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.