Blgtour review - Shatter Creek by Rod Reynolds

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

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

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

Now there's trouble busin' in from outta state

And the DA can't get no relief

Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

Paladin's Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet. And yet...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogtour review - Downlands by Norm Konyu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - South of Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver

South of Nowhere

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

ISBN(HB): 9780008665951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleeper Beach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strongly recommended.

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

Review - Underscore by Andrew Cartmel

Underscore (The Vinyl Detective, 8)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion by Ivy Grimes

The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

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

Blogtour review - Dangerous by Essie Fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - The Get Off by Christa Faust

The Get Off (Angel Dare, 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - Once Was Willem by MR Carey

Once Was Willem

MR Carey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and monsters. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strongly recommended.

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

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.