Forthcoming

For the first time ever, Blue Book Balloon is going to be part of a blog tour... we'll be landing in the gritty world of Helen Giltrow's debut thriller The Distance, which is just out, tangling with identity, guilt and rehabilitation.  That's on 7th March, when I'll be posting a review of the book - one that had me desperate to see what came next... but terrified of what might happen. Real hiding-behind-the-sofa stuff.

We'll just have to hope that the Balloon gets aloft again, and isn't hijacked for nefarious purposes by the inmates of The Program.

From the press release:

"They don't call her Karla any more. She's Charlotte Alton: she doesn't trade in secrets, she doesn't erase dark pasts, and she doesn't break hit-men into prison. Except that is exactly what she's been asked to do. The job is impossible: get the assassin into an experimental new prison so that he can take out a target who isn't officially there. It's a suicide mission, and quite probably a set-up.

So why can't she say no?"

Intriguing - and Charlotte is a great protagonist, brave, capable, holding her place in a very shady underworld and facing off some markedly dangerous characters.

After that, I have a couple of other review copies and my first Netgalley lines up, and I've also been on  a bit of a buying spree: there have been so many great books published in the past few weeks - from Sarah Pinborough (The Death House), Claire North (Touch), VE Schwab (A Darker Shade of Magic) and Naomi Foyle (Rook Song) - and there are others too - that it's been hard to keep up, I want to put up reviews of at least some of these here, in the next couple of weeks.

And there is another blog tour as well, with a book that's quite different from those I normally review, but which is proving VERY interesting... more on that later...