Review - The Essence by Dave Hutchinson

The Essence

Dave Hutchinson
Newcon Press, 9 December 2025
Available as: HB, 274pp, PB, 274pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781917735148

It's always exciting to see a new book from Dave Hutchinson and The Essence is one of his best. 

This was part of my Christmas present to myself for 2025 and I enjoyed it loads.

Michael is an economist, working for a covert branch of the UK Treasury. After he suffers a breakdown in the office, he's placed in a private hospital to recover. A spooks' hospital, you might call it.

Hutchinson's good on institutional shabbiness - the atmosphere of the hospital, a place with decent treatment, if uninspiring food, but a definite atmosphere of have been left behind in the late 20th century, is nicely evoked. So, on his discharge, is that of his office, on a shabby cut-through behind Oxford Street. 

He's also good when portraying Michael's struggle to retain normality and his measured steps back to independence, with the help of a social worker, Jo. The book leads the reader to understanding something of Michael's past, of what's missing in the cold little house to which he returns from hospital, without over-labouring its point. It's a nice, low key exploration of (part of) a life, taking drama and interest from everyday events and routines. 

Even without major incident, this part of the story was a joy to read. Major incident is coming, however, when Michael is unexpectedly sent to Amsterdam to investigate an issue with his office's Dutch counterparts. This is where the story slips, seamlessly, into what one might call "spook mode" although it's important to understand that Michael sees himself as an economist, not a spy. Nevertheless, he's forced to think differently once it emerges that he's sought after by various factions of an international conspiracy. They all believe that he has knowledge of something called "The Essence", a mysterious and contradictory supernatural phenomenon of which he's never heard. 

The story then takes Michael across Europe, both feeling and negotiating with the different flavours of "Essencehead" while trying to understand just what he's involved in - and why. For man who's recently been hospitalised with mental health issues, the sheer preposterousness of what's stumbled on seems a real danger to his grip on reality. But evidence mounts that the Essence is a real thing, and then Michael has to question why everyone things he knows something about it.

The Essence is a combination of thriller, horror and espionage that will transition in a heartbeat from the bizarre (such as the scenes with a certain dog) to the violent to the intense, all overlaid on a kind of fantastical road trip using the breath of Europe and engagement with its history to give solidity and heft to the incredible storyline.

And behind it all, there's something else going on...

This is a glorious book, great fun, gripping and satisfying. Recommended.

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

Blogtour review - Catherine by Essie Fox

Catherine
Essie Fox
Orenda Books, 12 February 2016
Available as: HB, 287, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9781917764421

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

It is, I think, 40 odd years since I read Wuthering Heights, in the early 80s when I was doing O level English lit. This wasn't one of our set books, but our teacher was keen to make sure we read much more widely. I remember that the introduction to the edition we read made much of the Brontës' father's "Celtic" ancestry as a factor in their romantic temperament - you don't get criticism like that today.

I tend not to re-read, so my memory of the events in the novel was hazy - ideal, really, for this retelling since it meant I wasn't looking forward for what I knew would come next.  It also meant my sympathies and appreciation of the characters could shift, uninfluenced by the later story, the perfect frame of mind to enjoy this version.

I think it's important to recognise that in the Wuthering Heights universe there are no absolute heroes and villains, and no "likeable" characters. Everyone behaves badly, everyone is worthy of sympathy. In that respect, and others, Catherine isn't a new story, it is proper Wuthering Heights but - and here's the difference - told by Cathy, rather than narrated, in hindsight, by Nelly Dean. Essie Fox uses a rather clever device to make this possible, one consonant I think with the subtext of the original novel and which handily telescopes the 20 or so years period that the story takes to unroll, and gives a real sense of immediacy and, well, jeopardy to the events - in contrast with the hindsight-tinted perspective of the original. (And we're spared Mr Lockwood, who isn't event mentioned by name, just - in one or two places - as "the tenant").

Fox also takes the opportunity of this being Cathy's own story to enlarge on parts that Dean is only passing on from Catherine herself - who Fox makes unreliable, or at least incomplete, in what she tells her maid. This gives some space to develop aspects about which the original book is silent. For example, Heathcliff learns the truth of his background and relates this to Cathy - something that is then a significant motivation for Cathy - but Cathy never tells Nell the details. In that respect, Catherine is therefore a retelling, not the retelling - other authors could make other choices. I do think though that Fox's choices are deeply true to the novel, and in taking over the book's characters, she captures something genuine in their relationships and history that makes this more than simply a glossing of the original. The people you'll meet here are vital, human, and true to Brontë's original.

All this makes Catherine more than simply a retelling, it's a rich story in its own right. There is tragedy here, and room for pity and empathy even with the apparent villains: like Wuthering Heights itself, Catherine is something of a gale of emotion and feeling - longing, lust, hatred, regret, jealousy - and if you're going to enjoy this book you need to be on board for that. It won't suit everyone! In my view, the power of Emily Brontë's original is here in Catherine, undiminished, but this retelling addresses matters which the climate of the mid-19th century could not allow, as well as revisiting aspects where modern sensibilities raise issues, or ask questions, which the original didn't.

Catherine is a grand, sweeping read which takes nothing away from the original novel - it is, as I said, only a retelling, not the retelling, I can imagine alternatives that take different paths, but what a retelling! 

I would recommend.

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

Review - In This City, Where it Rains by Lyndsey Croal

In This City, Where it Rains

Lyndsey Croal
Luna, 4 February 2026
Available as: PB, 129pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(9781915556691PB): 

In a modern city that is, and is not, Edinburgh, a young woman, Maggie, lives alone and sees ghosts.

Specifically, Maggie sees ghosts in the rain. They have little or no substance in the dry, so she mainly encounters them on the way to and from her job serving whisky cocktails in a basement bar. They have become familiar to her.

Nobody else can see the ghosts - until one day, somebody can.

And then, the ghosts begin to ask Maggie for help.

I loved the way that In This City, Where it Rains opens as a seemingly mundane story - what is more normal in Britain than a walk in the rain? - and then gives us a dash of the uncanny. We see Maggie's relationship with her boss Angus, who's missing his dead brother. Banter over tips, chat on a quiet evening in the bar. Then we see that Maggie perceives... something... in Angus's brother's favourite chair.

A dash of the uncanny. Then a bit more. And then In This City, Where it Rains goes full-blooded horror. Maggie finds herself, somehow, at the centre of a web of mysteries - and in danger. Is the prolonged rain actually natural? What lies beyond the city? And how does it link to the strange, decaying Tair House?

Maggie's existence in the city seems to take place mysteriously on two levels - she does the normal things that are needed to maintain existence in a service economy, and suffers the alienation attendant on that - expressed powerfully in the rain. Where are the rest of her family? What became of them, and what was the "accident" her granny told her about? 

Yet, at the same time, Maggie is sought, eagerly sought, by mysterious players in the haunted city. It's not just her life that seems to be on hold, there are others, only half-awake, who need her.

I really enjoyed In This City, Where it Rains. Both naturalistic and creepy, it's a story that (I write, as the rain pours down outside) powerfully inhabits its own metaphor, pointing both to a state of stasis and, perhaps, to awakening and renewal.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about In This City, Where it Rains, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

Christina Henry
Titan Books, 4 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781835412640

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Place Where They Buried Your Heart to consider for review.

As a reader I'm endlessly fascinated by the way that books reflect their authors' own worlds both overtly - a book set in the US will of course use different language and make different assumptions from one that takes place in the UK - and in terms of tropes, attitudes and lifestyles.

Take for example that idea of the scary old house in the neighbourhood. The run down place the kids dare one another to go into at midnight. That is very much a US thing, I think, I don't think it occurs much in UK writing (or indeed real life!  - I live in the UK and always have done). Perhaps this is because here a, say, 100 year old abandoned property is not really old. That is, it may be old enough to be squalid but not scary. Not far away will be an 800 year old church or a 500 year old Tudor cottage, and those are old old. 

Or it may be because we have less space and the idea of an abandoned mansion up on the hill is less plausible. Given house prices it probably won't be empty anyway.

So I approach a book like The Place Where they Buried Your Heart with interest, wanting to see not just how the story unfolds but how this trope works out in the context of the plot - how the idea is justified and where it leads, what it means in the context of a modern urban setting for there to be such a feature. And perhaps most of all, why the authorities don't just do something when kids begin disappearing?

In this book, Jessie Campanelli's life is entwined with such a house. It is her fear and her shame. Early on in the story, she suffers a loss when she dares her little brother Paul to go in the house, largely to get rid of him when she wants to sulk. Of course Paul vanished and Jessie is left with a burden of guilt. Henry then very subtly, very cleverly, shows us how that guilt warps Jessie's subsequent life and how Paul's loss breaks her family - first her father, and then her mother. Setting aside the fantastical element this is a very human story of loss and grieving and pain as we see the Campanelli family fail, and Jessie grow up, living in the same familiar neighbourhood as it changes and the old people move out and new people move in.

All that time, the empty house sits, untouched, waiting, malign. It's a like or there-not-there presence both in Jessie's life - at one level it haunts her, at another she puts it out of mind. The house is also present but not present in wider affairs: yes, Jessie's neighbourhood is gentrifying and the site must be valuable, but a string of... accidents... convinced everyone to leave well alone.

Except the kids.

And now Jessie's got a daughter of her own...

I found this a satisfying, fun and creepy novel on many levels. Jessie's a perfect t rounded character in herself, seeking to make something of her twisted life, a determined fighter who takes no crap from anyone - not her dead-end boyfriend, not that creepy house, not the few bad neighbours (there are many good, supportive ones). Watching her cope with grief and guilt is painful and sad, but she's a survivor.

A book I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Place Where they Buried Your Heart, see the publisher's website here.

Review - What Stalks the Deep by T Kingfisher

What Stalks the Deep (Sworn Soldier, 3) 

T Kingfisher
Titan Books, 30 September 2025
Available as: HB, 192pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy and bought
ISBN(HB): 9781803369716

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

In this, the third part of kis adventures, Alex Easton, former soldier (and still suffering from that) in the army of Galicia, an obscure Central European country where military service (ie being a 'Sworn soldier') determines gender, gets to visit the USA.

Easton answers a call for help from Dr James Denton, who shared an earlier adventure with Easton. Denton's cousin has gone missing in a disused coal mine. Now Easton suffers from claustophobia, so of course he feels duty bound to assist his friend despite the weird, supernatural goings-on down the mine...

What follows is a fun, if creepy, exploration of a mystery that brings with it danger, exploration in cramped, inaccessible tunnels, revenge, prejudice and an ethical dilemma. The book reminder me in a sense of a Doctor Who adventure. At the risk of slight spoilers, I'd say that whereas in the previous parts of this series, Easton has confronted outright, malign, evil of a supernatural or at least fantastical sort, here the "monster" is a more nuanced being. That's important. because it presents, as I have said, a moral dilemma. But Easton's experiences in What Moves the Dead and What Feasts and Night, overlaying kis PTSD (to use the modern term, the one used here is 'soldier's heart', an older version of the same thing) have made kim defensive so there's a personal challenge here too: hitting out is an all too common reaction to stress or danger.

(And that might also apply to other characters in this book).

Plus of course, there's that fear of enclosed places to overcome...

An intelligent, scary book which is a good addition to this series.

For more information about What Stalks the Deep, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Whisper in the Wind (Sunder City, 4)

Whisper in the Wind

Luke Arnold
Orbit, 29 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 377pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521626

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Whisper in the Wind to consider for review.

I recently suffered a clash of fictional worlds when I came across Luke Arnold, writer of this fantasy noir series, playing the lead role in a TV version of Scrublands, the first book in a detective series I am also reading. I hadn't realised Arnold was also an actor. I am very impressed that he finds time to keep Sunder City rolling along too.

I had in fact thought this series was paused with the last instalment. At the end of One Foot in the Fade, Fetch Phillips, Man for Hire, had hung up his metaphorical gumshoes and settled down to run the café - more of a greasy spoon - that he inherited from his friend Georgio. No longer will Fetch suffer from interfering in other peoples' business, chasing for the magic that he helped to banish from the world. Not Fetch.

The trouble is, a man will pick up entanglements. When a nameless news sheet editor begins circulating a samizdat journal in Sunder City, thumbing a nose at the authorities, and a series of outrages begin for which a bunch of kids congregating in Fetch's café may take the fall, he is leaned on to un-retire. (To make matters worse, someone seems to know the secret of Fetch's role in ending magic, and to be willing to reveal it...)

What follows is a baffling, dangerous chase though the back alleys and gilded boardrooms of Sunder City, and a still more baffling and dangerous chase though the moral landscape of Fetch's mind. There is a sense that, having thought he was out of the game, had evaded the difficult choices and found himself a role in the shadows, he's now being challenged to step back into the daylight to atone for what he did and make the best amends he can. That dynamic may have been what was driving Fetch in the earlier books, but he was always satisfied in the end with little achievements. Now, he faces more difficult choices. 

It's interesting to see how this character, who Arnold has developed into a complex but well-rounded man over the space of four books, gradually realises the magnitude of what's at stake. Starting by acting to keep himself out of the limelight, he realises that is no longer longer viable. Only through the network of friends he builds up as that decision crystallises does he find the strength to do that must be done. Establishing that network takes him to new places and sets wheels in motion that, one trusts, may lead to real change in Sunder City. But it's at a cost for Fetch's comfort and safety.

Whisper in the Wind is a complex fantasy mystery but also a mystery with a very creaturely (I won't say human because, well, not every person here human) focus. It's a book with great heart, and moves the Sunder City series on to new places and new things. I await the next part eagerly!

For more information about Whisper in the Wind, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

Charles Stross
Publisher, 27 January 2026
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

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

The Regicide Report is the final volume (at least for now?) of Stross's Laundry Files sequence, something that, in my view, has grown into a SFF phenomenon. Over the past two and a half decades I've followed the story of Bob Howard, necromancer, demonologist and computer nerd, through books that began as stories "in the style of" a series of espionage masters, mutated into treatments of classic monsters from horror, and ended up as pretty scathing criticism of UK politics.

Where is the endpoint of all that? In whose name is the espionage carried out out? On whose secret service are Bob, Mo and their colleagues engaged? Who is the most scary monster in the pack? What is at the summit of politics and public administration?

Why, the monarchy itself, of course. So, in a book which I think could probably only have been published following the death of Our Late Queen, here is the apotheosis of the Laundry, its endpoint (literally) as the unspeakable horror which has consumed the British State turns its baleful attention on the Crown itself. And on the billions of person-years of worship and belief that it has accumulated.

Written according  the normal convention of the series (Bob Howard writing his classified work diaries - but we finally see how and why that exercise is being undertaken) The Regicide Files gives us a complex plot hanging on the dilemma of the Laundry and its duty (enforced by geas) to both the current PM (that nameless horror, who was, in truth, the lesser of two evils - as PMs so often are) and to Her Majesty. 

Long-buried External Assets are being awoken, there's trouble afoot at the Palace and Bob's required to wear a fancy suit and shiny shoes. That last may be the thing he worries about most.

This book has all the notes I love in the Laundry Files: the fiendish plot (fiendish in at least two senses of the term), the dry humour, check-ins with most of the vast array of characters Stross has given us to date and a tight, action-filled narrative.  I don't know if this was planned in advance, but it's a story that derives real heft from the recent death of Elizabeth II and indeed probably couldn't have been published before. If you thought that the Royal funeral in 2023 was a big production, well, just look at THESE funeral games... 

I feel this book provides very much the ending that the Laundry (the series, and the institution) deserves. Bob and Mo get plenty of time (I've missed them in the past few books) and development but we're left guessing about just how events will proceed as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN unfolds and what role the Laundry will play in that. (I'm blurring some detail here so as not to spoil, but I will note that - as evidenced by Bob's being at large to write his casenotes, some form of normality does continue, albeit the warped version of the New Management)

Strongly recommended to long-haul Laundry fellow-travellers. If you haven't read these books yet then no, really this isn't the one to begin with but you have some fun in store if you go back and begin with The Atrocity Archives.  

(It was also fun to see Stross adroitly sidestep issues of continuity in the series...)

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

Review - Ring the Bells by CK McDonnell

Ring the Bells (Stranger Times, 5)

CK McDonnell
Bantam, 9 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 496pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857505392

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Ring the Bells  to consider for review. Given the seasonal bent of this book, I should really have reviewed BEFORE not after Christmas, but my reviews have been a car crash recently so perhaps just take this as a hint to buy it for someone NEXT Christmas!

You actually might not think of McDonnell's Stranger Times series as providing potential for a Christmassy story. The titular, Manchester based newspaper, which operates from a decaying, closed-down church, and chronicles the eerie and the unexplained is produced on a shoestring by a cabal of eccentrics and misanthropes. Attempts by the staff to inject a note of goodwill or cheer into proceedings tend to fall flat, even if the team general end up saving the world by the last page.

The books so far have tended to explore the seamier side of supernatural life leaving little time for wonder and cheer. Most of all, the editor, Banecroft (who is surely some sort of cousin to Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses) lives on cynicism and booze and would, one thinks, likely sit up by the fireplace with a shotgun ready to scare Father Christmas right back up the chimney.

So, as the storyline here develops, it's fun to imagine how the coalescing evil - which is clearly going to coalesce into something rather Santa-shaped - will both ring all the Christmas bells and threaten the known universe. That does happen, I didn't anticipate how, and the knowledge of it doesn't in any way lessen the fun and the fear when it does. I will say that there were possibly Prathcettian overtones to the theme here that belief in itself is a power to be reckoned with, but McDonnell also plays subtle games with the usual seasonal redemption arc which should make us question the transformation of an evildoer into the Chrismassiest person ever. Here, even the wrongdoer has his doubts about that trope.

A couple of sub-plots are though perhaps worth as much attention as the main story. Christmas is a time for family, and as far as we know, Manny, the mysterious Rastafarian printer who makes sure that each week's edition of the ST gets to its readers, has no family (other than the strange entity which imbues him). In this story, we find out more about Manny's background. It's a very affecting and sad story, giving him a central place he deserves after four books of being rather at the margins (or perhaps, in the basement).

There are also developments in the world of the Founders, the entitled and wealthy clique who try to control the magical world. Given that places at that table tend to follow the "dead man's shoes" rule, it's perhaps no surprise that competition is ruthless but Ring the Bells sets us up I think for a future battle Royale to fill a pair of those shoes (only given the likely contenders, they'd better be killer heels, not just any old shoes.

An entertaining and fun addition to this series, showing the value of an ensemble cast which keeps things fresh by always providing new corners and angles to explore.

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

Review - Shy Girl by Mia Ballard

Shy Girl

Mia Ballard
Hachette, 6 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035437924

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

"Shy Girl" actually contains three stories. The first, and longest, is about a woman called that - "Shy Girl" - and the abuse she suffers. The others, which are thematically similar, don't feature her, although one is a prologue of sorts. All three though are covered by the author's warning as to how disturbing the themes of the book are, which I would take seriously.

Illustrating that, "Shy Girl" is not the main character's given name - that is Gia - nor one she adopts for herself. It's the name given by her abuser, and renaming her is far from the worst thing he does to her.

The story is told fairly straightforwardly in three parts. In the first, Gia describes her awkward life, her difficult mother and how everything seems to just have gone... askew? Off course? Gia seems to be motivated by a desire for certainty, for safety, for exactness, perhaps to balance a deficiency, a lack of love and nurture. But this only takes her so far. One day, her exactness deserts her and she can't do her job any more, so poverty soon sets in. But there are deeper roots to her problems than the loss of her job. "I've been depressed" Gia states "for longer than I've been unemployed". All the same, economic trumps emotional well-being. To pay the rent, Gia tales to a sugar-dating website which leads her to Nathan.

This opens Gia into the power of her abuser. The second act of the book is very dark, basically a story of control and coercion, enforced by violence and threats of violence. I'm deliberately avoiding detail here both because of spoilers and in order not to repeat potentially triggering ideas. The story is though - I think - a compelling account of how one man dominates and abuses a woman. Ballard shows Gia's transformation into Shy Girl gradually. At every step, you think, it must end here. Surely not...? But it does not end and the reader is manoeuvred into a sort of complicity with Nathan - the final depths of whose manipulation doesn't actually become clear till almost the end, when he shows how he will have the final word, that even if Gia finds a way to tell her story, it'll be his version that is believed. In some ways that's the most chilling moment in the book, setting up Gia's final transformation - and revenge.

To mention that revenge isn't, I  think, a spoiler - if you follow the link to the publisher's site below you'll see the book described as a "harrowing tale of survival and revenge" - and it is visceral, but it depends on the transformation, the drift, that has befallen Gia. I didn't quite know what to make of it. In some respects it was only the prospect of this that made reading the earlier parts of the book bearable. But equally, what happens is fantastical - the restoration of a kind of wild justice not one that will redress the inequalities and power structures of the real world.

An absorbing and thought provoking read and one of the creepiest stories I've come across lately.

"Shy Girl" itself is joined by that sort-of prequel, "Before", and by a third story, "Harold", which takes a different take on the fantastical to show a woman dominated in the private domestic sphere by a male narrative such that the inertia and mysogny of the outside world will side with him, not her. It ends less happily than Shy Girl, though perhaps "happy" isn't the word I should use here. I think both stories in the end are about the power of the ability to frame the narrative and where denial of that power can lead.

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

Review - The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle

The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle
Bantam (Penguin), 15 January 2026 
Available as: HB, 432pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857509956

I'm grateful to the publisher for access to an advance e-copy of The Devil in Silver to consider for review.

The Devil in Silver is the story of Pepper, a man who is rubbing along just about OK until he picks a fight in a car park, and ends up being dumped in a psychiatric ward by the police officers who attend. (There's less paperwork for them that way). Thus he's introduced to the Kafkaesque world of New Hyde Hospital, dosed with powerful meds (and if he won't take them, why that means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?) and effectively "disappeared" from everyday life with no appeal rights and no advocacy.

LaValle does an excellent job of portraying the broken system that has Pepper in its grasp. Broken, in that nobody gets the help they need. A system, in that it grinds on. Apart from him and the other patients - sketched with a degree of tenderness and insight I think - that system also has the staff firmly in their place, weighed down by reams of paperwork and a defunct computer system designed by banks to cheat their customers.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, there's a monster on the ward, and patients keep dying. Or vanishing.

Pepper realises that he has to get out of this place, but who can he trust to help him? 

A magnificent, sad, and funny book that ranges here and there in its focus and gives us, for example, potted intros to Vincent Van Gogh and to the US silver rush of the 1840s as well as the thoughts of a narcissistic rat which lives in the abandoned part of the hospital, The Devil in Silver balances deliciously on the edge of naturalism and of fantasy. Is there really a monster at large in the hospital? Can we trust what Pepper - not to speak of the other patients - report about that, or anything else? Driven by a rage against the sheer unfairness of it all - take Loochie, for example, a young woman trapped ion the ward since she was 13 because she needs help and her family can't cope - LaValle creates a readable and involving story that visits some very uncomfortable place.

The book is also mindful of wider social dis-ease. While Hyde is a token system, it sits amidst a wider broken, or breaking, system. The inmates' 24 TV picks up news broadcasts pumping out disinformation and hate. There is a reference to "41 shots". With inmates like Pepper in the ward on a fall premise, the question does ask itself, should some of those... out there... not be.. in here?

It's a book that doesn't offer easy answers. Yes, some mysteries are resolved here, sort of, and Pepper achieves a victory of sorts in what he sets out to do, but the authorities are practised and containment - that's their who thing - and the most heinous scandals fade from the news feeds quickly, as here.

An unsettling and troubling read, but one with tremendous heart and deeply memorable characters.

For more information about The Devil in Silver, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Bone Raiders by Jackson Ford

The Bone Raiders

Jackson Ford
Orbit, 10 August 2025
Available as: PB, 465pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356523804

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

I loved The Bone Raiders.

Jackson Ford wrongfoots his reader almost from the start (I can't say more because spoilers) in a story of raiders, vainglorious empire builders and giant fire breathing lizards.

The Rakada are the most ruthless, vicious and pitiless raiders in the grasslands known as "the Tapestry". They wear their enemies' bones for ornaments, and often get their plunder without having to fight because of their fearsome reputation. But even the the most ruthless, vicious and pitiless raiders are suffering as a new Khan centralises his people from their scattered communities - so handy for raiding - builds a mighty army, and wages war on the raiders in general.

And the Rakada are about to do something that makes that war personal to them, not general at all...

It was fun seeing how this scenario played out, in a vaguely East Asian themed setting of the khan vs steppes nomads and roving brigands. It was even more fun though seeing how things are driven from the tight knit band of women who constitute the Rakada. For all their fearsome reputation, there are only a handful of them left, and it's clear they will only survive if they try something new. But the only suggestion seems impossible and will lead them into greater and greater danger. Sayana is determined to do what's needed, but it's hard, given complicating loyalties within the band, quarrels between lovers, the need to be loyal to the leader - and the cussedness of giant lizards. (Giants lizards are a theme).

Behind these issues is the uneasy knowledge that - whatever the rationalisation - the Rakada's way of life depends on theft and murder. Ford's characterisation of them is a triumph here. The Rakada women are appealing characters, vivacious, interesting people with rich and developed relationships. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motivations - a cold and absent father, a lost family, a passionate love - and these make for a complex and ever shifting power balance between them.

But they are also, as I have said, killers and thieves - indeed, successful killers and thieves as we are reminded every time they put on their bones for a raid. How do you set that against the fact that their leader enjoys to relax with a bit of tapestry, or that they make sure to accommodate the member who needs to communicate in sign?

Ford never shies away from this complexity. Sometimes he shows how the Rakada try to dodge the issues. Sometimes he gets dark humour from it. But it's always there, and it exacts a price. 

This moral depth and - I don't know, texture? chewiness? - marks The Bones Raiders out, I think, from much fantasy, of whatever stripe, and means I look forward to reading the next book when it comes.

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

Review - House of Splinters by Laura Purcell

House of Splinters

Laura Purcell
Raven Books, 9 October 2025
Available as: HB, 349pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781526627230

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

House of Splinters is a bewitching ghost story, a return to the world of The Silent Companions and a prequel of sorts, its events set at the end of the 18th century and drawing on the same, early 16th century background, as a young couple, Belinda and Wilfrid Bainbridge, attempt to make The Bridge their home.

Ancestral taint is thick here. There is not only the history of witch Anne Bainbridge, but a vivid implication of the present-day Bainbridges benefiting from colonial rapacity. Wilfrid's black sheep brother has been employed by the East India Company. Belinda's father and brother are engaged in the West Indies trade, with all the implications of that. And Wilfrid himself is, with whatever handwringing, about to turn the villagers off the common so that he can enclose it for wheat.

That background of cursed wealth is reflected in a panoply of gothic horror that strikes the family and their servants. Belinda is already predisposed to fear the house, after events five years before when her sone was born there, and she soon recognises that its malice is particularly directed at her and her newborn, Lydia. But what is the cause of that malice, and can it be placated? 

I really enjoyed this book. A good example of the gothic is, in my experience, quite rare. It's not enough to deploy the trappings - the bumps in the night, the isolated location, the sudden scares - you need to build, and continually deny, that growing atmosphere of claustrophobia and suppressed panic. Purcell is one author who can reliably do this with her novels that leverage the position of women in a patriarchal society into a fraught sense of confinement (literal in Belinda's case with the use of that term as she approaches childbirth). House of Splinters is a brilliant example of that, Lydia unable to take the actions she needs due to matters of convention, money and status, not least the patriarchal headship of her husband (however nice a man he may seem to be).

I sensed a little touch here of Wilkie Collins in the way that Belinda's plight isn't only due to the supernatural, but she is also trapped by societal conventions and mysogyny, but also in the strength and resourcefulness she shows in seeking to protect herself and her children. And the novel ends on an eerie, threatening hint of what's to come in the future.

All in all, an exciting, frightening and atmospheric book, perfect for the dark nights.

For more information about House of Splinters, see the author's website here.

Review - The Echo of Crows by Phil Rickman

The Echo of Crows (Merrily Watkins 18)

Phil Rickman
Corvus, 6 November 2025
Available as: HB, 309pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9781786494627

It's generally acknowledged that there are more books out there than one can possibly read in a lifetime. As a reader, this might amount to a bit of a memento mori. My own attitude has evolved through a number of phases. As a very young reader, I wasn't aware that there was a body of books already written, and a cadre of authors writing more. I devoured what I wanted from the shelves, and didn't bother too much about where the supply came from. 

As I grew older (and, perhaps, once I had more money to spend) I became aware that some authors (PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens) were dead and gone and there was a finite supply of their work (explaining the song and dance around unfinished and rediscovered works - Edwin Drood, or the half-finished Arthur Ransom story Coots in the North). I also became aware that others were still alive and writing and emitting the hardbacks I could now afford, generally at the rate of one per year, creating anticipated events in my reading calendar.

And then, inevitably, one of those authors would die, leading to a sort of reading bereavement, the encounter with the last novel. Another sort of momento mori. Reginald Hill. Terry Pratchett. Graham Joyce. Ursula K LeGuin. Christopher Priest. You'll have your own list. Most recently, for me, it was Phil Rickman. But in Rickman's case - and consonant with his having chronicled the uncanny, the liminal, the not-quite-dead - I became aware a couple of months back that there was another book by him out, and this made me so happy.

The Echo of Crows is, clearly, the last book featuring Merrily Watkins, exorcist to the Church of England diocese of Hereford, dweller on the Welsh/ English border (and on other borders, too). Merrily's drawn into strange events in Longtown, a remote village where, fifteen hundred years ago, a local king was murdered. Huw Owen believes that there's evil abroad in Longtown, and, truly, there has been a modern murder too which Frannie Bliss and his lover Annie are looking into. Jane gets involved too, in a sub-plot involving hangings and their legacy.

It's a satisfyingly convoluted story, as ever, with links picked out between historic evils and current day concerns (the housing shortage, offcomers buying up property, the drugs trade) and framed around the contemporary church's love-hate relationship with the "woo-woo". Huw's on the verge of quitting, Merrily, as ever, is aware of the ambivalence of smooth archdeacon Siân and of the diocesan authorities to her special calling - but also of the appeal, to modern seekers of something, well, a little more rooted, than traditional expressions of belief. 

Convoluted, as ever, and dark, as ever, but perhaps not quite as dark? This superb series has never flinched from darkness, but in this final part, the threat (there is a sense of threat) is perhaps less directly focussed on Merrily, something coming for her, as it is an outcropping, a problem in the field to be dealt with. That's a positive, I think, and a choice, not Rickman running out of steam, and the result is a sort of psychological space here that allows The Echo of Crows to draw together, to a degree, threads that have run through this series: Merrily's spiritual struggles, Lol's career, their ambiguous relationship but also Annie's relationship with her dead father, her and Frannie's future, and Jane and Eirion's on-off whatever-it-is. 

No, Jane hasn't saved Ledwardine from the developers (yet) or solved the mystery of its ancient roots, but some mystery is always necessary, don't you think? And, in the end, The Echo of Crows seems to be saying that there is always more light to be found here, and we should keep searching for that.

May Mr Rickman rest in peace, and rise in glory. Until then, his books are an excellent monument to him.

For more information about The Echo of Crows, see the publisher's website here.