Review - The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavalle

The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle
Bantam (Penguin), 15 January 2026 
Available as: HB, 432pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857509956

I'm grateful to the publisher for access to an advance e-copy of The Devil in Silver to consider for review.

The Devil in Silver is the story of Pepper, a man who is rubbing along just about OK until he picks a fight in a car park, and ends up being dumped in a psychiatric ward by the police officers who attend. (There's less paperwork for them that way). Thus he's introduced to the Kafkaesque world of New Hyde Hospital, dosed with powerful meds (and if he won't take them, why that means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?) and effectively "disappeared" from everyday life with no appeal rights and no advocacy.

LaValle does an excellent job of portraying the broken system that has Pepper in its grasp. Broken, in that nobody gets the help they need. A system, in that it grinds on. Apart from him and the other patients - sketched with a degree of tenderness and insight I think - that system also has the staff firmly in their place, weighed down by reams of paperwork and a defunct computer system designed by banks to cheat their customers.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, there's a monster on the ward, and patients keep dying. Or vanishing.

Pepper realises that he has to get out of this place, but who can he trust to help him? 

A magnificent, sad, and funny book that ranges here and there in its focus and gives us, for example, potted intros to Vincent Van Gogh and to the US silver rush of the 1840s as well as the thoughts of a narcissistic rat which lives in the abandoned part of the hospital, The Devil in Silver balances deliciously on the edge of naturalism and of fantasy. Is there really a monster at large in the hospital? Can we trust what Pepper - not to speak of the other patients - report about that, or anything else? Driven by a rage against the sheer unfairness of it all - take Loochie, for example, a young woman trapped ion the ward since she was 13 because she needs help and her family can't cope - LaValle creates a readable and involving story that visits some very uncomfortable place.

The book is also mindful of wider social dis-ease. While Hyde is a token system, it sits amidst a wider broken, or breaking, system. The inmates' 24 TV picks up news broadcasts pumping out disinformation and hate. There is a reference to "41 shots". With inmates like Pepper in the ward on a fall premise, the question does ask itself, should some of those... out there... not be.. in here?

It's a book that doesn't offer easy answers. Yes, some mysteries are resolved here, sort of, and Pepper achieves a victory of sorts in what he sets out to do, but the authorities are practised and containment - that's their who thing - and the most heinous scandals fade from the news feeds quickly, as here.

An unsettling and troubling read, but one with tremendous heart and deeply memorable characters.

For more information about The Devil in Silver, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Strange New World by Vivian Shaw

Strange New World

Vivian Shaw
Orbit, 20 May 2025

Available as: PB, 371pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521077

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Strange New World  to consider for review.

I thought that the series of books about Greta Helsing, doctor to the monsters of London, was done, so I was VERY excited to see the e-book only novella Bitter Waters last year. Gloriously it was followed up by Strange New World.  Strange New World does though think mark a definite end.

It was wonderful to meet Greta again.  I have a weakness for characters who, like her, may be tossed around by events and even baffled by what's going, but nevertheless remain level-headed, focussed and competent throughout - rather than becoming so just in time for the third act. 

Of course, it helps a protagonist when their husband is a wealthy vampire, their best friend is a senior functionary in Hell and their circle of acquaintances included the Voivode, Count Dracula himself. Greta has all of those advantages and is nowhere near as hard-pressed as she was in the earlier books. Still,  even it does look as though previous events - the hunting down of harmless monsters by religious fanatics - are being repeated. Greta suffered enough trauma from that to give her pause (I also have a weakness for stories that respect and recognise trauma rather than just ignoring it). Even so, the dangers (to herself, her friends and indeed, the fabric of reality itself) that she has weathered have also left her conscious of just how vulnerable mortals (and monsters) can be and of the need to face them. In Strange New World, those dangers come from a new direction, and the means to overcome must as well.

Without being too spoilery, I'd like to say how much I enjoyed the resolution to this book. It would have been possible to make it a magnificently bloody piece of combat, with the Universe balanced on a knife edge - and indeed there are some nail biting set piece conflicts in here - but the book is concerned  rather with empathy and morality. The solution, if there is one, is therefore going to require compassion, flexibility - and friendship.

That leads us to a much richer, and necessarily messier, conclusion than if it all turned on a knock-down battle, but also to a much better one I think. Indeed, as the book ended I found myself thinking of a perhaps surprising precedent - CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Setting aside the question of whether those "letters from a senior to a junior demon" (a kind of infernal Yes, Minister) establish Lewis, the great Christian apologist, as a founder of urban fantasy (I would love that but perhaps... not quite)  I think there is a comparison to be drawn. I think one of Lewis's insights was to explore issues of personality, confusion and despair in the subjects that his industrious demons were trying to mislead, rather than brimstone and temptation. 

Shaw's demons (and her angels) inhabit a different moral universe, not the Christian one, and nobody is actively trying to save or damn anyone. Here, Heaven and Hell are more like rival idealogical systems, and of course, as she makes clear, other mythologies are also available. But, at the root of things I think there are the same issues that Lewis explored - the fatal flaws in human, demon or, indeed, angel, that can lead to dreadful consequences. We are all monsters. We can all be better. We all need love, acceptance and hope. And friendship. Which made the ending of this book, and the moral actions that lead to the resolution and point to a future of hope, so powerful for me.

Which is, perhaps, a good place to end a series. While I will miss Greta, I feel that in these five books have completed something significant, say something significant. 

I will be keen to see what Shaw writes next!

For more information about Strange New World, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen Spotswood

Muder Crossed Her Mind (Pentecost and Parker, 4)
Stephen Spotswood
Headline, 7 December 2023
Available as: PB, 384pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035409495

I'm grateful to Headline for providing me with an advance e-copy of Murder Crossed Her Mind to consider for review.

I'm a bit behind with reviewing (the end of 2023 was pretty intense work-wise and we are in the middle of planning a house move) so only just catching up with the latest Pentecost and Parker mystery.

For those who haven't come across these books yet (and if you haven't, please go back and read them in order) Willowjean "Will" Parker and Lillian Pentecost solve crimes in postwar New York City. Will is a runaway who worked for a time in the circus: Lillian is the city's foremost private detective. 

In Murder Crossed Her Mind, the two investigate the disappearance of Vera Bodine, a retired legal secretary who has a preternatural memory but has become a "shut in" - a hoarder who refuses to leave her apartment and lives surrounded by years of clutter. Bodine's only friend, a slippery defence lawyer who gave Lillian a hard time on the witness stand in an earlier book, begs the women to look for Vera but at first they're not inclined to accommodate him. In a slick opening section to the book, Will, suffering after being assaulted and Lillian, struggling with her MS, spend a gruelling 24 hours establishing that there is something to investigate - all of this absolutely top-notch procedural work, a joy to read, really.

If Bodine has suffered harm, it soon becomes clear that there may be many motives - Vera's prodigious memory may mean that she retains information from her legal career, but it also seems she assisted the FBI in hunting Nazi spies. She's dropped a hint that she may want to report a crime. And then there are other suspects, closer to home, like the mysterious buyer who wants to take over the apartment building...

Pentecost and Parker navigate all of this with aplomb, also negotiating their own ongoing cases running on from previous novels, some of which seem to pose threats that I'm sure will come back to bite them in future books. Will's assurance and independence continue to increase (as I noted in reviewing the previous book, Secrets Typed in Blood) but here she's brought down a notch or two by Lillian - I love the relationship between the two women, both strong and complex personalities, both pointedly not saying a lot that they might. Indeed I'll go further and say that for all the genuinely intriguing detective stuff, it's that relationship which is at the heart of these books. Spotswood is taking his time showing it evolve, and I am in no rush for that: I want to enjoy what happens at a decent pace (so while it was great to get two instalments in 2023, I'd prefer these books to continue at one a year!)

For more information about Murder Crossed Her Mind, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood

Secrets Typed in Blood (Pentecost and Parker, 3)
Stephen Spotswood
Headline, 12 October 2023
Available as: PB, 384pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(PB): 9781035409464

I'm grateful to Headline for providing me an advance e-copy of Secrets Typed in Blood to consider for review.

I was excited to see not just one new Pentecost and Parker mystery this year, but two. I'll be reviewing Murder Crossed Her Mind, Book 4 in the series, shortly - but before that, what did I make of Secrets Typed in Blood?

Well, this is a clever, sharp detective novel that nicely explores the 1940s scene around the writing and publication of pulp detective novels while - at the same time - being a rather superior example of the genre, and indeed one with a distinctly noir-ish twist. But all that apart it's a real pleasure to welcome back Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker.

The two sleuths - or perhaps I should say, New York's foremost private detective and her assistant - are called in by Holly Quick, a writer of hard-boiled murder tales for half the pulp magazines in the city, when her scenarios begin playing out in real life. Bound on her honour to keep Holly's secrets - Holly has her reasons for these - Lillian risks souring her relationship with the New York police as the bodies pile up. There's also tension between Lillian and Will and, as ever, the latter doesn't take it well when Lillian tries to keep her away from the action.

I simply loved this book. Its gallery of smart women who know what they're about - not just Lillian, Will and Holly, but others besides - are a formidable counterpoint to the somewhat patronising NYPD. The introduction of Holly - a chain smoking, reclusive writer who spins out her stories paid by the letter - is a masterstroke, as is the involvement of a gumshoe Lillian brings in (to Will's disgust). We also learn more about how Will and Lillian support the women of the city, whether it's running self-defence classes, giving pro bono advice or tracking down missing relatives. (The background there is a clearly darkening climate for womens' rights, as they are squeezed out of "mens'" jobs and pushed back into the home, their behaviour policed and deviancy increasingly not tolerated).

Best of all though we see Will playing a lead role in things, and how far she's come since the first book. Juggling an undercover role on a separate case with investigating Holly's problem and discreetly supporting Lillian who (as regular readers will know) isn't in good health, she provides a running commentary (often a frustrated commentary) on progress which keeps the book moving at a brisk pace and hints at what is to come.

At the heart of things though is as classic a mystery as you could wish, the what and the why teasingly elusive even as Pentecost and Parker get further into the detail. It's all here in plain sight but also, it's fiendishly difficult to decode - just as a detective mystery should be.

All in all, another cracking instalment in this series which, to my mind, just gets better and better.

I'll be back with a further update when I've finished Murder Crossed Her Mind. You'll forgive me if I sign off now to do that...

For more information about Secrets Typed in Blood, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

The Seven Year Slip    
Ashley Poston
HQ (HarperCollins), 4 July 2023 
Available as: PB, 336pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008566593

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Seven Year Slip to consider for review.

The Seven Year Slip was such an enjoyable book to read, containing elements of fantasy (with a time travel concept at its heart) and romance but also a dreamy Manhattan atmosphere and an exploration of the worlds of publishing and of high-end restaurants.

It's the same universe, in fact, as in Poston's The Dead Romantics (the covers are nicely designed to compliment one another) with one or two characters from the earlier appearing in passing. The focus is though very squarely on newcomer Clementine West, who's going through a difficult time after the death of her beloved aunt and her breakup with Nate.

Clementine is a book publicist at Strauss & Adder, and her response to heartbreak - and other adverse life events - has been to throw herself into work, emulating superpublisher Rhonda. This always worked before, any threat to Clementine's work-life balance being addressed by spontaneous globe-trotting summer holidays with Aunt Analea. With Analea dead (and we will discover the particular sad circumstances of that in due course) Clementine cancels this year's booked trip to Iceland, but as somebody recently said, proximity to death does bring a certain clarity and Clementine is still left pondering where she wants to be in her life.

Fortunately - perhaps - she's provided with a distraction when a handsome young man appears in her apartment (which was her aunt's apartment), looking for somewhere to stay while he follows his heart's desire to become a chef. What could seem rather creepy actually turns out quite fascinating as Iwan comes and goes and shares his lifestory, his ambitions, and his fears. Over the following months his life and Clementine's entwine and they share some happy times and intimate moments - but it's the wrong time for either to commit to the other.

There's a fair bit I'm, annoyingly, not telling you here because the way that Poston lays out her story is rather special not only in terms of the facts of what's going on but also in terms of Clementine's development as a person overall and her growth in self-knowledge in particular. And in fact in terms of of Iwan's too. Poston is absolutely masterful in tracking the developing relationship, a sort of running commentary being provided by Clementine's workmates with whom she is engaged in a contest to snag a new celebrity author and save the company. That quest in itself produces some hilarious moments - this book is often very funny and it can move from moments of great emotion to plain funny in a trice.

How things are tied up is completely brilliant both in terms of the sequence of events and also of emotional development. It would have been easy for the latter to be overshadowed by the clever central concept here, but Poston is just too good a writer to let this happen and instead she gives Clementine's situation added resonance - there is a magic in life which she expected but which is lacking and the loss of her Aunt seems like the universe's ultimate betrayal, so why not shut down and lose herself in work?

The answer to that question is what the story turns on. It is a funny, heartfelt, sharply observed and really just very clever book - it is sure to be a hit I think and it was just a joy to read.

For more information about The Seven Year Slip, 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 - The World We Make by NK Jemisin

The World We Make (Great Cities, 2)
NK Jemisin
Orbit, 3 November 2022
Available as: HB, 352pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356512693

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of The World We Make to consider for review.

The World We Make concludes Jemisin's Great Cities sequence, the first part of which, The City We Became, was published in 2020. The author explains in the Acknowledgements why, in the end, this couldn't be a trilogy (basically, truth overtaking fiction) and why it was a tough book to write. However it is still, in my view, a brilliant accomplishment. Jemisin has - across two books - studied the essence of a confident yet wounded modern city - New York - through the lens of fantasy writing at its best. And it's fun to read too!

Jemisin's premise, if you haven't read the first book (you should!) is that "great" cities wake up. Past a certain point, they focus their essence into a human "avatar" (or in New York's case, seven of them - one for each borough and one for the whole. Yes, seven - if you want to know why not six read the first book). That has just happened for New York (there is a reason why it is so recent, which was one of my questions about The City We Became, though not something that particularly bothered me).

If that was all there is to it, we would not have far to go. But it's not. The Cities, NY especially, are under attack from a cosmic-horror style threat personified as The Woman in White and which has something of an affinity with gentrifying, authoritarian trends in the city. And, as becomes obvious here, in the wider multiverse. This threat was staved off somewhat in the previous book as the boroughs came together (mostly) but returns in The World We Made. Part of the meat of this book is the much closer detail we get about that threat and its motivations, which suggest some quite murky morality around the - what world shall I use? Ecology? - of the cities in the branching multiverse. 

That murkiness is reflected as Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini (avatar of Queens), Manny and the rest seek wider help to defend their city, and find some of the other great World Cities less than supportive. I loved the way that Jemisin transforms a potential weakness of her metaphor - that a typical city contains millions, and will have had hundreds of years of history, so its avatar is surely going to be a babble of incoherent voices and intentions - into a hymn to the creativity, the creative destruction, even, of our great cities. They aren't, we are reminded, gentle things or. Making a cameo, London blithely admits to killing people and taking their stuff. But she has changed. All is movement and change here, good movement and change, in contrast to the stasis and bland sterility beloved of The Woman and her city.

This second book is, though, not all focussed on the comic menace or on supernatural (superurban?) struggle. The avatars are ordinary people too, and Jemisin's portrayal of their bickering, of who fancies who and of the pressures on some - pressures from family, from legacies of abuse or even just from work (Padmini's lost a job and has the immigration service after her) is very well done, indeed the human detail really drives this plot rather than the city-ness and creates a level of reality that the Woman finds hard to wholly comprehend (though she seems fascinated by it, I think).

That's lots else. Brooklyn, goaded beyond endurance by the corruption and racism of the city authorities, campaigns for Mayor - giving Jemisin scope for some satirical scenes but also opening up the team to wider attack from political extremists in a subplot that very much exposes the underbelly of US politics and society. Manny calls in allies, and we learn a bit more about his history and background - also rooted in the Black American experience. And Aislyn is faced with choices she can't duck over what the Woman is doing to her beloved Staten Island.

Less hectic, perhaps, than the first book, and more considered, The World We Make still rises to a heart thumping climax. It's vividly written and has a glorious sense of place, and above all, of engagement with the complex issues and messy compromises that make a real city a place worth living in and indeed, fighting for. Jemisin's writing is gorgeously inventive, and I felt that she truly inhabits her characters.

Finally, just look at that design from Lauren Panepinto. It's not just pretty - in the right conditions, it does things. This is a book you need to hold in your hand, not just have on your e-reader...

For more information about The World We Make, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Madwoman by Louisa Treger

Madwoman
Louisa Treger
Bloomsbury, 9 June 2022
Available as: HB, 304pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy, audio subscription
ISBN(HB): 9781448218011

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Madwoman via NetGalley. I also listened to much of the book on audio, via a subscription service. 

Madwoman, which is based on a true story, reads as a very modern account. There are hints of scandal in an institution - the asylum on "Blackwell's Island" in New York - and an intrepid investigative journalist sets out to penetrate the establishment and expose the truth. It gave me something of a jolt to recall that this was taking place in the later 19th century, when women were far from established in journalism, and sympathy for those with mental health problems was nascent at best.

Indeed, the story is very modern in several senses - Nellie Bly sets out with hopes of righting wrongs and exposing abuse, but a century of institutional scandals will warn the early 21st century reader that little is likely to be done. We should not be too judgemental of our Victoria forbears, perhaps.

More widely, Nellie herself is drawn as a fascinating character. A determined young woman, who has survived crisis after crisis following her beloved father's sudden death and her mother taking up with an abusive man, she is a survivor - who perhaps however sees herself reflected rather too clearly in the Blackwell's inmates. Nellie has already shouldered her way into journalism in provincial Pittsburgh, before making her way to New York in search of bigger stories and more freedom. The Blackwell's Island "stunt" is her attempt to make her mark, for Nellie herself is on her uppers, almost penniless and shut out of the male sanctums of the city's papers. Her ambition is at best tolerated, at worst seen as unfeminine, wrong, in some sense, bound to lead to trouble and perhaps indicative of an unsound mind. It's easy to see how Nellie's plan could go badly wrong. 

What she is doing - having herself committed to the asylum - is a deeply serious step and Nellie finds conditions worse there than she could have imagined. Abusive and vicious staff, scant and poor food, freezing conditions and hideous punishments rapidly take their dehumanising toll - and even worse is threatened. Treger's story, which in its first half explores and interprets Nellie's early life diligently, really takes fire in its second part as it touches on what Nellie might have been thinking and feeling as she was locked all night in a rat-infested cell; forcibly dunked in filthy, cold water; or half strangled by a vengeful nurse after speaking out about conditions. One quickly realises how high the stakes were for Nellie and how ingrained the ill-treatment of inmates was.

It's a fascinating story which resists any temptation to sensationalise, treating all the inmates of Blackwell's Island with sympathy and humanity and bringing these people - who really lived, a century and half ago, and, many of them, died, in that place - back to life to speak to us. The coda describing Nellie's later life is a fascinating glimpse of an intrepid and brave woman.

The audio itself is deftly performed by Laurel Lefkow, who reflects Bly's newspaper vocation, giving the text just a hint of one of the big stories being read out from that day's paper. We're reminded that, in piecing together Bly's history, Treger's first resource will have been her printed articles: this is a woman who found her voice and her freedom through a modern medium, the crusading newspaper, one of the first to do so. It's the perfect pairing of affect and content.

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

#Blogtour #Review - A Scandal in Brooklyn by Lauren Wilkinson

A Scandal in Brooklyn
Lauren Wilkinson

Short story

Available as e-book, audio
Published by Amazon Original Stories here (UK) (US)

Today, I'm celebrating the release of Lauren Wilkinson's A Scandal in Brooklyn with an interview, an excerpt and a review. There's also a giveaway, to win a $50 Amazon voucher.

Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel, American Spy, was a Washington Post bestseller; was nominated for the NAACP Image Award, Anthony Award, and Edgar Award; and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List. Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine and the New York Times, among other publications.

Let's start by hearing from Lauren herself...

Interview with author Lauren Wilkinson

Your newest story, A Scandal in Brooklyn, is about a complex murder with a plethora of distrustful suspects — a clear homage to classic Holmesian tales. What elements of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original work most inspired you?

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels are a lot of fun! And it was important to me that this story was fun, so I’d say that was the element of Doyle’s work that most inspired me.  We’ve all had a hard few years, so I didn’t want to write anything that was too heavy.  

What made you decide to omit Sherlock from your story and instead focus entirely on Irene Adler? 

Honestly, I just think that Irene Adler is the more interesting character. For one, in A Scandal in Bohemia, she outwits Holmes (and I’m glad she does because Sherlock Holmes is working for Irene’s toxic ex, who’s a huge hater that just won’t let be great). The other reason I think she’s the more interesting character is that there’s been far less written about her than there has been about Sherlock Holmes, so I felt like there was room to make up more stuff with her. And as a writer, that’s a more interesting place to hang out. 

Irene has been interpreted many ways in the last hundred years, but you offer a brand-new take on The Woman by making her a person of color. How does her background and culture change the narrative of this iconic female? 

Well, the fact that she’s a Black woman certainly informs her worldview. But for me, re-imagining Irene Adler as a modern character (and putting her in modern circumstances) was the choice that led to the most germane changes in the narrative. 

Irene has an eidetic memory which she has learned to use to her advantage – for example, in solving crimes. But this skill can also be a curse. What do memories mean to your characters and what do they mean to you? 

Memory is such an interesting thing to me! Our memories are so fallible, and yet a person’s collection of memories is the cornerstone of their identity.  What a strange internal conflict that is, and stranger still that it’s built into our nature.  The Mandela Effect is a good example of how this conflict plays: isn’t it interesting that -- for some people anyway -- it’s more agreeable to believe that objective reality is wrong than that they simply misremembered something?

Tommy Diaz, Irene’s old friend, recounts the story’s events including a murder as well as efforts to solve the crime. Why did you choose to show the story through his eyes? 

The character of Tommy Diaz is based on one of my oldest friends, Tommy Pico (who is a poet, screenwriter and now an occasional actor)! Honestly, it was just more fun for me to try to write a story from “his perspective” than from my own. I’m starting to get a little bored with my own perspective, if I’m being totally honest.     

How do you think modern technology is changing the mystery genre? What are some positive and negative aspects of these changes? 

I think that modern technology has the potential to give the genre new plot devices and twists. But ironically that has always been the case—apparently A Study in Scarlet was the first story to use the magnifying glass in a crime investigation. So, I think the question of how modern technology changes the mystery genre is a good example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

In 2019 you released your debut novel American Spy to an avalanche of critical acclaim which included being named on President Obama’s summer reading list. What effect did this experience have on your career?

I continue to be extremely grateful to President Obama for putting my novel on his summer reading list!  The exposure had a profound effect on my career, in the sense that it allowed me to pursue television writing, which is what I spend most of my time on these days. 

What’s next for you?

Well, in my personal life, I’ve recently gotten married and we’re renovating our house together, which is an exciting project (that’s also been pretty time-consuming).  And professionally—well I’m not too sure! I’d really like to write another novel one day. I’d also like to keep writing for television, and maybe a movie one day too.

A Scandal in Brooklyn Excerpt

We went inside, and into what looked like a clearing in the woods. It took me a moment to realize that the floor, walls and ceiling were all covered in LED panels that were projecting a three-dimensional image. Victor lay in a patch of grass in one corner of the room beside a tree whose branches stretched outward into the simulated sky. A cloud of bees was buzzing around the hive dangling from one of the branches. 

“I . . . can’t breathe. Help me,” Victor said without turning to face us. His voice was ragged. 

“Where did those bees come from?” The kid with the buzz cut sounded confused. He had a Russian accent, and couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. 

“There are more over there,” Tyler said and pointed to the LED panels on the opposite wall. 

“Victor must’ve been stung. But how—” 

“He’s allergic to bees,” Priya shouted. “He’ll die!” 

“He’s going into anaphylaxis,” Tyler said. “There’s epinephrine in the first aid kit.” He ran out into the hall to retrieve it, and when he returned, he shouted, “Someone call 911!” 

I tried to but the call was rerouted. As an automated voice thanked me for contacting Avisa’s private emergency number, I watched Tyler poke a needle into a vial of epinephrine and draw the clear liquid up into it. He plunged the needle into Victor’s thigh. 

A woman with a soothing voice came on the line, and after I explained what was going on, she told me she’d send emergency personnel to Avisa House. The alarm stopped suddenly, and I hung up and glanced over at Irene. She was observing everything, doing her best to commit the moment to memory. 

I’d assumed that the shot would’ve immediately revived Victor, like in the movies. Instead, his eyes rolled up into his head and his body went limp. 

“He passed out,” Priya said. “Do something, please!” 

Tyler started CPR. A blonde woman with a magazine tucked underneath her arm came through the open door. My best guess was that this was the chef, Carol. “What the hell is going on? What was that alarm?” 

Victor was still unconscious. He must’ve had a serious allergic reaction—his cheeks had ballooned to grotesque proportions, his eyes were swollen shut, and a bright-red rash had broken out on his neck and chin. Tyler stopped pumping his heart and put two fingers to Victor’s wrist to check his pulse. After a moment, he said, “He’s dead. I’m so sorry.” 

Priya dropped to her knees beside him. She started to sob. I was too stunned to say anything. We all were. The room was so quiet that I could hear the distant sound of rain drumming on the roof. A couple of EMTs showed up a few minutes later—looking back, I wonder if they really were EMTs. They had both the air of authority and the equipment of medical professionals, but I can’t say for certain. 

“I don’t understand this.” Priya had gotten up and was standing with Irene, Shinwell, and me. Her eyes darted back and forth between Irene’s face and Victor’s body as it was loaded onto a gurney. “He was fine just a few minutes ago.” 

“Was he stung by digital bees?” I asked in a low voice. 

“I think someone wanted it to look that way,” Irene said. “But I don’t buy it.”

My review

I'm grateful for a free advance e-copy of A Scandal in Brooklyn to consider for review. When I saw the description - a short story featuring a modern Irene Adler getting to the roots of a devilish crime in contemporary Brooklyn - I couldn't resist reading it, I love a Holmesian inspired mystery and wanted to see what Wilkinson would do with Adler.

A Scandal in Brooklyn is a short, fast-moving story. Adler is a woman with remarkable memory abilities which she's honed through practice and training ('To Irene, her memory is a physical place that look like her childhood home') and in this story, she teams up with an old friend, Tommy Diaz, to use them to solve a crime involving a tech billionaire. In the best Holmes and Watson style, the story is Diaz's write-up of a notorious case done at Adler's suggestion ('While some of the interest in the Victor Stein mystery has subsided, it's still a popular story in some corners of the Internet...'). It all begins when  Adler recommends him to her friend Priya to help investigate the disappearance of Priya's husband, who has gone missing.

The two quickly find themselves, together with Priya and Irene's sort-of housekeeper Shinwell, in the secret laboratory of said billionaire... who just happens to be Adler's husband... and who just happens to have another mystery he'd like them to solve.

As Adler gets to work, it becomes clear that her talents go much deeper than a killer memory. The case is a tricky one, with one obvious suspect, but also with perplexing clues, several witnesses with their own agendas - and other potential criminals on site. It's not just a matter of who and why, but also of how - a classic Holmesian mystery, and a situation where there may still be danger. 

I really enjoyed seeing Adler put through her paces here in something which is far from a pastiche or rewriting of a Holmes story, but rather a tale with a very modern ambience and at the same time, a familiar sense of devilish mystery. Great fun to read, great characters, and Irene Adler - in any incarnation - is of course a must-read. I'm hoping to hear more about this version of her!

But there's more...

You can find out more about Lauren and the story at the following links

Website: https://www.lauren-wilkinson.com/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thrillkinson/ 
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17287509.Lauren_Wilkinson 

And you can be in with a chance to win an e-copy of the story and a $50 Amazon voucher at the following address http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/07c2363f278 (draw operated by the book's publicist with whom I am not connected)

#Review - Boys, Beasts and Men by Sam J Miller

Boys, Beasts and Men
Sam J Miller
Tachyon, 14 June 2022
Available as: PB, 330pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781616963729

I'm grateful to Tachyon for an advance e-copy of Boys, Beasts and Men to consider for review.

Boys, Beasts and Men contains fourteen of Miller's short stories, linked into a meta-narrative by brief linking sections which seem to follow an encounter and exchange between two men ('I follow him out of the bar with no idea what kind of tale I'm stepping into'). Some of the stories arise more or less directly from what the two are doing or saying, while others make more sense in hindsight. The nature of the exchange itself, though, only slowly becomes clear and I don't want to spoil it.

The stories themselves are vibrant and wide-ranging. While they almost always have an element of fantasy either in the detail or, I think, in being set in slightly alternate universes, this often isn't the main point. For example, in the first, Allosaurus Burgers, the eponymous dinosaur turns up in a remote US town, catalysing a range of reactions from religious concern to conspiracy theories, but the story follows a boy and explores his relationship with his mother, sister and absent father. There's no justification for the Allosaurus itself but its presence seems to say something about what is erased, absent or forbidden to be spoken about in Matt's life.

The second story, 57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides, perhaps turns more strongly on its fantasy premise - no, you'll have to read it to find what it is - as well as introducing one of the main themes of the collection, the lives of gay men and boys in society. It's allusively written, those 57 reasons being given as a numbered list, which gradually develops into a narrative, exploring both the narrator's longings and failings (he lets down a friend badly) and the way he is treated. It also touches on another theme of the collection, alternatives and roads not taken - several stories here take actual historical episodes and add different features to them: supernatural disturbances, different outcomes.  The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History, for example, describes the Stonewall raid from numerous perspectives ('June 1969: The wet Manhattan air was like sick breath coming out of our collective throat') but steers the story into something strange, different, a kind of actualisation, I think, of collective rage and resistance to create a phenomenon that baffles everyone. That theme is recapitulated in Angel, Monster, Man, a story told in three parts - and of course echoing the title of the collection - where again, desire, rage and frustration seem to enable the physical manifestation of something that then takes a life if its own as the New York gay community of the 1970s and 80s is struck by the virus.

Death and loss feature here often. In Conspicuous Plumage a young man is absent, not spoken of due to the way that he died. It takes a voyage of rediscovery and reimagining to bring him back to mind. The  loss and regret are sometimes more, sometimes less, fantastical - more, for example, in Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart which riffs on the events off the film King Kong, bringing New York together in regret and repugnance at a shattering loss: a token perhaps of how we can be, and a story with a promise of something better arising. 

And the loss isn't always due to a death. In Shucked, it's much more subtle than that - a chance encounter by two American tourists in a bar with an older man ('One of the burdens of being with a boy as beautiful as Teen') leads to... doubts... about the reality of their own relationship and about identity. In The Beasts We Want To Be, a really creepy little story set in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution where strange conditioning techniques to engineer human souls vie with eerie religious artefacts, it's all about the strange sense of unreality even as survivors find consoling relationships amongst the bloodshed. In Calved, a tender story turning on a father's relationship with his son in a nearly post-apocalyptic world, we see the catastrophe coming - a catastrophe stoked by misunderstanding and an inability, or refusal, to be emotionally honest - but can't do anything about it. 

Relationships - whether between father and son, mother and daughter, lovers, or strangers - are often exquisitely twisted in this collection, not always completely messed up but ramified, vibrating even when seeking to unknot themselves. A sober churchgoing woman seeks out forbidden drugs to open the doors of perception, understand what her son is and hold out a hand to him. Absence undoes those relationships: 'while he was away, Hugh became someone else' or creates spaces in which they can be rebuilt or seen differently. And always, there is that framing story, providing some insights about where all this is going - though tantalisingly incomplete ones.

I simply loved this collection. While dark at times, it's never completely bleak, presenting moments of hope and, as I have said, resistance and weaving a seductive web around the reader.

For more information about Boys, Beasts and Men, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
Orion, 17 March 2022
Available as: HB, 400pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398705425

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Cartographers via NetGalley, to consider for review.

The Cartographers is a vibrant and exciting mystery story with a real killer of a central concept (one which, however, I can't say very much about because spoilers) and it is a book that I greatly enjoyed.

Nell Young is in a corner, financially and professionally. Brought up in the rarefied academic atmosphere surrounding her cartographer father, Dr David Young, all she has ever wanted to do is work with him in the rare maps department of the New York Public Library. But seven years before, she was cast out of Eden, and now scratches a living - literally - by touching up fake copies of old maps (adding in little drawings of sea monsters to make them more saleable) for online seller Classic.

When Nell's dad is found dead in his office, she realises she has lost the chance to reconcile with him, and embarks on a quest to understand him instead. Orphaned - her mother died many years before - her only clue is the unremarkable 1930s gas station map that she finds in his desk...

As Nell begins to track down and question her father's oldest friends, she realises that there is something very strange in their background. And that somebody else may be interested in that very ordinary map.

I did, as I've said, greatly enjoy The Cartographers. It's a testament to the interest of Shepherd's story and the strength of her writing that the book is able to zip back and forth, exploring events of thirty years before from multiple viewpoints to paint in the background to what threatens Nell now, and without ever losing headway. I often find myself slightly floored if a book has a lot of flashback, but done well, as here, it maintains, rather than squashing, tension.

And the story that is teased out is rich and psychologically detailed - the story of a group of charismatic college friends, at the height of their abilities, joining together to try and make something truly new, a fusion of cartographic science and of art, a 'Dreamer's Atlas'. We see the allure of the project, and for me, also, Shepherd captured that sense of possibility, of being able to weigh how one will spend one's life and who with, that is I think a very special (and sadly brief) phase of growing up. We also see how that ends - with consequences that play out into the "now" of The Cartographers, where hope has become fear and spontaneous trust and love, suspicion and manipulation.

At the same time, it's an accomplished and polished modern thriller with a very real sense of menace. It's natural to that genre that the reader will be slightly ahead of Nell in knowing there is danger, and perhaps, eventually, also ahead in putting together the clues and determining what is going on. That doesn't detract from the drama of seeing her unravel her family's and friends' background and grasping the psychological tragedy that she has been shielded from.

How Nell will negotiate all this, whether she will be able to grow herself enough to understand her father and what he did, and whether she will be able to break that spiral in her own relationships - and above all, whether she can do any of this in time, well, you will have to read the book to see. 

Intelligent, fun and rather sad, this is a substantial and engaging book that I'd strongly recommend. 

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

#Review - First Born by Will Dean

First Born
Will Dean
Hodder, 14 April 2022
Available as: HB, 384pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529307146

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of First Born via NetGalley.

In his new standalone thriller, Dean gives us a tense, twisty story focussed on the relationship between twins Molly and Katie ('KT' to her sister) Raven living respectively in London and New York. 

As the book makes clear, supposedly identical twins can turn out to be very different. One of the two prefers 'monozygotic'. Identical is 'a blatant lie. A travesty...' We see this in the contrast between staid, nervous Molly, living her restricted life in London and painfully aware of all the threats inherent in everyday life, and Katie, who has spread her wings, won a scholarship and jetted off to the Big Apple to study.

I thought at first that Dean was going to show us a Molly panicking, unable to function, a fish out of water as she's forced to travel abroad when things go wrong, but I should have known that he's a much more subtle writer than that. Molly is perfectly capable of facing her fears, even while regaling the reader with the relative risks of a phone charger or a poorly cooked restaurant meal. While her obsession seems to consume mental energy and throw up obstacles, she's adept at addressing her concerns and planning around them ('This is a classic Molly raven risk-reward situation') which then provides her a margin of safety, a heuristic, when she moves into a dangerous new arena.

Because it seems that there was more going on in Katie's life than her parents and sister thought. When Molly joins Paul and Elizabeth in New York - slumming it in a budget hostel because family fortunes are actually not too good right now - she decides to investigate what has been going on, a course of action that will test her planning and strategising (whether in improvising weapons or passing without being noticed) to the limit.

I really felt that Will Dean was having fun with First Born. While his last thriller The Last Thing to Burn was grimly realist, First Born just lets rip with a sizzling "What if...?" scenario in the pair of twins and with the idea of one investigating what happened to the other. Yet Dean makes its all so plausible, with the cool assessments of risk grounding the story as we move from one challenge to another - even as the tension screws tighter and tighter. It all culminates in a race for survival as New York braces for a hurricane (more disaster planning needed, of course). The sense of a narrator who is, in effect, in enemy territory (there are some real shocks I didn't see coming which underpin that - just what DID Katie do?) nudges things into thriller, rather than simply crime, territory, but take it form me, this is much more complex than your typical psychological thriller.

As things spiral out of control the story becomes more and more of a rollercoaster but Dean keeps events rooted in the relationship between the twins, cleverly articulating both what they share and the deep differences between their characters. We hear from both of them, with their wildly differing perspectives on shared events providing clues to what has gone wrong - but will there be enough clues for even the most rational, the most calculating, student of risk and payoff to plot a way through the maze?

A really entertaining, fast-paced thriller that both contrasts with The Last Thing to Burn and confirms Dean's ability to hold his audience entranced. 

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

 

#Review - The Midnight Lock by Jeffery Deaver

The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme, 15)
Jeffery Deaver
HarperCollins, 25 November 2021
Available as: HB, 448pp, audio, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008303846

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Midnight Lock to consider for review.

I enjoy Deaver's novels so much, and especially his Lincoln Rhyme thrillers. It's something to do with the strong setting and the collegiality of Rhyme and his group of friends/ helpers, but it doesn't hurt that, as Deaver described at a recent online session to launch The Midnight Lock, the author knows he's competing for attention with social media, games, video  and countless other channels and he sets out to write books that grab the attention. 

And how. In this latest visit to Rhyme's New York townhouse forensics lab - we've been away for a couple of years following the doings of new Deaver protagonist Colter Shaw on the West Coast - there is, as always, plenty of action, but this time, behind it all, a distinct air of menace. Rhyme has learned he's being targeted by old adversary The Watchmaker; he's also fluffed a case, and a crime boss who's free as a result wants revenge for Rhyme's involvement (some people have no gratitude); 'Verum', an online purveyor of fake news and rabble-stirring conspiracy theory, highlights Rhyme's failure as the outworking of a vast conspiracy; and, perhaps most concerning of all, the Mayor and the City authorities have turned against Rhyme, forbidding any police officer to work with, or even speak to him (tricky as Rhyme's wife Amelia is a cop).

It's all getting very dark, and amidst this, in a first person narrative, we hear the mysterious stalker known as 'The Locksmith' lay plans and carry them out. This figure, who will be Rhyme's main opponent in The Midnight Lock, is a master of burglary, entering women's apartments at night and disarranging things just enough to alarm. In some truly tense scenes, we see the break-ins and observe the Locksmith move around as if at home, toying with thoughts of going further still, selecting knives, musing on even worse crimes. Deaver gives us the dry, technical background to all the lockpicking, with serves both to show the depth of the Locksmith's skill and knowledge and also to undermine any faith I had in the ability of locks to protect. 

Bolts, bolts are the thing, and don't trust electronics either.

As usual in these books, it's very much a game of cat and mouse - or several games, in fact; Rhyme can't of course let the fact that he's still looking into the case come out, and there are other forces at work too, with their own agendas, their own truths. The malleability of truth here is something of a theme, the story covering not only Verum's bizarre ravings but also the activities of a sleazy tabloid which monetises lies for the sake of sales, and a dubious streaming service one of whose content moderators seems rather casual to say the least.

Against this background, Rhyme's absolute faith in the truth as revealed by evidence (by which he means, scientific evidence, not testimony) is a rather helpful touchstone and pointed up something I should perhaps have spotted sooner, that Deaver is pitching Rhyme as a modern day Sherlock Holmes. Certainly the milieux of the two men are similar, solving crimes from their homes at the heart of the world-cities of their age, London and New York, but the focus in The Midnight Lock on samples of material from shoes to enable identification of movements put me in mind of Dr Joseph Bell, whose deductions Conan Doyle reflected in Holmes. More prosaically, I think, Rhyme has some of Holmes' crabbiness, his disdain for "unnecessary" information, even commonplace knowledge if it isn't related to crime or forensics (which gives a bit of comic relief here, akin to the judge who'd never heard of the Beatles). And the same sense of ennui when not actively engaged on a case.

I wouldn't take this parallel too far - Rhyme has married! - but the presence of The Watchmaker as a Nemesis does create another similarity. In this book, the first question to be determined is, of course, whether The Locksmith and The Watchmaker might be the same person, a possibility that adds to the sense of danger in the air, a sense that only builds as the unknown stalker becomes aware of Rhyme's interest and builds it into his plans...

As always with Deaver's books, The Midnight Lock is terrific, page-turning fun and I was pleased to re-acquaint myself with Rhymes after the break (although also glad to hear on that Zoom event that Shaw will also be back again).

Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Midnight Lock, see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - The Somebody People by Bob Proehl

Design by Julia Lloyd

The Somebody People (Resonant Duology, 2)
Bob Proehl
Titan Books, 13 July 2021
Available as: PB, 663pp, e, audio 
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN(PB): 9781789094633

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Somebody People via NetGalley.

The Somebody People picks up where The Nobody People, one of my favourite books of last year, paused. As Proehl notes in his acknowledgements, it is more like the second half of a story than a sequel and if you haven't read the first book yet there would be a lot of value in reading one immediately after the other as there are many linking storylines, key events and things whose significance evolves from one book to the next. I didn't do that of course, but I still found The Somebody People an exciting, satisfying and cathartic ending to the whole story.

The first book introduces the idea of "Resonants" - individuals with what we'd call superpowers. Their number has apparently been increasing through the second half of the 20th century and The Nobody People tells how they are eventually forced to go public provoking a storm of prejudice and, eventually, persecution.

That story was told partly through the eyes of Avi Hirsch, a journalist injured while embedded with the Army in Iraq, and we saw his increasing obsession with the Resonants alongside the slow collapse of his marriage to Kay. By the time The Somebody People opens, Hirsch is out of the picture but his daughter Emmeline features in the second book as do many of the characters from the first one. There are also some flashbacks to the earlier life of Kevin Bishop, the mysterious head of a school for Resonant kids in New York, including one that describes how it all started

Alongside the treatment of Resonants as a persecuted group, The Nobody People also pointed to a militant faction among them and this - and the reason behind it - features strongly in the present book, set a decade or so later following a Civil War in which the Resonants and in particular that Black Rose Faction gained the upper hand. There is an atmosphere of ethnic cleansing and segregation in the background of The Somebody People with battle lines drawn and the survivors of Bishop's circle seeking to defeat the evil that seems to be driving the Faction. The action to that end is complex, with multiple plot threads and various characters trying to cope, principally Fahima Deeb who's managing badly in the absence of ex-girlfriend Alyssa. Alyssa is a "baseliner" ie a "normal" person - referred to by the hardliners in the Black Rose Faction as "damps" - and had to leave New York during the "evacuations".

It's all fast moving and Proehl throws in concepts such as multiple timelines, extra-dimensional spaces and something very close to possession, to support or impede our heroes as they try to safeguard humanity and see off the Faction. There's a haunting sense of moral ambiguity (I love the smell of moral ambiguity in the morning...) as we know that the extremes seen here are in part a reaction to the persecution shown in The Nobody People. Characters here are damaged in various ways, physically and mentally, by what was done to them, or suffering from guilt at what they have done. There is a real sense in Proehl's writing that people make mistakes and do bad things for good reasons. There is also more than attach of PSTD in many of them. It all feels very real for a world with superpowered inhabitants - the stress is on the human dimension not the wondrous abilities - and there are very few characters I didn't have at least a sneaking sympathy for.

My favourites were possibly the gay couple Dom(inic) and Clay, Resonants with secure middle class jobs and an adopted boy at a prestigious school, who become concerned about what is happening around them and about his future and - rather than seeking sober advice - embark on what I feel are some spectacularly ill thought out plans, landing themselves in the centre of the action as a result. I enjoyed that despite it all, they seek to secure their relationship and protect their boy and that they are in a sense ordinary people who for most of the story are just trying to survive but who achieve some very brave things. Most of all, despite those dubious decisions, their hearts are always in the right place. 

But there are many others here worth a mention. Kimani, perhaps, whose special power is to be able to create a room, outside space, which she can make appear anywhere on Earth (oh please, I want that ability!) and who uses it to shelter Emmeline. There's something special about Emmeline, and one of the themes of this book is her discovering that for herself and trying to learn how she can avoid being used by others, inevitably bringing her into conflict with both "sides" here.

In short, The Somebody People is both a rattling good story in its own right and an excellent completion of The Nobody People, teasing out themes that were sketched there and creating a wholeness to the story that confirms it is, indeed, a unity. I would recommend.

For more information about The Somebody People, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Fortune favours the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

Fortune Favours the Dead (Pentecost & Parker, 1)

Stephen Spotswood
Wildfire (Headline), 12 November 2020 (HB), 22 July 2021(PB)
Available as: HB, 322pp, PB, 336pp, audio, e
Source: Advance reading copy
ISBN: 9781472274779 (HB), 9781472274816 (PB)

I'm grateful to Wildfire Books for an advance copy of Fortune Favours the Dead to consider for review.

If you're looking for your next detective series, and you want it to be smart, set in 1940s New York, to feature two women who'll take no nonsense from anyone and who are brilliantly realised and just, well, themselves - then this might be the book for you.

Fortune Favours the Dead introduces Lilian Pentecost, detective extraordinary and Willowjean Parker, her new protégé, lately of a travelling circus (where she picked up many useful skills including knife throwing, lock picking and escapology). Told in Will's voice, it ranges over three periods: the two women's first meeting late at night during the War, the notable case, a couple of years later, that is at the centre of the story, and a later perspective, the time from which Will is telling the story, allowing her to be somewhat self-critical, freighting the account with some hard-won knowledge about life, detective work and herself.

The setting Spotswood creates here is strong. Moving from the exciting world of the circus (Will acknowledges its drawbacks including both a gropy mentor and having to shovel out the tigers' cages) to Pentecost's HQ, a three storey townhouse with an archive, basement for combat practice, resident Scottish cook and a consulting room, taking in the world of the industrial elite and the clubs of queer New York where Will likes to spend her time, it has a great sense of place. The central mystery is fun - it involves both a locked room murder and a fashionable medium - but a Pentecost and Parker investigation will not allow itself to get distracted by flashy mechanics. The focus of the two women is very much on the "who" and the "why", with the "how" expected to follow so we don't get endless discussion of ingenious, but wrong, solutions to that puzzle. 

Pursuing that "who" and "why" is what leads Lilian and Will into moneyed society which - no surprise - proves to be afflicted with the same human problems as everyone else.

I really enjoyed seeing Ms Pentecost and Ms Parker set about their case here. They are very unlike physically - Lilian has MS, which tends to frustrate and then she suffers after pushing herself; Will is strong and somewhat overconfident - but Spotswood catches, or presents, the ways in which they spark off and complement each other, showing what dear friends they are without ever quite coming out and saying it. There's a vulnerability here, hinted at by others in the book, both women are outsiders in different ways and in New York the pendulum is swinging back again from a degree of tolerance required during the war to - something else. I felt both that Lilian's imposing headquarters was a refuge, ands that it was threatened. 

Overall, this book was great fun, showing how a humble "cirky girl" finds herself a new career, a home, even perhaps a family. The focus is on deepening relationships, rather than the details of crime, casting a bit of light on an era and place often seen through Hollywood and Broadway stereotypes. This will hopefully be the beginning of a fine series - I look forward to reading more!

For more details of Fortune Favours the Dead, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Secret Santa by Andrew Shaffer

Cover art by Adam Rabulais,
design by Ryan Hayes

Secret Santa
Andrew Shaffer
Quirk Books, 10 November 2020
Available as: PB, 210pp, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781683692058

I'm grateful to the publisher and in particular to Jamie and to Stephen for an advance copy of Secret Santa to consider for review.

In a fun, and seasonal, horror novel Shaffer peeks beneath the tinsel at a prestigious New Your publishing house to reveal the darkness within.

Lussi (pronounced, "Lucy") need to make a success of her new job at Blackwood-Patterson. Out of work for several months after her previous employer was swallowed up in a merger, when she gets a chance to pitch to the new boss at B-P for a job, she's not reticent ('all I do is shit best sellers'). But she's a genre editor - can she bring that success to a fusty literary publisher? And will her new colleagues let her try?

Given three weeks to try, it's time to raid the slush pile...

I love office based novels, and I love horror, so this was a perfect blend for me. I enjoyed seeing Lussi's attempts at fitting in and doing her job being frustrated by the stand-offishness at her new workplace, and then by a series of gruesome accidents. We've all that that moment (haven't we?) when we realise we weren't invited to a key meeting and wonder of it was on purpose. Or when we unintentionally press colleague's wrong button. Or HAVE OUR FOOD STOLEN FROM THE OFFICE FRIDGE. Shaffer deftly weaves such moments into a classic horror story, taking place, of course, close to Christmas. (Yes, I know it's Hallowe'en that is meant to be the season for horror but there's a reason for all those classic Christmas ghost stories...)

It's a book of contrasts - between friends and foes (but which is which?), the ordinary (mundane office life one moment, then a step into the spooky basement) and of course, in Lussi's increasingly desperate imagination, success and failure. Along the way, Shaffer has some fun with the publishing industry - I have a feeling some of the people described here may be closely based on real life. 

The story is very readable, and awash with a pleasing amount of mystery (who is being targeted, by what, and why - but even once you think you know the answers to these there are still secrets kept right to the end). Lussi is a smart and knowing protagonist - as a horror editor, she is well aware of this stuff, just not to meeting it in real life - but has to contend with a lot. It's not just the supernatural, there's the behaviour of her colleagues too, and indeed untangling the two is one of her most urgent problems, because even if she survives the monster, she's still got to rescue the company as well. Her new boss wants a bestseller and her wants it soon.

Overall a fun book which makes a nice counterpoint to the jollity of Christmas and strikes a good balance between out and out horror and office based humour. Secret Santa would make a good stocking filler for a horror fan, an office worker or anyone in publishing. (And because it's  all set in the 1980s, there is no home working, Zoom or social distancing).

For more information about Secret Santa see the Quirk website here.