City series on to new places and new things. I await the next part eagerly!

For more information about Whisper in the Wind, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

Charles Stross
Publisher, 27 January 2026
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

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

The Regicide Report is the final volume (at least for now?) of Stross's Laundry Files sequence, something that, in my view, has grown into a SFF phenomenon. Over the past two and a half decades I've followed the story of Bob Howard, necromancer, demonologist and computer nerd, through books that began as stories "in the style of" a series of espionage masters, mutated into treatments of classic monsters from horror, and ended up as pretty scathing criticism of UK politics.

Where is the endpoint of all that? In whose name is the espionage carried out out? On whose secret service are Bob, Mo and their colleagues engaged? Who is the most scary monster in the pack? What is at the summit of politics and public administration?

Why, the monarchy itself, of course. So, in a book which I think could probably only have been published following the death of Our Late Queen, here is the apotheosis of the Laundry, its endpoint (literally) as the unspeakable horror which has consumed the British State turns its baleful attention on the Crown itself. And on the billions of person-years of worship and belief that it has accumulated.

Written according  the normal convention of the series (Bob Howard writing his classified work diaries - but we finally see how and why that exercise is being undertaken) The Regicide Files gives us a complex plot hanging on the dilemma of the Laundry and its duty (enforced by geas) to both the current PM (that nameless horror, who was, in truth, the lesser of two evils - as PMs so often are) and to Her Majesty. 

Long-buried External Assets are being awoken, there's trouble afoot at the Palace and Bob's required to wear a fancy suit and shiny shoes. That last may be the thing he worries about most.

This book has all the notes I love in the Laundry Files: the fiendish plot (fiendish in at least two senses of the term), the dry humour, check-ins with most of the vast array of characters Stross has given us to date and a tight, action-filled narrative.  I don't know if this was planned in advance, but it's a story that derives real heft from the recent death of Elizabeth II and indeed probably couldn't have been published before. If you thought that the Royal funeral in 2023 was a big production, well, just look at THESE funeral games... 

I feel this book provides very much the ending that the Laundry (the series, and the institution) deserves. Bob and Mo get plenty of time (I've missed them in the past few books) and development but we're left guessing about just how events will proceed as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN unfolds and what role the Laundry will play in that. (I'm blurring some detail here so as not to spoil, but I will note that - as evidenced by Bob's being at large to write his casenotes, some form of normality does continue, albeit the warped version of the New Management)

Strongly recommended to long-haul Laundry fellow-travellers. If you haven't read these books yet then no, really this isn't the one to begin with but you have some fun in store if you go back and begin with The Atrocity Archives.  

(It was also fun to see Stross adroitly sidestep issues of continuity in the series...)

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