#Blogtour review - Under the Blazing Sun by Jenny Lund Madsen

Under the Blazing Sun
Jenney Lund Madsen (trans by Paul Russell Garrett)
Orenda Books, 21 may 2026
Available as: HB, 275pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781917764155

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

Jenny Lund Madsen's Under the Blazing Sun follows her reluctant hero, crime author Hannah, on a new writing assignment - and into a new murder mystery.

Lund Madsen's previous book, Thirty Days of Darkness, introduced Hannah, a somewhat self-important literary writer who talked herself into writing crime (how hard can it be?) Packed off to Iceland by her editor, Hannah blunders into a real life crime, from which she however is able to draw inspiration, ending up with a whole new career and a book that's more popular that her earlier, more earnest, writing.

I was eager to see what Jenny Lund Madsen would do for this follow-up. Can the same idea really work again? It turns out that it can, and in Under the Blazing Sun that's triumphantly proven. Hannah, who's rather self-pitying at the start not only because she can't get that second book written but because she's missing her girlfriend Margrét, is an unlikeable character at first sight. She hates her crime novel, Murder Island - the book of hers that people want to read - and would prefer to be known for her litfic. When her long suffering editor Bastian gets Hannah on a popular TV show, she has a tantrum and walks off set. I, like, I suspect, many other readers, would have not blamed Bastian at this point for dropping her, yet instead he sends her off to Sicily to stay in a villa where she can write, far away from mundane distractions.

Instead she sets about swigging wine and enjoying the local food. And of course, Hannah being Hannah, catastrophe strikes - and soon she's trying to clear name of murder. It's here that Hannah's more attractive side shows. While you might expect her to collapse in a heap of self-pity and demand rescue, she doesn't. She sets about investigating the crime. Hannah is dogged and determined, almost to an embarrassing degree, milking the police for information, shoving her nose in wherever it's not wanted (up to and including running around Sicily asking question and the Mafia, does this woman have a death wish?). There's something admirable in Hannah's sheer persistence, even if you cringe at times at the situations she's getting herself into.

Of course, Hannah being Hannah, she manages this while still downing prodigious quantities of wine, and is also painfully, exasperatingly demanding of Margrét who's yet to disentangle herself of her husband in Iceland. One might almost feel that the distraction of the murder is taking Hannah's mind off her personal difficulties (though, she does also let herself get distracted by a cute young policewoman). And you fundamentally feel that Hannah's right about a couple of things - that the murder is linked to local corruption, that the police don't care and are simply trying to pin the crime on an obvious suspect - and that she's being targeted by somebody, as threatening notes begin to arrive. As matters become tense, it seems a race between Hannah blundering on the truth through sheer audacity, and a clever and motivated criminal catching her first. The tension builds in the final quarter of the book as Hannah, finally, acquires an ally, and as the villain makes their move.

All in all, Under the Blazing Sun is an enjoyable and distracting romp of a crime story with a unique protagonist and a rather bewitching setting. Yes, Hannah's put through the wringer, but (I hope) she gets another book out of that and she even seems to take some steps to self-understanding and to being just a little less selfish. Perhaps. This is also a very funny book, Hannah's habit of putting her foot in it carrying her not only into danger but into some humorous situations (often at the same time).

The translation, by Paul Russell Garrett, is excellent and lucid.

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

#Review - Three Fires by Denise Mina

Three Fires

Denise Mina (Narrated by Jonathan Keeble)
Polygon, 3 August 2023
Available as: HB, 128pp,  audio, e   
Source: Audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9781846976384

I have to say, I never expected to find myself reading a biographical account of a medieval Italian friar who became the populist leader of Florence in the 15th century. Such is the talent of Denise Mina, at not point did I find myself thinking, hang on, what IS this?

Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar who had a vision of the world as corrupt, unjust and fixated on fripperies. His was the hand behind the original "bonfire of the vanities", when "trash" such as fine Renaissance paintings were burned as irreligious, irrelevant distractions. (This is one of the three fires referred to in the title). It's hard to argue that society, and the Church, of the time were not corrupt and Savonarola had a fine line in denouncing Popes and secular leaders alike, including speaking up for the poor. He also preached antisemitism and homophobia, whether from conviction or to provide scapegoats to ease his way to power, is hard to tell. Perhaps that distinction doesn't matter, but it does I think beg comparisons with authoritarian populists of our own day, a comparison that Mina makes explicitly towards the end of the story. Less explicitly we have by then already seen Girolamo exploit the communications technology of the day - the church pulpit, but also, the new art of printing which meant that his message, unlike that of earlier firebrands, was preserved for posterity.

Mina makes an excellent job of putting this divisive and consequential figure into his historical context, happily using anachronistic reference points such as referring to him as an "intel" in the episode where he clumsily fails to court an heiress marriage to whom his family relied on for future prosperity. She also depicts the times that Savonarola lived in, and some of the awful things he saw and experienced in the fractious Italy of the 15th century. It is clear that it was an age apt to produce hellfire preachers and millennialist sects - while these had hitherto been repressed or co-opted by the Roman Catholic Church, the coming of printing would end its ability to do that.

All in all a fascinating is often horrific story (it does have its moments of humour, too!) The audio is excellently delivered by Jonathan Keeble whose, who I last heard narrating a thriller about climate change so his career seems to be focussing on apocalypses and fires - but it has just the gravitas needed for such topics.

I would recommend this book, even if you think you have no interest in medieval Italy. 

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

#Review - Confidence by Denise Mina

Confidence (Anna and Fin, 2)
Denise Mina
Harvill Secker (Penguin Random House), 7 July 2022
Available as: HB, 3044pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787301740

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Confidence via Netgalley to consider for review.

Confidence returns us to the world of podcasters Anna and Fin, whom Mina introduced in Conviction - the events of which turned Anna's middle class suburban life upside down. 

At the beginning of Confidence, Anna seems to have retained some of that safety - holidaying with her now ex, Hamish, and their girls, alongside his new wife and Fin and his new partner. All in an isolated lighthouse, where they can cosy around and bond with one another. What could go wrong?

Of course it doesn't work - the weather is horrendous, the heating fails and soon Anna is fleeing into the teeth of the gale, putting domesticity behind her again to pursue Lisa Lee, a young urban explorer who's gone missing (Anna and Fin have received a tip-off about this). Anna had never set eye on or even heard of Lisa before this evening, so what is it about Lisa that makes Anna abandon family and even safety and head out into the night?

Readers of Conviction will know that Anna did something similar there, although she did have the excuse that there was a direct threat to her. And that Anna had a secret, and a buried identity, both of which came back to haunt her. It may be that she's still dealing with the trauma of those events, and of their being known - and that the pressure has just got too much? Or is something else going on?

Whatever, Anna flings herself (and Fin) into the search for Lisa, who disappeared after posting an online video which seems to reveal a lost secret, something she found while exploring a forbidden French chateau. A chateau that the owners seemed to have abandoned at short notice...

Teaming up with the mysterious Bran van Wyk, South African drug smuggler, dealer in shady antiques and member of the super-rich and his sulky teenage son Marcos, Anna and Fin plunge into a complex trans-European quest seeking the origins of a religious artifact, the whereabouts of Lisa, and the truth behind a series of deaths and misfortunes that have attended the progress of the silver casket from its discovery in a Hungarian field to the Parisian auction house where it is now to be sold. The casket is the focus of conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism and, apparently, criminal gangs. Anna's obsession with it seems to have an element of playing with fire, with risk.

This story is in the end not I think a mystery in quite the same way as Conviction was. I don't think that by the end we are a great deal further on with understanding who the actors are, who is doing what to who and who is working for who else. Perhaps there isn't, here, a devious conspiracy, despite the Vatican being namechecked, so much as a muddle of greed, lies and desire for power. It's hard to take what anyone says as straight, except perhaps the little people, such as Lisa's friends with whom she made her video. 

As Anna and Fin become more and more confused, as Anna smokes more and more and evades questions from her daughters, it seems that they may be getting swallowed up in an unreality far from the comfort and safety of home. As they are following, not leading? How will they ever extract themselves from this dangerous world? Anna and Fin are in many respects witnesses, tagging along as events toss them now to Rome, now to Paris, back to London and so on. They are, perhaps, the man (and woman) in the street, aghast at the segment of society where organised crime, vast inherited wealth, religious obsession and a ruthless art-smuggling market overlap and bleed into one another. But at the same time they are voluntarily joining in events, passing up several opportunities to bail out and go home. Why they are doing so is for me the real mystery in Conviction, and that's part of (especially) Anna's longing story which is a long way from being resolved but I hope will be explored in further books.

I enjoyed Confidence. You need to accept that the "truth" behind events here barely matters - then you can sit back to enjoy and the ride and in particular Mina's exquisite character studies: chiefly Bran, the plausible rogue who seems to delight in telling six lies before breakfast (and then it will be a top of the range breakfast in the smartest of hotels, served in the room - or the suite - if you want). But she's also very good with the minor characters, especially the women. A new mother in a disordered flat, breastfeeding her infant in a haze of exhaustion and bliss. An apparently haughty auction house employee, confined in tight skirt and high heels, who jostles uncomfortably with Anna and Bran over a tray of champagne flutes. And more, all of them lifting the story beyond merely being a sequence of "things happening".

Through it all, Anna is at the centre of things, clearly distracting herself from facing some truths about herself and the questions that are bound to come from her daughters. (But I think there's more there). Her observations of the relationship between Bran and Marcos provide her with a stream of ongoing internal prompts, questions and moral touchstones which she uneasily takes to heart even as she refuses to answer calls form her own girls. There is more than a hint here, as I have said, that for Anna, this crazy adventure can actually stop at any point, if she wants. Say once she has found firm ground to stand on and can face her girls? The question is, will she do that before things take a turn - constantly hinted at and threatened - for the dangerous? You don't know who you are dealing with, Bran says at one point, and that's clearly true. Will Anna find out while there's still time, though?

Very entertaining and fun to read with some real moral heft (and a whole religious dimension I haven't said much about but which provides another ethical counterpoint to the whole story).

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

Blogtour review - A Modern Family by Helga Flatland

What you'll see in the shops...

A Modern Family
Helga Flatland (trans. from the Norwegian by Rosie Hedger)
Orenda, 13 June 2019
PB, 236pp

Today is DAY ONE of the blogtour for Helga Flatland's new study of families and family life in the 21st century, A Modern Family. I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

The proof copy of A Modern Family which I was sent  had a very different cover (see my photo below) from the final book (right). The image of a felled tree, lying in front of a Scandinavian-style house, all in cool tones of grey and green, is a big contrast to the Kodachrome tinged wedding photo - with the heads of the happy couple cropped out - which you'll see in bookshops and, I hope, on your shelves.

That isn't unusual, but for me it rather neatly illustrates something about this book. A Modern Family is a complex book, presenting many different facets, and both versions accurately capture an aspect of it. If I'd been asked to design the cover, I might have suggested a labyrinth made of mirrors - difficult to realise, I know, and I don't think that Orenda will be taking me on anytime soon as their designer. But it is my conception of this book: multiply reflective, misleading at times, presenting myriad images. I fear I won't be able to do justice to it in this review so the TL;DR summary is - if you enjoy sophisticated, vivid, portrayals of modern, grown-up life, then buy this and read it.

...and my reading copy.

The story itself is deceptively simple. It concerns two generations of a family: parents Sverre and Torrill and children (eldest to youngest) Liv, Ellen and Håkon. There are two years between Liv and Ellen, eight years between her and Håkon. Liv's kids Agnar and Hedda also feature, as does her husband Olaf, and Ellen's partner Simen.

As A Modern Family opens, all are gathering in Italy for a family holiday at which Sverre's seventieth birthday will be marked. However, he stuns the three children by announcing that he and Torrill have decided to divorce. The book then follows the family back to Norway and focusses on the reactions of Liv, Ellen and Håkon and their relationships with each other, another key theme being Ellen's desperation to have a child.

Put baldly like that, it doesn't sound as though a great deal happens here, and from one point of view, that's certainly true. But looked at another way, there is a great deal going on. Flatland's dissection of these lives is merciless and thorough - while short, it's not a book you can race through. I found I had to keep stopping both to think about what was going on, and also, at times, for a break from the merciless, and clever, exposure of a certain sort of family.

Merciless, because while one may at the end understand these characters, they are hard to like (except perhaps Agnar).

Clever, because Flatland gives us not just one unreliable narrator, but three.

The earlier sections of the book are told alternately from Liv's and Ellen's perspectives, the final section from Håkon's. They overlap to a significant extent, but aren't identical - so even accounts of the same conversations differ, the stresses reflecting both the concerns of the three at the time and their prejudices and histories. That tells us a lot, but indirectly, about Sverre and Torrill and their marriage. It is clear, for example, that each child sees himself or herself as the poor relation, the loser in a kind of emotional game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, as having either received less of their parents' attention or regard or having had greater demands placed on them.

For example, Liv believes her mother to be a controlling person, and that this has affected her most because she is the eldest. Whether this is actually true, or she is projecting, or looking for an alibi for, her own very obviously controlling behaviour with son Agnar, isn't clear. Similarly, Ellen sees her parents and siblings very much through the lens of her desire for a child, constantly going back to the effect of her own birth on her mother and on her younger sibling, Håkon (that eight year gap - was it her "fault"?).

But in neither case is it as simple as I have suggested, there are layers and layers to this book and each of the relationships adds nuance and caveats to the facts that you, the reader, think have ben established. It is a book that will keep you wondering, and feeling, to the very last sentence (have some bookmarks handy so that you can go back and forward comparing passages!) and not every mystery is solved. In particular, apart from a couple of well-rehearsed reported speeches (but, remember, the reporters here are all biased) we never see Sverre and Torrill's marriage from the inside, only as it is refracted through the lives of their kids. We are never told exactly how or why they decided to divorce.

Trying to infer what happened to those two is a bit like trying to plot the course of an unseen particle through its interactions with others. So we see the hurt that each of Liv, Ellen and Håkon display following their parents' announcement - but how far it is pique that their comfortable assumptions and routines have been overturned, and how far a genuine concern for their parents, seems questionable. (One reaction, that the decision means the whole basis of their family life has been a lie, seems especially questionable - and to raise fascinating questions as well!)

Among all this there are some fascinating character sketches. Liv, whose life seems built on control, carefully allowing herself fifteen cigarettes for the duration of the Italian holiday. Håkon, proclaiming  a very 1960s "free love" philosophy, who seems never quite to have grown up. Ellen, whose desire for a child, while heartfelt, always seems quite abstract, as though it's a box she has to tick before she will consider herself a full adult.

It's a family that seems quite inwardly focussed: none of the changes and chances explored here really affects anyone's material comfort - they all have nice middle-class job - the sort where you can skive for a day at home to cover an emotional upset without worrying about being sacked, or where an efficient PA will make sure that a meeting you forgot to prepare for will run smoothly. Houses and flats are bought and sold as required (while exorbitant mortgages are noted, they can clearly be paid). The state of the outside world doesn't impinge much (Trump and Brexit are mentioned in passing, but more to illustrate points in that endless game of three-dimensional chess between the three than as real things that might matter) and nor does anyone beyond the family.

Ultimately, I felt, this little group was willingly trapped in its own private world and would carry on and on trying and failing to understand and map it, with little of the outside perspective that would be needed for this to succeed. In that respect, perhaps it does describe a truly modern family - there is no sense here of location in any wider community (friends, work colleagues) on whom one might depend for advice or support. It's a vivid, if chilling, portrayal.

A Modern Family was a book I could really engage with - a fascinating and complex, if bleak, read.

For more information about A Modern Family, see the Orenda website here. You can buy the book from your local bookshop, including via Hive or from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.

The blogtour continues with some real treats lined up - see the poster below for further stops where new perspectives and fresh insights await!

Review - Conviction by Denise Mina

Conviction
Denise Mina
Harvill Secker (Penguin), 16 May 2019
HB, 384pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Conviction via NetGalley.

I love Denise Mina's books. Just when you think you know what's coming, she wrongfoots you with a move sideways, shifting from crime series to true life based crime to - as here - a chilling standalone psychological thriller.

This was a grabby book - by which I mean a book that grabs you, though it is one you will also want to grab! It's the sort that keeps you sitting up into the small hours just to see what's next. Following a gripping road trip undertaken by two lonely, desperate people who start off hating one other, but each of whom gradually comes to trust and support the other, it's a marvellously convoluted, tricksy read.

"There has to be a reason to tell the truth. I stopped some time ago..."

Anna is the happy mother of two girls, partner to Hamish, a seemingly dull (but rich) Scottish lawyer, and living a quiet life in Glasgow. The most exciting recent event in her life was the campaign for a new laminator at the school. It is clear, as she narrates this story, that there's something a little... odd... about her. She won't travel abroad. There is an anger in her. Hamish resents her habit of getting up early to wander the house alone, and the two are going through relationship counselling. Perhaps a life of cosy domesticity is grinding Anna down?

There are secrets in this book, things Anna has pushed into unswept corners of her mind, people she's hiding from. She knows they must never, never come to light. But there's no reason why they ever should - is there?

Conviction launches on an ordinary day, but an ordinary day when everything goes wrong. Anna's world collapses that morning, just as she's trying to get the kids out to school. There is a knocking, and Anna tries to ignore it but there is something trying to get in, something from her past. There's nothing she can do but run again - accompanied by anorexic musician Fin, who's been shipwrecked by the same storm that left her adrift. Thrown into each others' company, what can the two do but get in a car, bickering, and set off into the Scottish night, still bickering, to solve a notorious mystery, the sinking of luxury yacht the Dana? (And yes, they are still bickering all through that).

Ricocheting between locations - a ghastly tourist trap haggis restaurant, an upmarket Highland hotel, an exclusive French resort and a Venetian slum, to name only a few, while running through a pile of Hamish's cash and dodging assassins, the pair take as their guide a podcast series about the sinking of that yacht, and follow up the leads. In the course of this we learn more about the ghastly events that sent Anna into hiding, about the origins of Fin's anorexia, the notorious Sophie Bukaran - and the truth behind the Dana. The book is strong stuff in places, with references to rape, eating disorders, and to a real sense of mental disintegration. Anna is at times very scary. Some of the events here are told in fragments as she edits out what she can't bear; she drives like a fiend; and all through the book are the warning signs of the danger she and Fin are running towards - even as she imagines she's running from something that not only destroyed her faith in justice but left her at the mercy of baying mobs - in real life, and online.

Anna starts, then, low on trust, and the very gradual thaw between her and Fin (not a sexual thing, it's mush more interesting than that) is a deeply moving theme of this book, even more interesting and enthralling perhaps than the solution to the mystery (although that is itself a complex, twisty and satisfying crime story in its own right). They are very well imagined, well portrayed characters with a lot of depth, a lot of truth to them.

So there's a lot going on in this book, which is never less than deeply, deeply readable, and often brilliant. It's also frequently grimly funny, as with the scene where the pair, drunk on a train, encounter a hitman who telegraphs his intentions through a dark fairytale, or when Anna refers to "the beige uniform of American money"or describes her time working in that hotel for the super-rich (sacked, in the end: she didn't have the "personality for service"). Fin's fame also produces some funny - if frustrating - episodes: it's hard to go under the radar when people keep spotting and Instagramming you.

As you'd expect, Anna is something of an unreliable narrator ("It's an odd out-of-the-way place for odd out-of-the-way people, often incomers pretending to be Scottish. The whole area is awash with fictions. I loved it there.") She has of course edited her own past, giving her unreliability a solid narrative justification - rather than just deriving from an unexplained character quirk. She's few illusions left about life - for example, saying, of men "When [they] talk about a daughter it's often a coded way of saying they are not planning to attack you" or commenting on the less celebrated moments of Andrew Carnegie, often noted for his philanthropy: "It didn't show him ordering Pinkerton men to shoot at strikers... [or] mutilating accidents in smelting plants." Indeed, that last points to a general theme in this book - the ghastliness of the super rich, variously benefiting from loot gathered by Nazi forebears, committing murders to cover up crimes, behaving badly to underpaid staff... or just showing ghastly taste.

This is a pacy read, covering lots of ground - literally, emotionally, and conceptually. At its heart it has - well, lots of heart, in that central relationship between Anna and Fin. Both are damaged, and the book doesn't promise that everything will be or can be "fixed" for them. But they do find something.

Strongly recommended.

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

To buy the book, try your local bookshop, including via Hive! Or you can look at Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.