Review - The Christmas Cracker Killer by Alexandra Benedict

The Christmas Cracker Killer

Alexandra Benedict
Simon & Schuster,  6 November 2026
Available as: HB, 304pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781398532212

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Christmas Cracker Killer to consider for review.

Christmas is all about tradition, and one of my favourite traditions is to read a puzzle thriller from Alexandra Benedict. Her latest, The Christmas Cracker Killer, is set in a remote (but luxury!) hotel on a Scottish island, where a bunch of guests are stranded over the festive season - with a killer among them.

The book features Edie O’Sullivan, crossword setter and amateur detective, her partner Riga, and her adopted grandson Sean, who we met in The Christmas Jigsaw Murders. This time they're off home turf as winners of coveted places at the launch of the Aster Castle Hotel. But someone, it seems, wants to launch a rather different enterprise - one involving murder and mayhem...

The Christmas Cracker Killer is a perfect slice of cosy Christmas crime, with a varied and suspicious cast of guests assembled to attract guilt (and death). Benedict conveys the different personalities of this crew brilliantly, wasting no time, as they arrive on the hotel's yacht, in sketching personalities and animosities, hinting at dark secrets, and giving fragments of history. We sympathise, for example, with Mara, the manager of the hotel, who's rather put-upon by her parents, the main investors; we boo at the unpleasant banker and the savage hotel reviewer; we note the tensions between some guests, and the hints of mystery attached to others.

Most of all, we thrill at the sections written from the killer's point of view (and reread them, looking for clues as to their identity).

Then, even before the first death, the puzzles erupt, with potential clues appearing in crackers as Benedict hints at who the killer will be, while scattering red herrings (literally - "swimming fish" play a big part here). She's also warned us that her own puzzles are contained in the text (some of them have answers at the end) underlying the main theme. 

The action proceeds at a good pace with crime story cliches both fulfilled and subverted (I loved the closing reveal of the killer's identity) and, suitably for Christmas, a hint of the ghost story.

Necessarily this book foregrounds the glitzy guests, the so carefully curated jolliness and the Christmas cheer laid on by the bucketful. (The descriptions of the food made me hungry!) But it also gives us the other side of things - the hard working staff attempting to deliver a luxury experience, even as things go badly, scarily wrong (it's good to see that hard work recognised). However, when all is said and done, it's down to Edie and Sean to solve the crime and stop the killer. Doing that requires a delve into the pasts of everyone on the island, as well as the killer's clues. But as Edie and Riga are among the guests, they may not be the impartial observers we expect - the killer may have business with them.

As well as enjoying Christmas crime, I also enjoy stories set in hotels slightly out of season (is that weird or just niche?) There's something about a hotel as backdrop that can be both familiar - hotels have lots of similarities - and strange - places that should be public, bustling, are a bit uncanny when mostly empty, I think? And once normality is shattered by a killing, everything is different. It can make for an atmospheric and chewy story and Benedict makes full use of that.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Christmas Cracker Killer, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil by VE Schwab

Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil 

VE Schwab
Pan Macmillan, 10 June 2025
Available as: HB, pp, PB, 544pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781035064649

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil to consider for review.

I don't think I can review Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil without dropping one potential spoiler - although it is a point I see mentioned in some of the author blurbs, so I think it's justified, if you want to go into this story in delightful ignorance of the central idea, stop reading now?

Still with me?

Well...

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is very much a vampire book. Across three timelines - one starting in 16th century Spain, the second in 19th century England and the third, present day Boston, MA, we see the workings of these ancient, corrupt creatures. It's actually often on familiar ground in its exploration of the idea, showing up the consequences for these long-lasting, but not immortal, monsters. The solitude. The loss of any possible human connection as mortals age and die. The need for secrecy. The ethical dilemma, when one's existence depends on taking human lives, and often. 

Where VE Schwab adds something of her own to the conceit is in her chosen monsters - or perhaps I should say victims. 

María is a peasant girl in medieval Spain. Blessed - or cursed - with good looks she seizes an opportunity to get out of grinding poverty and toil, but finds herself in an unfamiliar world without allies or friends. The life of a noblewoman is even more circumscribed than that of a poor girl. Can María repeat her trick and turn the table son the stuffy aristo who she's married?

Charlotte is a wealthy young woman in 19th century England. Like María, her only future seems to be a loveless marriage - until she meets a dazzling foreign contessa who awakes forbidden desire...

Finally, Alice, a young Scottish woman who's arrived to study at Harvard, has already made her move for escape, and has no wish to go any further, but she has little say in matters following a student party...

Each of these three stories is substantial and receives generous space in Schwab's novel, the book cutting back and forward. I don't always enjoy this device, the writer has to really know what they're doing but Schwab brings it off handsomely - with one "but...". This is the inevitable risk that any reader will enjoy one of the timelines more, or less, and resent some of the switches. For me, I found time spent with Alice a little frustrating. She wasn't a character I warmed to very quickly, and it didn't help that while the other two women's stories are more or less chronological, with Alice we get both her "now, in Boston" story and also callbacks to her previous life in her rural Scottish town and her difficult sister. The latter often interrupt the "now" timeline very abruptly and sometimes, very annoyingly. In particular I found Alice's sister, Catty, who these segments often dwell on, difficult.

Alice's dilemma in this book is - spoiler coming - that having been "turned" and (unlike the other two women) "turned" pretty much non consensually, she wants to work out what has happened to her and, if possible, get revenge. Alice is a new vampire, and that's a fairly simple motivation, unlike those of María and Charlotte, both of whom have spent long decades or even centuries becoming who they are. Alice's family history (fifteen years before, her mum died, her dad remarried, Alice is friendly with the new wife, Catty hates her and behaves in an increasingly bratty way) doesn't really affect that or bear on her current situation so these parts of the novel while I think insightful in terms of family dynamics, read as a distraction from the main story.

Which is a shame, because the main story is terrific! We see lots of gore. We see jealously. We see the tedium of a centuries-long existence. The loss of family and friends. The different vampires here cope with, or endure, this situation variously but with a consensus that there is a hollowing out process going on, robbing all, in the end, of their remaining humanity. (How to deal with that?)

Schwab also deftly portrays a rather vampire-specific, but immediately recognisable, strain of abuse and coercive control which, once you stop and think about it, absolutely fits with the situation. (Do bear this element of there story in mind if that's something that you might struggle with).

Above all this novel is superbly plotted, with the dance of her vampires across the centuries well choreographed to bring them together and ignite a final conflict with a few twists I absolutely hadn't anticipated. At the level of the writing itself, Schwab is always excellent of course and Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil is very, very readable.

So overall, I enjoyed Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil, and would recommend it, with the one caveat above.

For more information about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, see the publisher's website here.

Review - A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

A Granite Silence

Nina Allan
Riverrun, 10 April 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781529435573

I have to say, I paused over A Granite Silence because I thought at first that might be "true crime" and I have a bit of a dislike of that genre. But I love Nina Allan's books and trust her as an author so was curious to see what she had written.

And I am so glad I did that because this is a wonderful book, albeit, at times, a painful one to read. 

But first, about that genre label. Showing how false and misleading these things are, yes, this book is about a true crime - the murder of a young girl, Helen Priestly, in 1930s Aberdeen - but it is also a work of fiction, and many other things besides. Allan gives us a razor sharp analysis of the crime and its aftermaths - and its beforemaths too. But she also wraps that in fiction. The ideas roll around like quicksilver, the book imagining the lives of the various protagonists, often in quite tangential settings and circumstances and far from Aberdeen.  Often, the settings often turn out not to be so tangential at all. There are alternative timelines and lives here too, all of which enrich the central events, and even pieces of clear fiction which might stand as complete stories in themselves. 

In Allan's hands, Aberdeen becomes a nexus, a place haunted by emigrés, journalists drawn to the events portrayed here and by the author herself as she describes her investigation of the murder and the subsequent trial but also fills us in on the wider past, the city and the country. She shows that Aberdeen is a complex place which has actually had many pasts.  There are even some science-fictional elements in this mass of stories, hinting at other worldly goings on.

I felt that A Granite Silence has implicit, but real, connections with other of Allan's books,  particularly The Rift and The Race, both of which turned on disappearances and loss and both of which also touched on wider alternate realities. In A Granite Silence things are more realist, but the exploration, in the second half of the book, of the trial which followed young Helen's murder naturally engages the same sense of multiple realities - that's the point of a trial, surely, you tip out everything on the table and try to sort out all the possibilities?

The book also covers an extraordinary range of other subjects, ranging from a modernised version of Burn's Tam O'Shanter (a poem I studied for O level English literature - at last, I felt as I read this, that has come in useful!) to Harry Houdini's visit to Aberdeen to the development of forensic science to the sheer difficulty of finding what becomes of people, only a few decades back, when there is no Internet to force them to leave breadcrumb trails.

It's difficult to do justice in a short review to the sheer breadth of this book, to its empathy for the poor souls devastated by tragedy nearly a hundred years ago or to the pains Allan takes to show how the great web of connections, of society, while stretched and holed, reaches forward. Far from being preoccupied by a shocking crime, Allan uses her art to get beyond that granite silence, to hear the very stones ringing to vanished footsteps, to futures that never were. The various strangers who people her Aberdeen and then move on are like sonic waves, imaging what can't be seen in the murk of the North Sea waters.

A profound, moving and thought-provoking book, but also a joy to read.

For more information about A Granite Silence, see the author's website here. 

Blogtour review - The Weekenders by David F Ross

The Weekenders (Raskine House, 1) 
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN( PB): 9781916788305

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

It's always great to see a new book from David F Ross and it's even better that this is the first of a trilogy. 

The Weekenders introduces us to the mysterious, troubling country mansion mansion Raskine House. I think I see thematic connections between the troubling goings on there and those in Ross's Welcome to the Heady Heights which was, like this book, partly set in 1960s Glasgow. There are also some common characters. So while she doesn't appear I have hopes that in later parts we may meet Barbara Sherman again.

While The Weekenders mostly takes place in the later 1960s, it also looks back to the Second World War where a central relationship - between Jamesie Campbell, later a Glasgow trades unionist and politician, and Michael McTavish - is forged when they meet as soldiers in the nightmare of the Italian campaign. Nobody comes out well from that section of the narrative, neither Campbell nor McTavish, nor the sadistic officers who pretty much betray them. Rather, these events are a bitter prelude to the later story. The writing here makes no bones about what happened in the war: at times the book is a hard read.

Later we see what the two men have become, and what Glasgow has become, both being discovered by two outsider figures, Stevie 'Minto' Milloy and Donald 'Doodle' Malpass. Milloy is an ex-footballer, dropped from the game after a cruel injury and turned reporter, while Malpass is a courtroom sketch artist who sometimes assists the police. Several years apart, the two investigate the murders of young foreign students which seem to be connected to Raskine House and its rumoured weekend no-holds-barred parties. (one of the links I saw to 'Heady Heights'). 

As a background to that, Ross brings alive a raucous, surface-confident, but, I felt, also a hurting, city which both Milloy and Malpass are part of but are also distanced from. They have their roles, yes, but there is an Establishment, which they're not in. Both men live in a sense on sufferance from that, as does John Meikle, the veteran reporter who's Milloy's mentor. It's an Establishment that has grown fat and canny over the centuries, profiting first from enslavement and Empire, then from war, and more recently, from the ideological polarisation of the 20th century. Money and power before ideology or truth, and these puppet masters aren't going to let go a whit of its money or power.

There is another darkness here too associated with Raskine House itself - a darkness which the muck-and-brass merchants don't wholly comprehend. In this book, Glasgow is far from a safe place, whether you're a visiting student, police, nosy reporter or even one of those who think they pull the strings. Glasgow itself will, I think, have the last word here.

If all that sounds rather remote and grim, this book was, as are all of Ross's stories, also immensely entertaining, featuring rich and vivid characters who don't so much populate the page as march off it and sit down with you for a drink and a chat. Their voices sing in your head, their lives move and affect, their fates - some of them - sadden you as if they were old friends. Ross shows us real people showing how their desire simply to live and enjoy that living is baffled, diverted, sometimes blocked, but never - until the last breath - wholly defeated. (Ross's characters are all the more real for speaking in authentic language).

I am really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy!

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

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

#Blogtour #Review - The Legacy of Arniston House by T L Huchu

The Legacy of Arniston House (Edinburgh Nights, 4) 
T L Huchu
Tor (Pan Macmillan), 7 November 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097771

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of The Legacy of Arniston House to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I've been really enjoying Huchu's Edinburgh Nights series, of which The Legacy of Arniston House is book 4. The setting is a chastened Scotland, humbled in the aftermath of a "Catastrophe" and held down by a resurgent England. Its capital has complex politics, criminal networks, magic and, above all, the authentic texture of an alternate Edinburgh.

Huchu's main character, Ropa Moyo, is engaging and spiky, a marginalised figure (literally - she and her gran live squatters' lives in a caravan encampment on the edge of the city) who is trying to make her way in the world of Scottish magic whose leading lights, snooty and entitled as they are, don't want to be bothering with her. At the end of the previous book, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa seemed to have caught a break when she was hired by the English Sorcerer Royal. While I was concerned this might take her away from Edinburgh, I need not have worried: it seems that Lord Samarasinghe has ongoing business in the North. (That can't bode well, can it...?) Ropa is therefore still hanging round her old home town, albeit cut off from magical society, something that pains her more than she expected. She's even able to revive her old gig as a ghost talker, albeit not everything seems to be well in the spirit realms... there could be trouble ahead.

Huchu definitely ramps up the tension in this book. After a deceptively calm opening (if you've read the first few chapters you may say to yourself "David's talking nonsense again" because they don't seem that calm, but JUST YOU WAIT, IT'S ALL RELATIVE) mayhem of all sorts erupts with rioting, mischief and Ropa being hunted by both magicians and Police. She's framed for a heinous crime and  the whole world she was used tseems about to be torn apart. All this leads up to a fast-moving conclusion in which we learn more both about Ropa's past and about recent Scottish history - and are then left, literally, on a cliffhanger. 

Or perhaps, over one.

Compared with the first three books, which were more self-contained, The Legacy of Arniston House represents a clear change of gear and of focus. There is, as in each of the others, a self-contained mystery and an injustice to be solved and righted (you might think, actually, several). But there is also a much more intricate and visible connection to the plot that's been glimpsable in the background, with certain puzzles finally closed from those earlier stories. At the same time, the implications of Ropa's own history and background are made plain for the first time.

A fun return to what is shaping up to be one of the most interesting and readable series of the past few years. I'll wait for the next book with a great deal of anticipation.

For more information about The Legacy of Arniston House, see the publisher's website here. 

You can buy The Legacy of Arniston House from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Review - The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre

The Cracked Mirror

Chris Brookmyre
Abacus, 18 July 2024
Available as: HB, 497, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780349145792  

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Cracked Mirror to consider for review.

The Cracked Mirror is a story with many layers. As described in the blurb, it unites a tough LA detective, Johnny Hawke,  with a seemingly genteel Scottish spinster, Penny Coyne (yes, I know!) a librarian who solves crime in her quaint village. Penny would never break a rule (she know the sorts of consequences that can follow) but she does have some surprises for Hawke (who is of course, Mr Rule Breaker, always at odds with his own boss, and with a string of dead partners behind him).

Each is presented in their own segment, which has its distinct title ("The Cracked Mirror" being one). Hawke is working on a high-stakes murder at a Hollywood film studio, but is about to be suspended and thrown off the case when strings are pulled by those with, well, pull. Coyne investigates a death at a local church, which she solves before moving on to a Society wedding - to which she's been invited, but doesn't know why. Indeed, this isn't the only instance of Penny's memory proving unreliable - an experience shared by Hawke, planting seeds of there being something unsettling going on even before the two, improbably, meet in one story.

Which is where things go REALLY weird. What has so far read as basically a pastiche of two different crime genres, if an entertaining one, then pivots to become something all its own. It isn't an oddball crime story in which the two mismatched detectives have to work together and earn each others' respect. Or rather, it is, it can't avoid being that, but that's almost incidental, it provides some fun but it's not the point. Unfortunately I can't say what the point is without being spoiler, so you'll just have to take it from me, Brookmyre is on top form here and if you think the story as presented is fiendish, well, you've seen nothing yet. This book simply bowled me over.

It wasn't just the way that Brookmyre maintains the structure of the two, very different, narratives - using it to show events from two quite distinct perspectives - while fusing the whole thing into a powerful, engaging and much more distinct unity. Yes, there are cracks here which we will eventually understand once we know what's going on, but those cracks also make sense in terms of the frames of reference of Penny and Johnny. Unlikely events which befall our hapless protagonists do have their own logic, but as they happen, the vividness of Brookmyre's writing sweeps the reader up so were less concerned with the why, as with the "how do they get out of this?"

No, it wasn't just that. I found these characters growing on me. The more I learned about who they were, the more heart I saw this novel had. Behind the different brands of detective genius which the two display (with Penny, especially, showing great ingenuity even though apparently out of her comfort zone in the LA sunshine) there's a real sense of loss, of burned bridges and deep hurt, which drives them to behave as they do (whether to step over the line, or treat it as a religion) and which makes them, in combination, a formidable force.

Come for the high concept, stay for the vivid, relatable characters and their strange world.

Overall, a fun and rather tricksy novel that kept me guessing although - when I went back and thought about it - Brookmyre played a straight bat and left enough hints to work out what is happening. Also, a book that plays some wonderful games with genre conventions and the reader's expectations.

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

#Review - The Days of Our Birth by Charlie Laidlaw

The Days of Our Birth

Charlie Laidlaw
Rampart Books, 27 June 2024
Available as: e   
Source: Advance copy
ASIN: B0D3B87HHD

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of The Days of Our Birth to consider for review.

The Days of Our Birth follows the lives of Sarah and Peter, born on the same day and who live next door to one another as kids in the coastal town of North Berwick, a few miles from Edinburgh. Birthdays are key moments in this book as the two move towards adulthood, growing into a joint tradition for the two, into joint celebrations.

Until they're not...

We meet Sarah first, 20 years on, working in an office job in London - and separate from Pete. We then gradually learn the how and the why of that separation, returning to their sixth birthday where the story proper begins then moving forward as the two kids grow up. It's in many ways an ordinary story, leading us through school, family tensions, adolescence and loss. But in many ways it's not "ordinary" at all - what does that even mean when we are all so different? - and Laidlaw captures well, I think, that awkward fence-sitting we all do as we process where we - and our friends - fit in. 

Or don't. 

This is encapsulated by the difference between Peter and Sarah, and the nature of Sarah herself. She doesn't fit in easily with other kids - 'psycho Sarah' they call her at school. Nor is she comfortable in her office job, or perhaps, no, she is comfortable but others aren't comfortable with her. It takes her deliberate effort to understand what others pick up unconsciously. Sarah tends to take things literally. She is, people increasingly decide, on a spectrum, of some kind. Yet to Pete, Sarah is just, well, Sarah.

As the parent of two children diagnosed with special needs, I felt that Laidlaw's portrayal of Sarah was sensitive, nuanced and, above all, rounded. That's partly achieved by the way this book is constructed - showing both kids developing, but doing it from different perspectives, both Peter's and Sarah's, sometimes exploring the same incident immediately from both points of view, sometimes allowing one or the other to comment on it later in light of experience, of adulthood, and of their later understanding. The book takes time to explore the messy reality of human beings, showing what led to the two being the people they are and sometimes, using that adult perspective, what was going that we weren't told about first time round. Thus it can catch the reader out in making assumptions which are later corrected.

This is, indeed, a book that challenges assumptions and shows that, regardless of what boxes we're told we tick, each and every one of us is a unique, complex individual. Peter and Sarah make many mistakes in the course of their fascinating relationship - as do those around them - but it's only when losing sight of this truth that things really go wrong for either of them. Lose sight of it they do from time to time, though, and it's a mark I think of how real Laidlaw has made these characters that when we see that happening it actually hurts, these are people you want to prosper emotionally - but in a harsh world with lots of other noise and so much to learn, is it realistic to believe that may ever be possible?

A super, stunning book from Charlie Laidlaw.

For more information about The Days of Our Birth, see the author's website here and the publisher here. You can purchase it from Amazon here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Collapsing Wave by Doug Johnstone

The Collapsing Wave (The Enceladons Trilogy, 2)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 14 March 2024
Available as: PB, 257, e, audio   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB):  9781916788053

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

The Collapsing Wave is the sequel to The Space Between Us - the title comes from the quantum mechanical notion of wavefunction collapse, when an observation resolves an experiment into a known state, but it also cleverly alludes to events in the story. It picks up events six months after the end of the previous book, which was hopeful, if ambiguous, but now everything seems to have gone to s***. Ava, who escaped from her controlling, abusive husband, is now on trial for his murder and has been separated from her newborn daughter, Chloe. Lennox and Heather, who also bonded with the alien they called sandy, have been kidnapped and are being held in what I will emphatically state are illegal circumstances at a secret US facility on Loch Broom, where the Enceladons (Sandy's people, refugees from the moon Enceladus) are being studied (read: tortured).

The first half of the story is therefore pretty rage-inducing with the wicked and the venal going about their business pretty much unmolested. It didn't do my blood pressure much good, I can tell you, and I would love to have a few minutes in private with Turner, Gibson or Carson: cowards and bullies all. In contrast, as ever, our heroes are somewhat conflicted, unsure of their best course of action, and hampered by little things like moral scruples, empathy and guilt. ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity").

In a sense it doesn't help that the gifts the Enceladons bring are all about empathy, and sympathy, about a way of being and living that challenges the cult of individuality. They therefore represent a threat, whether the humans know it or not, that is more fundamental and insidious than the "invasion of the little green men form Mars" trope. The example of a better way of being implicitly judges Earth's ways, and shows the current greed-driven model of society, growth and progress to be wanting. In this respect, I find Johnstone's story to be rather like a reverse Gulliver's Travels - just as Jonathan Swift pitilessly highlighted the faults and failings of his own society by taking a specimen of that society and comparing him with various idealised nations, so Johnstone brings a benign, cooperative creature to, ultimately, shame us and our doings.

It won't end well. It can't end well. Our heroes are imprisoned, dark deeds are afoot and the resistance, if I can use that term, painfully weak and fragmented. (One of Johnstone's themes is how supposedly democratic social media simply floods the channels with a deluge of lies, confusion and conspiracy theories, swamping the truth. There is some interest in what's going on in that secret base, with a peace camp of sorts outside, but I can't help feeling that in the high days of activism there'd have been telephone trees and samizdat-style newsletters getting the word out, and successful raise on the base to challenge the authorities). 

But.

BUT.

The dark powers we see don't, can't, possibly imagine the strength of an alternative social model. Imposing pathetic labels on things they don't understand (they call the sea creatures from Enceladus "illegals") they fail to understand what they are dealing with, leaving some, slight, margin for a ragtag group of the wise and the just to succeed. Maybe. If the first half of the book was enraging, the second is really, really nail-biting  and I will say NOTHING about what goes on here and what might happen in the next book.

I should assure you that The Collapsing Wave isn't just a moral fable, though it is a powerful one. It's a novel of characters too, with each member of the little group an individual who has lived a lifetime and has the knocks to show for it. Even Lennox, who is "only", 16 has been through stuff. You can read this book for the protagonists alone who are, every one, fascinating, quirky, real and loveable.

All in all, a superlative novel with great moral force, an urgent book, I think, in view of world polictis and the state of the planet. A cosmic, world-shaking novel form Johnstone, one I'd strongly recommend.

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

You can buy The Collapsing Wave from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by TL Huchu

The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (Edinburgh Nights, 3)

TL Huchu
Pan Macmillan, 27 July 2023 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529097726 

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance e-copy of The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle to consider for review.

In this, the third book of the Edinburgh Nights series... Edinburgh doesn't feature! Rather, ghostalker Ropa Moyo and her friends and enemies are attending a magical conference at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye. The duties are irksome, and Ropa's still not actually being paid for her work (she's an intern) but she plots a bit of casual larceny to help support her, her grandmother and her sister. 

Before Ropa can carry that out, however, everything goes wrong. Despite the presence of some seriously powerful and significant guests in the magical world - England's Magician Royal makes an appearance, allowing Ropa to explain a lot that was previously hinted at about the position of Scotland and its magicians in relation to a revanchist England - a serious crime is committed (no, not by Ropa) leaving her with limited time to sort things out before her world, and that of her boss, Sir Callander, implodes.

I enjoyed this change of scene for Ropa. While she has allies at Dunvegan - especially Priya - she's away from her home turf and has fewer resources to draw on, especially as she is, more than ever, under the eye of the snobbish, entitled masters of Scottish magic. That means she has to be even more ingenious than usual - as we know, Ropa is a formidable person and no respecter of the puffed up and self-important. She doesn't care what feathers she ruffles, and it's magnificent to see her cut a swathe through her lords and masters and right a few wrongs as she does.

The mystery here is also intriguing and apt to be solved through a close understanding of Scottish magical society, the sort of understanding that Ropa has had to develop to ensure her own survival. So her commentary on events and persons has a sort of subtext, paving the way for an eventual solution.

Behind that, though, I had a sense that things are getting more serious in Huchu's magical world. There is a big postcolonial theme in this story, with a stolen artefact from abroad at the centre of things and unhealed wounds from the past a main issue. That arises in a number of ways: the treatment of non-Western societies, but also the basis and roots of Scottish magic. We now learn this is grounded in the dispossession and even imprisonment of the Fae of Skye, those who came before, making the whole enterprise essentially a colonial one. There seems to be a historic injustice there which Ropa won't tolerate for long, but what can she do about it?

The bargain that Ropa has made with the principalities and powers of Edinburgh magic is already strained - their fault not hers, she's only trying to do her job and investigate what's gone wrong - but that cuts little ice. It was always an unstable situation and now seems to be coming apart with loyalties tested and Ropa's future in doubt. If that wasn't enough, alongside the plentiful action there's a bubbling drama that will surely eventually come to the foreground of these books concerning Ropa's history, her future and the survival of magical society. 

Huchu is definitely shaking things up - this series shows no sign of bedding down and becoming formulaic, and I'm on tenterhooks for what will come next.

For more information about The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, see the publisher's website here.  

#Review - Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken MacLeod

Beyond the Reach of Earth (Lightspeed Trilogy, 2)

Ken MacLeod

Pyr, 18 July 2023

Available as: PB, 328pp, audio, e

Source: Advance copy (UK edition)

ISBN(PB): 9781645060659

Warning - there are spoilers here for Book 1 in this trilogy, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, which I'd strongly advise you to read first. (If you haven't read it, or are hazy about the details, there is a helpful precis in Book 2, but the first book is so much fun, you really ought to read it).

In a clever sequel to Beyond the Hallowed Sky, MacLeod returns to his near future world (the book is largely set in the 2070s) dominated by three blocs - the Alliance (Anglosphere including rump UK), the Union (ex EU, including Scotland) and the Co-ord (Russia and China). The Union is particularly interesting, embodying a post-Revolution society and therefore viewed with especial suspicion by the other two (this is hilariously illustrated in some spoof tabloid headlines that crop up towards the end of the book).

MacLeod is very good, as we've seen in other books, at plausible just-over-the-horizon politics and societal development - indeed his portrayal of societies and their relationship with their citizens is one of the things I always look forward to. As a subject it's as fascinating and important as the future tech in these books. Or perhaps I should say that unlike many SF writers he appreciates the interplay between both: the societies influenced by the tech, the path of the tech driven by the science, and all deeply enmeshed with strong, relatable characters who just belong in their background. 

Above and beyond that, this book has a deeply satisfying, ramified plot involving espionage, slightly scary AI (I really want to know more about Iskander, the universal intercase to the Union's predictive/ assistive AI which attempts to preempt the needs of its citizens - but also, it's hinted, serves other goals besides) and a more than slightly scary robot. For me, all that made Beyond the Reach of Earth very enjoyable to read.

A spirited rendition of The Internationale didn't go amiss either, performed here when some Union settlers arrive on the newly discovered planet Apis, albeit escorted by the perfidious Alliance English who have shuttled them there for obscure reasons in their FTL spacecraft. And indeed the settlers bring their own distinct approach to Apis, refusing to fall into the "homesteader" mode urged by their hosts. Politics are never far beneath the surface here, whether the politics of superpower deterrence, threatened by the discovery of FTL travel and restored by the strangest of means, politics between the constituent entities of the "economic democracy", the Union, which come into play when the state gets its own FTL craft though the ingenuity of a small shipbuilding firm and a causal loop, or the attempts by the various powers to deal with the enigmatic Fermi, aliens of unimaginable power who occupy outcrops of rock on Earth, Venus... and Apis.

And if aliens incarnated in rocks shaping the future of humanity sounds familiar to you, it's an idea that MacLeod himself has fun with, some of his characters spotting the parallel to a certain bestselling SF series of the late 20th century. (This being Book 2 of 3 we don't get to find out how close a parallel that will turn out being).

In summary, this is smart, well-written SF, great fun to read and every bit as good as Beyond the Hallowed Sky. It's a middle volume of a trilogy that builds on the first, rather than just marking time waiting for the conclusion - which nevertheless I'm really looking forward to. I'd recommend.

You can purchase Beyond the Reach of Earth from Amazon here.

#Review - Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken MacLeod

Beyond the Reach of Earth (Lightspeed Trilogy, Two)

Ken MacLeod

Orbit, 23 March 2023

Available as: PB, 368pp, audio, e

Source: Advance copy

ISBN(PB): 9780356514802

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance e-copy of Beyond the Reach of Earth via Netgalley to consider for review.

Warning - there are spoilers here for Book 1 in this trilogy, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, which I'd strongly advise you to read first. (If you haven't read it, or are hazy about the details, there is a helpful precis in Book 2, but the first book is so much fun, you really ought to read it).

In a clever sequel to Beyond the Hallowed Sky, MacLeod returns to his near future world (the book is largely set in the 2070s) dominated by three blocs - the Alliance (Anglosphere including rump UK), the Union (ex EU, including Scotland) and the Co-ord (Russia and China). The Union is particularly interesting, embodying a post-Revolution society and therefore viewed with especial suspicion by the other two (this is hilariously illustrated in some spoof tabloid headlines that crop up towards the end of the book).

MacLeod is very good, as we've seen in other books, at plausible just-over-the-horizon politics and societal development - indeed his portrayal of societies and their relationship with their citizens is one of the things I always look forward to. As a subject it's as fascinating and important as the future tech in these books. Or perhaps I should say that unlike many SF writers he appreciates the interplay between both: the societies influenced by the tech, the path of the tech driven by the science, and all deeply enmeshed with strong, relatable characters who just belong in their background. 

Above and beyond that, this book has a deeply satisfying, ramified plot involving espionage, slightly scary AI (I really want to know more about Iskander, the universal intercase to the Union's predictive/ assistive AI which attempts to preempt the needs of its citizens - but also, it's hinted, serves other goals besides) and a more than slightly scary robot. For me, all that made Beyond the Reach of Earth very enjoyable to read.

A spirited rendition of The Internationale didn't go amiss either, performed here when some Union settlers arrive on the newly discovered planet Apis, albeit escorted by the perfidious Alliance English who have shuttled them there for obscure reasons in their FTL spacecraft. And indeed the settlers bring their own distinct approach to Apis, refusing to fall into the "homesteader" mode urged by their hosts. Politics are never far beneath the surface here, whether the politics of superpower deterrence, threatened by the discovery of FTL travel and restored by the strangest of means, politics between the constituent entities of the "economic democracy", the Union, which come into play when the state gets its own FTL craft though the ingenuity of a small shipbuilding firm and a causal loop, or the attempts by the various powers to deal with the enigmatic Fermi, aliens of unimaginable power who occupy outcrops of rock on Earth, Venus... and Apis.

And if aliens incarnated in rocks shaping the future of humanity sounds familiar to you, it's an idea that MacLeod himself has fun with, some of his characters spotting the parallel to a certain bestselling SF series of the late 20th century. (This being Book 2 of 3 we don't get to find out how close a parallel that will turn out being).

In summary, this is smart, well-written SF, great fun to read and every bit as good as Beyond the Hallowed Sky. It's a middle volume of a trilogy that builds on the first, rather than just marking time waiting for the conclusion - which nevertheless I'm really looking forward to. I'd recommend.

For more information about Beyond the Reach of Earth, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Space Between Us by Doug Johnstone

The Space Between Us
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 2 March 2023
Available as: PB, 276pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585449

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for an advance copy of The Space Between Us to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

In his new novel Doug Johnstone - whose most recent works include the Skelfs detective series set at an Edinburgh undertaker's - really doesn't hang about, plunging us right into a fantastical plot with three varied and intriguing protagonists. Told in short chapters with dramatic changes of view, we quickly learn who is who.

Lennox is a lonely teenager living in a children's home. 

Ava is pregnant and trying to escape her coercive, in fact outright abusive, husband. 

Heather has lost her daughter and her husband, she has cancer and, when we first see her, is trying to end her own life.

All are about to have their destinies and lives changed when they encounter first, a strange light in the sky which leaves them hospitalised then miraculously healed, and secondly, a peculiar octopus-like creature washed up on the Edinburgh shoreline and affectionately named Sandy by the three.

In chapters told from their alternate perspectives, and those of a couple of other characters who are drawn in, we follow events during a frantic road trip across Scotland with several different but equally sinister authorities intent on capturing Sandy (I have tagged this review "Men in black") and a furious husband chasing down Ava.  (An interesting juxtaposition). The different viewpoints make for a clever technique - Ava, Lennox and Heather have a lot to come to terms with, both their own variously troubled lives and Sandy's unique nature. Their developing relationships with each other complicate this, and plot shock about. Johnstone's approach allows him, though all this, to both reveal and, at  times, to conceal, just what is happening, allowing the author sometimes to not describe things from the perspective of whoever has the clearest view, preserving ambiguity and building tension.

That ambiguity is at the heart of the story - we know how the scared authorities will react to Sandy, we know that Ava's husband has no good intentions for her, but what we don't know is how the gang will ultimately process what's going, how they will assimilate the incredible moral challenge presented by Sandy's existence and his need. Nor how those on whom whey will depend for help will react.

It all comes down to empathy, to the balance between their fears for their own future and their capacity for love, their ability to go on hoping. 

I don't want to over intellectualise this or make it sound over solemn, because its not. It's the very opposite. The Space Between Us is a thriller about human (and non human) nature, but it's a fun read, morally clear in that you can happily hiss at a couple of the characters and root for the others, (even if at times they do play fast and loose with legal niceties). As a science fiction adventure (that's not really a spoiler) the setup is by no means original - I could draw parallels with at least one well known film and a couple of other recent novels - but Johnstone brings to it his ability to create fresh and lively characters who quickly become very real to his readers. They are people you feel for - full of complexities and quirks and above all very very human. 

Additionally, the Scottish setting gives the whole thing an air of familiarity and localness which makes it all seem very plausible. And who doesn't love a good road trip?

In summary, The Space Between Us is a fresh and enjoyable story which explores some fundamental themes about what it is to be connected - or not. Tears may well have been shed over it... definitely recommended!

For more information about The Space Between Us, see the Orenda Books website here, and also the other steps on the tour, listed in the poster below.

You can buy The Space Between Us from your local bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, WH Smith, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Dead Water by C A Fletcher

Dead Water
C A Fletcher
Orbit, 21 July 2022
Cover design by kid-ethic
Available as: HB, 501pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy provided by Orbit
ISBN(HB): 9780356513836

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of Dead Water to consider for review.

Dead Water is an experience of a book, a whole body, heart-thumping, grabs-you-and-makes-you-finish-it story. It kept me riveted and sitting up reading on the hottest night of the year (only slightly because it took me to a seaswept, rain drenched location much more attractive than the stifling heat of global warming hit Oxfordshire).

It's not, though, a book that grabs with immediate action. Rather, the first half is slow and studied (and the better for it) introducing us to a cast of characters on a Scottish island (and to some visitors and incomers arriving on the ferry). A young woman who flirts with danger, freediving alone every morning because it's the only thing she can embrace in life after a series of tragedies. An elderly dog-walker who just happens to be there each day with his binoculars when Sig changes out of her wetsuit. Matt, a young fisherman, with whom Sig has history. A family arriving on the ferry to make a new life on the island - with tensions between stepmum and stepson marked. A shady character, travelling to the island for some purpose that requires him not to register in memory or CCTV gaze. And so on.

We learn about all these people and more, picking up the tensions, the histories, the hopes, the hates, that blossom and fester in any small community, and especially in a fairly isolated one. Among and behind this is a degree of foreshadowing: that ferry is described as an unlucky ship, there are near-accidents, talk of omens, unchancy happenings, and coincidences. It's less that these are things that happen to people, but markers for a world, or a worldview, which accommodates the less than rational (or the more than rational?) They are signposts, showing us that Sig's fiercely scientific outlook, acquired after a horrific loss, is set to be challenged.

A pair of ravens patrol the island, and a woman who may have the Sight wakes uneasy. Those themes bleed into a separate story told between the parts of the main one, the story of a young warrior, far from home, who trespasses against ancient custom and suffers a retribution. His connection to the island story slowly becomes clear and if you want to know a little more about what's going on, without too many spoilers, you might read those sections together as one. Quite aside from his part though in the wider tale he, also, contributes to the atmosphere of weirdness, representing a different, a more believing, even spiritual side of things than the mundane concerns of the islanders (fish catch, the spotty phone coverage, romantic entanglements). 

There are then plenty of hints and scene setting to warn that something very strange will happen to those well-realised and fully three dimensional characters, and while some readers may think that makes it go too slowly and want the action to hurry up, I'd argue rather that the buildup gives us just what we need - a clear picture of the protagonists, hopes and fears for some (and in particular their dogs! I always worry when an author brings dogs into a story and Fletcher has form here) and a distrust of others. We get a sense of how they will behave, see how high the stakes might be, and then begin to follow the chain of events that will lead to... 

Well, that'd be telling. It is a culmination fully worth waiting for and one which shouldn't be spoilers, pitting a small group of islanders against an implacable, because entitled and self-assured, enemy that they are ill-suited to defeat. Especially because of animosities, mistrusts and, well, just history stuff, which have been sketched earlier. But, Fletcher hasn't told us everything about everyone, nor have they all been completely honest with themselves. It takes the strain of extreme peril to surface some things that would otherwise have stayed submerged - and to make unlikely heroes. Once this begins to come together you'll know that you just have to go on reading, the writing becoming more and more arresting: the wild storm, the isolation and the lurking evil out there in the dark more and more impossible to resist. (A great book for a sweltering night, in fact!)

So I'd recommend, but do be aware the story doesn't start off with a bang. 

It's better than that.

For more information about Dead Water, 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.

#Review - The Good Neighbours by Nina Allan

The Good Neighbours

Nina Allan
Riverrun, 10 June 2021
Available as: HB, 293pp, e, audio
Source: ARC kindly provided by the publisher
ISBN: 9781529405170

I'm really grateful to Ana McLaughlin at Riverrun for an advance copy of The Good Neighbours to consider for review. Nina Allan's books are among my favourite reads of recent years so I was VERY excited to that The Good Neighbours was coming - and indeed, it's classic Allan, an apparently simply story but which proves to have many depths and currents to it.

We first meet Cath, whose story this (mainly) is, getting ready, with her friend Shirley Craigie, for a Saturday trip to the Big Town. Shirley's doing her makeup, Cath, less daring, just her nails. There's a warm teenage friendship between the two young women which comes over strongly in this first scene and to which Allan returns again and again. The detail is goods: as the two leave they hear Shirley's mum Susan singing 'like Lizzie Dreams on Playdays' and this moves on to a memory of her (jealous, overprotective?) dad, John.

Cath and Shirley live on an island, not hopelessly remote but a ferry ride away from the mainland, and then a bus trip into town, which as it happens is Glasgow. That gives the day a bit of a frisson - if you miss the ferry, you're stranded - as does the girls' sneaking into a bar for vodka and Shirley's nicking a camisole from a shop. Looming behind that, though, is John's attitude of control and general disapproval. (Cath's parents don't like her spending time at Shirley's house).

Fast forward a few years and Cath is working in a Glasgow record shop and trying to establish herself as a photographer. She's in a dead-end affair with a married man, and Shirley is nowhere on the scene. Cath is working on a photograph project to document "murder houses" - places where killings have taken place. We see her examine a house in Glasgow, delving into the case - the victim and her background, and the presumed murderer. Then she decides to return to the island - where the house she's interested in is that one we saw at start of the book, Shirley's, house, where she, her mother, and her little brother were murdered by John Craigie.

I loved the way that, in this story, Allan shows us Cath essentially being stuck. What happened back on the island derailed her life, turning her from a straightford path - school high flier, good university, good job - to... something else. The delicacy of the way Allan does this is impossible to explain without oversimplifying. It's not "my childhood friend was murdered and I never came to terms with that" (though that is true). It's more about understanding, knowing, seeing. Part of that is learning what actually happened to Shirley and her family - there is an official account but it doesn't satisfy Cath - but part is also about appreciating her, Caths's, own place in everything. Was what happened, at some level, her fault? Cath decides to find out - not only by viewing the house where everything happened (now owned by Alice, a financial analyst seeking refuge from London) but also by looking into the background (which proves surprisingly shifty).

That makes the story sound like a crime novel and if you want to see it that way, it is a fine crime novel. But there is much more to it. Allan's novels often come with hidden wiring - they may allude to nested fictional worlds either overtly (such as through stories-within-stories) or implicitly through themes of craft or artistic accomplishment, skills which create their own worlds or make gateways to others. The Good Neighbours is apparently more straightforward but it still has at its centre a whiff of strangeness. 

There is a man - Craigie - who cannot read, but seems to have had a rare talent for working in wood ('wood was warmer than stone and wood was kind') and who has encoded his life in some sense in a doll's house (but the dolls themselves are missing). Similarly, Alice has formidable talent for maths - her breakdown is connected with her (mis?)using this in finance. Dovetailing with that are speculations about "many worlds" quantum mechanics and its possible links to fairy, supported by the parallel careers of (real) Victorian painter Richard Dadd and (fictitious) linguist and mathematician Mabel Konig, both of who returned from trips to the Near East with changed perspectives on art, nature and reality. 

All of this creates a sense of something strange which remains tantalisingly close, yet impossible to grasp. So, again, you could focus on those aspects of the novel and see it as fantasy/ SF. But while that background, and the theme of the "Good Neighbours" themselves, in folklore, in Craigie's early life and in Alice's family stories, are always present here, like a river flowing nearby - stop and listen for a moment and you can hear it running - they are not "all" the story. In reality I think this book is a wonderful dance of all those themes, and more, for example Craigie's violence and controlling behaviour (both their origins and the failure of an apparently close-knit community - in fact, more than one - to confront that). This in turn has echoes I think in Alice's relationship with her partner, something we only see in glimpses.

There are some secrets here, which emerge in their own good time, so, yes, in some sense what actually happened is clear by the time the book closes, but the joy of this chewy, intricately textured novel is the journey to that point, rather than any satisfaction at having a mystery solved. It is a book to be read slowly and savoured and indeed, re-read. I would strongly recommend and I think (while it is still early days!) this will be one of my favourites of 2021.

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

 

#Review - Hyde by Craig Russell

Hyde
Craig Russell
Constable, 29 April 2021
Available as: HB, 400pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-ccopy
ISBN: 9781472128393

I am grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

In Victorian Edinburgh, Detective Superintendant Edward Hyde is uneasy. In one case of frightful murder, leading to a hanging, he worries that the police have got the wrong man. In another, he finds himself conveniently close to the victim, but can't remember how he came to be there. And there are nagging requests from Special Branch in London to investigate a rising nationalist politician.

And Hyde's sessions with Dr Porteous, who he relies on to cure the memory loss and associated troubling dreams, are not helping at all...

Russell's speculative detective novel, loosely framed around Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (there is a prologue in which Hyde tells Stevenson his story as inspiration to the latter) is a heady blend of many elements. 

There is the brooding, unrestful Hyde, half convinced that he is a monster - people tend to draw away from him, as though sensing something troubling about him. Hyde is I think suffering (alongside the epilepsy that Porteous diagnoses) from PTSD, after serving in the army in the East. Russell makes a point not only of the awful things that Hyde has witnessed and indeed taken part in, but also of the taint, the fundamental badness, of the campaign that Hyde took part in, devoted to theft and looting ('cruelties performed under a sun-blazed sky in the name of Empire'). Fragemented personalities recur ('he had been a different man, back then).

This links in turn to political turmoil, as Scots radicals seek to free themselves from what they see as English domination and from being associated with that same infection of Empire. This is an interesting connection to make, the focus on colonialism and its relation to English and Scottish history and society being a truly hot topic in today's politics and one capable of provoking strong emotions (see the UK Government's defensiveness over challenges to the interpretation of colonial-era figures and artifacts).

Underlying this is a third layer - a preoccupation both with the Celtic supernatural, as both occultists and mountebanks move in various secret circles overlapping both with nationalist politics and with the apparently staid Establishment. That preoccupation bleeds into national myth-making about the origins of the Scots and their real destiny. And alongside all this, Russell also reflects the place of gay men in society, and the constraints under which women exist. We meet Elspeth Lockwood, heiress to one of Edinburgh's great department stores, a woman who very much wants to go her own way, and I really liked Dr Cally Burr, who performs many of the autopsies for Hyde; as a female doctor, she's treated with a great deal of suspicion and is short of work (we see her being helped out by the famous Dr Joseph Bell, mentor to Arthur Conan-Doyle who is mentioned but does not appear in the story). Burr is smart and resourceful, practical where Hyde seems likely to wilt under the various stresses that he suffers, and certainly the kind of person you want beside you in a creepy Gothic house at night.

Because this book is Gothic, whatever else it may be. There is an isolated mansion of bad reputation, whispers of supernatural beasts, devils and ancient gods and of secret sects and guilds behind the bland face of respectable Edinburgh ('fine Presbyterians of good birth and standing leading double lives') as well as secret tunnels beneath it, at least some of which are certainly real. There's a danger, I thinks in overdoing the Gothic, but for my money, Russell gets it just about right: enough, combined with the theme of madness and loss of identity and control, to darken the atmosphere (alongside the various horrific murders) but not enough that solid, systematic police work becomes self-evidently pointless. Truly, Edward Hyde lives in more than one world at one, but he is sufficiently rooted in the "real" one, enough of a respected, credible figure that he makes progress, gets things done (aided by Burr's shrewd insights).

The book is also grounded in the medical science of the time (even if it looks primitive to us) and it is convincingly, pleasingly Victorian without were seeming a pastiche. Russell has fun with erudite bits of language and Hyde will certainly broaden your vocabulary, adding words such as muliebrity, supervenient, brumous and peccancy. I did see a couple of the plot twists coming (such as the identity of the Hanged Man) but there were also some jaw-dropping surprises and, above all, Hyde is a book that hooks the reader and builds to a tremendous climax.

An interesting counterpoint to Russell's The Devil Aspect which also dwelt on issues of good and evil, divided personality and the relation between individual responsibility and political crime. 

Definitely recommended.

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