Review - Itch by Gemma Amor

Itch
Gemma Amor

Hodder & Stoughton, 9 October 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399745369

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

"It looked like something from a fairytale about lost children following trails of breadcrumbs..."

Itch is Josie's story. Brought up, after the death of her mother ("She still found that absence difficult to cope with. It was like leaving a conversation partway through") by a slovenly father, Josie watches her mother's neat, tidy home being degraded and soiled. Her dad, alternately bullying and wheedling, can perhaps be excused a lot, but Josie grows up nervous and neglected, full of tics and avoidance.

She doesn't remember her childhood. It's blotted out. By her.

Small wonder, perhaps, that she falls in with an abusive partner whose chief joy seems to be in controlling her and who eventually lands Josie in hospital.

And so Josie ends up back in the Forest of Dean, living in her dad's holiday let - which he makes clear is on sufferance. 

It feels to me almost like a release when Josie stumbles on a decaying corpse in the woods. (Do be aware that this scene is authentically revolting - not one to tackle when eating your lunch, as I stupidly did!) While the discovery is traumatising, and the effect on Josie is profound, the body, and the subsequent murder investigation, provide a focus for her life. 

I say the effect is profound. That's perhaps putting it mildly, without giving too much away, there is a sense in which I think Josie takes the violence of the killing into herself, imagining - or does she? - that the crawling ants she discovered around the dead body have somehow infested her. Crossing the line from hallucination to real, physical presence, Josie views the colony now infesting her as an actual, almost sentient thing. Her attempts to rid herself of it are vivid and concrete - washing, scratching herself till she bleeds, even scraping her eyeballs - and distressing to read. But her growing acceptance of it as an entity, almost an actor in the events that unfold, is if anything even more so.

As the police investigation into the dead girl focusses more and more on Josie, her father's behaviour grows more menacing, and dark secrets emerge from the woods, Josie endures a punishing winter of malice and loneliness.

Itch really is a dark story. Josie's relationships are in a bad place. Her mental health is suffering (Josie's mood, her internal monologue with its undermining narrative, and her frenzied attempts to regain control, are touchstones of this story). The murder casts a shadow over her life. And her hometown, isolated in the woods of the Forest of Dean, indulges in a yearly "Devil's March" that is either a commemoration of said Devil, an attempt to exorcise him - or, as one local folklorist believes, a ritualised attempt at scapegoating difficult women.

I really enjoyed the folk-horror vibes that the March, and its mythology, evoked. Despite Jacob's (that folklorist) urgings to follow the Old Ways, Josie is sceptical of the meaning of the March and as it becomes increasing clear that there are powers abroad in the Forest, she's sceptical of them, too. They might be invoked, but if you bargain with the Devil, you'd better get the terms right? The ethical landscape here is much, more complex than "appeal to the Old Ways and they'll fix things". The infestation Josie suffers is similarly ambiguous. It, and the murders, and her tangled relationships, seem to be related, part of a pattern that's ensnared her her all her life, but it's unclear how - even if Josie can work out what happened - she can get herself clear of it.

A vivid, enthralling story, one ideal for dark winter nights.

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

Review - Why Q Needs U by Danny Bate

Why Q Needs U

Danny Bate
Bl!nk (Bonnier Publishing), 2 October 2025
Available as: HB, 376pp, audio, e
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781785307430

I enjoy listening to Dr Danny Bate's podcast, A Language I Love Is, so  was excited to hear that he had a book appearing, especially as it takes on a subject that sticks out as a problem with English - the spelling.

Compared with other languages, one can make a case that English spelling is irregular, confusing, and hard to learn. Indeed, there's an old joke that English spelling is so weird that you could spell there word "fish" as "ghoti".  This has always annoyed me. Yes, those letters are used in various places for sounds that could make "enough". But nobody who can read English would see them and hear that. You would pronounce those letters as something like "goatee". 

But that leaves the question, why? Danny Bate sets out to explain the facts. As part of that, he works his way through the modern English alphabet, explaining where the letters came from - tracing the story back into Latin, Greek and Phoenician, and ending up with the early Semitic language speakers who adapted many of the symbols from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.  (So the story goes back 3000+ years!)

As a non-linguist, it was a revelation to me just how much of what now seems to be so fixed - what could be more solid than the alphabet? - was in flux for centuries, in fact till very recently, with letters being repurposed for new sounds, dropped, reinstated, reused and spun off from one another (so, G started as C, with the little crosspiece added to form a new letter). Along the way a few were lost completely (please hold poor ð and þ in your thoughts). 

The history of the letters - one per chapter - naturally draws us into an explanation of what sounds they were used for, in Greek, Latin and English Old, Middle and ModernIt is a complex picture, depending on some understanding of how the sounds for which the letters stand are each made - what the tongue and throat are doing, and how changes in that can chance pronunciations, sometimes resulting in tectonic shifts which leave their traces in systematically wrong-seeming spellings. Bate is very good at giving the reader enough to understand his point, but without turning the book into an instruction manual. (It may help in though, if you can read the book in a place where you can say the sounds out loud.)

The story reminded me, somewhat, of archeology or geology, a process of unearthing layers of deposits giving clues to speech and spelling. For English, that means repeated outside influences from Norse, Norman French, Latin, the invention of printing and centuries of social and political change. These resulted in consistent patterns which can still be traced in modern spellings (though every rule has an exception, as do many of the exceptions). It's a fascinating story and the conclusions are often deeply satisfying as some apparent anomaly becomes clear.

If I've made all that sound terribly dry, it's not. This is a fun book with some amazing facts hidden away. After reading it you will, for example, know more about some of the hieroglyphs you may see on Only Connect.  Why Q Needs U would make an excellent Christmas present for any word nerds in the family, as well as potentially helping settle family arguments, if your family is prone to argue about things like "s" or "z" spellings or why "W" sounds like "double U".

Or, indeed, why Q needs U at all.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Why Q Needs U, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Sound of the Dark by Daniel Church

The Sound of the Dark

Daniel Church
Angry Robot, 28 October 2025
Available as: PB, 400pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781915998408

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Sound of the Dark to consider for review.

Though this book is set during the summer, it would make great reading (and a great present!) for a landscape-horror to consider at this, the darkest time of the year. In particular, The Sound of the Dark, as its name suggests, makes superb use of sound as a channel and metaphor for the insinuation of evil. 

It therefore feels very current - the true-crime podcaster in fiction is fast, I think, becoming the modern day equivalent of those slightly fusty academics MR James wrote about - the ones who come across an oddity in a manuscript from the previous century, investigate it... and suffer the consequences.

Whether "the consequences" arise from the malice of an evil spirit, or more mundane human wickedness, or a combination of both, there's something about the hapless investigator pulling an unravelling strand from the past and trying to establish what really happened that provides the perfect gateway to horror. That feeling one has that they are in for trouble and should draw back - but knowing that they won't, and waiting and wanting to see exactly how bad it gets.

And in The Sound of the Dark, that's very bad indeed.

With folk horror vibes, Church's new novel focusses first on a murder-suicide that took place in the 80s when a troubled artist destroyed first his family and then himself. He'd been poking around in a disused RAF station, Warden Fell. 

(Who was the warden, we might wonder. Against what were they on guard?)

Forty years later, podcaster Cally Darker stumbles across Tony Mathias's story. Darker, herself troubled and in a relationship with a controlling boyfriend, digs enthusiastically into what records she can find. I had a distinct sense that Cally was using Tony's story to escape from her own rather grim reality. She is an engaging and, as the story proceeds, increasingly brave and determined young woman, but she certainly has Issues. (Kudos to Church for telling us just enough about her family background to give the outlines there, but not holding up the story by providing too much detail).

Ultimately, Cally lays hands on some relics of Tony's life that will cast light on those events in 1983. Or perhaps, cast darkness. Because there is a sense of a taint here - a darkness at noon - as something ancient and amiss seems to be at work even under the midsummer sun. This subversion of the usual horror conventions only makes things seem more eerie, more out of joint, as we see the ancient horror beginning to take form, or rather, as we hear it - this book is haunted by a whispering, by an insinuating quality of sonic presence. Church captures that sense you sometimes get alone in a house, or awake in the small hours, when there's a noise and you lie there trying to work out what it was, half convincing yourself there wasn't a sound at all, even though you know there was.

Take that, energise it, and bring into broad daylight and you'll appreciate how Cally begins to feel as she discovers more and more about Tony, tracks down witnesses to his life and deaf, and begin to listen to his tapes. It's a creeping horror that coexists with the very mundane. And she still has to navigate that mundane - the nasty boyfriend, the lack of a job and money, her flaky mental health 9could all this just be some sort of episode?) 

In the best traditions of folk horror, everything is under threat, but it's not clear how...

For more information about The Sound of the Dark, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Christmas Cracker Killer by Alexandra Benedict

The Christmas Cracker Killer

Alexandra Benedict
Simon & Schuster,  6 November 2026
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398532212

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

Christmas is all about tradition, and one of my favourite traditions is to read a puzzle thriller from Alexandra Benedict. Her latest, The Christmas Cracker Killer, is set in a remote (but luxury!) hotel on a Scottish island, where a bunch of guests are stranded over the festive season - with a killer among them.

The book features Edie O’Sullivan, crossword setter and amateur detective, her partner Riga, and her adopted grandson Sean, who we met in The Christmas Jigsaw Murders. This time they're off home turf as winners of coveted places at the launch of the Aster Castle Hotel. But someone, it seems, wants to launch a rather different enterprise - one involving murder and mayhem...

The Christmas Cracker Killer is a perfect slice of cosy Christmas crime, with a varied and suspicious cast of guests assembled to attract guilt (and death). Benedict conveys the different personalities of this crew brilliantly, wasting no time, as they arrive on the hotel's yacht, in sketching personalities and animosities, hinting at dark secrets, and giving fragments of history. We sympathise, for example, with Mara, the manager of the hotel, who's rather put-upon by her parents, the main investors; we boo at the unpleasant banker and the savage hotel reviewer; we note the tensions between some guests, and the hints of mystery attached to others.

Most of all, we thrill at the sections written from the killer's point of view (and reread them, looking for clues as to their identity).

Then, even before the first death, the puzzles erupt, with potential clues appearing in crackers as Benedict hints at who the killer will be, while scattering red herrings (literally - "swimming fish" play a big part here). She's also warned us that her own puzzles are contained in the text (some of them have answers at the end) underlying the main theme. 

The action proceeds at a good pace with crime story cliches both fulfilled and subverted (I loved the closing reveal of the killer's identity) and, suitably for Christmas, a hint of the ghost story.

Necessarily this book foregrounds the glitzy guests, the so carefully curated jolliness and the Christmas cheer laid on by the bucketful. (The descriptions of the food made me hungry!) But it also gives us the other side of things - the hard working staff attempting to deliver a luxury experience, even as things go badly, scarily wrong (it's good to see that hard work recognised). However, when all is said and done, it's down to Edie and Sean to solve the crime and stop the killer. Doing that requires a delve into the pasts of everyone on the island, as well as the killer's clues. But as Edie and Riga are among the guests, they may not be the impartial observers we expect - the killer may have business with them.

As well as enjoying Christmas crime, I also enjoy stories set in hotels slightly out of season (is that weird or just niche?) There's something about a hotel as backdrop that can be both familiar - hotels have lots of similarities - and strange - places that should be public, bustling, are a bit uncanny when mostly empty, I think? And once normality is shattered by a killing, everything is different. It can make for an atmospheric and chewy story and Benedict makes full use of that.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Christmas Cracker Killer, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - The Wee Small Hours by Rosa Temple

The Wee Small Hours
Rosa Temple

Island Dream Books, 31 October 2025
Available as: PB, 322pp, e   
Source: Review copy
ISBN(PB): 9780993338113

I'm grateful to Anne Cater for sending me a copy of The Wee Small Hours to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

About the Book

A cosy small-town romance about sleepless nights, unexpected friendships, and finding love when you least expect it.

Annie Lambert hasn’t slept properly in years. Her remedy? Moonlit walks through her quiet Herefordshire town, where secrets linger and stories whisper in the shadows. When her mother returns to Australia, Annie inherits the crumbling family home—and a place in the Monday Afternoon Knitters Circle, a trio of spirited seventy-somethings determined to fix her life stitch by stitch.

Suddenly, Annie’s small-town world is anything but quiet. A homeless man and his loyal dog become her closest confidants. A charming ex-footballer arrives as a new client. And her rugged builder seems to have more than bricks on his mind. As romance sparks and renovations begin, Annie finds herself tangled in more than just yarn.

But when old wounds resurface and the knitting club’s secrets threaten to unravel, Annie must decide: can she mend the lives around her while finally stitching together her own?

The Wee Small Hours is a heartwarming novel about second chances, found family, and the healing power of connection—even in the loneliest hours.

About the Author

Rosa Temple writes feel-good contemporary fiction with plenty of romance and romantic humour. Her novels celebrate love, friendship, and the messy, magical moments that make life worth living.

She is the author of four self-published titles: Sleeping With Your Best Friend, Natalie’s Getting Married, Single by Christmas, and Dear...Anybody? As well as three romantic comedies published by HQ Digital: Playing by the Rules, Playing Her Cards Right, and Playing for Keeps. In 2022, Simon & Schuster UK released her uplifting novel The Slow Lane Walkers Club, a heartwarming story about community and second chances.

Rosa Temple is the pen name of Fran Clark, who also writes emotive women’s historical fiction.

She lives in Herefordshire, where she leads a community choir, teaches vocals, and occasionally performs soul, jazz, and Latin music. She writes every day, usually with herbal tea and banana bread, and is always trying to improve her piano skills.

Website: https://www.rosatemple.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosatempleauthor/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rosatempleauthor

What I thought

There's something appealing about the idea of being up late and alone, don't you think? Just you and the late-night radio, perhaps, alone in your room, an island of light. Or wandering the streets, able to explore and linger where you couldn't by day. It's a magic evoked in music, such as the song which gives this book its title. In the sight of a lit window set against the darkness. Or in the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks.

Not so much fun, though, if you're alone and awake because you can't sleep. The romantic dream of solitude is more of a nightmare if you suffer insomnia, if you know you're going to spend hours lying awake and the next day drained, unable to function properly because of your lack of rest. 

This is fate of Annie Lambert, heroine of The Wee Small Hours. Annie lives with insomnia, roaming around Ross on Wye, her home town, in the dark rather than lie sleepless in bed. In the c course of her wandering Annie makes friends, such as homeless Dez and his dog, Phoenix. She passes the shuttered and dark houses of her friends. Living alone, Annie  disturbs no one with her comings and goings. Constantly warned it's not safe, it's not wise, she nevertheless continues.

Annie still lives in the family house - the rambling, old, cold family house - which is freighted with memories after her mum and sister (whose coats still hang in the hall!) decamped to live in Australia. Seemingly content with her life, shuttling between the Monday afternoon knitting circles, work as a physiotherapist, and home, Annie remains, however, both single and sleepless.

Everything turns on its head, however, when one of Annie's clients turns out to be a celebrity... and an attractive handsome one at that. Is something about to happen between Annie and Reef? 

This book was great fun to read. Annie's an appealing central character, portrayed very well - an anxious woman, concerned that she might have inherited her mum's depression, suffering from sleeplessness but still trying to get on with her life, willing to try different things. For example, Annie took up drawing and painting during lockdown and is pretty good at it, though she's formed a habit of rejecting praise or compliments. She also plugs away at her knitting, despite being very bad at that, enjoying the company of Bea, Judith and Rhiannon, septuagenarians who have their fingers on the pulse of things despite some long-held animosities - and who are united in their goals of supporting Annie.

So when Reef comes into her life, Annie has baggage (as does he) but nevertheless the two try to develop their relationship, interrupted as it is by his busy schedule. Annie bonds especially with Reef's son Noé and all seems to be going well until... well, I don't want to indulge in spoilers, I'll just say there is a distraction for Annie. 

Everything comes to a head over Christmas. I loved the way that Temple allows Annie a joyful celebration with her rackety collection of friends even while hinting that all may not be well with her. Real life is like that, we can have fun and entertain worries and doubts at the same time. It’s not all yes and no, the world s full of maybes and possibles. And we can flap between alternatives, trying on possibilities as Annie does multiple dresses in one key changing room scene. That scene is, I think, quintessentially Annie - her anxiety balanced with her willingness to try new things and not just take what she's offered.

The central characters here are engaging and feel real. Annie's dilemma is I think one of not being able to trust herself amidst conflicting pressures - not least the mix of good, bad and plain flaky advice provided by the knitters - while being continually undermined by that pesky insomnia. She has, though, a shrewd eye for what's really going on, perhaps being better at sorting out others's lives than her own.

For more information about The Wee Small Hours, see the author'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 Wee Small Hours from your local high street bookshop or online from Foyle's, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Slow Gods by Claire North

Slow Gods

Claire North
Orbit, 18 November 2025 
Available as: HB, 422pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9780356526188

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Slow Gods  to consider for review.

After three books telling the story of what happens at home while Odysseus is adventuring, Claire North still has something to say about the gods - though here they are not Olympian deities but mighty computer systems, going about their inscrutable business across the galaxy. One, in particular, is referred to as "the Slow" because it eschews faster-than-light "arc travel". But one might equally accuse them of being "slow" to act against injustice and oppression in human affairs, which are illustrated in the opening sections of this book by the sad story of Mawukana na-Vdnaze. 

Maw has the misfortune to be born in the polity known as the Shine, a nakedly exploitative territory that works its common people to the grave to support the small minority who are Shiny - possessed of an indefinable mix of wealth, flair and assertion which gives them a passport to success. 

Maw does not have Shine, and his fate follows from that, leading him to a transformation ("I am a very poor copy of myself") which makes him, in the eyes of some - including himself - a monster, a ghost. 

The focus of the book is, in part, how Maw deals with that monsterdom, and seeks to be, if a monster, then a monster on the side of the angels - whether that means resisting the Shine, or working hard on the crisis of his time, the foretold collapse of a binary star system. When it occurs, this supernova will create an intense expanding shell of radiation and extinguish life for hundreds of lightyears. This will obliterate many of the Shine worlds, but also the planet Adjumir, on which a galaxy-wide rescue effort focusses.

I loved the way that North describes Adjumir and its people - "describe" is perhaps the wrong world, they conjure it up through stories, songs, language and the behaviour of the Adjumiris and especially Gebre, a spiky archivist who Maw meets on his rescue mission. Throughout this book we get snippets of history, turning into laments for what's been lost, for the fractured lives of exiles in the Adjumiri diaspora.

There's also haunting love story between Gebre and Maw, who only meet on two occasions - a fusion of duty, desire, loss and inevitable fate which gives the book its core, and a core of steel.

Entwined about that core are conspiracies, plots, secrets and lies, as well as the reprehensible behaviour of the Shine authorities. They see the threat of the coming supernova and refuse to act, indeed suppressing knowledge of it in their territories. (Thank goodness no nation today would act like that, ignoring a planet-killing threat for their own selfish convenience!) 

Through all this, we see Maw's gradual coming to terms with what he is and what he's done. This is often through the exploration of the myriad languages of the Galaxy and their customs and social structures, particularly a diverse assembly of genders (expect multiple systems of pronouns). It's a slow awakening for him, the dry tones of the editorial Maw writing this at some later point in his life counterpointing the passion of what he did and said in his story (and we're warned, this won't always be a reliable account). He's a character who finds it hard to forgive himself for some terrible things, something that, perhaps, allows him an insight into the otherwise inscrutable minds of the gods. I recall the frequent pleas in the Bible to a mighty God who yet permits suffering. How long, O Lord, how long? How long will the unrighteous prosper? How long will the innocent be oppressed? Rescue your people! Reveal yourself before the nations in your might, and cast down the evildoer!

A question we, in our day, might well ask...

Slow Gods gives a hint, a flavour, of the true complexity of that prayer, and of what it might take to answer it. Because there's always a cost to action - as Maw discovers one awful night on Adjumir. And it does so in a warm, generous narrative where monsters and failed, imperfect beings may contemplate their own very essence and deeds and seek redemption, even if - as suggested in a coda to the story - that seems to obliterate justice. 

Slow Gods is an enthralling, intelligent and absorbing story which revives the genre of space opera and adds North's distinct tone of moral questioning. A brilliant book. Buy this one as a present for the SF nerd in your life, and if that's yourself, just buy it!

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

#Blogtour #Review - Black as Death by Lilja Sigurðardóttir

Black as Death (Áróra Investigates, 5)
Lilja Sigurðardóttir (trans by Lorenza Garcia)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: PB, 225pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788848

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

I read this excellent book with a degree of sadness because it is the last in the Áróra Investigates series. Of course the set up - Áróra has returned to Iceland to look for her missing sister Isafold, so her adventures from book to book, that quest aside, are somewhat secondary - meant that once the mystery of Isafold was solved, Áróra would probably move on. 

In the previous book, Dark as Night, Isafold's body was discovered so I knew what was coming. But I'm still sad!

At least - fortunately for the reader, if not for poor Isafold and her sister - some doubts remained about the circumstances of her death, so there is at least this final part to the sequence. And in tying them up, Sigurðardóttir gives us a final, spectacular conclusion to the story, a book to keep you reading till into the night as we hear Isafold's sad story in her own words, even while Áróra and her friends and colleagues struggle to join the dots.

Be warned - if issues of domestic abuse and coercive control are triggering for you, you may prefer to look away, because Isafold's story is, sadly, an example of this. While that was implicit in what we already knew, the chapters in Isafold's voice here are harrowing, the more so, I think, because we already know the outcome. What we don't know, of course, is exactly how she, her abusive boyfriend, Björn, actually died. The solution to that will tie into a present-day narrative that Áróra & Co unravel, a mixture of money-laundering, smuggling and criminality in the shadier parts of the city. It's a gripping and complex tale in itself - a generous gift really from Sigurðardóttir because now she's built up her protagonists (Áróra herself, Daníel, Helena and of course the fabulous Lady Gúgúlú) into such real and complex personalities, frankly I could just read about them all day, I don't need plot, all I need is to see these wonderful characters revolve around each other.

As they do. All their stories advance, and they're all left on cliff edges (though not perilous ones). We want to know more, and maybe one day we will.  The book would be compulsive if that's all there was to it. But as I said, there is more, the crime plot here murkier than ever, the twists handbrake-grade and the peril (for some) real. For her last adventure, Áróra really has something to get her teeth into - which is good for her because otherwise the sense of loss, of guilt, that now catches up with her might be just too much. Certainly her normal distraction - lifting weights at The Gym - isn't enough any more, so she throws herself into the case.

Perhaps too much...

All in all a magnificent ending to this series and a fantastic crime novel. And one well served by Lorenza Garcia's translation, giving us an English text that hums along. I'm so grateful to translators who provide a window into other languages and cultures, as Garcia does here.

For more information about Black as 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. 

You can buy Black as Death from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (always Smith's in my heart!) or Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - Secrets of the First School by TL Huchu

Secrets of the First School (Edinburgh Nights, 5)
TL Huchu
Tor/ Pan Macmillan, 16 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 382pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035055487

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Secrets of the First School to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's the endgame for Edinburgh Nights and for Ropa Moyu - rather literally in her case, as she's dead, banished to the Other Place. This series has gone from relatively low-stakes exorcisms of unwanted spirits, via scuffles over membership of the ridiculously self-satisfied Society of Sceptical Enquireres (the Scottish magicians' guild) and a knife-sharp portrayal every dreadful corporate exhibition you've ever attended, and the collapse of the Society's relations with magic in England, to a sudden bid for power by the ghoul Henry Dundas who wants to make himself King, God and goodness knows what else.

Huchu wove this destination from the beginning, it's clear, and one can only pity Ropa for having such a stern creator. She's faced here with the impossible. Get back from the Beyond. Find her missing sister, abducted by Dundas's cult. Defeat said cult, when the cream of Scottish magic has been destroyed, or bent the knee to a tyrant (depressingly current, that). Do this without upsetting the English Sorcerer Royal, a mercurial figure, or the King, who rules the country with the most extreme application of Divine Right. This is a hardscrabble UK, living on the edge of starvation after a financial catastrophe not unrelated to Ropa's granny, who is also dead - making things even harder for Ropa; just scraping together bare sustenance is too much for many.

Yes, we have seen Ropa do the impossible before, or seemingly, but will she be able to use her understanding of von Clausewitz, her laissez-faire attitude to rules, and her shaky grasp of magic, to repeat that? As Ropa moves from one crisis to the next, it looks less and less likely. Her ability to walk away from allies, to insist on going alone, always a liability, seems positively self-destructive now.

Yet, she persists.

To say much more about what Ropa does would be to risk spoilers, and I won't do that, but I will say that Secrets of the First School challenges her like she's never been challenged before. She will discover that her understanding of life, magic and of herself, her family and her allies, is about to undergo an earthquake. And she will have to draw on strange sources of power to defeat the Establishment in Edinburgh - and forge strange alliances, despite that habit of walking away from people. (Though, given what Ropa discovers here, trusting anyone is going to be hard).

How it all works out is great fun and the outcome turns not only on Ropa and what she does but also on the tainted roots of Scottish magic and the tainted fruit it has produced. Dundas is a magnificent villain, but he isn't a puzzling, lone, megalomaniac criminal in the manner of a James Bond antagonist. I think that Huchu is nudging us with that character, and his origin in Empire, finance and exploitation to see parallels with some equally tainted modern figures who have the arrogance to try and make the world dance to their tune. And who, I'll prophesy, will meet a not dissimilar fate.

It's a magnificent end to what has been a marvellous sequence of stories and, I think, more than that - not just a fitting end but a powerful and moving novel in itself, the best of the five (which is setting a high bar).

For more information about Secrets of the First School, 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 Secrets of the First School from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (they'll always be Smith's to me!) or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - The Winter Job by Antti Tuomainen

The Winter Job
Antti Tuomainen (trans by David Hackston)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 228pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788824

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

December 1982, and with Christmas coming up, postal worker Ilmari Nieminen has no way to buy his beloved daughter the piano he's impulsively promised her. Following his divorce - Ilmari has issues with trust, which have torpedoed his marriage, as well as all his other relationships - Helena is the centre of his life. He can't let her down. he just can't.

So he takes on a delivery job. A rather strange one. He has to transport an antique sofa more than 1000km to the north of the country. In the depths of winter. In an elderly British van unsuited to Finland's ice climate. Moreover, he's determined to take diversions on the journey to settle old obligations.

What can possibly go wrong?

So begins one of the strangest road novels I've ever encountered. As if the task Ilmari has assumed isn't tricky enough in itself, there's something... off... about the sofa (and indeed, the whole job) from the beginning. It's soon clear that others want it too - a bruiser called Otto, whose way of dealing with opposition is to knock it down, shows up, as does a pair of bickering political activists, Anneli and Erkki, who want to sell the sofa to fund the Cause.

Oh, and Ilmari also bumps into an old schoolfriend, Antero, he hasn't seen for years (since accusing him of theft, in fact). Antero is down on his luck, and joins Ilmari for the ride. But he, too, has business to settle on the journey.

As winter closes in, and this disparate group heads north in their various rackety vehicles, the stage is set for drama, catastrophe and... friendship?

The Winter Job is highly entertaining, not least in the lengths that the three groups go to acquire, or retain, the sofa. There is violence, double crossing, coincidence and heroism here - to such a degree that it seems as though this unlikely McMuffin has driven everyone clean out of their minds. (At times I was getting distinct Ealing comedy vibes, but the violence lurking here has a real edge, there are some truly gruesome scenes). It's also really enjoyable to see how Tuomainen takes an unlikely scenario and manages to invest the reader in its truth. You won't doubt the commitment of anyone here to the sofa, or the possibility that all this could actually happen.

Above all, though, or perhaps behind all or beneath all, there's more going on here than some bizarre gameshow challenge. All the participants in the Great Finnish Sofa-Off feel, in a sense, lost. They lack friends. They lack trust. They lack something or someone to come home to. Even lone wolf Otto senses this, though he then goes about building friendship in a most self-defeating way. And on those long Finnish miles - sorry, kilometres - there's plenty of opportunity to reflect on what went wrong and how it may not be too late to put is right.

The Winter Job is fun when it's doing slapstick, but also profound and moving, a kind of collective dark night of the soul for Ilmari and the rest - but is it a night they'll all come through to dawn unscathed?

Read this book and find out!

The Winter Job is translated by David Hackston into a lucid and readable English version that must have been a struggle in places given a context and setting that would be clear to the reader of the original but much harder to set out for a foreign reader.  (it's great to see David given credit on the cover).

For more information about The Winter Job, 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 Winter Job from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (it'll always be Smith's to me) or Waterstones.

Blogtour review - The Space Between the Trees by Norm Konyu

The Space Between the Trees
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 21 October 2025
Available as: HB, 104pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/): 9781787746800

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan for sending me a copy of The Space Between the Trees to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Norm Konyu's new fantasy The Space Between the Trees brings his haunting imagery and heartfelt storytelling to the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.

In 2022 a young couple, Meera and Mark are looking for a house, viewing a development that has been cut into the primeval forest. Something about it doesn't appeal - it's all a bit "Little Boxes" perhaps and despite the sylvan street names, the forest is nowhere to be found. Disappointed, they head home - which is when the fun really starts (for a rather special value of "fun") as, despite a clear road, they become lost.

The reader will have anticipated this from a short prologue set in 1902 and featuring a group of loggers who run into problems themselves. But the exact danger is left unclear. As in Downlands, Konyu plays games here with his setting.

And as in Downlands, I love the way that the threat creeps up on Meera and Mark. We've been given a hint in the prologue that something may be up, so I was expecting that journey into the woods to go wrong, but Konyu cleverly wrongfoots the reader as to what has happened and, of course, what will happen. Though Mark's story about the spooky forest where he grew up may give a hint.

Konyu's angular, understated drawing style is perfect for this - extreme horror doesn't need swirling imagery. I think it's fair to describe the atmosphere here as gothic, but by being rendered in clear, stylised graphics the creepy factor is dialled up because of a certain... incongruity? A contrast between what are very Modern graphics (in a mid 20th century sense) and the primeval, gothic mystery of the forest. The fate of the characters is slippery - they seem so solid, so well located in their clearly depicted, definite world... which then turns shifty and paradoxical as they seek to march from one frame to the next. It's like there is a magician performing in front of you, everything is visible, but then, wham! And where did that go? Look at the page again, can you spot the glitch... maybe...

I found that once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. It is perfect for devouring in a single sitting - and then going back to see what you'd missed. There's a richness - both of storytelling and of characterisation - that is belied by the plainness of the style.

And which would be undermined if I said anymore about what happens! This is a book to come to unsuspecting, as it were.

Like Meera and Mark.

In short, really, really enjoyable and I hope to read more by Norm Konyu soon.

For more information about The Space Between the Trees, 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 Space Between the Trees from your local high street bookshop or comic shop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (they can call it what they like, it'll always be Smith's to me) Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Like a Bullet by Andrew Cartmel

Andrew Cartmel
Titan Books, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803367941

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

The return of Cordelia Stanmer, aka The Paperback Sleuth (she's had cards made and everything) is always welcome. Unlike her counterpart in the world or rare record collecting, Cartmel's Vinyl Detective, Cordelia's got few scruples (she's certainly up for a bit of burglary) when it comes to securing down a rare, pristine paperback volume, so life is always exciting when she's around. These books are a third mystery, a third scavenger hunt, and, perhaps, the other third has a distinct flavour of mild hedonism, Cordelia employing her gains in the pursuit of pleasures both licit and... not. 

In Like a Bullet, Cordelia's been engaged by wealthy, retired rock star Erik Make Loud (known to those who've been reading the Detective's adventures) to locate a copy of the legendary 1960s novel Commando Gold. This is a book so rare that online wars break out over whether it even exists. How can she resist that challenge (and the promised reward for achieving it)? 

Especially since, on acquiring the previous books in the series, she finds them eminently readable (not really what she'd expected from an author called "Butch Raider").

As ever, though, Cordelia doesn't really know what she's getting into. Someone really, really doesn't want that book found. There's more at stake here than a musty, mouldering volume of war stories. Soon, she' dodging a very determined enemy... one very familiar with the kinds of techniques described in the books.

As ever, I had great fun with Cartmel's latest. Cordelia's a very distinct, very well-formed character, more of a loner than the Detective (while she eventually has to ask for help in this story from her ex hard-man landlord Edwin, she generally handles things herself rather than travelling with an entourage like the Detective). She's a planner, often (but not always) one step ahead of everyone else. She inhabits the same slightly raffish south west London. Cartmel also has a good eye for location and geography, mapping out backstreets, pubs and routes into and out of London, as well as giving us glimpses of the strange characters (never quite too strange to be believable) who live there.

An excellent addition to the series.

For more information about Like a Bullet, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss

The Second Chance Cinema

Thea Weiss
HarperCollins, 7 October 2025
Available as: PB, 320pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008769185

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

Ellie and Drake seem very different, but complementary to one another - she a cataloguer of vanishing places, always on the lookout for the quirky, the picturesque, the vintage, he a construction expert, safe and reliable, always fixing things. So, in many ways an ideal couple.

As the two plan their marriage, however, both worry about secrets they are keeping. 

And then one night, as Ellie (of course) leads them off the beaten track, they stumble across a hidden cinema with its own, special, midnight show - The Story of You. Those secrets will be revealed, and the two will have to face some uncomfortable truths.

I adored The Second Chance Cinema. I always think there's something magical about a cinema, something liminal as one steps out of one's normal life for a while. The darkness. The anticipation. It's especially magical when you have the whole place to yourself - as though the world has, just for a brief while, bent itself around you. For Ellie and Drake, that's literally true as they attend showing after showing, taking each of them deeper and deeper into their backstories - and revealing their pasts to each other.

This is a brilliant way to tell how two people came to be who they are, and to expose the dilemmas and tensions they now face. Across the screen flit parents, siblings, childhood insecurities, teenage angst, lovers, breakups, and betrayals. "To know all is to forgive all" runs the old saying, but will that be true for Ellie and Drake? Rather, it seems likely that with more perfect knowledges comes judgement, misunderstanding and pain. Yes, you may see what happened to your lover on a certain night ten years before, but will you understand? And are they the same person now as they were then? Is it fair to judge them on that past?

As the showings continue, the revelations affect Ellie and Drake, with things done, or left undone, in the past reaching out and putting their lives and relationship in question. Ellie's fears that she can't recapture her best work, and Drake's frustration that instead of building lovely, bespoke homes he's working on cookie-cutter residential boxes, tangle with family tensions and past relationships to make this a complex but rich account of a couple's situation. At the same time there's a good sprinkling of magical Christmas sparkle and humour to lighten the more intense moments.

All in all I found The Second Chance Cinema a compelling read - Weiss takes her fantastical premise and grounds it sufficiently enough that it seems real, with the authentic consequences for Ellie and Drake. It is in some ways an unsettling story, with real challenges for the couple, but it's one I had to keep reading - a "what if" that I had to follow to the last page.

For more information about The Second Chance Cinema, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Cold House by AG Slatter

The Cold House

AG Slatter
Titan Books, 7 October 2025
Available as: HB, 160pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781835412541

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

Though set in modern Britain rather than her fantasy Sourdough world, in The Cold House Slatter explores similar themes to her recent fantasy novels - here we meet a woman left somewhat alone and struggling to understand her place in the wider world. Everly'd had her share of tragedy. there is a mystery about her early life which Slatter only gradually shares, and more recently, she's lost a husband and child. When we meet Everly at the beginning of the story, she reached the "attacking strangers in supermarkets" stage of grieving, something which rather shakes her out of herself and forces her to seek help.

Though the help proves to be a recommendation to get away from it all by spending a few days at an isolated, spooky house on a remote island. That leads Everly into a somewhat folk horror chain of events which moves quickly from the charming and quaint to the downright terrifying. As we learn how she handled those earlier, terrifying events in her life, the question looms: does that make her a survivor, or a betrayer? Will she be able to summon the strength to push through, or will things, this time, just be too much?

The Cold House is a cracking read, a short book but one with terrific pace. Slatter is perfect at judging what her readers need in the book, and where gaps will be filled in. That means we don't get reams of back information about Everly's harrowing earlier years, for example, or about the history of YYY Manor, just essential nuggets which are really quite enough. But there is a beautifully told account of Everly's very real distress and sense of dislocation at the start of the book (if "beautiful" is an appropriate word for a portrayal of such distress; I couldn't find a more apt one). 

The pace also feels natural, I think, as the book moves from an initial paralysing situation to exploration to that to a real, pounding, action-y conclusion as Everly's forced to fight for her own identity - and to choose who, and what, she will trust. Her quick decisions will result in lasting consequences and we have to hope that those will be results that she can live with. I felt that the ending contained a delicious ambiguity here, and wondered if things were, indeed, over? I suppose time will tell!

I'd strongly recommend The Cold House, if you haven't read any of Slatter's stuff before this standalone would be a good place to take the temperature, as it were.

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

Blogtour Review - A Lethal Legacy by Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir

A Lethal Legacy
Guðrún Gúðlaugsdóttir (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 20 September 2025
Available as: PB, 234pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586023

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of A Lethal Legacy to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Nothing has changed at Bjargarlækur for as long as anyone can remember – so are moves to bring change to this remote farm in the Icelandic countryside a motive for murder? Three elderly siblings have lived more or less peacefully in this isolated place their whole lives, until Brynjólfur is found dead in his own bed. Called on to help out at the farm, freelance journalist Alma is far from certain that the old man died a natural death. Determined establish the facts of the matter, she finds herself caught up in a vicious family feud. Sisters Klara and Thórdís are unable to agree on the future of the farm, just as others with an interest in the place circle hungrily around them. Echoes of missed opportunities, lost love and age-old crimes surface as a reckoning takes a bitter toll on those left behind – and Alma struggles to get to the truth.

Journalist Alma and her husband Gunnar have just embarked on renovating the wreck of a house they've bought. However a most dramatic call from daughter Gunnhildur summons Alma away to a remote farmhouse. (One of the minor delights of this novel is how - from off, as it were - Gunnar, left back at home, continually reports to Alma that he's found a new problem - the floor, the windows, the heating - that will require either a tradesman he can't find, materials they hadn't budgeted for, or indeed, a complete change of plan about layout. But he never loses his enthusiasm! It'll all be fine!). Gunnhildur, a nurse who needed some time away from things after splitting from her boyfriend, reports that the elderly man she was caring for alongside his two sisters has been found dead. She worries she may be blamed for mixing up Brynjólfur's meds, and asks her mum to come out and support Gunnhildur and her own toddler daughter Una.

This is Alma's intro to the isolated community at Bjargarlækur. Soon she's in the thick of investigating Brynjólfur's death, partly to help Gunnhildur - though dear Daughter happily scarpers part way through the story as Boyfriend has appeared again - but mostly, one senses, from a prickling of her journalist's thumbs and from sheer burning curiosity.

It's a tangled tale that emerges. The siblings were at war with one another. Brynjólfur and Klara, one of the surviving sisters, wanted to preserve the farm and turn into a museum of old Iceland. In a country that has experienced rapid change one can see why this might be worthwhile. (Another of the joys of A Lethal Legacy is the glimpses of that older Iceland that we get in the stories from the sisters and some of their neighbours. One is left in no doubt how much these remote communities were required to be self-sufficient, and the echoes of that run forward to some extent into the present of the novel, with the police remote and the authorities slow to intervene in the escalating situation).

The other sister, Thórdís, was though dead set against the museum idea. Complicating the picture is the presence of a younger couple to whom the farm has been let, and who may or may not be a pair of ne'er do wells. All sorts of accusations are thrown - Slaughtering the sheep! Selling the cows! Brewing moonshine! Behind them are suspicions they may have their eyes on the place, perhaps in a stitch-up with local authorities.

Once the possibility of murder is added to this mix of family dissension, greed and a gossipy local community - a great deal is to be gleaned from the local priest and the doctor - and Alma's shut in at the lonely, slightly spooky, house - one may well expect almost anything to happen. And there is drama. The sense though that something is rubbing under the surface is an even greater source of tension, the contrast with the bleak, static landscape and the changeless decades that the siblings have lived at Bjargarlækur only adding to this.

Is that impression of calm, of retreat, misleading though? 

At its heart a story of family secrets, A Lethal Legacy manages to be both truly Gothic, with the possibility that not everything going in totally natural, and also a fine, taut crime thriller. Alma's rather out on a limb in conducting any sort of investigation here and she lacks institutional backing to ask questions or poke around, having to rely on the sisters' goodwill (which is in short supply) and her de facto position as their nurse/ carer, to gather facts. 

As she does so it slowly becomes apparent that there is more going on here than you'd expect. With a parallel strand of the story focussing on possible past abuse affecting a member of her own family, and the differing attitudes of the sisters resulting in contradictory accounts of their earlier lives, there's a difficult jigsaw for Alma to assemble. She is, though, nothing if not determined.

I really enjoyed this story. The brooding, remote setting is a fitting location for dark deeds. Klara and Thórdís are magnificent characters, well drawn. Neither is exactly likeable - though by the end of the book one knows enough about them to forgive a lot - but they are a great double act. Alma is determined to reach the truth, at first to protect her daughter, but later, it seems, from sheer bloody-mindedness. And as I've said, the glimpses of Icelandic history and culture are fascinating.

As ever, Quentin Bates' translation sparkles, catching the very different characters of the individuals at the heart of this story through their speech - sometimes slangy and modern, at others more formal or even slightly outdated. He does this while navigating a lot of rather abstruse language describing funeral customs - wakes, lyings-in, funeral meats and such - laying clear subtle differences which matter to Klara and Thórdís. A lot of the background here would be known to the Icelandic reader and so it isn't explicitly set out, but the translation makes clear where everyone is coming from, as it were.

Great fun - and also in some aspects, very sad. I'd recommend this one strongly.

For more information about A Lethal Legacy, 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 A Lethal Legacy from your local high street bookshop or online from Amazon.

Review - The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Bewitching

Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Arcadia, date, 
Available as: HB, 354pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB): 9781529441703

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

In The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia deftly blends three timelines to produce a clever and suspenseful New England horror which is also fully aware of, and reflects on, the tradition of New England horror. It's not just, here is a seemingly innocent country of coasts and little towns where lurk horrors. it's, here is a country whose horrors have been written about. The implicit warning - Don't go into the scary place! - is turned inside out from the start, because for Minerva, the scary place is the point. (A point driven home by Moreno-Garcia's deployment of many modern horror authors' names as background: look out for the names of student halls, faculty, positions, awards and honours. See how many you can spot!)

In 1998, Minerva is a young graduate student at Stoneridge College, making ends meet by doing teaching jobs and supervising student accommodation. She's looking forward to some peace and quiet over the summer months to develop her thesis about cult horror writer Beatrice Tremblay, who herself studied at Stonebridge in the 1930s.

In 1934, Beatrice herself recounts the events which led up to the disappearance of her beloved Virginia - events which, decades later, she based one of her most celebrated stories on. 

And in 1908, Minerva's great-grandmother, Alba, who lives on a dull backwater farm looks forward to a visit from her beloved uncle Arturo and yearns to return with him to the bright lights of Mexico City.

Each of the three women - Minerva, Alba and Virginia - will learn dark truths about the hidden world and will have to find strength to face a haunting evil. To that degree, they're in a sense the same story, though with varying outcomes. Of course Minerva's and Beatrice's stories take place ion the same setting, with direct connections between the horrors they confront. But the stories are also very different, interestingly different, featuring women in quite varying situations.

Alba is at first naive, on the edge of womanhood and yearning for a life of glamour, as she perceives it. There's something a little too trusting about her, perhaps. Her natural rebelliousness at the chaffing rules imposed by her mother may, one feels, lead her into trouble and it's hard to be sure who her real friends are as a string of grisly calamities begins to hit the farm. To whom can she turn for help?

Minerva seems at first a more solid personality, her main difficulties when we first encounter her being a severe case of thesis block and her difficulty in accessing the private archives she needs to explore to learn more about Beatrice. When - through a fortuitous chain of events, even if one foreseen in a hint of not entirely usual powers - Minerva succeeds in persuading their dour guardian to led her read the notebooks and manuscripts that will open the way, Carolyn Yates still imposes a myriad of restrictions and limits. Carolyn, matriarch of the distinctly "old money" Yates family, also appears in her youth in the 1930s section of the book as a friend and confidante of Beatrice, albeit not perhaps the witness to events that Minerva would really have sought.

The third protagonist, Beatrice herself, is more of a witness, her later life writing horror perhaps an attempt to testify, to piece together just what happened in December 1934. (Or to atone for her part in it?) The disappearance of a young woman from college wasn't looked into particularly at the time, the blame, if blame there was, being directed at a young Mexican man. Historic prejudice joins the mix here alongside class attitudes and gender norms in twisting the direction of events (one wonders whether, if the love that may have been possible between Virginia and Beatrice had been able to develop, events would have taken quite the same turn).

To understand what is happening in each of the sections, you need to stand back and see the picture as a whole, to look for patterns. Minerva. once she realises the stakes, does just that, piecing together present day events with the wisdom of her Nana to meet the threat. Alba herself draws on reserves of courage to behave in ways her society wouldn't expect. And Beatrice, well, in her witness Beatrice warns and provides vital information.

As the threats mount in all three time periods, there is a feeling of doom - we know some of the outcomes, and there have been hints about some of the rest, so it can feel as though this is a predetermined road to death and loss. But Moreno-Garcia is adept at misdirecting the reader, or perhaps, letting their own assumptions disguise the truth, resulting a thrilling ending (or, endings) though with just a little room for doubt as to the future. 

She, herself, writes in the last sentence of her Afterword "I wear my bracelet against the veil eye pin my left hand."

Wise.

A gripping and exciting story. 

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

Review - The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

Megan Bannen
Orbit, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 388pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521947

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam to consider for review.

This, the third and I think final (pity!) of Bannen's fantasy Western romances, revolves around Tanrian Marshal Rosie Fox (who is also a demigod, and therefore immortal) and haughty, aloof inventor Dr Adam Lee, the man who invented the portals that give access to the magic-touched world of Tanria.

Always a bit error-prone, as we've seen before, now the portals seem to be failing completely, and Rosie and Adam may hold the key to restoring them. It's a shame that something - oh, say, unresolved romantic tension - is stopping them working together smoothly...

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam is, I think, the best book yet in this series (which is saying something, given how good The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy and The Undermining of Twyla and Frank were). Not only is there full-blooded, smouldering romance between Rosie and Adam, but Rosie's difficult backstory is sensitively shown. Just imagine being a demigod, daughter of a good-for-nothing trickster god and a sentimental but mortal mother. The passage of time means you'll lose anyone you ever get close to - first, your adored parent, then any lover, friend or colleague, all will go the same way. Apart from that abandoning father who always turn up just when he's not wanted.

Bannen has taken care to give this world, the archipelago of the Federated Islands of Cadmus and its surrounding continents, a true sense of reality and a history and culture - the last hundred years, which Rosie recalls, have seen development so that her memories of her early life with her mum have a sepia tinge, a kind of fin de siècle quality that evokes well both the rose tinted view we often have of childhood, and the quainter pleasures of a more gilded age to which modern day Cadmus looks back wistfully.

If Rosie's missing her mum, who died decades ago, she she's resentful of her dad, not least as she blames him for the grinding poverty in which she grew up (well, he is a Trickster).

This book is I think the most unapologetically "fantasy" of Bannen's three stories. As with Cadmus, she's so far sketched in and shown the mythological background to her works, and there have been a few divine or semi divine traces, but in The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam reality, at least in Tanria, begins to shift and it's all traceable to the doings of the gods and powers. There are obscure rules in play, debts and prices have been incurred, and Rosie's about to have to deal with the consequences, even though they're not her fault. As if her complex love life, and her difficult relationship with her boss weren't enough (each time Rosie dies on duty it's such a pain for her boss! Think of the paperwork and the H&S issues!)

At the same time it's thoroughgoing romance as the two bickering protagonists are forced together in a chi-chi rural destination retreat, albeit with some unwelcome colleagues for company. Unless they can work out what's gone wrong with the portals, none of them will ever get out!

All in all, great fun, with an ending I didn't see coming. I will be sad to have to leave Cadmus (though, hopeful to find my way back there one day).

Finally, now the sequence is finished, I'd just like to give credit to Lisa Maria Pompilio for her beautiful covers. Just look at them next to each other and you'll see a pattern - a brilliant interpretation of the themes of the books.

Hoping for more like this from Orbit!

For more information about The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam, see the publisher's website here. 

Blogtour review - The Great Deception by Syd Moore

The Great Deception (Section W)
Syd Moore
Magpie (Oneworld), 4 September 2025
Available as: PB, 328pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780861548PB

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Great Deception to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Sequel to The Grand Illusion, The Great Deception is Moore's continuation of the story of Daphne Devine. As prequels set several decades before her Essex Witches novels, I simply had to read to these book, and they don't disappoint.

The Great Deception finds Daphne assigned on a dangerous mission in Iceland as part of her work for Section W, the branch of Second World War British military intelligence tasked with all things supernatural - or potentially supernatural. Here, the ostensible target is a clairvoyant, Karlsson, who may or may not be able to foretell the future and may or may not be passing secrets to the Germans. Britain has occupied Ireland to prevent it being used as a German base, but the position of the island hangs in the balance, so anything that could tip things one way or another might be very important.

The story intrigues in a number of ways. First, Daphne herself, as Moore draws her, is a fascinating character, a very strong and strong-minded woman in an age which is still deeply, deeply patriarchal. The officers with whom she deals here are clearly not comfortable with an intelligent, assertive woman and even Septimus, who will be important to her future, doesn't treat her well. Yet Daphne persists. Next, this is a genuinely interesting and eye-opening exploration of a little known aspect of WW2. The whole occupation of Iceland, going rather against the grain of the early war, raises intriguing questions of power and collaboration which we normally see from a rather different perspective. The situation of Iceland itself is also interesting, a very poor country at the time and also a remote one but not, of course, subject to the same restrictions (or to attacks) as Britain itself so rather a haven for Daphne.

Finally, there's the whole magic/ supernatural angle. Books about WW2 magic are starting to appear in numbers, I think perhaps Syd Moore set a trend here, but readers of the earlier story and of course the Essex Witch novels will know that this author is then canny about how she uses the idea of magic. You never quite know what to believe - and that goes as much for Daphne as for us!

So when Daphne decides - and she does take the decision, in the end she choose not to trust the chain of command - that urgent action is needed, and forms her own small taskforce to undertake it, much of the focus in the story is on the material factors: the cold, availability of food, the strained relations between Daphne, her local contact Anna, their minder Björn and of course Karlssen. Daphne's forced to pick her way through what is a tense and thriller-y novel, chasing down leads and pursuing the truth - all while surviving threats from Nazi agents and the condescension of her own superiors.

Whether there's a real supernatural threat is another thing entirely, but even here, Daphne has her instincts which, we know, have guided her before. In the land of the Northern Lights, and approaching a a region rumoured to be the home of dark magic and of evil, anything may be possible.

I really enjoyed The Great Deception. It's a story with great drive - you WILL keep turning these pages - and very solidly located in its time and place, as well as having a real element of jeopardy and danger. Daphne's wrestling with guilt at some of the things she's done and at other she may have to: and there is business here that she darkly accepts she will have to deal with later, once the immediate danger is over. The story is also though, in places, very funny! 

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