Blogtour review - Kill Them With Kindness by Will Carver

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

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

A worldwide coronavirus pandemic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil 

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

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

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

Still with me?

Well...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review - We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough

We Live Here Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it's Emily that is the problem.

That's certainly what Freddie decides.

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

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

I would strongly recommend We Live Here Now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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