Blogtour review - Sharks by Simone Buchholz

Sharks (Chastity Riley)

Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 26 February 2026 
Available as: PB, 210pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917764087

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Sharks  to consider for review and to Anne for inviting me to join the blogtour.

Simone Buchholz's sequence of books about Chastity Riley, public prosecutor in Hamburg, is one of my favourite crime series. Starting with Blue Night and running through five stories up to River Clyde, we delve into Riley's troubled, deeply noir-tinged world. In the final book, we see her get some relief, perhaps.

But there is backstory! When Blue Night opens, Riley has already been through a lot, and Buchholz is now telling these stories which I think we previously published in German but are now being reworked, and then translated (again by the brilliant Rachel Ward). 

Sharks is I think the third part of Buchholz's reworking of the earlier Chastity Riley books, described as "Chastity reloaded" (a phrase which I feel could constitute an... interesting... proposition in ontological terms, but let's not go down that rabbit hole). We can therefore see the setting, and the circle of friends and lovers, forming that constitute the background for the later books, beginning at Blue Night. So inSharks, we see the origin of the Blue Night café itself, which features as a central location in the stories. We also see a fracture in Riley's relationship with her lover Klatsche.

We also, of course, see Riley, public prosecutor in Hamburg, grappling with a crime, the brutal double murder of two Americans in a squalid, run-down apartment building, leading into a world of double dealing and corruption in a district subject to gentrification. It's a well thought out plot strand that demonstrates Buchholtz's familiarity with the pulse (as it were) of Hamburg. It also shows the start of her involvement with Inceman - perhaps the beginning of a Chastity spiralling out of control as we see in the later books.

A feature of these stories is that Chastity's world, and that of her colleagues in the police and the prosecutors' office, is a distinctly menacing, unfriendly place. Often the best friends, the warmest comradeship, is with the petty crooks of Sankt Pauli, the people with whom Riley will gladly drink a night away. The higher up the ranks of officialdom we go, the further into wealth and power, the worse people get and the more dangerous the journey. That's doubly true in Sharks, and Riley faces additional danger as our girl is suffering from a chest infection. She may even have to give up smoking, that's how bad it is!

As ever though this feeds into a tangible sense that Chastity's not taking care of herself and she certainly won't allow anyone else to take care of her, so she makes a point of only quitting for a day or two. After that there's the business of self-punishment to resume. The only respite she allows herself is when she's supporting her friends, as she does when Carla is in crisis - which paints more background to the development of the group, as do manoeuvres to establish the Blue Night café which we see in operation in the later books.

Told in taut chapters, Sharks is classic noir, a book with an atmosphere so strong that one almost inhales, rather than reads, this story of late nights, insomnia, coffee, and cigarettes - a world that seems nocturnal even when the watery sun is in the sky. Buchholz layers on the mean streets, the meaner people, the need to release through drink and sex. But the book also provides some relief in the small joys of friendship - Riley supporting Carla for example, or making time to watch her favourite (failing) football team. 

It's less about the crime (though that is a satisfying mystery, taking us to some grim places physically and morally) than the little group of friends weathering the storm, trying to make something worthwhile and to endure.

Another lovely novel, one that contributes to the achievement this evolving series is. Chastity's always great to be around, and I really enjoyed this.

As ever Rachel Ward's translation is atmospheric, fun and nimble. The partnership of Buchholz and  Ward as delivers a sharp, bracing story with language that seems laconic and plain at first sight but where deep and treacherous subcurrents run. 

Strongly recommended.

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

#Blogtour #Review - The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz

The Kitchen (Chastity Reloaded, 2)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 11 April 2024
Available as: PB, 226, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788077

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Kitchen to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

It's SO GOOD to see Chastity Riley return. She must be the most morose woman in noir and, confusingly, every minute spent with her is a joy. Which may be a strange way to welcome what is a very, very dark story.

In this one, Chas is winding up a difficult case, a particularly distressing instance of trafficking which has left its young women victims especially traumatised. Getting her head round the ins and outs, Riley is convinced that the perps will go away for a very long time. We see her coming and going, doing her courtroom thing, as another case looms, one in which young men - possibly, abusive young men - have been dismembered. Somehow Riley can't work up her normal head of outrage over that.

Throughout the book, we are also invited into the head of another woman - or perhaps,  a series of women, it's not made clear - each short episode another example of abuse by men. It could be that this is a series of events befalling by one girl/ woman - the subject is growing older as they proceed - or it could be a potpourri of everyday outrages. Either alternative points at a grim reality. 

Closer to home, one of Riley's own circle also suffers, perhaps stoking her fury further.

As the city swelters in unaccustomed heat the resulting behaviour of its residents is mercilessly described and dissected in Riley's sardonic internal monologue, which remains as sharp as ever, indeed knife-keen when it comes to the abuse suffered by women. There is a sense that in The Kitchen events are especially aligned with Riley's sensibility. It's as though, attuned to the unheard vibrations of her familiar Hamburg, Riley now finds herself in such sympathy with them that she and the city are in resonance, in such harmony that she encapsulates and articulates the pain suffered by Hamburg's women as well as the deep sense of injustice when nothing is done about it. The fact that those doing the nothing are often Chas' colleagues only heightens the tension. Surely, one feels by the end of this story, some revelation must at hand? 

While of course some of Riley's usual gang do feature, the sense of her leading her crew is rather muted. She feels much more on her own than normal (and that's saying something, I know). Yes, Klatsche is around, Riley both reaching for him and pushing him away. Yes, her team are at work. But there's a muffled quality to Riley's work here, she only really seems to sharpen up when she's catching up with retired Faller, who's taken to sitting outside an old lighthouse ostensibly fishing. There seems to be a deep communication between the ex-colleagues, though at a level that isn't put into words for us, the readers.

So, as ever, Chastity Riley makes her murky way though the murky city, navigating by tapping into the strange rhythms and currents of nighttime Hamburg, a kind of pilotfish for her more orthodox colleagues, feeling what they don't feel and suffering wounds that they don't, or won't, see. Deeply alone, even more so than usually, hers are the insights that will crack open the case, and on her shoulders will fall the moral the moral decisions that will result. How does she bear it? Drink and cigarettes, in the main, it seems.

I'd strongly recommend The Kitchen. It isn't a nice book - you just have no idea! - but it is a neat one, an intense story deftly communicated by both author and translator (Rachel Ward is on top form here, conveying the little sallies and the flavour of Riley's deceptively stable but not really narration).

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

#Blogtour #Review - The Acapulco by Simone Buchholz

The Acapulco (Chastity Reloaded)
Simone Buchholtz (Trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, date, 27 April 2023
Available as: PB, 243pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

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

It's always good to catch up with Chastity Riley's life. We last saw the Hamburg based State prosecutor getting a measure of closure over her family history in a visit to Glasgow. In The Acapulco, though, we don't get the next story - we're back to the beginning and able to read, for the first time in English, the first book. So we perhaps see a slightly less moody Riley than we're used to and those around her aren't, as it were, quite in their familiar settings.

Hamburg is still, though, throwing grim mysteries Chastity's way. Young women - dancers from the Acapulco club - are being murdered and mutilated, and Riley finds that something about the case makes it difficult for her to get into the mind of the murderer, her usual approach in investigating crimes. That family history, which is hinted at here (though if you've been reading these books you'll know a bit more than is directly stated) may be messing with her. Or it may be something else...

The study of a Chastity coming apart at the seams, so to speak, is as brutal but also as touching as ever. Drinking too much, smoking too much, her personal and professional lives both muddled and decaying, it's impossible to say whether she is suffering because she is trying to box in and control desperate underlying pain and trauma, or because she's failing to do that, and it is overwhelming her.

Also as ever, salvation seems to come from that small circle of friends, some of whom seem to bring a modicum of normality and sanity (though others, not so much - I'm looking at you, Klatsche.)

These are books where the noir atmosphere almost seems to take tangible form, a neon-lit, smoky, netherworld that has substance and personality all of its own, breeding both monsters and moments of beauty. Reading them - The Acapulco, if anything, even more than the others - is like being bathed in silver nitrate then dyed monochrome and developing-lamp red and transported inside the silver screen to sit in a corner of that club, that bar, simultaneously in 2020s Hamburg and a 1940s Hollywood flick, close - indeed at times, almost too close - to the action.

The writing - magnificently translated by Rachel Ward - is punchy, allusive, knowing, done in broken sentences and rueful, suggestive lines. Fittingly for the book that kicked it all off, unlike in some of the others, the point of view is all Riley's (apart from some interspersed sections which I'm not commenting on for spoiler related reasons) giving this story a very narrated quality - you can almost imagine her voice as a commentary to the film, sorry, the book. That also means there is little sense of what is happening out of view, with the atrocities committed by the serial killer coming as increasingly jarring, unpredictable shocks.

It is a short book but powerful, punchy and very dark. I found it hard to put down, even sitting reading it in the cinema in the gloom before the films started.

A magnificent addition to this sequence.

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

#Review - The Book of Gothel by Mary McMyne

The Book of Gothel 
Mary McMyne
Orbit, 28 July 2022
Available as: PB,  366pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356517704

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The Book of Gothel to consider for review.

The Book of Gothel is a compelling, richly imagined and involving fairy-story retelling. It distinguishes itself from much of this genre by not being set in a vaguely fantastical world but by being firmly rooted in a particular time and place - the Black Forest of the later 12th century. Indeed, the book shows a clear engagement with the political and religious conditions of the time. There is a framing device (the discovery and translation of the book itself by a modern academic) which makes this completely clear, neatly answering the "how do I come to be reading this story?" question.

Our main protagonist is Haelewise, introduced as a young girl at the beginning of the story but who is writing it all down as an old woman. It is her life story, or at least the story of her early life, before she became "Mother Gothel", named from the tower in which she lives. The Book of Gothel is a wonderfully varied story, involving magic, romance, politics, religion and prejudice as well as male power. Haelewise wants nothing more than to be safe with her family, but the times - and her weak father - won't permit this fate for her. After her mother dies, Haelewise - subject from birth to "spells" - either migraines or epilepsy, perhaps - is distrusted by the townsfolk and driven out as being a witch. After that, her existence is precarious, not really fitting in anywhere and full of yearning, for the mother and the life she has lost, and for the sweetheart who might have been hers had things been different.

Haelewise's life is also shaped by her having to compromise to receive any help or support. What she's is being asked to sacrifice is her adherence to the creed of her mother - a system of belief, part magical craft, part old religion, part simply inherited wisdom that challenges the Church - which Haelewise was only just discovering. McMyne makes this very much something that Haelewise sees as her inheritance from her adored mother, so more than simply a creed or faith, it's bound up with her identity and with the love of a parent. A very personal thing, I think. That connection gives Haelewise's dilemma a real depth and heart, one that keeps this book from being at centre a neo-pagan apologia. 

That complexity of holding together different beliefs and faith systems also shows in what to me was the most intriguing aspect of the story - an encounter between Haelewise and St Hildegard of Bingen, well known now for her mystical experiences but also for her music (and much else!) I loved that McMyne let Hildegard show the possibility of a Christian mystical context, and suggest that these matters might be a little bit complex. Like Haelewise, Hildegard is clearly having to compromise and her success both in politics and in church affairs perhaps suggests this may not be a losing game. 

Haelewise can be an annoying character at times, ignoring what seems like good advice not only form Hildegard but also from aged witch Kunegunde and indeed at times from her mother too. (If somebody tells you not to venture outside the charmed circle of stones because it it VERY DANGEROUS and then you do, what do you expect to happen?) However throughout her adventures, she is an active, bold and determined young woman. Her understanding of the situation shifts and her goals alter accordingly. perhaps becoming more attainable, but she never gives up on her determination to be safe with a family - and she is a formidable enemy to those who would stand in her way.

There are only a couple of aspects where I wanted a little more.

The first is the insistence in the publicity - and this is reflected in the cover image - that this is the story behind the witch in Rapunzel (the woman who shuts Rapunzel in the tower). While that may well be true, the main events of Rapunzel take place later than the period covered by this book. They are certainly mentioned but are not at all central to The Book of Gothel. (I would love to see McMyne write that story, but it would definitely be a Part II of Haelewise's story). The other is that I hoped that a little more of Prof. Eisenberg's discovery, which bookends the story. I anticipated that things might jump off from what she learns, with consequences in the modern world. But perhaps that, too, may be written one day?

Those reservations are perhaps a bit unfair ("this book doesn't contain what it doesn't contain!") because the story that IS here is a taut and well-written fantasy novel with some real moral and theological weight. It isn't, in the end, a retelling of a particular fairytale - though you may spot echoes of one or two apart from Rapunzel - but actually I think that's a good thing. The Book of Gothel is its own story, at the same time perfectly comfortable being both set in a recognisable part of the medieval period and on the borders of fantasy, and it is a cracking story at that.

For more information about The Book of Gothel, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

Hotel Cartagena (Chastity Riley, 4)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 4 March 2021
Available as: PB, 214pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN: 9781913193546

I'm honoured to be taking part in the blog tour for Hotel Cartagena, and grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne at Random Things Tours for providing a copy of the book and inviting me to take part.

Well, this one is certainly something different!

I've been following the Chastity Riley stories from the beginning and thought I knew what to expect, but in this fourth episode Buchholz  shakes things up somewhat. In fact she throws all the rules out of the window - the window being that of a 20th storey hotel bar above the Hamburg docks. That's where Riley has come with her collection of damaged friends and colleagues to celebrate Faller's birthday. Yes, it's an office party (of sorts) for Hamburg's CID and their hangers on, and as you will expect if you think about that for a moment, it turns out not to be an ordinary party AT ALL.

The gang's all here - introduced one by one: Faller, Brückner, Calabretta, Klatsche, Carla, Rocco, Stanislawski, Riley herself of course - with their placing carefully spelled out. Even before anything else happens, Riley notes the tensions and suggests that 'we have a situation'. 

And then, hostage takers storm the bar...

This is therefore in many respects a very different book from the previous ones in the series, which all follow the patten of a criminal investigation - but also, very similar, in that the same people are present (except for one), the atmosphere - a kind of exhausted noir - is the same, and the ultimate motivation for what happens is rooted in the same criminal underworld. 

We get the familiar punchy, irony-laden chapters narrating both events in the bar (from Riley's point of view - 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') and, going back several decades, the life of a man - Henning, later Henk - who is intimately related to what happens. His is a compelling life history, even though told in miniature (this is a short book and Henning is only part of it). Buchholz gives us, in a relatively small space, a deep feeling for this man who, on a whim, hopped on a ship and worked his passage to South America (you can still do that?), found a home, fell in love... and suffered unimaginably. 

It's also a heist, because what happened to Henk underlies a complex, carefully planned operation in the attack on the hotel bar. We see this unfold, and some of the planning and preparation, at the same time as the police response and the dramatic endgame. One of the crew is missing from the bar: Stepanovic got distracted by a pretty face on his way to the party, so ends up shivering in a tent in the street, playing at being a hostage negotiator (it gives him an in, at least). Personal life and police work come into conflict as the various men with whom Riley is, or has been, involved (again, 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') endure the waiting, trying to work some angle with kidnappers or authorities).

And all the time, the clock is ticking.

We've seen all these characters before, generally in Carla and Rocco's bar. They are free spirits who have come and gone through the pages of Buchholz's stories. Now she has, rather cruelly, constrained them. It's almost a laboratory experiment, a test of how all the distinct personalities we've come to know and, yes I'll say it, love, will change under extreme conditions. 

But Hotel Cartagena is much more than that. As I've said, Henning/ Henk's story is compelling and his development as a person is riveting and all to credible. The previous books sketched the Hamburg underworld for us as a pretty dark, dangerous place but Hotel Cartagena makes it seem like a kindergarten, compared with the more elementary, more ruthless world that Henk stumbles into.

As ever, Rachel Ward's translation here is sharp, lucid and colloquial. Some chapters verge on poetry, rendered in terse, rapt lines. In other places we get dreadful puns ('The Wurst is yet to Come' - literally true for one character). Always, the deadpan tone of Riley's internal monologue, the dry wonder at how bad things can get, is maintained, the effect building through the book until a final, unexpected climax that knocked me right off balance. 

There's a change of pace, a rising of the stakes, in Hotel Cartagena, compared with its predecessors which makes it - and I would have thought this next to impossible - even better than they were, even tenser, even darker. At the same time I think there is also a sense that under the pressure, some block in Riley, something which has trapped her in her familiar sardonic circles, has shifted and she may be on the move. To what effect, we'll have to wait and see in future books - which I'm now very impatient for!

If you haven't been reading this series (in which case I envy you about to discover it all for the first time!) Hotel Cartagena would be a good place to begin, giving a taste of the mood and tone - and the characters - without being spoilery about earlier events. 

For more information about Hotel Cartagena, see the Orenda Books website here - and the marvellous blog tour entries on the poster below.

You can buy Hotel Cartagena online from UK Bookshop dot org, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. And also of course from your local bookshop if they are doing click-and-collect, as many are. (For my local shop it's more of a "David-sends-email-and-collect" and if I'm lucky they have the book in anyway so actually much quicker...)

#Blogtour #Review - Hammer to Fall by John Lawton

Hammer to Fall (Joe Wilderness, 3)
John Lawton
Grove Press, 14 May 2020
Available as: HB, 400pp, e
Read as: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781611856354

I'm honoured to be starting off the blog tour for Hammer to Fall, the new thriller from John Lawton (and grateful to Ayo for inviting me to take part and providing a free advance e-copy of the book).

This is the third book in Lawton's sequence featuring their, rogue and spy Joe Holderness (nickname Wilderness) and for a bonus it also includes (Frederick) Troy about whom Lawton has written rather more books. I enjoy the "shared universe" of these books and characters and the way that Lawton dots backwards and forwards, intersecting with previously established storylines (this one covers events in 1948, 1955 and 1966-68).

As we open, Wilderness is based in West Berlin, notionally and RAF Sergeant but actually up to something spooky. This work seems to leave him with plenty of free time for petty larceny and smuggling and he's part of an established band of "Schiebers", minor crooks, smugglers, and forgers who basically supply what the East German Communist regime can't. This involves contact with their opposites in the NKVD who are just as corrupt. Lawton paints a fascinating picture where amidst the nascent Cold War, such behaviour is simply a fact of life. The accent is very much on the individual, on the minor misdemeanours rather than everything having Consequences with a capital "C". That contrasts with the high stakes in the world of say George Smiley where one feels that an MI6 operative known by the opposition to be smuggling would immediately be blackmailed, turned and end up dishing out secrets from the top of the Service.

Consequently things here are very morally ambiguous and the implications of what's happening very subtle indeed. Nor is the sense of freewheeling, conniving spidery confined to the immediate post War years. In the main party of the book, Wilderness finds himself posted as a punishment to Finland where he has to pretend to be a Cultural Attaché showing British films in remote, draughty village halls. Bored out of his mind, he rapidly becomes involved in a local racket alongside an investigation in to a potential real bit of spycraft. The heart of the story is, though, always on Wilderness as a person, the effect on him of years spent in dubious undercover schemes while his young daughters grow up without him in London, and on where this may lead (an example is given of an old spy living a only life in Dublin).

The third act of this book takes us to the Prague Spring, where, naturally, British Intelligence is very interested in the goings-on and there is a reunion of sorts of Wilderness and his old crew. (Of sorts...) Lawton is very good, I think, on the dynamics of those months, on how the internal struggles would have looked to a close observer and on the reactions of ordinary citizens. The writing here has to strike a balance between a convincing, engaging plot giving agency to characters we've come to know and understand and the need to narrate the history they are experiencing as though it were in doubt - history which may be bent a little, but can't be fundamentally changed. Lawton does this pretty well - we do get a certain amount of narration, with Embassy cables recounting key events and moving things forward, but we also get Wilderness (and others) pursuing their (sometimes shady) objectives below the radar, as it were, with a genuine doubt about how everything will come to a climax.

In the meantime there are the (to me, ever fascinating) tropes of spy fiction - living a cover, clandestine meetings with contacts, the danger of betrayal, even, in flashback, a scene as agents are exchanged on a bridge in Berlin at midnight. And behind it all there is, quite properly, the human factor. When all the plans are made, all the fall-backs imagined and the risks assessed, what will the thing be that nobody saw but which rewrites the story? The boredom of an agent leading to unwise mischief? The inability, after carrying years of guilt, to harden the heart and kill at the needed moment?  The inability, after years of fear and stress, to trust at the needed moment? The bureaucratic blunder? The key failure of operational security?

The conclusion is truly nailbiting. There is, as Lawton notes, a sense of an ending here - but how will it come?

(That's not, by the way, the only allusion to a book, film or song I saw here - 'It was a looking-glass war from which few returned', 'I met my old lover on the street last night' - with its unstated refrain).

This was an enjoyable, gripping read, a more people-centred espionage story in which the central question is less, what are "they" up to, but, how can we (all of us, both sides) survive this business with something, some of ourselves, intact? Lawton draws his characters generously and he has a way with the telling phrase ('It would be a one-horse town if somebody happened to ride in', 'little Berlin Walls of the skull', 'Not designed to make you feel at home, but to make you feel there was no such place as home', 'It was hard to make new friends. So he didn't try.') There is atmosphere in spades, and the pages on my e-reader flew by. I'd recommend.

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

To buy Hammer to Fall, it's worth trying your local independent bookshop, even in these difficult times (especially in these difficult times). Or you can order online from Hive Books - who support local booksellers - Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

There are more stops to come on this tour - see the poster below and do, please, follow all of them.

#Blogtour #Review - Mexico Street by Simone Buchholz

Mexico Street (Chastity Riley 3)

Cover design by kid-ethic

Simone Buchholtz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 5 March 2020
PB, e, 227pp

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for a free advance copy of Mexico Street and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

If you've read Buchholz's previous books, Blue Night and Beton Rouge, you'll know to expect the doom, pared down, noirish atmosphere, the short chapters, the sense of desolation as Chastity Riley, Hamburg state prosecutor, narrates her life. The language is so hard, so abstracted that sections read almost as prose poetry and on the surface it is so bleak that it could repel if it weren't for a streak of, I don't know, a... something... in Riley's tone, a self-knowingness, a sardonic interest in the world's follies and failures that keeps her, and therefore us, engaged.

In this third bulletin from Riley's life we find her even more moodily lonely. She seems to be smoking more (how?) drinking more, and to be losing even the limited family she had: no Klatschke, of course - his flat a looming emptiness in Riley's psyche - so we don't see the bar but we hardly vist Rocco and Carla's café either and those cosy, spontaneous evenings where the place goes from public bar to family party without trying seem long gone, the little coterie split and uneasy.

Rather, much of the book's airtime is given over to Riley's and her colleagues' investigation of a young man dragged barely alive from a burning car (in this book, cars are burning everywhere - night by night the fires spread across Germany, then Europe, until news bulletins begin to report them from all around the world). Tracing what happened to him leads her to a secretive group of families living by crime on the fringes of German society, an interrelated web of feuding cousins and macho fathers and brothers (and trampled wives, sisters and daughters). Buchholtz writes movingly of the plight of these women and sympathy for them is one thing that prods Riley out of her ennui.

I always enjoy the Chastity Riley books, not only because they have a uniquely dark vision of life but because Buchholtz shows how this darkness coexists with blissful, unaware, lives often very close (geographically or emotionally - I suppose that's why I missed those evenings Riley used to enjoy the café). Well, that contrast was never so strong as in Mexico Street and alongside Riley's investigation we also see, sketched out, lives on the dark side of that wall and the voices of those who want out. It makes for compulsive, if disturbing, reading, the end in one sense already determined by the opening of the book but also wide open as there are people out there Buchholz has made us care for, care about (despite the bleakness! Despite the darkness!) and we want to know more about them

It's a short book but, my goodness, it packs in a tremendous amount. And Rachel Ward's translation serves the story, serves the mood, so well too.

Recommended without hesitation.

For more about Mexico Street see the Orenda Books website here.

You can buy the book from your local bookshop, or online via Hive Books who support high street bookshops, or from Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

The tour continues - look at the poster below for the wonderful bloggers lined up for this book!

#Review - Testament by Kim Sherwood #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Cover design by Andrew Smith

Testament
Kim Sherwood
riverrun, 12 July 2018
PB, 455pp

This is my second (of four) reviews as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the Author

Kim Sherwood was born in Camden in 1989 and lives in Bath. She studied Creative Writing at UEA and is now Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her pieces have appeared in Mslexia, Lighthouse, and Going Down Swinging. Kim began researching and writing Testament, her first novel, after her grandfather, the actor George Baker, passed away and her grandmother began to talk about her experiences as a Holocaust Survivor for the first time. It won the 2016 Bath Novel Award, was longlisted for the 2019 Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Author’s Club Best First Novel Award.

About the Book

'The letter was in the Blue Room - her grandfather’s painting studio, where Eva spent the happier days of her childhood. After his death, she is the one responsible for his legacy - a legacy threatened by the letter she finds. It is from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have found the testimony her grandfather gave after surviving the labour camps in Austria. And, since he was one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists, they want to exhibit it. But Joseph Silk - leaving behind József Zyyad - remade himself long ago. As Eva begins to uncover the truth, she understands the trauma, and the lies, that have haunted her family. She will unravel what happened to József and his brother, who came to England as refugees. One never spoke of his past - the other couldn’t let it go. Their story - and that of the woman they both loved - is in her hands. Revealing it would change her grandfather’s hard- won identity. But it could also change the tide of history. This testament can lend words to wordless grief, and teach her how to live."

My review

Testament is one of those books which begins with a story that seems small, personal and intimate and then, almost without you realising, blossoms, expands and acquires wider resonance, deeper relevance and added meaning. While still remaining, in a sense, small, personal and intimate.

Eva is devoted to her elderly grandfather, artist Joseph Silk (Jószef Zyyad to some), who, as a young man, survived the horrors of wartime Hungary. As a Jew, he was enslaved, tortured, marched from camp to camp in the dying days of the war and lost his parents and sister, afterwards making a life for himself in England. Silk's (as he is generally referred to) choice was then to turn his back on the past, on the family he lost, the country that is no longer his own, the house he grew up in, everything from before. he certainly never wanted to tale part in reunions, contribute his testimony to museums, or to explore what was lost.

Granddaughter Eva, close to Silk and feeling herself rejected by her father John, is keen to protect Silk's legacy and reputation but most of all perhaps, his privacy. Approached by curators, journalists and art historians who want something of this eminent figure, this eminent survivor, she asks herself what Silk would want - and then closes down, even as she's dealing with the sale of his house and studio and the need to decide what should happen to everything, to decide how Silk should be marked in the world (even the text for a gravestone is impossible to settle). Inevitably that can't, in the end, hold, and Eva embarks reluctantly on a search for the truth, her easy trust in and love for Silk eroded by the discovery that he told her lies, lies, lies.

This is then a story about survival. While we are shown episodes from the Holocaust - those affecting Jószef, his brother László, and a young woman Zuzka - and these are very grim, the story is necessarily  selective there (I don't think what we told is by any means the worst that happened) and really focusses, I think, on what happened after, when the three young survivors are brought to England, to the Lake District of all places. We see, slowly, the dilemma they face.

The need for safety and security. The alienness of this damp land, a country of grey streets and chilly attics. The ambivalence of the English who haven't suffered as Jószef, László and Zuzka have but who are the victors, the owners, in their own country, of the war, as it were. (And among whom there is still prejudice - anti Jewish, anti foreigner).

But also, rejection by a Hungary that joined in the Nazi purges and doesn't want them now, offers nothing, no family, no restored home, no life. (In the modern parts of this book, that's paralleled by the scary resurge in Hungary of the far Right with its attempts to airbrush history).

The three survivors find, in the end, different responses to this dilemma. I'm not going to say any more about what they are because Eva's discovery of all this is an important part of the story, for her and for her father - but none of them come without cost. And we see that while John. and Eva may be second and third generation survivors, they are still survivors and the ripples of what happened to a father and a grandfather spread out to affect subsequent generations.

It's a cleverly written book, balancing an account of what happened in the 1940s and after - which, we need to keep remembering, can't be known to Eva because she hasn't been told things, she's been lied to, the witnesses are dead - with one set in the present day, taking in Eva's mourning silk, her doubts about herself and her father, her excitement at discovering Berlin and Budapest and in them, a couple of young men. Despite the aspects of the book that expose suffering and death, there is a great sense of life in Testament, not only in the modern parts but in the lives of the young refugees in Ambleside or the Jewish community in London (on the cusp of moving from the East End to North London).

Testament is a book that beautifully masters what it is trying to say, shows what has been and what the consequences can be. I loved the characters in this book, their flaws and their struggles, and felt that it truly honoured those who suffered and those who inherited aspects of that suffering.

It's also a book which has, because it must have, warnings for us, warning not to forget, warnings to be on guard, to keep watch.

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

Blogtour review - Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

Blue Night (Chastity Riley, 1)
Simone Buchholz (trans by Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 28 February 2018
PB, 182pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy of Blue Night and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

Blue Night is the first in a series featuring Hamburg public prosecutor Chastity Riley. Her (to me) unlikely name and some of the flashback detail hints at a foreign (non German) background and the flashbacks at a tragedy in her early life but we have yet to hear details of those. Watch this space.

In the meantime, we have Chastity's recent history: sidelined by her office for exposing a senior prosecutor as corrupt, she's been assigned to witness protection but seemingly in a very vague role that keeps her at arm's length from the rest of the department.

That seems to suit Chastity down to the ground, giving her maximum freedom to indulge her loner tendencies, manifested especially by chain-smoking, heavy drinking and gazing moodily at Hamburg's admittedly awful (at least, according to this book) weather. That may sound rather off-putting but in Buchholz's hands it's actually rather appealing. Chastity's little world - bounded by her flat, the Blue Night bar run by her friend Klatsche, and the cafe/ restaurant belonging to Rocco and Carla - is fully detailed (when off duty, she has a tendency to end up working behind the bar if someone has to rush away on an urgent errand) and peopled (add to the above her ex boss Calabretta and retired colleague Faller - about whom, for different reasons, the group of friends are worried). One senses that these are real people, with real histories: this is heightened by occasional chapters starting from 1982 which and feature thoughts of the principal characters as they move towards the present-day story. It's a very effective device, like overhearing the internal monologue of characters waiting to step out onto a stage. (And it also includes figures who aren't identified till well into the story, so hinting at the role they will play).

Simone Buchholz

Into this somewhat Bohemian world comes Joe, victim of a gang attack whom Chastity is charged with guarding. She begins work on him, coaxing out his story and joining the dots between it and the wider world of crime in Hamburg. But if she learns too much, will this place her - and her friends, especially some who have past connection in the underworld - at risk?

The crime background to this book isn't, in the end, particularly complicated nor is it the most interesting part of the book. Wisely, in my view, especially given this is a relatively short book, Buchholz spends most of her time on Chastity's relationships with her circle of friends and with Joe. The result works very well, whether seen as a study of character, a slice of noir (I should write Noir, this book has it in (Sam) spades) or as mainly laying foundations for what I hope will be a future series.

The language is a joy. Take the opening words

Under a dark sky the engine gives one last cough, clears its throat like an old man, then floods.
I get out, sit on the rusty-gold bonnet, and raise my face to the heavy, cold air.
Cigarette.
First things first: I'm going to smoke this damn fog dry.

or

I can't stop staring at the damn moon.
I smoke another three to eight cigarettes, and someone knocks on the door, two long, three short.

This must reflect, I think, an especially fruitful collaboration between Buchholz and translator Rachel Ward, I don't, of course, know how the original German reads (it would be beyond my ancient "o"-level ability anyway) but the English is simply addictive. I also loved the chapter titles, gloriously elaborate confections such as "Candles all round, please", "I'd like to go somewhere, right now, where I can smoke" or "Because it's Sunday" which tend to reflect Chastity's state of mind more than the progress of the story, as well as giving the merest hint of how she senses the atmosphere in colour, reads a crime scene for the touch of a murderer, knows when something's about to go down. It isn't painted as a sixth sense or a mystical ability but does come across as Chastity being very much in her element in those mean streets as the late drinkers head home and the litter blows down the Reeperbahn.

Simply an excellent slice of atmospheric crime. Give me more, soon!