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. 

Review - Small Fires by Ronnie Turner

Small Fires
Ronnie Turner
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 300pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788473

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Booksfor sending me a copy of Small Fires to consider for review.

After the mysterious but violent deaths of their parents, sisters Della and Lily flee their home in Cornwall to a remote and nameless Scottish island known only as the home of the "God-forgotten". Public opinion has the girls down as killers, despite there being no proof (the complicated truth emerges through this story) and they're the subject of keen discussion not least in the blogosphere(!) and among podcasters. 

Perhaps the island will be a refuge, despite the damning words of the boatman who finally agrees to take them to it - he sees them as a curse that he hopes will bring harm to the strange community known as "the Folk".

Or perhaps it will be the end of them.

As the two women explore the island we learn what a truly strange place it is. Owing fealty to a devil - if not perhaps the Devil - known to the Folk as their "Warden", the island is haunted by dark stories. Cut off from the mainland that the Folk never visit, instead living in fear and accepting their own dark fate, it is though plugged into events in the wider world, so that rumours of the Pedley sisters' evil have reached the place (as has news of the dark goings on at Berry and Vincent, chronicled in Turner's So Pretty). Della and Lily soon learn these stories - horrific, Gothic tales of cruelty, abandonment, revenge and murder. 

The sisters struggle to make sense of these. That struggle is itself, I think, an inherent part of the Gothic - I remember first reading The Castle of Otranto and being struck not so much by the magnitude of the weird but by its simple presence, its lack of a rationale. There is talk in Small Fires of curses and darkness affecting the island or its Folk, but no, at it were, actionable intelligence, so sense of an origin and so, no sense of a solution.

There are though hints, with a constant theme - present in the Gothic background but also in the present day action of the abusive treatment of women and girls by men. One of these girls ends up on the island, telling how, even with its evil reputation, it's safer for her than the father she's left. But the danger doesn't end at the water's edge, among the Folk there are men with the same dark desires.

The sisters, too, are troubling. The island, and the Folk are, we are told, somehow toxic, poisoned, serving a dark power. The stories we hear about their past are twisted, many of the personalities we meet are gruesome - only Silas, the sort-of hereditary leader, appears even remotely normal. But equally, Della and Lily seem to have secrets and stories of their own. 

Which is worse? Where does the darkness come from? Can evil overpower evil?

Written in short chapters told from the point of view of a man and woman, Small Fires contains bitter little nuggets of plot, of emotion, of character. It's a book where every word counts, where the mental and the spiritual is expressed, even extruded, though the physical, with pains, wounds and injuries, with stress and fear, visited as people clutch stomachs, poke, prod and clasp one another, draw blood. On the Island, it seems, there is licence to injure. The normal constraints and boundaries don't seem to exist.

Instead, we have dangerous games played in the half dark. Different characters play them by different rules, convinced they hold the winning cards but not knowing how they're about to be outbid. A pervading sense of masculine entitlement is part of it, but by no means all. We also see - illustrated through those stories - bitter jealousies and hatreds within families and abusive cycles between generations (not only inherited, but eagerly fostered and anticipated for the future).

There is a lot here that may hard to stomach, and I'd definitely say it's a high pressure book, one you may want to take a break from. But it's equally one that will grow on you, in you, and that can't be left alone for long. All in all a remarkable piece of writing, and calling it horror, folk-horror or even gothic barely scratches the surface of this disturbing, thought-provoking story.

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

#Blogtour #Review - Little Red Death by A K Benedict

Little Red Death
AK Benedict
Simon & Shuster, 13 February 2025
Available as: HB, 367, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398519879

I'm grateful to Anne at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of Little Red Death to consider for review, and  for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

(If you think I'm being slightly oblique in this review, it's necessary because of what this book is and no, I can't explain that, for spoiler related reasons but I hope you will read the book and then conclude that my review makes more sense).

AK Benedict's latest is a crime novel, and a puzzle novel, and also a novel about writers and writing, and it's about friendship and childhood and loss and... this is difficult to put into words... I suppose it's about the essence of what a crime novel is?

Most of all though, it's a superb read. 

It's a crime novel, in that we meet DI Lyla Rondell, an efficient and driven young detective taking the lead on her first murder enquiry when a young woman is kidnapped and murdered. 

It's a puzzle, in that, like Benedict's recent Christmas novels, there's a game to play here, a contest between writer and reader. 

It's about friendship, because Lyla has a deep hurt, relating to her childhood friend Allison. Lyla's childhood matters, both because, for a mere character on a page, Benedict makes Lyla real, motivated and true and her childhood is part of that. 

Loss, because, yes, loss.

That death in the woods is only the first. The book features a series of murders which are inspired by fairy stories. There is a Wolf. There are woods. There is also a woman imprisoned, made to perform an impossible task,  trying to spin straw into gold, as it were, to save her life and maybe, earn her freedom. Her plight takes us into the essential dilemma of this story. Crime as entertainment. Cosy crime. Murder on demand. How does that even work, ethically? Are we, as readers, not just clients, commissioning our hit -men and -women authors to off victims simply for our pleasure and amusement? (As an aside, when did "crime" fiction become murder fiction?)

The question is especially piquant here because of the situation that author KT Hexen is in, writing death scenes which will then be enacted by a serial killer. Is she somehow responsible? How far should she cooperate with a killer? At what point do you, dear reader, at what point do I, have to accept that some of the blood is on your - or my - own hands?

As the layers of the story build up - the forensic investigation, the pressure from the boss, the prurient Press, the leaks from the enquiry, the taunting notes from the killer - that moral greyness spreads, because we're also seeing things from another perspective, as it were, we're reading messages. The messages keep getting clearer, perhaps, but will we, at the end of the story, still be dancing in the dark?

This is a story that, to succeed, has to function at several different levels. It needs to be a good police procedural. It needs to make us fear for the next death. It needs to make us love Lyla. And above all, it needs to work properly in retrospect, when, so to speak, the curtain is pulled aside and we see what's happening. And all that without any jarring effect, any suspicion that things are off. Benedict achieves all this and more creating something rather different, eminently readable, and also fun. (The Author, in her endnote, does refer to a trail of breadcrumbs, and I think I spotted these, it's almost as if she left consecrated bread throughout the book, but I don't count those as a jarring element at all, they have a purpose here in terms of what's going on).

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Little Red Death, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

Blogtour review - The Weekenders by David F Ross

The Weekenders (Raskine House, 1) 
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN( PB): 9781916788305

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Weekenders to consider for review, and to Anne of Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's always great to see a new book from David F Ross and it's even better that this is the first of a trilogy. 

The Weekenders introduces us to the mysterious, troubling country mansion mansion Raskine House. I think I see thematic connections between the troubling goings on there and those in Ross's Welcome to the Heady Heights which was, like this book, partly set in 1960s Glasgow. There are also some common characters. So while she doesn't appear I have hopes that in later parts we may meet Barbara Sherman again.

While The Weekenders mostly takes place in the later 1960s, it also looks back to the Second World War where a central relationship - between Jamesie Campbell, later a Glasgow trades unionist and politician, and Michael McTavish - is forged when they meet as soldiers in the nightmare of the Italian campaign. Nobody comes out well from that section of the narrative, neither Campbell nor McTavish, nor the sadistic officers who pretty much betray them. Rather, these events are a bitter prelude to the later story. The writing here makes no bones about what happened in the war: at times the book is a hard read.

Later we see what the two men have become, and what Glasgow has become, both being discovered by two outsider figures, Stevie 'Minto' Milloy and Donald 'Doodle' Malpass. Milloy is an ex-footballer, dropped from the game after a cruel injury and turned reporter, while Malpass is a courtroom sketch artist who sometimes assists the police. Several years apart, the two investigate the murders of young foreign students which seem to be connected to Raskine House and its rumoured weekend no-holds-barred parties. (one of the links I saw to 'Heady Heights'). 

As a background to that, Ross brings alive a raucous, surface-confident, but, I felt, also a hurting, city which both Milloy and Malpass are part of but are also distanced from. They have their roles, yes, but there is an Establishment, which they're not in. Both men live in a sense on sufferance from that, as does John Meikle, the veteran reporter who's Milloy's mentor. It's an Establishment that has grown fat and canny over the centuries, profiting first from enslavement and Empire, then from war, and more recently, from the ideological polarisation of the 20th century. Money and power before ideology or truth, and these puppet masters aren't going to let go a whit of its money or power.

There is another darkness here too associated with Raskine House itself - a darkness which the muck-and-brass merchants don't wholly comprehend. In this book, Glasgow is far from a safe place, whether you're a visiting student, police, nosy reporter or even one of those who think they pull the strings. Glasgow itself will, I think, have the last word here.

If all that sounds rather remote and grim, this book was, as are all of Ross's stories, also immensely entertaining, featuring rich and vivid characters who don't so much populate the page as march off it and sit down with you for a drink and a chat. Their voices sing in your head, their lives move and affect, their fates - some of them - sadden you as if they were old friends. Ross shows us real people showing how their desire simply to live and enjoy that living is baffled, diverted, sometimes blocked, but never - until the last breath - wholly defeated. (Ross's characters are all the more real for speaking in authentic language).

I am really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy!

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

Review - Triggernometry Finals by Stark Holborn

Triggernometry Finals

Stark Holborn (illustrated by Philip Harris)

Rattleback Books, 4 February 2025
Available as: e, print length 63pp   
Source: advance copy
ASIN: B0DT6S5PW5

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of Triggernometry Finals to consider for review.

As the title may suggest this is the final book in the Triggernometry sequence, following Triggernometry and Advanced Triggernometry, showing us the ultimate fate of  Professor “Mad” Malago Browne and her desperate associates in an alt-West where academics in general, but especially mathematicians, have been persecuted and banished, knowledge trampled down, and ignorance exalted. Any resemblance to the present day is I'd conjecture, purely intentional, especially in the glimpse we're give at the start of the book of how this state of affairs originated.

Anyway, as the story opens, things are more perilous than ever, with the forces of the Capitol closing in and our little band of reluctant "math" heroes losing one of its leading analysts. It seems only one desperate, last play remains to them...

As in the other books, the writing here is great fun, Holborn clearly combining mathematics with the genre of the Western so that geometrical instruments, solutions to equations, and infinite series (among other things) are weaponised and deployed among guns and dynamite to make mayhem. There are gunfights in bars, parched desert and lawless towns where Browne's face appears on "Wanted" posters. The atmosphere of violence reminds us of the underlying concerns that Browne had in the first book when she was, you may remember, lying low not only from fear for her life but from disgust at the destruction her field had wrought and which was part of its downfall.

We are though beyond that ambiguity now, with various mathematical heroes brought out of the pages of journals and assembled in one company, ready to take on the forces of reaction and darkness. Their presence in one time and place may be anachronistic but it works, Holborn infusing each with a recognisable character that reflects their body of work. Taken as a whole they do of course show how any academic discipline evolves in dialogue with its past. 

It's a swift moving story, with plenty of darkness and fear as to how things might turn out, and some shocking twists. The Capitol has its way of suborning the "mathmos" - gold talks, and can everyone really be trusted?

A suitable, and enjoyable, conclusion to this fast-shooting series, one which keeps all the plates spinning right to the end and then, as it were, shoots them all down with one fantastic trick shot. Strongly recommended.

For more information about Triggernometry Finals, or to purchase it, see the author's website here.

Review - The Crimson Road by Angela Slatter

The Crimson Road

Angela Slatter
Titan Books, 11 February 2025
Available as: PB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803364568

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

I loved returning to the world of Slatter's Sourdough stories, for a tale that draws together the threads of her recent novels, All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns and The Briar Book of the Dead.

Like the young women who are central to of those stories, Violet Zennor is alone in what is ostensibly a very male world. A young heiress surrounded by men in authority - the lawyer, the Bishop - she might balk at the prospect that her story will be all about being married off (and indeed, there is a suitor in the wings). But in a twist the made me smile, Violet is already actually busy balking at the other plans her father laid for her, plans that involved her training relentlessly from childhood for deadly combat - and also involve somewhere mysterious called the "Anchorhold". So relieved is Violet by her father's untimely death, and at not having to live the fate that he laid down for her, that the idea of marriage may almost be welcome to her.

But life never goes smoothly for a protagonist in Slatter's world. Across those earlier books we have seen her explore ideas of inheritance, of coming into adulthood and of women finding a way to survive with integrity and freedom in that male world. These ways are never as simple as "having a lot of wealth" because, really, the sources of wealth are always murky (as Violet's proves). They are though various, though often magical, and I was eager to see how Violet would deal with this predicament. As her arm begins to be twisted to follow the course planned for her, we may wonder if she will ever be able to control her own destiny? 

Of course as we have also seen in those earlier books there are ways around, even if not through. And Violet is aided by a sisterhood of the women we've already met. This could have come across as a bit of a whistlestop tour of the earlier protagonists, but Slatter is better than that. These are all women whose own stories clearly had more to be told, so in visiting them again, she answers the need any reader will have to learn a bit more about what happened next. Their various life lessons, magics and centres of protection act both as supports for Violet in her time of need and as little candles of hope in what has become a very dark world for her, hunted as she is by both dark monsters and the hypocritical church, which is willing to use the women it condemns to protect itself from those same monsters.

It all culminates, of course, in absolute bloody slaughter, not unlike the cause her father steered Violet towards - but with one key difference: that victory, and survival - if she can find them - won't be primarily through those hours and years of martial training but through friendship, love and solidarity.

A fine and gripping book, and one that rounds off this quartet of Sourdough novels (though I hope there will be more to come in future).

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

Review - Lie of the Land by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

Lie of the Land

Kerry Hadley-Pryce
Salt Publications, 6 January 2025
Available as: PB, 224pp, e   
Source: Advance e-copy, purchased copy
ISBN(PB): 9781784633318

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

I have been blogging here for more than ten years, and reviewing books online for longer than that, and in all that time I have, but very rarely, perhaps five or six times, come across a book so stunning, so good, that it's actually hard to know what to say about it (beyond "read this").

Lie of the Land is such a book.

Superficially, it's straightforward. Solicitor Jemma and accountant Rory have recently met and decide to move in to together. The house they choose - deliberately a "doer upper" - proves to be a nightmare, and being there leads to tragedy, guilt and despair. 

But the story. Oh, the story. What depths of conflicted motivation are revealed here. What layers of deceit and misdirection.

It's told mainly in a slippery, indirect voice, almost as if narrated by a third party (but who?) which informs us what Jemma "will say":

'Jemma will say she watched Rory, she observed him in a way she hadn't since they'd first met...'

'But she'll say this now, she'll say she wasn't frightened, not then, not yet.'

Is this telling us what Jemma has actually said, on various occasions? As though the story is reporting an account she's previously given, one we may be partially familiar with, as though she's already notorious? Is it rehearsing a line that Jemma is planning to bring out, if questioned? (Why might she be questioned?)  Or should we  pay attention to the word 'say' as being distinct from what is actually true? Through this book, these questions arise again and again, the narrative voice layering doubt upon doubt, an effect only heightened as certain awkward facts emerge about Jemma, Rory, and Rory's previous girlfriend, Sophie.

From the moment that Jemma wakes in Rory's and Sophie's flat, the moment that, she 'will say', she discovered Sophie's existence, there is, I think, a doubt. We are ostensibly hearing the story exclusively from Jemma's perspective - though the narrator takes care to plant uncertainty, pointing out for example that Jemma is very motivated by money, that she wants out of the area. (So, is the narrator an investigator of some sort?) Whether that is supposed to suggest that her behaviour is more considered than the chapter of accidents presented in the book, or, perhaps, to be read in hindsight as a comment on what actually becomes of Jemma, is unclear.

What is clear - once the central catastrophe of this book falls, numbing both Jemma and Rory - is that the layers of motivation, the failures of empathy and the presence, frankly, of evil - coil round both of them, and round their neighbours Ed and Catherine (who occasion a bit of Abigail's Party-esque light relief at first, but later add more than a touch of darkness) like mist rising from the troubled Black Country earth. 

At one level the book reads as though all Jemma's troubles arose from buying that house, as though the land was contaminated (not unlikely in that area) or contained old workings except it seems to be moral contamination, ethical or relationship workings, that lie beneath The Rocks. Hadley-Pryce uses all those tropes about an old, toxic house to underscore this point. Sure, we may think, given the various references to how things might have turned out if they hadn't bought the house, it must be something akin to a haunting that is in play here (even if it's a moral rather than a spectral painting?)

But - in another level of narrative altogether - maybe not. The chronology of the book also suggests that there has been a misstep even before the house was bought. Perhaps it is only responding to what's been brought into it? There is a whole business with Jemma and Sophie that we only hear about gradually but which precedes all else. 

Either way, the playing out of mounting horror, the numbing of guilt, reflected in the bitter cold of that place, the feeble rumblings of the boiler that can never heat it, the noises off, all add to a sense of deepening crisis, one that's only made worse when a particular moment of unbelievable tension passes. Hadley-Pryce is adapt at playing on her readers' fears here, seeming to present one awful thing while actually the truth is something else as bad, or even worse.

It's not always an easy book. (Typing this just now I first wrote "it's not always an evil book" - and frankly I don't know what that says!) There are, as I said, moments of almost unbearable tension. There are times you want to look away. Though short, I had to read it slowly, taking time to think about what I'd read, and to read and reread certain parts, to mark and inwardly digest them. And it kind of haunted me after I had read it. 

But, oh this book. What a captivating, sly, cutting experience reading it was. What multitudes it contains. What weirdness. What darkness.

For more information about Lie of the Land, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - The Stones of Landane by Catherine Cavendish

The Stones of Landane
Catherine Cavendish
Flame Tree Press, 14 January 2025
Available as: PB, 240pp, HB, 240pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787588912

I'm grateful to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of The Stones of Landane to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Firmly in the folk horror genre, The Stones of Landane sees a young couple, Jonathan and Nadia, arrive to spend a few days at a comfortable pub in the eponymous English village eating good food and drinking nice things while exploring the local stone circle - to which Nadia feels an inexplicable bond. 

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot, as you'll have anticipated - but in this eerie, mysterious novel Cavendish adeptly keeps us guessing as to exactly what. 

This particular sort of prehistoric-focussed supernatural fiction must I think actually be quite tricky for an author to get right. A great deal has been written about the origin and properties of prehistoric monuments (The Stones of Landane takes in not only a henge-like circle, but also a long barrow, and an artificial hill modelled on Silbury). You can read anything from the driest of scientific archaeology to the enjoyable speculations of modern day antiquarians to frankly disturbing, Occult-tinged material. So almost anything could be going on here, and I'm impressed at how Cavendish stays grounded, as it were, and serves up a novel like this which is coherent in terms of plot, distinctive enough to merit a new story, and which lives up to the wealth of history and speculation that already exists.

I'd say in fact that she succeeds with rather a degree of aplomb in a tale that uses different timelines to suggest what may be going on without ever spelling things out. That also allows for rather interesting episodes set in the late Victorian period and the high (pun deliberate) flower power era, both of which show varying attitudes to women's role in society - rather a theme of the story, I'd say.

That, and a growing sense of peril and tension, accompany the gradual unfolding of a complex and at times, almost heartbreaking, narrative pitting individuals, who mostly just wanna have fun, against a millennia-spanning conflict where there may be a good and and evil but there's certainly precious little solace. Even victory here would have a bitter taste, I think, and my abiding feeling was wishing I tell the protagonists to jest get away while they can.

In all I found this a deeply engaging and fun story which at times put me in mind of Robert Aickman at his best - especially the opening section with the unsuspecting couple arriving at the rural inn. 

For more information about The Stones of Landane, see the publisher's website here.

You can buy The Stones of Landane from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz

Nightingale & Co
Charlotte Printz (trans by Marina Sofia)

Corylus Books, 15 January 2025 (e), 1 February (PB) (390pp)
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298982

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Nightingale & Co to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

From the Publisher

Berlin, August 1961.

Since the death of her beloved father, Carla has been running the Nightingale & Co detective agency by herself. It’s a far from easy job for a female investigator. 

When the chaotic, fun-loving Wallie shows up at the door, claiming to be her half-sister, Carla’s world is turned upside down. Wallie needs Carla – the Berlin Wall has been built overnight, leaving her unable to return to her flat in East Berlin.

Carla certainly doesn’t need Wallie, with her secret double life and unorthodox methods for getting results. Yet the mismatched pair must find a way to work together when one of their clients is accused of murdering her husband.

Nightingale & Co is the first in a cosy historical crime series featuring the sisters of the Nightingale & Co detective agency in 1960s Berlin.

What I Thought

I loved it.

Printz gives us a view of postwar Germany, and particularly of West Berlin, that was new to me. We may be familiar with le Carré or Deighton Cold War spy antics involving the Wall, prisoner exchanges on lonely bridges at midnight and the heroics of people trying escape the East.

We know less, perhaps, about the impact of the sudden construction of the barrier - the everyday inconveniences as families are suddenly split, people are cut off from their jobs or homes, and transport disrupted. And, connected with that, the porosity of Berlin before the Wall - a city where citizens could work in one part of the city and live in the other.

Behind that suffering is, of course, a deeper history as the generation affected by this was one that had also lived through the War - whose effects are often pointed out in this book with buildings still ruined and bullet holes visible here and there - and necessarily, under the Nazi regime before and during that. There are plenty of passing comments in this book about how people had accommodated themselves with that regime, and what they had then done after to distance themselves. As well as rumblings in bars and on street corners from those who rather liked the Nazis. The details are fascinating and reach into the present of this novel to, affecting the attitudes of the characters and their position in society.

Alongside those political themes, though, this book also does a very good job at delineating the personalities in this story, women (for the most part) living at a time of enormous change, which some of them welcome and others shun. For example, Ingrid, a saleswoman for the new contraceptive pill who is one of Carla's clients. Carla herself, whose life is dominated by her strained relationship with a domineering and controlling mother. And free spirit Wallie, who breezes into this story upsetting apple carts down every street. Wallie is something of a catalyst for events in the book, given that half-sister Carla is rather cautious and, one feels, left to herself would never take the steps necessary to resolve the two cases here (tracking down a missing American serviceman with whom Ingrid had fallen in love, and solving the murder of a prominent architect whose wife came to her seeking help with a divorce, and who then herslelf naturally falls under suspicion). Wallie, on the other hand, goes in with all guns blazing and seems adapt at everything from setting a honeytrap to spotting a tail. We can only wonder where she learned these skills. Perhaps it goes with the territory if you work the bar in a topless nightclub?

Above all, though, Nightingale & Co is a joyous, thrilling crime narrative that keeps the reader hooked from the first page. Carla is a rather atypical detective, at least by genre standards, and she's often juggling the dramatic - having to race across Berlin to interview a client in prison, contending with the dislocations caused by the Wall, chatting up contacts bin the American military - with the mundane - getting home in time for tea rather than face an earful from her mother, or rescuing her zany aunt from some scrape. It makes for a rich tapestry of life, and that's even before we see things from the perspective of the slightly chaotic Wallie who surely has some secrets of her own. (I should mention that until Wallie turns up suitcase in hand, Carla didn't know that her dad had another daughter in the East - so things are pretty tense between then as you can imagine).

It's all rendered in excellent, taut prose by Marina Sofia, including being clear about - but not intrusively - the points where the distinction in German between familiar and formal pronouns conveys shades of social distance that English has lost. 

In short, strongly recommended - and I hope to see more of Carla & Co in future.

About the Author and Translator 

Charlotte Printz is the pseudonym of a successful former TV editor with a penchant for writing gripping historical novels and screenplays. She is one of the founders of the Munich Writing Academy.

Marina Sofia is a translator, reviewer, writer and blogger, as well as a third culture kid, who grew up trilingual in Romanian, German and English. This is her first translation of a German crime novel to be published by Corylus Books

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

#Review - The Strandling by James Brogden

James Brogden
Aion Books, 2 September 2024 
Available as: PB, 365pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9798333565426

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of The Strandling  to consider for review.

Set in the present day, in a village on the East Coast of England which is rapidly being eroded into the sea, The Strandling has extremely resonant mythic themes as well as confronting present day issues including climate justice and religious intolerance.

Megan Howard lives a difficult life, looking after her father in a cottage that will fall into the sea come the next big storm. (And it is coming!) Her dad, broken by his wife's death, collects junk from the shore and it's left to Megan, who stopped going to school during the Covid epidemic, to try and persuade him to accept the Council's offer of new accommodation inland. 

Megan also does her best to take care of the scattered community living in and around the village, doing what she calls her 'rounds' visiting the old and the housebound who live in caravans on the margins of society. Her closest friend is probably her dog, Kelpy, who she rescued from the beach some years before. No-one else seems to care much for Megan, indeed many do not approves of her (in particular one of the local farmers hates her and Kelpy) - but she doesn't care much about that.

Yet is will fall to Megan, again, to step up when the local community is threatened by an evil from its past, and she may have the means to fight it.

If they'll let her.

Brogden's books always weave together the supernatural and the eerie and very practical, workaday issues. They make no bones about the presence of the weird - so here we see something very nasty emerge in an otherwise modern setting, a village beset by climate change and the kind of poverty that is increasingly common in marginal communities. Yes, there's a mystery about the 'something nasty' but Bogden shows it emerging, and something of its perspective (a perspective deeply interwoven with the reality of the place, with the drowned land under the North Sea and the drowning land that is still to be lost).

There is also a mystery about Megan (and Kelpy) who seem to be becoming the villages' protection, but we don't understand either although we see them go about their business. The story reminded me in some ways of MR James, with modern day people oblivious to the historical dangers and protections that surround them, and as liable to do the wrong thing as the right. The trouble here is, though - what is the right thing?

With many moments of danger, a salty taste of gathering evil and the ever real threat of the sea and the storms, it's hard to see how The Strandling won't end with carnage. My concern was, though, who would pay the price for that carnage?

The Strandling is a book that explores being folk horror but is I think in the end something even more complex and satisfying. 

Strongly recommended.

Review - The Scholar and the Last Fairy Door by HG Parry

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door

HG Parry
Orbit, 24 October 2024
Available as: PB, 436pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356520322

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door  to consider for review.

I have been enjoying HG Parry's books, particularly how they address inequalities such as those of race, gender and colonialism, aspects of society that some strands of fantasy manage to sidestep (one might even say, some strands of fantasy seem to exist to do that).

In The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, set mainly in post Great War England, that means largely class prejudice, colonialism and patriarchy. 

Clover is a young girl growing up on a farm in Lancashire. When her brother is seriously injured on the Western Front, Clover determines to learn magic in order to discover how to help him. The magic she studies is largely the preserve of the upper classes, taught on a magical campus called "Camford" (it can only be entered from either Oxford or Cambridge). Overcoming considerable barriers merely to earn a place at Camford, Clover comes up against the reality of life as a 'scholarship witch', distinctly second rate among the gilded young things of post war England's magical elite, very few of whom are women and even fewer of whom are poor - or Northern.

Fortunately (or perhaps not as events turn out) Clover is taken up by the circle that follows Alden Lennox-Fontaine. There's a question about why they allow her such access, but Clover pushes that to the back of her mind - until she's forced to confront reality and ask what her fine friends really want.

I absolutely loved The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door. Clover is a redoubtable and likeable personality, wrestling with real life dilemmas: different social circles, the pain of moving on from home to grander (maybe) things, class prejudice and guilt, and friendships. And, as then layers of truth are peeled back from England's magical world, there is the need to reckon with the crimes of the past and to admit that foundations of the glittering world - with which Clover is so enchanted - may conceal crimes and violence. As a metaphor for a colonial society it's compelling and rich.

But The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door isn't just a neat allegory for imperialism, it also features active, buzzing characters, a strong plot and an increasingly taut and thrilling denouement with Clover hunted by malign forces and forced to reckon up what she most values - and fight for it. And to recognise what may be lost.

All in all, an engaging and fun read with thought-provoking themes. I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files, 13)

Charles Stross
Little, Brown, 7 January 2025
Available as: HB, 224pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356524641

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending giving me access to an advance e-copy of A Conventional Boy to consider for review.

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do start her I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misuderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God... 

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Not so much political as, perhaps, Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's wettest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's harmless and don't read what he's producing. If they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with.

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really bad can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

For more information about A Conventional Boy, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Broken River by Chris Hammer

The Broken River (Ivan Lucic & Nell Buchanan #4) 

Chris Hammer
Headline (Wildfire), 2 January 2025
Available as: HB, 464pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035410774

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

The "Broken River" of the title gets its because it flows through a valley in New South Wales that was once ruined by uncontrolled gold prospecting. Trees were felled, farmland destroyed, the Indigenous population driven away, and the river itself redirected and channelled to serve human greed..

But the gold went away, as gold will. The Valley remains and is now peaceful - apart from ongoing friction between loggers and environmentalists. But it's not that which draws Ivan and Nell to the remote community, rather a prominent businessman has died under suspicious circumstances and the two are sent to investigate. Exactly why this death merits the attention of their high profile murder team rather than being left to the local police isn't clear, though...

I loved this novel. Hammer has established a winning formula with these books, dissecting the tensions and history of a small community where the shadow of the past is always, always shaping the present. Like previous books, the timeline moves back and forward, giving us glimpses of what set the modern day mystery in motion, but keeping the spotlight mainly on Ivan and Nell as they resolve them. The last book, Cover the Bones, also closely involved Nell whose family turned out to be involved with the mystery (but also, not to be quite the family she had thought). The Broken River builds on that family connection making the two books in some respects, I think, a little duology of their own within the series as Hammer tells us more here about Nell's origins. Given that Ivan's life has calmed down since his father's death, that is perhaps a logical development in the pairing. It's time to find out more about Nell. The past timeline has, perhaps, to strain a little to accommodate this but the drive of the plot, and the passion of the events and characters, easily carries the reader along in a story that's both exciting and baffling.

There is certainly plenty going on. The days of gold mining may, it seems, be coming back to The Valley, but, aside from the death that sets things in motion, there is a series of puzzles to be solved. Accidents, disappearances and coincidences surround the old abandoned mine. An inheritance is in play. There is a crooked lawyer who its suspected of enriching himself. And thugs from out of town seem to be taking an interest - what is their agenda? Will the new owner be the one who finally succeeds in turning this stubborn valley to profit?

The Broken River has a bit of everything - family passions, secrets, gangsters, and corruption in high places. Will Lucic and Nell be up to unravelling things...? Well, what do you think?

Marrying a fascinating setting with a vivid cast of characters, The Broken River is another excellent continuation to this series. And publishing these books in the UK in the dreariest time of the year is a stroke of genius (I write as I look out into the pouring rain) as we can live out all this drama beneath the heat of the Southern Hemisphere.

Again, the setting here is well realised and intriguing, helpfully illustrated by  another of Aleksander Ptočnik's maps (though to call these gorgeous 3D realisations "maps" doesn't really convey their nature very well). 

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