Blogtour review - Kill Them With Kindness by Will Carver

Kill Them with Kindness
Will Carver
Orenda Books, 19 June 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788381

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

A worldwide coronavirus pandemic. 

Shady but well-connected figures eager to profit from the misery. Lockdowns. 

A foppish, populist UK PM who can't keep his trousers zipped up for more than half an hour.

All signalling, then, that Kill them with Kindness has no bearing AT ALL on actual recent world history. So the speculation here that the virus, and the vaccine, was scheduled; that a third party intervened to change it from what it might have been; and that a secret cabal of world leaders knew rather more about matters that they let on - can all be safely indulged in the interests of a fascinating and knotty plot that nevertheless dramatises some of the real dilemmas that we faced a few years back. Carver's writing is excellently adapted to the. He has the rare ability - no, scratch that, unique, at least so far as I'm aware - to dramatise not only the events of a story but also the actual ethics of it.

Here, that is done mainly though two characters - the blustering, blond Harris Jackson, Prime Minister of the UK, who can't encounter a woman without seeking to impregnate her, and brilliant but modest Dr Haruko Ikeda, a Japanese scientist who works at a Chinese research centre backed by American money. Jackson doesn't care if a few million people die, so long as it serves his purposes. Ikeda wants to save lives, but he has a wider vision than that: to make life, people, kinder. While the two never meet, they are in effect the players in the chess game, well matched since one has immense political power but - seemingly - little empathy, while the other brims over with empathy but is being forced to act by circumstances.

Carver's portrayal of both men is superb, but it's only part of the storytelling here. Events, literally taking part on a world scale, are given life by vignettes of individuals, too many to list, across the nations and of all ages and social positions. This author is a master of the telling phrase, the perfect description or action, showing what people are doing or thinking. These go beyond simply the reaction - people are panicked, people are scared, people are greedy, selfish or heroes, or whatever - to engage with the rights and wrongs, the awkward unexpected reactions, the unintended consequences, of the story. 

Carver widens his canvas, I think, here, compared to previous books where events were often focussed on a small locality - a building, a village - but despite this larger stage he still makes the story connect very directly with a reader's own experience and convictions. It helps here of course that we have all recently gone through a pandemic so many of the experiences described and the trains of thought are closely rooted in observed experience. That connectedness means that Kill Them with Kindness is at the same time a deeply serious and thoughtful book - the author's argument about the value of simple kindness deserves respect - as well as an absorbing and often funny read. 

Carver never disappoints, and Kill them with Kindness is a stunner of a read.

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

Review - Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil by VE Schwab

Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil 

VE Schwab
Pan Macmillan, 10 June 2025
Available as: HB, pp, PB, 544pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035064649

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil to consider for review.

I don't think I can review Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil without dropping one potential spoiler - although it is a point I see mentioned in some of the author blurbs, so I think it's justified, if you want to go into this story in delightful ignorance of the central idea, stop reading now?

Still with me?

Well...

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is very much a vampire book. Across three timelines - one starting in 16th century Spain, the second in 19th century England and the third, present day Boston, MA, we see the workings of these ancient, corrupt creatures. It's actually often on familiar ground in its exploration of the idea, showing up the consequences for these long-lasting, but not immortal, monsters. The solitude. The loss of any possible human connection as mortals age and die. The need for secrecy. The ethical dilemma, when one's existence depends on taking human lives, and often. 

Where VE Schwab adds something of her own to the conceit is in her chosen monsters - or perhaps I should say victims. 

María is a peasant girl in medieval Spain. Blessed - or cursed - with good looks she seizes an opportunity to get out of grinding poverty and toil, but finds herself in an unfamiliar world without allies or friends. The life of a noblewoman is even more circumscribed than that of a poor girl. Can María repeat her trick and turn the table son the stuffy aristo who she's married?

Charlotte is a wealthy young woman in 19th century England. Like María, her only future seems to be a loveless marriage - until she meets a dazzling foreign contessa who awakes forbidden desire...

Finally, Alice, a young Scottish woman who's arrived to study at Harvard, has already made her move for escape, and has no wish to go any further, but she has little say in matters following a student party...

Each of these three stories is substantial and receives generous space in Schwab's novel, the book cutting back and forward. I don't always enjoy this device, the writer has to really know what they're doing but Schwab brings it off handsomely - with one "but...". This is the inevitable risk that any reader will enjoy one of the timelines more, or less, and resent some of the switches. For me, I found time spent with Alice a little frustrating. She wasn't a character I warmed to very quickly, and it didn't help that while the other two women's stories are more or less chronological, with Alice we get both her "now, in Boston" story and also callbacks to her previous life in her rural Scottish town and her difficult sister. The latter often interrupt the "now" timeline very abruptly and sometimes, very annoyingly. In particular I found Alice's sister, Catty, who these segments often dwell on, difficult.

Alice's dilemma in this book is - spoiler coming - that having been "turned" and (unlike the other two women) "turned" pretty much non consensually, she wants to work out what has happened to her and, if possible, get revenge. Alice is a new vampire, and that's a fairly simple motivation, unlike those of María and Charlotte, both of whom have spent long decades or even centuries becoming who they are. Alice's family history (fifteen years before, her mum died, her dad remarried, Alice is friendly with the new wife, Catty hates her and behaves in an increasingly bratty way) doesn't really affect that or bear on her current situation so these parts of the novel while I think insightful in terms of family dynamics, read as a distraction from the main story.

Which is a shame, because the main story is terrific! We see lots of gore. We see jealously. We see the tedium of a centuries-long existence. The loss of family and friends. The different vampires here cope with, or endure, this situation variously but with a consensus that there is a hollowing out process going on, robbing all, in the end, of their remaining humanity. (How to deal with that?)

Schwab also deftly portrays a rather vampire-specific, but immediately recognisable, strain of abuse and coercive control which, once you stop and think about it, absolutely fits with the situation. (Do bear this element of there story in mind if that's something that you might struggle with).

Above all this novel is superbly plotted, with the dance of her vampires across the centuries well choreographed to bring them together and ignite a final conflict with a few twists I absolutely hadn't anticipated. At the level of the writing itself, Schwab is always excellent of course and Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil is very, very readable.

So overall, I enjoyed Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil, and would recommend it, with the one caveat above.

For more information about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, see the publisher's website here.

Review - We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough

We Live Here Now

Sarah Pinborough
Orion, 5 June 2025 
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398722606

I'm grateful to Orion for giving me access to an advance e-copy of We Live Here Now  to consider for review.

Sarah Pinborough is the queen of the domestic tragedy, where a middle class couple have their brittle stability upset by secrets, physiological flaws and a twist of the supernatural - which sometimes seems to have been conjured by a darkness emanating from the apparent contented pair.

We Live Here Now explores just such a setup, pairing it with a convincingly Gothic setting - Larkin Lodge, a brooding house on Dartmoor, a place that, as the opening section hints with its references to Jane Eyre, has its own secrets.  It's expertly done and Pinborough guides her readers in and out of sympathy with the main protagonist, Emily, making the outlandish goings on here seem almost unexceptional and certainly quite believable.

Emily is coming to terms with drastic changes in her life, as the job she'd staked so much on is taken away from her in the aftermath of a dreadful accident. Troubled by guilt and loss, she doubts herself, she doubts her husband Freddie and, one feels, has thrown herself into the project of buying and occupying Larkin Lodge as a way of avoiding the need to confront all that. 

Freddie has his own demons - I think the reader will suspect from fairly early on that it's one of two possible things, either likely to wreck his and Emily's relationship. 

In chapters written from the point of view of each, we are soon shown the facts, but more importantly, the layers of self-justification, the accusations, and increasingly, the poisonous state of the relationship. It's all rather compelling, rather horrifying and rather ominous. And that's before Emily starts feeling there is... something... about the house.

This build was impressive - there were so many ways things might go - with an atmosphere of moral taint, a feeling that something about Larking Lodge is alive and reaching out, that Emily and Freddie - and those who lived there before them - is reaching out. But it's puzzling. As Emily becomes obsessed with the Lodge and begins to research it, she doesn't discover a simple history of tragedies. There are former owners who seem to have had a good life there. How to square that with her own feelings of distress?

Maybe it's Emily that is the problem.

That's certainly what Freddie decides.

With overtones of gaslighting, coercion and manipulation, We Live Here Now goes to some very dark places indeed. Equally at home providing the reader with a plausible nexus between individual despair and the supernatural, and a pin-sharp portrayal of middle class life and relationships, Pinborough has written a story that grabbed me and made sure I kept on until the final catastrophe(s) are resolved - or not, given the very unsettling final section.

I loved seeing the shout outs to other authors, including to a particular supernatural series whose author recently died, as well as the sense of time-encrusted mystery around what is actually wrong with Larkin Lodge and when it all began.

I would strongly recommend We Live Here Now.

For more information about We Live Here Now, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, 3)

Heather Fawcett
Orbit, 11 February 2025
Available as: HB, 368, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356519197

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales to consider for review.

"Stories shape the realms and the actions of those who dwell there. Some of those stories are known to mortals." - Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales.

Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales begins just where Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands finishes, with Emily (Cambridge's foremost dryadolgist) and Wendell about to step through the magic door that will lead them from our world to Wendell's, so that he can reclaim his fairy kingdom. Emily's irritating colleague Wendell is, we have learned, in reality and exiled fairy prince who has been searching for a way back so that he can challenge his stepmother for the throne.

This story is, then, rather different from the previous two because it's less Emily trying to solve a mystery in the course of her research than a deliberate and planned incursion (even if Emily's diary and reporting style are reminiscent of an academic field trip - you can take the woman out of Cambridge, but...)

Or so it would seem. In fact, once the two set foot in Wendell's kingdom, their troubles have only begun. It's less the battle for the throne, more the elusive and downright sulky nature of the kingdom itself. Oh, and the curse that his stepmother has laid upon it...

And that does take us closer to the earlier books, which might be oversimplifiedlified as Emily drawing on her knowledge of fairy lore to solve a situation. In Compendium of Lost Tales, it's a brutal one, the kingdom is dying, how will it be saved? Wendell has an answer, but his solution is likely to cost Emily everything. can she find, as it were, a loophole in the contract? Surrounded by shifty fae, whose loyalty and friendships change like the clouds on a windy day, and with Shadow also ailing, it's a tough challenge.

I enjoyed this book the most of the three Emily Wilde stories. Until now, the fairy kingdoms have only been visited briefly, events being seen through human eyes from our world. While Emily's and Wendell's strong central characters have dominated, the human angle has distracted - I kept trying to pick apart the differences between Fawcett's Earth and our own, and to locate her Cambridge and Emily's and Wendell's society in relation to our own. That isn't really the point of the books, I think. In contrast the full blown engagement with fairyland in this third book rather frees the imagination to engage with the tricksy business of fairy magic, fate and Wendell's complicated family relationships. It also brings a slew of fascinating new characters who I enjoyed meeting.

Great fun, and a fine ending to this brilliant series. 

For more information about Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Soft Core by Brittany Newell

Soft Core

Brittany Newell
4th Estate, 13 March 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008670382

I'm grateful to 4th Estate for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Soft Core to consider for review.

In Soft Core, Ruthie goes by several names. She is "Baby" in the club where she strips, "Miss Sunday" in the Dream House dungeon. As she remarks herself, she's almost never called Ruth. The image of a ghost pops up repeatedly, as though Ruthie is merely haunting her world. "I was an affable ghost, too shy to speak up when someone cut me in line..." Passing from bar to bar, she is "both a ghost and an archangel".

It's not clear how her missing ex, Dino, refers to Ruthie as he's, well, missing through most of this story. Indeed the story seems occasioned by his disappearance since, as a slice of Ruthie's life, the book begins when he vanishes. While she waits for Dino to reappear, or not, Ruthie goes about her day - and nightly - business, recalls her earlier life and muses on the city around her.

Through it all, she is, though, gradually coming apart. To call Dino her ex understates what the two meant to each other, I think. "To me, [Dino] was San Francisco embodied, misty, bookish and debased". Also "I didn't need anything other than what [Dino] gave to me; he was my nightlife, my superstore, all the books in the world" and 'I'd felt like this during my wild years too, until Dino had managed to calm me". 

Ruthie's meeting with Dino ended a restless period of her life, both in terms of employment and relationships ("My body was a friendly ghost, causing trouble just because. I dealt with it as one must deal with a poltergeist; I didn't take its hijinks personally and tried to ignore what it did after dark. That's when I went out, got horny and stupid", "After the line cook, I went on a spree. I began my weekends on Thursday and slept with a different man every night... suddenly I had a hobby... Mazzy [Ruthie's friend] put it succinctly: You've found something that you're good at. She would know, she was a prodigious slut... she would go on to blow the father of the family she babysat for." Even though they've split (for some hard to understand value of "split" she still lives in his house and the book paints a touching picture of the complex relationship between them. 

Food is a central preoccupation in the book. Dino, a drug dealer, had been a professional cook and cooked for Ruthie. "...vast Dominican feasts; we played chess while we digested". When the pair first met they "sat on the deck and ordered like tourists in love". Dino's  ominous absence is marked by Ruthie's reversion to scrappy, irregular meals. She is conscious of the change. "At twenty-five I knew enough to know that my silly little body was far from enough. This was not self-deprecation, just brute fact. Thus I had to always be prepared for [Dino], my pantry well stocked, deli meats and sliced cheeses and sour pickles on hand. 

In Dino's place, Ruthie forms friendships with work colleagues from the club Ophelia and Emeline. Both friendships are problematic, Ophelia in an-again, off again relationship with her boyfriend, Emeline the only daughter of wealthy parents and seemingly obsessed with Ruthie.

Told in episodes that hop back and forward, less a continuous narrative then a testimony, a recollection guided not by time than but by theme, Soft Core (the name comes from a perfume that Ruthie's find of) is beautifully written, with prose that flows. As well as ghosts, death, and specifically suicide, are preoccupations - Ruthie's mother went off the rails after Ruthie's father died: he may have killed himself - and Ruthie is also I think marked by that death ("There was a very small yet ferocious girl inside me that was prone to throwing drinks in men's faces"). Ruthie has an unfinished thesis on "surveillance, ghosts and reality TV".

Dino's disappearance shakes Ruthie. She begins to think she sees him everywhere. She even approaches some of the men she thinks might be him. Realistically, Dino's profession is one that might lead to his vanishing, either in dispute with other figures in his world or his flight from danger. Perhaps looking too closely into this isn't just unwise for her wellbeing ("At this point in my decline...") but also for her safety? Nevertheless Ruthie persists, even getting into relationships with some of them. Likewise she gets closer than she ought to one of her customers at the dungeon, a collector of dolls' houses with whom she has long text conversations about suicide. 

Ruthie's life as a dancer, meeting the desires of the (mostly male) customers ("Men would do anything to feel less alone; why couldn't they be like women, humming through the pain, too shy to ask for mercy?" is a significant theme in the book. She's blunt about the work "Danger was an elemental part of our job, even if we never got hurt", her place in it "The most marketable thing about me was that I was new and white" and its impact on her "Since I started dancing I had forgotten how to look nice without also looking slutty." 

But she also notes positive changes, invisible to the men watching - dancing makes her physically stronger "a change in my body that the men couldn't discern" and she notes that in the club "all women were my sisters" (although also "All men present were my daddies" which with her father dead also recalls the themes of death and ghosts). This ghost states that "I was only visible when I took off my clothes in a dark room at night".

Soft Core is a melancholy read, at times, for all its evocative language. Ruthie's time after Dino's disappearance, her season alone, is beset by thoughts of darkness, by dangers more intuited than plainly seen. One evening the San Franciscan fog "followed me home like a man". Ruthie had "the marks of men all over me".  She's lost in some way, or Dino's absence has revealed a loss that had already existed "I missed who I was when [Dino] and I had got together, that twenty-five year old fool. She'd never given a lap dance. She's never had a mai tai. She believed in her thesis on cameras and ghosts." It's hard to feel that, if he reappeared, she'd be safer - happier, perhaps, better fed, for sure, but safer? I suppose the fact that I was concerned for her shows that Newell has made this weird ghost sympathetic and certainly Ruthie's story is immersive but it's hard to see a good resolution coming here!

I'd certainly recommend Soft Core, though its themes will not be to everyone's taste.

For more information about Soft Core, see the publisher's website here.

Grave Empire by Richard Swan

Grave Empire

Richard Swan

Orbit, 4 February 2025, 
Available as: HB, 509pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356523866

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Grave Empire to consider for review.

Grave Empire ought not to work. Swan has gone back to the world of his Justice of Kings trilogy for a followup, set several hundred years later and with entirely new characters. The setting is recognisable, but beyond a few callbacks to the earlier books, the action is new (though, as the story develops we see that what I might call the theological character of the world is also the same).

There are pitfalls of writing a continuation to a successful trilogy. You may rehash the original, undoing the earlier resolution and making the reader ask what the point was (hello, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant! Hello, Star Wars episodes VII - IX!) Or you may produce something notionally related but not really, and be accused of simply cashing in on the earlier success. Either want you may miss what appealed the first time round.

Swan, however, avoids both of these traps and indeed rather gloriously transcends them. If the first trilogy had a sort of neo-Roman Empire setting, albeing garnished with Northern, rather than Southern, European tropes, Grave Empire picks things up in a more gunpowdery age. The warfare is a bit Napoleonic, the geopolitics more Age of Empires (complete with colonial excesses) than Ancient World. Yet, behind it all, the menace that Sir Konrad discovered, the cosmic horror that drove events in the earlier books, still festers. Only, the re-established Empire of the Wolf has now made the lore that might have allowed it to resists, even more forbidden. Quite the conundrum.

Against that background, Grave Empire gives us some brilliant new characters. There is Peter, a young man recently recruited to the Sovan Army. Swan is good on the motivation for the this, the mix of personal drift, family situation and peer pressure. He also creates a plausible military for Peter to join, and a plausible disillusionment for him to undergo, amidst the coming apart of Sovan political and diplomatic influence and an increasingly precarious strategic position. Peter's arc will lead him to and beyond the fringes of Sovan power and to him becoming the holder of strange secrets.

There's also Renata, a studious if obscure Sovan diplomat in a little-regarded branch of the bureaucracy, that will soon be brought to the centre of matters as the crisis escalates. I rather like the "obscure functionary unexpectedly thrust into the limelight" trope (as a bureaucrat myself perhaps it plays into my wish fulfilment: if only people would actually listen to ME!) and Renata's an ideal subject for it, a mix of high competence and low confidence. 

This opening volume of the new trilogy takes its time, and gives plenty of space, allowing both Renata and Peter to develop and for us as readers to take their measure. (And also introduces a number of others). Plenty else is happening, with military expeditions, plots and a mysterious master-spy whose motives seem deeply dubious, if still rather obscure. Many of these threads remain separate, though Swan uses the alternate viewpoints they provide to provide more information about the "modern" version of his world.

It's a gripping read, one that fairly rattles along in terms of pace and Swan successfully prevents the reader from pining overmuch at the loss of his earlier roster of characters, as she or he might have if it had been set closer in time. 

Recommended.

For more information about Grave Empire, see the publisher's website here.

Review - A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

A Granite Silence

Nina Allan
Riverrun, 10 April 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781529435573

I have to say, I paused over A Granite Silence because I thought at first that might be "true crime" and I have a bit of a dislike of that genre. But I love Nina Allan's books and trust her as an author so was curious to see what she had written.

And I am so glad I did that because this is a wonderful book, albeit, at times, a painful one to read. 

But first, about that genre label. Showing how false and misleading these things are, yes, this book is about a true crime - the murder of a young girl, Helen Priestly, in 1930s Aberdeen - but it is also a work of fiction, and many other things besides. Allan gives us a razor sharp analysis of the crime and its aftermaths - and its beforemaths too. But she also wraps that in fiction. The ideas roll around like quicksilver, the book imagining the lives of the various protagonists, often in quite tangential settings and circumstances and far from Aberdeen.  Often, the settings often turn out not to be so tangential at all. There are alternative timelines and lives here too, all of which enrich the central events, and even pieces of clear fiction which might stand as complete stories in themselves. 

In Allan's hands, Aberdeen becomes a nexus, a place haunted by emigrés, journalists drawn to the events portrayed here and by the author herself as she describes her investigation of the murder and the subsequent trial but also fills us in on the wider past, the city and the country. She shows that Aberdeen is a complex place which has actually had many pasts.  There are even some science-fictional elements in this mass of stories, hinting at other worldly goings on.

I felt that A Granite Silence has implicit, but real, connections with other of Allan's books,  particularly The Rift and The Race, both of which turned on disappearances and loss and both of which also touched on wider alternate realities. In A Granite Silence things are more realist, but the exploration, in the second half of the book, of the trial which followed young Helen's murder naturally engages the same sense of multiple realities - that's the point of a trial, surely, you tip out everything on the table and try to sort out all the possibilities?

The book also covers an extraordinary range of other subjects, ranging from a modernised version of Burn's Tam O'Shanter (a poem I studied for O level English literature - at last, I felt as I read this, that has come in useful!) to Harry Houdini's visit to Aberdeen to the development of forensic science to the sheer difficulty of finding what becomes of people, only a few decades back, when there is no Internet to force them to leave breadcrumb trails.

It's difficult to do justice in a short review to the sheer breadth of this book, to its empathy for the poor souls devastated by tragedy nearly a hundred years ago or to the pains Allan takes to show how the great web of connections, of society, while stretched and holed, reaches forward. Far from being preoccupied by a shocking crime, Allan uses her art to get beyond that granite silence, to hear the very stones ringing to vanished footsteps, to futures that never were. The various strangers who people her Aberdeen and then move on are like sonic waves, imaging what can't be seen in the murk of the North Sea waters.

A profound, moving and thought-provoking book, but also a joy to read.

For more information about A Granite Silence, see the author's website here. 

Review - Strange New World by Vivian Shaw

Strange New World

Vivian Shaw
Orbit, 20 May 2025

Available as: PB, 371pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521077

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Strange New World  to consider for review.

I thought that the series of books about Greta Helsing, doctor to the monsters of London, was done, so I was VERY excited to see the e-book only novella Bitter Waters last year. Gloriously it was followed up by Strange New World.  Strange New World does though think mark a definite end.

It was wonderful to meet Greta again.  I have a weakness for characters who, like her, may be tossed around by events and even baffled by what's going, but nevertheless remain level-headed, focussed and competent throughout - rather than becoming so just in time for the third act. 

Of course, it helps a protagonist when their husband is a wealthy vampire, their best friend is a senior functionary in Hell and their circle of acquaintances included the Voivode, Count Dracula himself. Greta has all of those advantages and is nowhere near as hard-pressed as she was in the earlier books. Still,  even it does look as though previous events - the hunting down of harmless monsters by religious fanatics - are being repeated. Greta suffered enough trauma from that to give her pause (I also have a weakness for stories that respect and recognise trauma rather than just ignoring it). Even so, the dangers (to herself, her friends and indeed, the fabric of reality itself) that she has weathered have also left her conscious of just how vulnerable mortals (and monsters) can be and of the need to face them. In Strange New World, those dangers come from a new direction, and the means to overcome must as well.

Without being too spoilery, I'd like to say how much I enjoyed the resolution to this book. It would have been possible to make it a magnificently bloody piece of combat, with the Universe balanced on a knife edge - and indeed there are some nail biting set piece conflicts in here - but the book is concerned  rather with empathy and morality. The solution, if there is one, is therefore going to require compassion, flexibility - and friendship.

That leads us to a much richer, and necessarily messier, conclusion than if it all turned on a knock-down battle, but also to a much better one I think. Indeed, as the book ended I found myself thinking of a perhaps surprising precedent - CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Setting aside the question of whether those "letters from a senior to a junior demon" (a kind of infernal Yes, Minister) establish Lewis, the great Christian apologist, as a founder of urban fantasy (I would love that but perhaps... not quite)  I think there is a comparison to be drawn. I think one of Lewis's insights was to explore issues of personality, confusion and despair in the subjects that his industrious demons were trying to mislead, rather than brimstone and temptation. 

Shaw's demons (and her angels) inhabit a different moral universe, not the Christian one, and nobody is actively trying to save or damn anyone. Here, Heaven and Hell are more like rival idealogical systems, and of course, as she makes clear, other mythologies are also available. But, at the root of things I think there are the same issues that Lewis explored - the fatal flaws in human, demon or, indeed, angel, that can lead to dreadful consequences. We are all monsters. We can all be better. We all need love, acceptance and hope. And friendship. Which made the ending of this book, and the moral actions that lead to the resolution and point to a future of hope, so powerful for me.

Which is, perhaps, a good place to end a series. While I will miss Greta, I feel that in these five books have completed something significant, say something significant. 

I will be keen to see what Shaw writes next!

For more information about Strange New World, see the publisher's website here.

Blgtour review - Shatter Creek by Rod Reynolds

Shatter Creek (Casey Wray, 2)
Rod Reynolds
Orenda Books, 22 May 2025 
Available as: PB, 355pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788091

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

This one put me in mind of one of my favourite Springsteen songs, Atlantic City:

Now there's trouble busin' in from outta state

And the DA can't get no relief

Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade

And the gamblin' commission's hangin' on by the skin of its teeth...

Also set in a coastal town that's seen better days, like Atlantic City Shatter Creek sees hard-pressed officialdom - in this case the Hampstead County Police Department - hanging on by the skin of its teeth, threatened by by a wave of murders, by political interference and by the taint of corruption.

Sergeant Casey Wray is back, naturally. She's the woman trying to hold it, and herself, together. Casey - just - survived the violent events of Black Reed Bay, both physically (unlike her partner she's alive!) and reputationally, back on duty after a lengthy investigation exonerated her (though not in everyone's eyes). Now it all seems to be happening again, with her superior officer mistrustful, mysterious calls from a would-be informant, and pressure to resolve the murder of a wealthy political donor without raking up further dirt.

We're in for a tense few days, then, as Casey has to balance the different pressures on her. 

But someone else seems to be interested in recruiting her...

This certainly is not a relaxing read. As with its predecessor, Shatter Creek is a tense book, a window into a high pressure world where nothing can be fixed and just getting to the end of each working day is a minor miracle. Casey's clearly a good cop, and a good friend - she spends as much time sorting out the frictions among her team as in chasing down the suspects - but she's in a tight place. By the time I was a third of the way through this book I was beginning to dread every phone call and text that interrupts Casey's day, because each one piles more and more pressure on. 

As the story progresses, the limited normality and security that Casey has reestablished is stripped away leaving her very exposed. She's pressured to do favours for the politicians - but we just know that if she gives in, it'll blow up in her face. If she resists, though, she'll end up being the fall girl when the enquiry goes wrong, as it seems to be doing.

Through it all, Reynolds keeps a plot moving that is - once we reach the end and see what's gone on - beautifully simply, yet fiendishly complex and misleading as it unfolds. And he makes real a whole train of characters - broken people, who've lost loved ones or discovered someone wasn't what they seemed. Rage, loss, jealousy, greed and pride chase each other down the pages of this novel as though someone had set up a track and field tournament for the Seven Deadly Sins. 

And amidst it all are those broken people, desperately vulnerable. It's not just Casey who's in jeopardy (though she does seem at risk). There's a missing mother and child. Other women are dying, with a particularly nasty form of patriarchy and coercive control on display. Each death leaves a dreadful void for the survivors. Protecting them all is Casey's touchpoint, her still centre in this storm - one of the reasons she's such a relatable and compelling protagonist - but other actors, bad actors, seem more concerned with covering their own backsides, or finding advantage in the chaos.

It is a riveting read, and one hard not to undertake in a single go, though if you suffer from high blood pressure, well, you may want to make sure you take regular breaks... or medication.

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

Review - Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

Paladin's Grace

T Kingfisher
Orbit, 8 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 360pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN (PB): 9780356524313

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Paladin's Grace  to consider for review.

Stephen is a broken paladin. His god dead, he's trying to find purpose - and to prevent the berserk rage overtaking him, because with the Saint of Steel gone missing, Stephen is afraid he'll lose control and commit mass murder. 

The rest of the time, he knits socks...

Grace is a perfumer. A Woman with Secrets, she's already lost everything - twice - and is desperately afraid it'll happen again.

So when Grace is chased through a graveyard by malevolent priests, and literally jumps into Stephen's arms to put them off the scent, she's being practical, not looking for an offer of rescue, still less for romance. And Stephen's too afraid of letting go and losing control to admit the feelings Grace stirs in him.

And yet. And yet...

Paladin's Grace is a fun fantasy romance. Kingfisher's setting - a medieval-ish town crammed with feuding priests, plotting diplomats and, as the toll of bodiless heads mounts up, murderers - is well realised without being over-serious. Stephen's, and Grace's, sensitivities, are well drawn. Their respective drives to resist romantic entanglement war with natural feelings - STRONG feelings, my goodness, as Kingfisher makes clear - but both, of course, are too embarrassed, not to say confused, to explain to each just what they're going through.

And in any case they have no time. There are murders to solve!

The two protagonists are interesting and fun - Stephen may sound from my description above as though he's stepped out of a D&D adventuring party, but he's an intelligent man, not just an arm with a sword, and a complex one at that, trying to navigate his way in a world he never expected or wanted to live in. Grace is a resourceful and determined woman who's suffered appallingly at the hands of entitled men, and is determined not to fall into any man's power. Her profession as a perfumier gives her an ambivalent place in society, allowing access to privileged circles while not being part of them. (As becomes clear when her secrets, and her life, begin to unravel, her foundations in her profession are shaky too).

Through all this, a developing plot concerning poisonings in diplomatic circler, as well as those unidentified heads, adds tension, putting both Stephen and Grace in danger and driving the story towards a violet conclusion.

While I might, perhaps, have hoped that this violence would come on a little sooner - we know it's coming, don't we? - the anticipation mirrors, er, another kind of anticipation that's building of course in our protagonists. Will they or won't they? Well, fair reader, I don't deal in spoilers, you'll just have to read the book.

All in all, great fun and - I understand - a standalone adventure in a wider world that this author is currently developing with more volumes to be published shortly. I'll be watching for them.

For more information about Paladin's Grace, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - Downlands by Norm Konyu

Downlands
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 13 May 2025
Available as: HB, 292pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787743328

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan Comics for sending me a copy of Downlands to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the blogtour for this excellent graphic novel.

I hadn't read Norm Konyu's work before but now that I've seen Downlands I'm a fan. To this 70s child there's a haunting fusion of form and content here, not so much dreamlike as "memories you had forgotten like". And that's even before you add in the folk-horror vibe and rich historical depth.

Set in the ancient countryside and the villages of Sussex, Downlands is centred around James and his 14 year old sister Jen, who dies suddenly at the start of the book. I think it's fair to say the story is centred around James and Jen because her absence is itself a presence that haunts this book. It is (as well as being many other things!) a powerful evocation of loss and dislocation, as James and his parents struggle with their grief and the unfairness of a life lost so young. ("Tea again. I was constantly being offered tea as if it would make everything right.") The supernatural events that flit around the subsequent story reflect that dislocation, but they are clearly intended here as more than a reaction to it - there is something amiss.

Jen's absence isn't the only one. Through the book, Konyu also gives us, via retold stories, fragments of history, postcards, extracts and countless other sources, the stories of the houses in James' street. These include many losses. There have been deaths. There have been disappearances. Young men march away to war, to return changed, it at all. One unfortunate woman is committed to the county asylum. A family perish in a road accident. A cottage burns down and is never rebuilt. 

Other events are also touched on - a famous writer lodged in the street while working on her masterpiece. The local vicar struggles with his sermon. A woman whispered to be a witch has some answers. And, through all of it, a mysterious black dog that only some can see steps in and out of the tale.

It's a puzzle of sorts. James tries to understand what happened to Jen, but discovers that is linked to other, older mysteries. It's not "ancient evil" territory but there is a sense of malevolence, or perhaps, of human twistedness warping a natural ineffableness to darken and taint the lives of those who live in The Street (and especially at one particular address). In the course of sketching this out, Konyu blends many powerful themes, both historical and mythic - excavating the "ghost soil" as it were (and helpfully describes some of the sources at the end)

The story is, as I mentioned, conveyed in a very distinctive style, naturalistic yet stylised, the angles and often muted tones often gorgeous yet chiming with the slightly awkward feelings and sense of disjunction being felt by James and his family. Grief, guilt and disbelief will do that to how you see the world, I think. I have no learning in graphical styles so may be making some huge faux pas here, but to me it also recalled a strand in book illustration from the 60s and 70s - something overlapping between the sparseness of Dick Bruna and those intricate line drawn pictures in 70s Puffin books. I felt very at home with these pages. (That's especially useful since the book encourages you to turn back and forward, making connections between things as later pages shed new light on earlier material).

All in all, a ravishing read, perfect whether as something spooky to send shivers through you in summer hear or autumn fog, as a powerful episode of nostalgia, or as a comforting companion in grief. Or, just if you want a good read!

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

Review - South of Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver

South of Nowhere

Jeffery Deaver
HarperCollins, 8 May 2025
Available as: HB, 416pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy

ISBN(HB): 9780008665951

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with advance access to an e-copy of South of Nowhere via NetGalley.

In the latest instalment of Deaver's compulsive readable Colter Shaw series (though, I'm not sure Deaver writes anything that isn't compulsively readable) our hero is pitted not only against the bad guys but against the forces of nature itself.

Amidst a general drought, the Californian town of Hinowah is threatened by, of all things, flooding, due to snow melt in the mountains. The levee that protects the town has been allowed to fall into disrepair, and it's threatening to give way. In the heart-stopping prelude to the story, we see travellers on the levee road facing the threat of being swept away by the floodwaters, and later, Shaw's cool analysis of how they might survive (if you're trapped in a submerged car with a pocket of air, it will last longer if you wee on the carpet, apparently, so you'd better hope the car's upright).

How, and why, Shaw comes to be in Hinowah and what allies - and enemies - he has there, will be revealed in the book. At the start he's worrying about a development from his troubled father's past, one that may place the family in danger again. That thread is picked up in the book as something that may feature in future stories, but mostly, this one is about the peril in Hinowah. We see an agreeable set of figures battle against the crisis - Army engineers, a disaster response professional who happened to  than be passing by, the town boss who fancies taking over as police chief and sees the whole episode as a "test" for him, a new police recruit who's who most competent person on his team, and, of course, Shaw himself. 

Laced with Deaver's brand of informed analysis on issues ranging from river law (and law), to flood risk to the history of the California goldrush to modern tech and its insatiable demand for water, and his meticulous plotting, the story isn't without the human touch either - whether it's Shaw himself finding romance or seeing the inhabitants of a small town respond in realistic ways to the threat hanging over them (spoiler: realistic ways doesn't always mean sensible ways). 

There are subplots and wheels within wheels and a feature I love with these novels, a Survivalist family who are not far Right crazies - and whose skills and talents are particularly well suited to the crisis unfolding in South of Nowhere. We also see some bad actors about their business (but what, exactly, is their business, amidst a natural disaster?) and there are some surprises about who is up to what.

As ever, immense fun, and those same bad actors provide enough of a whodunnit/ whytheydunnit element to leaven the straight disaster narrative, if that's your thing, although for me , that drama was nalibiting enough in itself.

Strongly recommended, but if you pick this up, be sure to clear your diary for the next few days because you won't willingly out it down again till you reach the end.

For more information about South of Nowhere see the publisher's website here.

Review - Sleeper Beach by Nick Harkaway (Cal Sounder, 2)

Sleeper Beach

Nick Harkaway
Corsair, 10 April 2025 
Available as: HB, 312pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472158895

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

Sleeper Beach is the second book featuring Cal Sounder, PI in a near-future, fractured reality. In the first story, Titanium Noir, we saw (spoilers!) Cal fatally injured and treated with the drug T7, which prolongs life and increases body mass, strength and endurance. 

Five years on, Cal is still learning to live with his new body and with the profound change to his status in his own - and wider society's - perception. Cal is now a "Titan", one of of a tiny number of reengineered supermen (and women) who seem set to inherit the earth, poisoned and heated as it is. Titans can live for hundreds of years, with many acquiring great wealth over their prolonged lifetimes. They have a different view of the world, losing track of relationships and of the lives of the ephemeral "baselines", many of whom are resentful, forced to the sidelines of life in what is a nakedly capitalist, dog-eat-dog world.

Despite his new status, Cal continues to do what good he can, rather than allowing himself to be enfolded by the cushion of money and privilege that might be afforded by his girlfriend's, Athena's, membership of the powerful Tonfamecasca corporate family. This is how he comes to be investigating the suspicious death of a young woman in the seaside town of Shearwater. Harkaway lovingly portrays the atmosphere of the peeling resort/ fishing town, a place dominated by the Esrkine family who've been having trouble with their workers. It's a complex plot featuring potential revolutionaries, trades unions and family tensions all of whom have only one thing in common - a preference for Cal to mind his own business. Lurking in the background is the mysterious organisation the 1848, a revolutionary sect that may or may not exist and may or may not be set to avenge the massacre that happened some decades earlier in a place called Tilehurst.

That name is one of the few familiar anchors for me to the present - I regularly travel through Tilehusrt on the train, although it's not the small city portrayed here - the action in the book taking place in a strange, almost dreamlike place that's hard to connect, either spatially or temporally, to now. From the hard boiled tone of the narration one might think the story was based in the US, but other place names, and the geography, seem frustratingly off for that. Maybe there's more going on here than one might think - perhaps Cal, who is our narrator, is already succumbing to the Titan outlook, telescoping time and the b brief lives of baseline humans. Perhaps history is being rewritten, and the centuries the Titans have allegedly been around for are a myth, or something worse? It's all tantalising.

Harkaway is certainly having fun with all this, and, I felt, perhaps poking fun at another current project, the continuation of the George Smiley books. There's perhaps a thin line between Cal's profession and that of the spy, the Communist organisation in the shadows suggests, of course, a subtle enemy and I definitely spotted allusions ion the language - as for example when there is a need for a "legend for a girl". 

But the fun doesn't take over. Cal is not in fact a spy, he is a hardboiled detective - a man who may walk down the mean streets but is not himself mean, hard though it may be to grasp his humanity changed as he is - and in Sleeper Beach he does just want he ought to, carrying out the instructions of his mysterious client, who may or may not be fatale, she is definitely femme but not a stereotype dangerous blonde, to discover who is the murderer. There may or may not be a Titan angle here - it's so easy for them to become killers, so easy to escape justice. There may or may not be a political angle. Cal makes alliances and enemies, explores the roots of the town and spends a great deal of time on that beach where the hopeless come to let their lives drain away.

It's a glorious book, a knotty detective mystery wrapped round a peeling dystopia. I can't think of anything quite like this series. It's got noir, obviously. It's got echoes of M John Harrison's Viriconium. It's got a scorching moral centre as Cal processes the nature of the creature he's become and debates its right to exist. So maybe add Frankenstein to that mix? And I could go on. It's weird, it's sad, it's fun and it's all its own thing.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Sleeper Beach, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Underscore by Andrew Cartmel

Underscore (The Vinyl Detective, 8)

Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 15 April 2025
Available as: PB, 416pp audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781803367989

It's always great to see a new instalment of Andrew Cartmel's Vinyl Detective series (or for that matter, an outing for his spiritual sister the Paperback Sleuth) and I'm especially chuffed because this one quotes Blue Book Balloon in its rundown of reviews. Perhaps I can finally call myself an influencer. 

Not that I am letting that sway me in giving my verdict here. Oh no. I can genuinely say that Underscore maintains the high standard of its predecessors, as the (still unnamed) Detective (who's getting sick of being called that, however, what will Cartmel do?) launches into a search for the soundtrack LP to Murder in London, a gory 1960s Italian film whose events seem to be echoed in modern London...

The Detective, and his girlfriend Nevada, have been commissioned to track down a pristine vinyl copy of the record - but also, if they can, to exonerate its composer, Loretto Loconsole, of murdering his lover during the film's production production. The killing, for which no-one was ever charged, hung over Loconsole's later career, but his granddaughter Chloë now wants to reissue the music - something hard to do if he's still under suspicion (and harder still if she doesn't have a decent copy of it).

The resulting investigation hits all the notes that a Vinyl Detective novel should. I get sheer pleasure from the way that in these novels Cartmel creates a believable, and frankly enviable, lifestyle for his shifting bunch of characters who lunch and drink their way around a beautifully realised corner of the West London suburbs. Yet there are dangers that follow them, and Underscore has some heart stopping moments. Someone is determined to stop Chloë vindicating her grandfather, or reissuing his music, or both. Cass and Desdemona, the grandkids of the murder victim, are also hanging around - they would bribe the Detective to desist if they could (Nevada's tempted, of course) but might they go further?

How to solve a nearly 60 year old mystery? How to find a copy of a recording which - due to the scandal attached - was never issued, with the discs rather being destroyed? How to stay alive while doing both?

It's a tightly written, action filled story (with breaks for those lunches, naturally) which kept me guessing. As ever, Cartmel fills the reader in on the finer points, in this case the giallo genre, the politics of the late 60s recording industry and the surprising fidelity of a pristine vinyl copy. (It's no coincident that the Detective is after vinyl, rather than vintage CDs or tapes). The result is an excellent addition to the canon, and a better knowledge of these essential matters. 

With another Paperback Sleuth novel due this year as well it's going to be a good year, I can already tell.

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

Review - The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion by Ivy Grimes

The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion

Ivy Grimes
Cemetery Gates Media, 21 April 2025
Available as: PB, 166pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9798310899803

I'm grateful to Cemetery Gates Media for sending me a copy of The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion to consider for review.

Ivy Grime's debut novel, The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion, is I think an updating the Bluebeard story. That is clear from the title alone but we also have a mysterious husband (one in a line of mysterious husbands, in fact) marrying a new bride (Ruby, the main protagonist) who is taken to the Scary Mansion. There is talk of previous wives (what became of them?) and Ruby is forbidden to go into a particular room.

As expected in fact. Only, Ruby's new husband, Glaucon, and his creepy house (castle?) are by no means the only weird elements of the plot. Or indeed, the weirdest. Ruby's, and her sister, Opal's, lives are strange even before her wedding changes everything. They live in a remote house in the woods where their mother, terrified of bears and strangers, keeps them a secret as much as she can. Walking in the woods, Ruby and Opal encounter the enigmatic Phew, so called because he is the Nephew of God, and a prophet. Also, a talking possum and a distracted Frenchman, seeking his daughter. 

Grimes's deadpan, real-but-dreamlike tone makes such odd developments seem real and obvious, albeit it's clear this isn't a fantasy world where such things are simply accepted, so the story hardly needs to change its affect when Blaubart Mansion itself comes to the centre of things with an array of enigmatic servants, ghosts, cast-off wives (they aren't executed anymore, just retired to a kind of rest home in the grounds) and mysterious architecture. However there is more going on here than just the gothic. Blaubart is, as much as a home, a grand machine dedicated to laundering and celebrating a certain sort of history... located in the US South you might expect this is a certain sort of White, moneyed, history, and so it proves. 

Putting me in mind of Gormenghast with its enigmatic rituals, isolation (though, unlike Gormenghast, Blaubart is located in a recognisably modern location), sprawling, generational construction and its celebration of a skewed history, Blaubart soon reveals itself as suffering from a certain dis-ease. The  wives are the least of it: maintaining the traditions seems to exact a price from all involved. How will Ruby free herself of this place (which she married into mainly to provide medical care for her sick mother, to be promptly forbidden from ever seeing her again) without becoming a murderer in turn?

The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is a complex and allusive story which works on many different levels, blending honest to goodness horror with a real sense of the past tainting and corrupting the present. Ruby's escape will require her own courage ind ingenuity, the forging of unlikely alliances - and facing the truth of her and Opal's family and its refuge in the woods. Though short, it packs a lot in. As I have said, it's part Bluebeard, part Gormenghast and there is also a sense of Cold Comfort Farm in the sensible heroine stranded amidst the grotesque. But it is its powerful own thing - a disturbing book that takes a scalpel to the decorous rituals of modern society and reveals the canker beneath.

Recommended.

For more information about The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - Dangerous by Essie Fox

Dangerous
Essie Fox
Orenda Books, 25 April 2025 
Available as: HB, 305pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788442

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

The reference in the title of Dangerous to Lady Caroline Lamb's quip about Lord Byron - that he was "mad, bad and dangerous to know" may be the thing most people know about George Gordon Byron, alongside the fact that he was considered scandalous by the Victorians (but, what wasn't?) As Essie Fox shows with her novel of his years in Venice, there is a great deal more to be said than that and Fox certainly allows the man to speak for himself in this imagined account, taking us to Venice for an exciting tale of intrigue, revenge, murder, love, sex and - possibly - the supernatural.

Framed by a prologue and epilogue describing the discovery, and later destruction, of a bundle of papers hidden in Byron's tomb at Hucknall Torkard, the main body of the book gives us the story itself. It takes place against a background of canals, gondolas, Carnivale and gothic horrors. Amidst all this, Byron is mouldering somewhat - matching the mood of damp and fever in his crumbling palazzo - mulling over his life choices, spending money and chasing women. It's a shock to him, and to Venetian society, when some of them are found dead. 

Byron fears more scandal, but he's also moved by the deaths, and sets out to discover the truth.

Literary rivalries and plagiarism also make their appearance in a rich and sumptuous story. Behind all this, Fox does, I think, give us a shrewd portrayal of a man who was obviously tortured and damaged. Wealthy and titled, he has the good fortune to be able to take himself off to a more permissive foreign locale to work though some of his issues: but, for most of the story, he makes little progress with that, and his frustration almost steams off the pages.

That degree of psychological insight and truth is impressive, and not a given in this sort of historical novel. Dangerous exists, I think, at the intersection of three different kinds of writing - the historical detective story ('Lord Byron, solving crime, in Venice!'), the supernatural ('Lord Byron... and vampires!') and the character study. If I were an author (you can be grateful I'm not) I'm sure I would go overboard on one of the first two. Yet in Dangerous we have a nice balance, with the book all the more readable because Byron's character chimes with the themes - the love, the sex, the degradation. It means something, is vital to the atmosphere, the tension, the implied chain of events. 

In Dangerous, despite it being subtitled 'A Lord Byron Mystery', we don't just get a run of the mill investigator wearing Byron's cape, as it were, we get a real human being, a particular human being, a man in some distress, wrestling with issues of truth, consequence and morality. In other words Fox has given us a historical mystery where the history isn't just set dressing. To understand and engage with the book you need to understand the straits this man was in, as well as contemporary mores and settings, and here the author informs and even educates without info-dumping on, or lecturing, the reader. 

The result is a fine piece of writing that is both an engaging mystery and a gateway into Byron's life and his world. That's not the same as a whitewash of him: Fox makes clear that he wasn't anything like an innocent: but she also shows he was a complex man and enmeshed in a culture that was itself pretty corrupt.  "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past..." as someone wrote a few decades further into the 19th century.

I would strongly recommend Dangerous for all these reasons, but also for the beauty of the writing and the tinge of mystery and uncertainty which seeps off its pages from beginning to end.

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

Review - The Get Off by Christa Faust

The Get Off (Angel Dare, 3)

Christa Faust
Titan Books, 18 March 2025
Available as: PB, 256pp, e   
Source: Advance copy from the author
ISBN(PB): 9781835411735

I'm grateful to Christa for sending me a signed advance copy of The Get Off to consider for review.

The Get Off is the third part (the final part?) of a series of novel featuring Angel Dare, adult entertainment performer, fugitive - and killer.

As the story open, Angel (given name Gina Moretti) is closing in on her sworn enemy, Vukasin. The two seem to exist in a bubble of mutual antipathy, and Angel's determined to end him. (One has the sense that if she achieves this she'll then actually be left without a purpose in life, so out of control have things spun for her).

Well, it all goes wrong, and Angel's on the run (even more on the run?) now branded a cop killer. What's more, she faces a personal Situation that messes with her in so many, very personal, ways, limiting her ability to simply disappear.

What follows is essentially a trail of destruction. Angel has hunters after her, who don't care what collateral damage they cause, so those around her are at high risk. But more than that, she seems to have a nose for trouble - not so she can avoid it, but so she can land in the middle of it. Travelling with a peripatetic bullfighter (it's OK, he doesn't kill them) seems likely to land her or him in danger sooner or later and sure enough, it does. Angel blames herself for this and yes, perhaps she makes some bad choices here (not that I'm sure she actually has many options). However there are other bad guys and girls out there and they don't hold back from dragging her into their murky plans.

So there is death after death, a trail of killings that, surely, one could see from space. Not the ideal way to stay below the radar, really. Still, if Angel can just stay ahead of the pursuit she may have a haven where she can find shelter and sort out her Situation...

This was an action-packed story full of narrow escapes, slaughter of innocents (and the guilty) and the sort of moments when you go back and reread to confirm that, yes, she really did do that. Angel is a conscientious - or perhaps I should say, conscience wracked - narrator who's fully aware that she has crossed numerous red lines. She agonises over it, and regrets the carnage, but nevertheless, she presses on. What else can she do? Despite the bloodletting, Angel is a sympathetic protagonist and I hoped against hope that she would find a good end. Nevertheless the story is realistic, indeed it pulls absolutely no punches in depicting a number of rod different, but gruesome deaths. (Probably not one for the  fainthearted, but then, you'd hardly be browsing "Hard Case Crime" if you were, I think).

A great story though from the first page and one I'd strongly recommend.

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

Review - Once Was Willem by MR Carey

Once Was Willem

MR Carey

Orbit,  4 March 2025
Available as: HB, 297pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356519449

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Once Was Willem to consider for review.

One of the things I really enjoy about a New Year (yes, I know it's March now, bear with me) is the prospect of new books from favourite authors. Many authors publish a book a year, or every other year, and these are previewed a few months ahead, so it's easy to follow the rhythm of the calendar and accumulate a forward look of what's coming. This is laudable behaviour, what in a business context is called "horizon scanning". It's easy to convince yourself that you are being bold, a veritable explorer, searching the horizon with a telescope and alert to future trends.

The reality of course can be slightly different - a deluge of upcoming books you want to read but will never have time to. Perhaps this will change in coming years when there are no authors left, and AIs, or as George Orwell called them, the "novel-writing machines", churn out reworked slop to keep the readers happy and stop anyone thinking. Then I will throw away my catalogues, settle down in my corner, and spend the rest of my life catching up, as there will be nothing new to miss.

We are not there yet. But happily there is already a better way out of this dilemma because we have MR Carey, and other authors, whose coming books one obviously has to read and there's an end to it. I have been watching this one coming, and eagerly waiting to start it and can now report that it every bit as good as I had wished.

A historical fantasy set in the 12th century English Midlands, Once Was Willem takes us to a world of knights, barons, and kings in a time of civil war. Or actually, it doesn't, quite because most of the KB&Ks are kept offpage while the action focuses on villagers, children, outlaws and fugitive magicians. 

Oh, and monsters. 

I approve of this, on the basis that the KB&Ks get too much attention given they basically have their holdings by theft and murder, and deserve taking down a peg or three. History is much, much more interesting seen from "below" (or, as one may equally say, when seen clearly). So in Once Was Willem, the lawlessness of the times is due to the quarrels of the KB&Ks, but the people who have to deal are... the people. And they have no choice by to deal, and precious few resources to use for that yet they SUCCEED. How to we know they succeed? It's simple. You and me are here today, so our ancestors managed the difficult trick of staying alive and keeping things on the road (In the particular context and setting of this story, that is true for values of "you and me" that mainly includes European descended people because that's where the book is set, but I think the point is absolutely general - our ancestors survived, and kept things going. Perhaps in appalling circumstances, but still they did, or none of us would be here). 

Of course this book is fantasy, and the people in it didn't exist so didn't, literally, survive. And it being fantasy they had resources that don't exist "for real". But I don't think that diminishes the validity of a story that focusses, like this, on ordinary people.

Nor does the fact that, as is true in Once Was Willem, they ordinary people do many appalling things. The Willem of this story is a boy, outcast from his family for reasons I won't spoil, who has to take refuge in the woods alongside monsters. There he finds a more welcoming and accepting family than in his village of Cosham, which habitually chases out the weird kids and burns the witches. Nevertheless, it's those outcasts and weirdos who come to the village's rescue when a local upstart lordling (he was of late an outlaw and robber himself, see my point above) demands Cosham hand over all its children. Shades of "Seven Samurai/ The Magnificent Seven" here when the mysterious creatures from the woods come together to defend the kids (not, really, the village.

The story is cleverly told from Willem's point of view, with an appropriately limited (but gradually expanding) understanding of events and the wider context. That did slightly recall Koli's perspective in Carey's Rampart trilogy, (also excellent). There is a split perspective so that events are narrated both as they happen and in hindsight, Willem having come on pretty extensive knowledge  afterwards so he's able to report action and conversations in the right places without having to be there. While this, obviously, sends an enormous signal about the book (Willem survives!) that's hardly unexpected and Carey is masterful in pulling the rug from under our feet when we think we know how that happens, what it means and what Willem will have to go through to ensure victory. 

Willem, and his friends. All of them are very real characters, hurt in their various ways and needing to develop the ability to trust before they can move forward. None completely understand what is going on or what is at state and they need to find ways to see each other as allies and friends, not as the dangerous creatures they're rumoured to be.

Their opponent, Cair Caradoc, the magician, is as villainous and self-seeking as a storybook wizard should be, magic being something that can easily be accommodated to this slightly liminal, chaotic part of England. His power is great, his deeds vile and his ambition deadly. A magnificent creation.

All in all this is a terrific, absorbing fantasy with a story that simply romps along. Rooted in a recognisable time and place it's able to surprise because it's told from a genuinely distinctive point of view. It isn't, nor does it mean, to be, word for word historically accurate (the early mention of potatoes signals that) but at the same time it is accurate in that it speaks up for and focusses on the fate and actions of the common people, who are, after all, the people who actually did the history (because they had little choice if they, and their children, were to survive).

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Once Was Willem, see the publisher's website here.