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.