#Review - The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Banner

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank

Megan Bannen
Orbit, 4 July 2024
Available as: PB, 380pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521923

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of The Undermining of Twyla and Frank to consider for review.

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank is set in the same world as The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, which wowed me last year, and is a fantasy romance in the same vein.  

And, yes, we do bump into Mercy Birdsall and Hart Ralston and their circle again here, although they're not the main characters in this book. That would be Twyla Banneker and Frank Ellis. They are partners, Tanrian Marshals employed to police that strange space, once a prison for gods, that opens from the island of Bushong, part of the Federated Islands of Cadmus. Now, after the events of The Undertaking of Hope and Mercy, the drudges (zombies) that threatened Bushong from Tanria are gone, and some are even questioning the need for the Marshals. But there are other threats in Tanria, and assets there to be guarded, as Twyla and Frank are about to find out.

I loved this book. The comfortable relationship between middle-aged Twyla and Frank - work, but not life, partners - is realistic and well portrayed, their lives to this point sensitively sketched with all their pluses and minuses. A failed marriage. A dead spouse. New lives rebuilt, the best made of things. Children to nurture and see over the threshold of adulthood. The backgrounding of hopes and dreams in the face of practical concerns - money, health, family. As a result we have two beautifully drawn and largely content characters...

...who are about to have their cosy world turned upside down in a blaze of conspiracy, murder - and dragons.

It was both moving, and hilarious, to see how Twyla and Frank cope with the various eruptions into their lives that follow from what's brewing in Tanria. These are both large and small. There's the fact of a totally unexpected and previously mythological species of creature. There's crime. There are new colleagues - in this case a dangerously sexy scientist who upsets what turns out to have been a carefully balanced relationship that only survived by not asking certain questions, not thinking certain things. But, it seems that relationship rested on certain assumptions, and once these are challenged it's clear that for Twyla and Frank, nothing will ever be the same again.

Oh, and just who's trying to blow the pair up?

In some ways, Twyla and Frank have very ordinary lives. In some ways, they are very extraordinary people. But once the balance of the ordinary is upset, will they ever find it again? Will they even want to?

STRONGLY recommended. More like this, please.

For more information about The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Stranger Times by CK McDonnell

The Stranger Times
CK McDonnell
Bantam Press, 14 January 2021
Available as: HB, 432pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN: 9781787633353

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Stranger Times via NetGalley. (I also have my copy on order from the local bookshop, because I need this one on my shelves!)

Is there a subgenre called "cosy urban fantasy"? If not, there ought to be. Not that The Stranger Times pulls its punches, oh no, we see some gruesome deaths here and evil is decidedly on the march, but still, there is that same combination - a strong sense of place, well defined characters and that slight twist of the absurd which I enjoy in cosy crime, an assurance perhaps that while there's a mystery to be solved and a real threat, other things are also important, or more important: office banter, for example, getting the latest edition of The Stranger Times to press, pursuing a good story for the lead. The characters need I think to be at home in some sense - to have found where they belong.

Before you can belong, though, you need to arrive and so for Hannah there's the little matter of a job interview... as this book opens, she is desperate for a job. Accustomed to a life of upper middle class luxury, she's alone, in unfamiliar Manchester, without money or friends, for the first time and desperate enough - just - to seek employment with the eponymous paper. We will find out what Hannah has done, and what's been done to her, in good time. First, she has to learn about The Stranger Times itself and the oddballs who staff it. 

The paper glories in the weirder side of life: UFOs, hauntings, conspiracy theories and the like. ('Nessie is the Father of my Child'). Presided over by Vincent Banecroft, a former hotshot Fleet Street editor fallen on hard times who now looks like 'his own corpse waiting to happen', The Stranger Times may have seen better days, but it has ethics of a sort: they don't make stuff up, they don't judge, instead they report what people claim they saw or what they claim happened. The claims may be rather outré, but the obvious liars and sensationalist are weeded out and there's an integrity in the way that it recognises and reports things that are being claimed to have happened. 

Nobody expects to wade into a supernatural crisis though, and indeed for a considerable time they don't realise that the bodies in the morgue with strange wounds, and the disappearance of a down-and-out man, have anything to do with each other. McDonnell allows the setting and personnel of the paper plenty of time to establish themselves. The staff - Hannah, Grace, Reggie, Ox, Stella and of course Manny, who prints the thing (he prefers to wear no clothes) are actually stranger than anything it reports. The grotesquerie at The Stranger Times was really entertaining and I enjoyed seeing the interplay between, for example, Grace, the fiercely Christian receptionist and drunken, foul-mouthed Banecroft. In parallel, we are told about a couple of villains who reflect the darker side of things and are clearly Up To Something. During this first third most of the action is with those villains, but what they are up to is still obscure. When things really begin to move along, and the team from the paper are fully in the firing line, they are well established and we really care what happens to them.

I won't say too much about the background that then reveals itself, except that The Stranger Times does (to a degree) follow the template of there being a "hidden" paranormal world that lives in tension with the mundane one - there's a balance that has to be kept and it is, of course, in danger of being upset. McDonnell does, however, bring a real freshness to the concept. The Stranger Times isn't about rivalries between clans of monsters or (much) about humans being drawn into their worlds, rather its's about individual motivations, greed, ambition, survival and the willingness to exploit others in pursuit of those things. As well as about the importance of getting the paper to press, come werewolves, police or rogue sorcerers. 

Oh, and about integrity - whether in that mission to report what is being said, in the desire of DI Sturgess to give the dead their due by investigating every case meticulously, even the hopeless ones or in Grace's fierce love for tearaway Stella who broke into the paper's offices one night and has stayed ever since. 

The group at the heart of the novel are eccentric, bickering and plain odd, but they have a fierce loyalty to one another which gives this novel real heart and soul. Combined with sharp writing ('Mason himself seemed oblivious to his own halitoxicity', 'Coppers often dealt with people who were having the worst days of their lives. That deserved somebody's best'), a strong plot and a good sense of place - the place being rainy Manchester ('predicting it was beyond the capacity of meteorological science') - that makes for a thoroughly readable and completely enjoyable story.

Here's hoping we meet Hannah, Vincent and company again and soon.

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