C K McDonnell
Transworld, 9 February 2023
Available as: HB, 464pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787633391
I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Love Will Tear Us Apart via Netgalley to consider for review.
All is not well at The Stranger Times. New assistant editor Hannah Willis, until now our window into the Manchester-based publication which exposes the strange, the unlikely and the downright impossible from its base in a former church, has departed. Vincent Banecroft, the human waste tip of an editor who at least always gave the impression of knowing what was going on, is adrift.
Love Will Tear Us Apart therefore takes the risk of moving things on somewhat from the cosy - for values of "cosy" that admit bloody murder and monsters on the streets of Manchester - setting established in The Stranger Times and revisited in This Charming Man. A necessary risk, I think, for an ongoing series and one that I think McDonnell brings off magnificently. In Love Will Tear Us Apart we both see Hannah up to, well, her own thing, and Banecroft in freefall, obsessed with his dead wife to a degree that hadn't previously been made plain and which renders him dangerously vulnerable. It's up to the rest of the crew to hold things together, particularly Stella and a couple of new characters - who prove more than formidable.
That doesn't mean that Love Will Tear Us Apart lacks the charm and humour of the previous books. Far from it. We see another Loon Day, the interactions between team members are as well observed as ever and there are the usual bizarre excerpts from the paper. There is though less focus on the production of the paper, and more on the working out of individual threats and of the history of some of the characters. That allows for a closer look at the inhabitants of McDonnell's alt Manchester, including the Founders themselves, who actually appear nastier each time they're glimpsed. (One of the perspectives they're seen from is via a creepy wellness centre, which manages both to be genuinely menacing and also rather funny).
Alongside this we get a variety of sub-plots - ghosts, abductions by sinister goons and a returning character from This Charming Man, who I didn't expect to see again but whose presence does help to build a sense of a wider world. There's even a little gentle grave robbing. DI Tom Sturgess does also appear, although he is rather more peripheral than I'd have liked, his investigation not really going anywhere and not linking with the rest of the narrative much. But without Hannahin the Stranger Times offices perhaps he has less of a part to play.
That point aside, this is a thrilling continuation of the series, taking it to new places and showing us familiar characters slightly differently. And if it wasn't clear before, I think Love Will Tear Us Apart makes clear that any accommodation with the Founders is likely to be temporary at best - it isn't just their methods and history that taint them, but they also seem to attract the power hungry, the entitled and the plain bad to their orbit. Not a nice bunch.
It all comes together in a genuinely scary and perilous conclusion, and I look forward to a Book 4 and to seeing what McDonnell does next with his long-suffering characters.
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