Blogtour review - Home Before Dark by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir

Home Before Dark 
Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (trans Victoria Cribb)
Orenda Books, 17 July 2025
Available as: HB, 300pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788602

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

In this new standalone psychological crime novel, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir introduces us to troubled Marsí. In 1977, Marsí dreads the tenth anniversary of her older sister, Stína, disappearing into the Icelandic night. 

Marsí has always blamed herself for Stína's loss, because 14 year old Marsí, was conducting an illicit correspondence with a penpal - using Stína's name.

And on the night Stína vanished, Marsí had arranged to meet him...

The first thing to say about this novel is that - as the title hints - it is dark, dark, dark. The setting is almost gothic, the isolated town, and the even more isolated farmstead where Marsí's family still live, breathing suppressed secrets and decades old grief. Marsí's dad makes his living by farming hens, the miserable lives of the poor creatures in their close confinement adding suffering from which she shrinks, and her mum sits in the house drinking alone, mourning her lost career as an actress.

Marsí has her own problems - not all related to the trauma and guilt of losing her sister - and Ægisdóttir cleverly cuts between events of 1966/ 67 (seen from the perspective of each sister), and Marsí's life in 1977. She clearly has an eating disorder, something that goes unremarked in the 70s. Sometimes the two girls' accounts support each other, sometimes they contradict each other significantly. Add in that 70s Marsí is either misremembering, is imagining things, or is a very unreliable narrator indeed, and it's clear that Home Before Dark is a real puzzle box of a book, a story where nothing can be taken for granted and events need to be reconstructed, almost forensically.

All this, and Marsí begins receiving letters again from her former penpal, who now threatens to become her stalker.

I really enjoyed Home Before Dark. It's miles from the typical Icelandic crime mystery (not that I've anything against those!) in that here the investigation of the crime isn't the central thread of the story. Yes, Marsí does make a new attempt here to discover what happened in 1967. (Of course, everyone tells her to leave well alone). And - spoiler! - she does eventually succeed. And that has... consequences. But really, it's her journey to this knowledge - and the re animation of a whole series of relationships (friendships and enmities) from her teenage years, as well as the stirring of long buried family skeletons, that drive the story. Marsí herself emerges as a brilliantly portrayed character, at once very dislikable but also, ion her affliction and desperation, very vulnerable. I changed my mind more times about whether I found her sympathetic than in any book I've read for a long time. 

In best gothic fashion, Home Before Dark shows us one family tragedy, but hints at more. As we will eventually learn, behind the apparent catastrophe there are complex family dynamics and unhealed wounds. While the atmosphere of darkness grows, the detail is only revealed slowly, with plenty of time to get to know Marsí, Stína and their (rather strange) parents and circle of teenage friends (seen both in the 60s and, more grown up, later). Ægisdóttir also shows us bits of Icelandic history that are not normally explored in a contemporary crime novel. Some are just intriguing - like that fact that even in the 70s TV shut down on Thursday. Others are darker and look back to a more patriarchal, decidedly unmodern Iceland.

Though it all, Victoria Cribb's excellent translation captures mood and nuance, matching the gathering tension and keeping all the distinct voices clear and recognisable, with their idiosyncrasies and different identities.

 An excellent book, and a great escape from the current UK heatwave!

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

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.

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.

Blogtour review - Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz

Nightingale & Co
Charlotte Printz (trans by Marina Sofia)

Corylus Books, 15 January 2025 (e), 1 February (PB) (390pp)
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298982

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Nightingale & Co to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

From the Publisher

Berlin, August 1961.

Since the death of her beloved father, Carla has been running the Nightingale & Co detective agency by herself. It’s a far from easy job for a female investigator. 

When the chaotic, fun-loving Wallie shows up at the door, claiming to be her half-sister, Carla’s world is turned upside down. Wallie needs Carla – the Berlin Wall has been built overnight, leaving her unable to return to her flat in East Berlin.

Carla certainly doesn’t need Wallie, with her secret double life and unorthodox methods for getting results. Yet the mismatched pair must find a way to work together when one of their clients is accused of murdering her husband.

Nightingale & Co is the first in a cosy historical crime series featuring the sisters of the Nightingale & Co detective agency in 1960s Berlin.

What I Thought

I loved it.

Printz gives us a view of postwar Germany, and particularly of West Berlin, that was new to me. We may be familiar with le Carré or Deighton Cold War spy antics involving the Wall, prisoner exchanges on lonely bridges at midnight and the heroics of people trying escape the East.

We know less, perhaps, about the impact of the sudden construction of the barrier - the everyday inconveniences as families are suddenly split, people are cut off from their jobs or homes, and transport disrupted. And, connected with that, the porosity of Berlin before the Wall - a city where citizens could work in one part of the city and live in the other.

Behind that suffering is, of course, a deeper history as the generation affected by this was one that had also lived through the War - whose effects are often pointed out in this book with buildings still ruined and bullet holes visible here and there - and necessarily, under the Nazi regime before and during that. There are plenty of passing comments in this book about how people had accommodated themselves with that regime, and what they had then done after to distance themselves. As well as rumblings in bars and on street corners from those who rather liked the Nazis. The details are fascinating and reach into the present of this novel to, affecting the attitudes of the characters and their position in society.

Alongside those political themes, though, this book also does a very good job at delineating the personalities in this story, women (for the most part) living at a time of enormous change, which some of them welcome and others shun. For example, Ingrid, a saleswoman for the new contraceptive pill who is one of Carla's clients. Carla herself, whose life is dominated by her strained relationship with a domineering and controlling mother. And free spirit Wallie, who breezes into this story upsetting apple carts down every street. Wallie is something of a catalyst for events in the book, given that half-sister Carla is rather cautious and, one feels, left to herself would never take the steps necessary to resolve the two cases here (tracking down a missing American serviceman with whom Ingrid had fallen in love, and solving the murder of a prominent architect whose wife came to her seeking help with a divorce, and who then herslelf naturally falls under suspicion). Wallie, on the other hand, goes in with all guns blazing and seems adapt at everything from setting a honeytrap to spotting a tail. We can only wonder where she learned these skills. Perhaps it goes with the territory if you work the bar in a topless nightclub?

Above all, though, Nightingale & Co is a joyous, thrilling crime narrative that keeps the reader hooked from the first page. Carla is a rather atypical detective, at least by genre standards, and she's often juggling the dramatic - having to race across Berlin to interview a client in prison, contending with the dislocations caused by the Wall, chatting up contacts bin the American military - with the mundane - getting home in time for tea rather than face an earful from her mother, or rescuing her zany aunt from some scrape. It makes for a rich tapestry of life, and that's even before we see things from the perspective of the slightly chaotic Wallie who surely has some secrets of her own. (I should mention that until Wallie turns up suitcase in hand, Carla didn't know that her dad had another daughter in the East - so things are pretty tense between then as you can imagine).

It's all rendered in excellent, taut prose by Marina Sofia, including being clear about - but not intrusively - the points where the distinction in German between familiar and formal pronouns conveys shades of social distance that English has lost. 

In short, strongly recommended - and I hope to see more of Carla & Co in future.

About the Author and Translator 

Charlotte Printz is the pseudonym of a successful former TV editor with a penchant for writing gripping historical novels and screenplays. She is one of the founders of the Munich Writing Academy.

Marina Sofia is a translator, reviewer, writer and blogger, as well as a third culture kid, who grew up trilingual in Romanian, German and English. This is her first translation of a German crime novel to be published by Corylus Books

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

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

#Review - The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird by Louisa Morgan

The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird

Louisa Morgan
Orbit, 21 November 2023
Available as: PB, 371pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356516837

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird to consider for review.

I have enjoyed all of Morgan's "witch" novels and I enjoyed Beatrice Bird too. While it's a bit of an outlier in not making overt use of the same witchy mythos, with the supernatural here being less clearly delineated and understood, the theme and tone in very similar and Bird succeeds in giving us both a slightly creepy tale and the account of a woman suffering from controlling, collusive patriarchy. (As to the latter, the position of the women here is in many respects even more constrained than in the earlier, historically based novels where they at least had some freedom of action within an understood domain of their own).

Beatrice is a successful doctor, a therapist practicing in San Francisco among the happenings of the late 60s (there are some drug-related themes) and the downer years of the early 70s. The novel's "present" is 1977, but there are many flashbacks, both to Beatrice's earlier life (as a child, and then to her practice and patients) and to that of Anne Iredale, of whom more in a moment. 

Beatrice has a special skill/ talent/ sense in that she can perceive "ghosts", as she calls them. These aren't chain clanking, sheet-waving spectres, rather they are "hauntings" that express truths about people, emotions such as their sorrow or anger. This talent developed early - Morgan shows us its beginnings in Beatrice's rural childhood - and one would imagine that it would be useful to her in her practice, but in truth she has become more sensitive to these "ghosts" than she can bear, seeing them tag along not only with her patients but in every street and shop too. As the story opens, has retreated to a small island off the US West Coast where there are few people and so, few ghosts. Beatrice does though have her two cows, and is trying to live a peaceful life, supplying milk to the island convent whose sisters, happily, leave her mostly alone.

It's to this island that Anne comes, fleeing domestic abuse. Of course that means she brings with her fear, guilt, and regret, things that Beatrice would rather not have to cope with, especially not personified as her "ghosts", - but also something even nastier, something with a real sense of horror to it. Is it an actual thing, or has Beatrice tipped over and begun losing her mind?

How these two women come to know and trust one another, and build on that trust to address (rather than running away from) their problems is the heart of this book. But first we have to learn what both, especially Anne, have been through, in scenes that some readers may find distressing. These show how Anne falls into the control of a manipulative bully of a man, how she blames herself, and what she is up against more widely - her abuser is a judge, a Big Man in the small world he inhabits and his word dictates her future (she has no friends, having been cut off by her abuser from any support network).

Such behaviour and its indulgence hasn't of course gone away in the 21st century, but by locating her story in the 70s I think Morgan makes the stakes very high, with little public or official awareness of the issue and no support for its victims. Anne gets some help from the Roman Catholic nuns - in passing I have always enjoyed how Morgan's novels, even with their witchy heroines, refuse to subscribe to a binary world where organised religion is simply demonised - but it's only once Anne and Beatrice are able to understand one another that they can both begin to heal and to address the formidable difficulties - no, dangers - that threaten. The supernatural twist to the story means that Beatrice has unusual resources to draw on here, but it doesn't magically resolve everything, that takes human courage, solidarity and not a little cleverness.

Another great, and rather different, book from an author I rely on to give me a fresh view on life.

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

#Review - Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

Nothing Special
Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury, 2 March 2023
Available as: HB, 240pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781526612120

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Nothing Special via Netgally.

Nothing Special is a hard book for me to review. I tend to review mainly plot or character driven books, which both provide relative easy ways into a review: you can describe what happens (without spoilers!) or you can talk about the people in the book (without spoilers!). Then you can get into the atmosphere, the way the book makes you feel and so on.

With Nothing Special I'm afraid that neither approach will work, which is frustrating because I want to persuade you to read this rich, fascinating story. Plot? Yes, things do happen here, but they're the comforting jumble of everyday life (for value of "everyday life" that fit New York in the late 60s). Fascinating, textured coming and goings but difficult to summarise. Characters? There are indeed well delineated characters. In particular, 17 year old Mae, our window into this world, is a blizzard of a character, full of desires, hopes and already (at that young age) regrets. Her mother, and her mother's boyfriend Mikey, are also richly layered and well observed. But Mae is also vastly contradictory, and she is telling the story of her teens from the perspective of some thirty years later, commenting on it with a great deal of knowingness both about herself and about the events which bring her - brought her - into the orbit, if the distant orbit, of 60s celebrity Andy Warhol. 

I'm not sure I can do justice to that, especially as there are really two Maes in the book, the impulsive (but is she?) young woman and the more resigned, but also more understanding, older one. And as the younger Mae, at least, changes and develops rapidly in the hothouse environment of Warhol's Factory, where she comes to work (although here, it's always the 'studio').

Mae has, for example, an affect of rather chilly detachment from what she's witnessing, but it's hard to tell whether that is actually meant to be how the 17 year old saw things, or if it was a teenage pose, an attitude, a protection against what are pretty intense emotional ups and downs. Or it may be an artefact of the older woman recalling her youth? Once I started asking myself questions like that (another arises in relation to Mae's relationship with her mother (who seems pretty unpleasant) and her mother's boyfriend Mikey (generally derided, but he seems one of the more likeable characters here)) the book became almost a hunt for clues, every phrase, every comment turned over and examined. I cam to no conclusions. We are left to wonder, and it's fascinating to do that.

We're also left to wonder about the detail of what is happening - and about what we're not told. Before reading this book I knew very little about Warhol (apart from the Campbell soup cans, and "famous for fifteen minutes") so I wasn't aware of how much in the book to take as literal. (A bit of research afterwards suggested, quite a lot). But actually that's not the right question, I think. What's more important here than "what really happened?" is "what is Mae thinking and feeling?"

For example, she's been employed (though doesn't actually get paid much) for transcribing tapes that will be used as the basis for an experimental novel "by" Warhol. (Incidentally, he's not often named in the book, and when he is, it's with no upper case in his name - like many of the other characters, even Mae's "I" is lower case - except when he is called "Drella", a nickname used by his associates based on "Dracula" and "Cinderella". Make what you want of that.) The content of these tapes horrifies but fascinates Mae and her fellow typists, and their developing relationship with them is central to the book - but the content is never directly described, though it is implied that it is degrading, exploitative. I'm left wondering what I would find if I ever read "a: A Novel"(it has NO reviews own Amazon!)

Another example might be Mae's introduction to and relationship with Warhol's whole operation. Presented here, it's the result of a more or less random chain of events followup a casual hookup she has with a man she meets in a department store. (Early ion the book Mae spends a lot of time in department stores hoping to get picked up). One might be forgiven for thinking she thereforelittle idea where she's going when she turns up to be interviewed for the typing role by "anita" (lower case "a"). But in the succeeding weeks, Mae (and the other typists) seem to have a near obsession with Warhol's circle, some of whose leading personalities appear on those tapes, an obsession that reminded me of the attitude some people have today towards their favourite social media stars and influencers. 

While it's perfectly plausible to see this as something that has developed in the hothouse atmosphere of the 'studio' (albeit the typists are corralled in a distant corner, overlooked by the artists, actors and socialites who seem to spent their time lounging around and smoking at the centre of things) I also wondered whether there wasn't something much more intentional in young Mae's involvement, a deliberateness to her penetration of this social circle, its parties and schisms which the older woman has tried to play down but not completely erased?

Similar mysteries abound, so that, while at one level you might indeed say that little actually happens in this book, that wouldn't really be true. You need, as I said above, to pay close attention, and you need to approach everything Mae (both of them!) says with caution, but when you do, you will see all sorts of stuff going on - both about Mae's own circumstances and her growth and coming of age, and encapsulations of wider society at a cultural and emotional crossroads.

I keep coming back, in thinking about this book, to the TV series "Mad Men", some of whose plot threads depict the same 60s New York avant-garde scene. Of course "Mad Men" does it from a different and more privileged perspective this demimonde is a place to be visited and explored... before getting back on the train to a comfortable suburb. It's starkly obvious that Mae doesn't have such a safety net and there is often a sense of danger, of edginess, to the things she gets up to which is heightened by our not being told just how much "young Mae" understands (and intends) that. 

Older Mae doesn't elucidate for us here, leaving several different alternatives open from her teenage self deliberately exploring this world, to her falling into it accidentally but then aligning with it, to rather darker interpretations.

By the end of the story I almost had the sense of reading a choose-you-own-adventure story, but with all the switches and alternatives obscured so that it seemed like several stories at once. This was at times overwhelming and confusing but also, increasingly grippy, and deeply thought provoking. 

Far from an easy read, but a very rewarding book, I think.

For more information about Nothing Special, see the Bloomsbury website here.

Review - Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver #Blogtour #NetGalley

Wakenhyrst
Michelle Paver
Head of Zeus, 4 April 2019
HB, 359pp, e-book, audio

I'm grateful to the publisher for inviting me to take part in the Wakenhyrst blogtour and for providing a free advance e-copy of the book via NetGalley.

Having loved Paver's previous two supernatural-tinged novels, Dark Matter and Thin Air, I was delighted to see Wakenhyrst coming - and then to be able to take part in the tour.

Like Dark Matter and Thin Air,  at the heart of Wakenhyrst is the social structure of early 20th century England (England not Britain). I say that despite the fact that the previous books were not set in England: they still explored English notions of class and the way that English arrogance impinged on, and fell foul of, other cultures and places.

Wakenhyrst is, very much, set in England (with one short diversion to Brussels) and the English upper class scorn for the beliefs of the 'natives' that featured in Thin Air is here turned back on itself as a dilettante Edwardian gentleman, researching the obscure fifteenth century mystical biography of one Alice Pyett, goes to dark places despite (or because of?) his rejecting the beliefs of the 'lower orders'.

Edmund Stearne is a man 'of spotless reputation' but, to his daughter Maud, a forbidding and pernickety father ("You know my dislike of manhandled newsprint") who enthusiastically administers physical punishment. To his Belgian wife he is a tyrant ('It was Father who had decreed what Mama ate, read, did and thought...') As a girl, indeed as a woman, Maud is slighted, discounted, disregarded. Edmund knows what he wants - his wife pregnant (she suffers an endless series of miscarriages - Maud comes to dread 'the moaning'), his daughter silent in the nursery, and servant girl Ivy at his disposal ('Nor did he regard what he regularly did with Ivy as anything but the satisfaction of a lawful appetite'). Allegedly a religious man, it would be overgenerous even to label the contents of the diary we're allowed to read here as hypocritical. Indeed there's a vein of outright misogyny in Edward ('Women are all the same. Devious, hypocritical, corrupt') and also in his pals the local doctor and the Vicar. The subordinate role of a young woman in that time and place is made very plain: when she seeks their help in a crisis, Maud is threatened, told to stop being hysterical sent on her way. Throughout the book, Ivy and Maud are at odds, seeking to undermine one another, even though the cause of their problems is not their own relationship but the stultifying, patriarchal, power of Maud's father.

But this isn't just a story of how bad things were in the past and how much better they have become. Paver is shrewder than that. The book opens in 1966 with a quoted newspaper article which is, in its own way, just as patronising, just as set on keeping women in their place, as Doctor, Parson and Squire at their worst. Describing the discovery of some sublime artworks created by Edmund in his later life, it introduces the academic who first recognised them thus:

' "My hair stood on end," shrills Dr Robin Hunter, 36, a mini-skirted redhead in white vinyl boots...'

That article portrays the elderly, reclusive Maud, still living in her decayed childhood home out in the Fens, as at best, a bitter old maid, at worst, a murderer and witch - and naturally, as in conflict with another woman, her cook. Plus ca change... Initially unwilling to share the real story, despite the calumny directed at her, Maud eventually relents  (a storm has damaged the roof, she needs money) and admits to her confidence that same Dr Hunter.

We then hear Maud's account, interspersed with entries from her father's diaries. This is where the real story begins - of a lonely girl with a strict father, growing up amidst the wildness of the Fens. Young Maud's life is marked by contrasts, for example between the different customs, of her father and of the villagers, which she must or mustn't follow (sometimes she can't remember which is which). There's the language itself - while the elderly Maud speaks with a 'cut glass accent' it's clear that she is or was perfectly fluent in the local dialect:

' "D-don't fret thysen,' she stammered, unthinkingly lapsing into village talk. "I told thee I wanted to go babbing..." '

In keeping with that, it's clear that everyone - not just the working people but Maud, her mother, Edmund himself - has recourse at one time or another to the potions and remedies of the village wisewoman.

There is the contrast between the entitled, complacent world of men (principally her father) and the second class existence of women.

And between the buttoned-up public attitudes of the trinity who preside over this world and their secret behaviour.

Above all, the story contrasts Edmund Stearne's public reputation as 'a rich landowner and respected historian' with a private dread that he has committed a terrible sin (even if he protests to his diary that he can't remember what it was, and that anyway it wasn't his fault). His fear drives an obsession with Pyett's text, which seems to him to parallel his own case. This is an aspect of the story that only surfaces gradually (there is a lot submerged in the Fen) and indirectly, and saying too much would spoil the effect. The slowly emerging picture does, though, underly a growing atmosphere of menace which makes this book truly Gothic. Paver signals what may be going on with language that alludes to the master of this genre, MR James, from details (toad-like carvings on a pew, Stearne's almost tripping as he comes downstairs, his feeling as if he had been bitten) to turns of phrase ( '...whoever painted that picture painted the demon from life') and overall themes (the fear of a hairy thing that has been let loose, the story's focus on a lone scholar and its being told, in part, looking back some fifty years through a manuscript account). We could be reading one of those stories where an accusing spectre haunts the guilty, slowly driving them over the edge of sanity.

Michelle Paver (photo: Anthony Upton)

Whether that is, in the end, the case - well, I won't say any more about that. You should read the book and make up your own mind. But it is clear that there is much more going on than in a classic ghost story, even though Paver uses that form expertly. Apart from the theme of patriarchy, I think there's also an exploration here of the creation of memory, of the importance of story - most obviously of course in older Maud's desire to control the narrative, as one might put it now, but also for example in the way that Stearne says in his diary that he remembers something 'though I didn't before' - he is a most unreliable narrator indeed and seems to me to be reinventing his life and outlook under pressure of - well, of whatever it is.  Maud sees Edmund's story take shape and come to life - and eventually realises how it threatens her and those she loves. And in the end she has to take control and make her own truth.

In describing how Maud does that, Paver has, in a sense, to go beyond the supernatural and show how some horrors are actually worse - because more universal - than the shades haunting remote mountain peaks or isolated Arctic bases and which her previous books turned on. Wakenhyrst depicts a sense of unearned entitlement, the systematic application of privilege and the embrace of hypocrisy, both in the Edwardian summer and the topsy turvy '60s, which to me is actually much more chilling than a vengeful ghost keening in the Fen.

It is a powerful, enthralling book which I'd encourage you to read. If you need any more urging, it's also a beautifully designed thing, the cover tactile and brooding, the endpapers leafy and glorious, the pages crawling with the life of the Fens - the design by Stephen McNally really enhancing the experience of reading this book (yes, I was sent an e-copy, yes I have bought the hardback - there was no way wasn't going to have this on my shelves). And there's much, much more than ice been able to cram into this review: the teeming wildlife of the Fens, Maud's later life - only sketched but Paver does it so well that we can join the dots - and even some romance.

This will definitely going to be one of my standout books of the year.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for other excellent reviews - and you can buy Wakenhyrst from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon (and doubtless other places besides).

#Blogtour review - The Courier by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Courier
Kjell Ola Dahl (trans Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 21 March 2019
PB, 314pp, e-book

This is my stop on the blogtour for Kjell Ola Dahl's new standalone thriller, The Courier. I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part and providing a free ARC of the book.

Set in three time periods - 1942, 1967 and 2015 - this is a complex novel, starting out as, ostensibly, a thrilling, if dark, war story but turning into something far darker and more interesting.

In 1942, in Oslo, occupied by the Nazis, Ester is doubly hunted: as a Jew, and as a courier for the Resistance. Barely escaping arrest, she flees to Sweden, continuing to work against the Occupation, and meeting the enigmatic, haunted Gerhard Falkum.

In 1967, a woman, Turid, who lost her mother in the war, is studying law. A man from the past, who died when she was still a child, turns up in Oslo, and events take a threatening turn for Ester.

In 2015, Turid discovers a brooch on sale which belonged to her mother. She sets out to retrieve it and to learn its story.

I enjoyed this book A LOT. It soon become clear that it was more than just a thriller. The sections in 1942 and 1967 (2015 is more of a coda, albeit crucial to understanding the book) are freighted with menace, with mysterious figures in dark, snowy streets, with the threat of arrest, betrayal and worse. The world of the Resistance is portrayed as small, claustrophobic, almost existing in synergy with the Norwegian police and Gestapo. (At one stage they're puzzling over the same murder). There are no descriptions of daring sabotage, it's office work, dull errands and freezing safe houses.

The story reminds us of what's easily forgotten - alongside war, political crime, and genocide, age old human entanglements, resentments and emotions continue, and it's these latter that seem to be the focus of the story and that raise it from being a matter of spying, propaganda and near misses to a tale of heart, blood, and revenge. The tense relationships between, for example, Ester and Gerhard in 1942, or her and Sverre in 1967, are strongly drawn and for me recalled some black and white movie where Burton and Taylor are about to begin screaming at each other (and then fall into each others' arms).

And yet... this book actually has layer upon layer. Deeper still, perhaps at the heart (or does it go further?) in this book is Ester's hatred of what's been done to her parents, to her people, to her. As though 1942 Oslo was a forge pressing out a new Ester, the woman we see in 1967 seems different, harder, marked by experience. We learn a little bit of what that experience was, of the things she's apparently done. It's enough to understand that for all this difference, the girl who got ready for a night out in 1942 Stockholm is linked to the woman of 1967 by at least thing - a desire for revenge.

All in all, this is a twisty little story where enemies are not always visible, conversations are marked by what is not said, and innocent childhood seems far, far away. One thing is clear - after 1942, nothing will be the same again for any of these characters.

I said above that I enjoyed reading this book, I should add to that that I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word for a rather dark story. It seems almost wrong to "enjoy" some of what goes on here. But it is a fine work. The characters are strongly drawn and everybody is sympathetic - to a point. At times, events are clouded by mystery, an effect enhanced by the different timelines although Kjell Ola Dahl keeps things on the right side of the line between "puzzling" and "baffling", and the relentless drive of the narrative - it is truly nailbiting at times, always thrilling - means the jumps are pretty easy to read through. The pacing is superb, building up to simultaneous climaxes in different periods which have a real sense of jeopardy (even though the structure means we know - or can guess - how things turned out).

As ever, Don Bartlett's translation gives us excellent, lucid English with just a hint of foreignness to remind the reader that this story does come from somewhere else, as it were, something I always think adds a little tingle.

I'd recommend The Courier to fans of spot fiction, historical or crime, and especially to those who like a mashup of all three.

You can buy The Courier from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Waterstones, Blackwell's, or Amazon.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for forthcoming posts and for any past ones you might have missed.

Review - Our Child of the Stars by Stephen Cox

Cover by www.leonickolls.co.uk

Our Child of the Stars
Stephen Cox
Jo Fletcher Books, 24 January 2019
HB, 483pp

Today I'm joining the blogtour for Our Child of the Stars, published on Thursday. I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley - and indeed for a finished hardback copy too which is a real work of beauty.  If you can, take yourself to a bookshop and hold it in your hands! And then buy it, obviously.

I'd been looking forward to the book, based on advance "noise", and there was a extra layer of intrigue because of it being Cox's first book. That always raises the possibility of something a little different. I mean, obviously some aspiring authors will want to write, say, another space opera (or whatever) in line with all the previous space operas, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I've found that, in contrast, some debut authors produce books that are a little different (and not just in the "X meets Y" sense).

Cox's IS one of those, and the result is amazing. While this is firmly a SF novel - Aliens! Spaceships! - for much of the book that aspect is almost incidental. Allow yourself to suspend disbelief in a crashed alien spacecraft and a Government cover-up (and patently, lots of people do) and you have a story of a frightened, injured child and the woman and man who will do anything to protect him. And, eventually, of the others they gather around them to help.

The sheer verve with which Cox portrays these three - especially Cory, the alien child who wants so much to learn and experience the world and to put behind him the dreadful things that have happened - is a joy be read. After introducing the story with Cory's joyful Hallowe'en, Cox turns to Molly and Gene's background. It's the 1960s, they're a bit counter-cultural, stranded in hyper-conformist middle America under, I think, the Nixon administration with the Vietnam War in the background and the Cold War behind that. Molly finds Gene and Gene finds Molly, but it's not all roses. She suffers depression after a miscarriage and struggles with drink. He... can't cope and looks elsewhere. The effects of this are a major theme, sensitively handled, not just a hook so that their acceptance of the alien boy they call Cory is plausible.

That happens after an event called Meteor Day, bringing death and destruction to Amber Grove but also astounding new evidence of extraterrestrial life. The cover-up follows, something Cox makes very believable. I said above "Allow yourself to suspend disbelief", but remember, this is the late 60s we're talking about. In that period and running into the 70s such things were in the air (something expressed much batter than I can in the Hookland Guide, see https://hookland.wordpress.com/about/). The spectacular conspiracy sketched here, involving the President's Chief Scientific Adviser, the FBI, the CIA and more is actually very convincingly done, pitting the Myers against the apparatus of the State in defence of a child they fear will be treated as a monster. It's not only the US Government that pays attention - they need to worry about criminals, the Russians and inquisitive neighbours, too.

As all this develops, Cox succeeds in portraying the alien - the child - at the centre of everything as an inquisitive and hopeful, if very lonely and scared, little boy. Yes, you could see ET vibes here if you wanted but I think that by providing a substitute family for Cory - even as he mourns the death of his mother and his playmates and wishes for the return of "Cory people" to him - the central theme of love and acceptance is built into the heart of this book. And heart is the right word, this story has a great deal of it, dwelling on themes of motherhood, fatherhood and love that had tears in my eyes several times.

There is, also, a more conventional SF post going on in the background, which perhaps had John Wyndham-esque overtones (the disaster of Meteor Day is never really accounted for, nor a couple of other events which suggests a sequel in the works) but that felt, at times, a little optional to me in what is really a very human story. I said I hoped for something new and different, and the book delivers that, but it also does a very old thing in showing us ourselves through the eyes of a helpless and vulnerable stranger come to challenge and affirm our humanity.

(And if that last sentence feels as though it could have been written over Christmas you shouldn't be surprised. It may be early but this would make a great present for 2019 if you're the ultra organised type).

A great SF story, a great story of humanity, full of action but also of heart. Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website here.

I really meant what I said about about holding this book in your hands in a shop! But if you want to skip that you can buy from Hive here - supporting local bookshops - or from Waterstone's, Blackwell's or Amazon.

Review - The War in the Dark by Nick Setchfield

Cover by Natasha MacKenzie

The War in the Dark
Nick Setchfield
Titan Books, 17 July 2018
PB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a copy of The War in the Dark for review.

1963, and SIS assassin Christopher Winter is on the brink. He's caught between postwar austerity (bombed out building from the War still feature) and a 60s that has yet to begin swinging. He's a murderer, working in the service of law and freedom. It's a tangibly sooty, smoky world of depressing brownish cafes and Bakelite, set against the alluring prospect of technological white heat and progress.

But now, Winter's about to step into a war with the invisible powers, the rulers and principalities of this age, a war fought with runes and rituals and arcane knowledge that seem centuries away from satellites, nuclear weapons and computers.

It all begins with a routine job, the offing of a priest who's been selling secrets to the Russians. Winter's never killed a priest before, but why not? Things don't, though, go according to plan and soon there;s a trail of blood across London and Winter's encountering the Almost men. Convinced that he's been betrayed, he puts together what clues he can and head for Vienna...

This blend of the occult and espionage moves at a brisk pace. While it's clear there is a bigger picture, and the hints that Setchfield drops will eventually build to reveal what it is, the focus is mainly on Winter's immediate plight, hunted by all sides - the Russians, his own Service and shadowier enemies as well. There's no need, I think, to worry too yard about the trail that he's following as it leads him from one confrontation to the next - rather, one might worry about where he's going and what he will do when he gets there. Because Christopher Winter does have skin in this game, even if he doen't realise it. In fact, in a sense he is the skin in the game.

In counterpoint to Winter we also see the progress of a mysterious figure, Hart. Between them, he and Winter hold the fate of nations, of universes. But, enmeshed as they are in the rivalry between a decaying Empire and a rising Soviet Union, will they be able to do their duty - and what will that cost?

I enjoyed this mixture of treachery, blood and magic. Setchfield explores a crossover I've seen dealt with in various ways - from the World War Two sage of Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds trilogy to Tim Powers' Le Carre-esque Declare to Charles Stross's Laundry books, but The War in the Dark carves out its own distinctive space infused with a sense of paranoia and doubt that seems to foreshadow the domestic political chicanery of the 70s rather than the Great Game played against Russia (another way, perhaps, in which Winter is on the edge of a change).

It is an absorbing book, one which kept me guessing till the end and one which palpably creates a wider world to which I hope Setchfield can return, with or without Christopher Winter.

Review: Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars

Image from http://www.4thestate.co.uk/

Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars
Miranda Emmerson
Fourth Estate, 12 January 2017
HB, 304pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy via Netgalley.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you get a book and read it and think "this is just perfect". Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars in such a book.

Set in swinging London in the mid 60s, on a few snow-bound days in November, it focuses on a small group of characters brought together - metaphorically: they never all meet and one is in the USA - by the disappearance of the actress, Iolanthe Green, then playing in the West End. The Miss Treadway of the title - Anna - is Lanny's dresser. Brennan - or, as he'd prefer to be called, Brandon - Hayes is the young Irish policeman trying to find her. Orla, Brennan's wide, and their daughter Gracie, also appear as does a young West Indian, Aloysius and the owner of the Turkish café on Neal Street above which Anna lives, and his family.

Emmerson has a deceptively simple style, very cinematic, in which she'll follow one character till they someone else, then switch to them, then to a third person. Sometimes she'll take someone's thoughts back to explore their earlier life, as with Orla, trapped at home by the burden of childcare and almost a stranger to her husband, showing how things came to be.

And there is a great deal to be explained. Several of these characters have mysteries about them. It slowly becomes clear that Lanny has been inventing and reinventing her life. Who are all the people she is paying money to? What happened to her parents? But you might expect that of an actress. It's more of a surprise to learn - gradually - of the other inventions and reinventions going on here. Brennan has a adopted a more English name to fit in among the Met Police, and ways to accompany it - looking the other way when a "coloured" man is arrested for no reason, beaten, traduced or when a girl is brought in for no crime worse that being out late at night in a short skirt. Ottmar, the café owner, has morphed from being a serious journalist back home on Cyprus to a driven supplier of exotic refreshments. Orla has changed. Anna has changed. Aloysius came to London expecting to be a gentleman like those he read about in Waugh and Christie - but now sees that he and his society aren't in those books.

Everybody is busy reinventing or rediscovering themselves, consciously or not, playing with identities, in a society that seems, almost visibly, to be delivering itself of its own future - from the music playing in the "coloured" bars to the memories of wars, of internment, to the stars "said to drink" in those Soho bars and clubs.

But just as you begin to think this is all about rose tinted nostalgia for the 60s, Emmerson pulls out her cosh and whacks you on the back of the head. There are desperate women, who will be ruined or be unable to cope if they have babies. There is casual racism, not even winked at by those in authority, simply accepted. There are all kinds of people dreaming of a better world but creeping round the edges of this one, trying not to draw attention, from the gay men in the top flat to Lanny herself who's buried on the edge of several kinds of ruin.

While the thread that draws this novel together is Lanny's disappearance and the search for her, and we might think at the start it's going to be a crime story or a detective novel, it isn't. There is detective work, yes, and some danger, but really, it's an exploration both of a very distinct time and place and of some brilliant characters who comes across very much as real people, making their way, living with regrets, looking backwards or forwards and trying to puzzle out who they are and where they're going. (And who everyone else is and where they're going to - with cues of class and accent and race studied and acted on and outsiders spotted and excluded: "Nothing can ever be too English, can it? Nothing can ever be too pure.")

There is some brilliantly sharp characterisation - Anna's tendency, for example, so see men as obstacles, as something awkward, potential problems, dangerous: it's a long time till we find out why. Or Aloysius saying sadly "I want the world to be a gentler place than it is... I don't think that is a many sentiment to have." The 'white person nod'. Two lovers who first met at a funeral and fell out of love when a child came along.

It is, simply, a breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreaking and evocative book. Buy it, read it, get it for your friends, family and workmates. Do it now. Go on!