Review: Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson

Our Noble Selves

Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 10 September 2026
Available as: HB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529937824

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Our Noble Selves to consider for review.

I have recently been listening to Kate Atkinson's earlier novel, Transcription, which has been dramatised for Radio 4. It's a story of wartime espionage and peacetime consequences, set between 1941 and 1951 and I was struck by athematic unity (at least in part) with Our Noble Selves.

The later book is set wholly during 1951 and is focussed on the Festival of Britain, which took place in that year, but it looks back to the war in two respects.

First, the main character, ex-journalist Harry Flynn, has landed up in his rather non-job as part of the team preparing the Festival after spending most of the War as a prisoner of the Japanese, working on the infamous Burma Railway. ('"Was it absolute hell?' Flynn shrugged. 'Others had it as bad.' He was thinking of Evans. Of almost every returning soldier since Troy and Thermopylae.' In the manner of his day and age, Flynn doesn't want to recall the horrors that he underwent, although they occasionally creep through in his dreams (he depends on drink to limit this) in something of the same manner as the flashbacks in Transcription. In her Afterword, Atkinson says that she originally intended to make more of these events but cut them back because she wanted to make the story lighter. It is true that it's lighter than Transcription, but I also feel that this choice fits better with the reality that such awful events were often ignored for decades.

It also fits with the whole ethos of the Festival - designed partly as an enormous party for a war-weary country, partly as a bold vision of the future, showcasing British living, manufactures, the Empire (as it still was) and modern design. Atkinson gives us extracts from Festival guides and maps, conveying the epic scale of the event and some of its subjects. The book is peppered with extracts from the catalogue of goods available, with supplier names and details. It's a fascinating glimpse into what now seems like a vanished culture.

The second overlap with Transcription is that while the action is set in the present (ie 1951) events are very much driven by unfinished business from the war. This is a time when everyone still wants to move on, to forget about it. (Though as Flynn shrewdly comments, 'A few years later and they start wanting to remember again. A few decades later and they're wallowing in it.') Yet, there are reputations to be protected, grudges to be satisfied, enmities and differences that still fester. Such things have a way of shaping events, as we will see.

An amusing feature of Harry Flynn is that he's apparently very attractive to women. While he doesn't really seem to understand that, he's willing to go along with it and, at the start of the book, he's found himself a wife - hoping to settle in a boring suburban home with his little family and their dog. The nightmares put paid to that, and one day, Flynn just walks out of an increasingly fractious relationship, eventually landing his job at the Festival. But the ladies still have an eye for him, and so when a woman working at the office disappears after meeting him, she's assumed to be 'Your French girlfriend', a misconception that he struggles against through most of the story.

Worse, Flynn comes under suspicion, the plot building up with coincidences, trickery and ever more-desperate attempts by Harry to clear his name by working out what really happened - in the teeth of the police, who see him as a wrong 'un, and a cast of washed-up war heroes (and some villains) of the sort who gradually pickled themselves in whisky in London bars though the late 40s and 50s. There are some truly dreadful people here, with dreadful secrets to persevere, who don't welcome Flynn's probing into their affairs. It makes for an effective thriller plot, leavened with humour and Atkinson's absolutely, steel-sharp observations of manners and gift for drawing character.

We also actually get quite a shrewd perspective on the Festival itself. Largely inaccessible to us now except through old guides and newspaper photographs, it is often portrayed in idealogical terms as a brave future vision - and of course there is that element. However Atkinson does gently show how much of what was on display was backward, not forward looking: the model rooms on show for example informed by class and gender prejudices which seem distinctly antediluvian to us now.

In all, Our Noble Selves (the title comes from a military toast and does rather capture the slightly self-satisfied tone which Atkinson imputes, whether fairly or not, to the Festival itself and the wider Britain of 1951) is a fun read, jostling with life and with characters who are a joy to spend time among. I'd strongly recommend it.

For more information about Our Noble Selves, see the publisher's website here.

The Knight Watch by Thomas D Lee

The Knight Watch

Thomas D Lee
Orbit, 23 June 2026
Available as: HB, 562pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356518558

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for sending me a copy of The Knight Watch  to consider for review.

SO grateful! Two years ago I loved, loved, loved Lee’s debut novel Perilous Times, which brought King Arthur and the Knighrs of the Round Table into a near-future, dystopian Britain. The book was a breath of fresh air, exploring the idea of an ancient hero and his war band sleeping, returning to "save" the country and what that might mean in a present where both "save" and "country" are deeply contested, and evolving, notions. It also poked gentle fun at a childhood classic I love, and is written in vivid, fresh language away from the conventions of fantasy (and indeed urban fantasy)

So I was keen to read Lee's next book, not exactly a prequel, but set earlier than Perilous Times, during the Second World War and also featuring the Knights. (As you will know if you have paid attention to the Matter of Britain, Merlin lives life backwards, so in a sense we’re emulating him). 

The short version: The Knight Watch is just as good, perhaps even slightly better, and now I need to go back and reread Perilous Times so thanks Thomas, this is doing my TBR state no good at all.

Like its predecessor, The Knight Watch riffs off the tropes and concerns of the classic legends. For example, there are echoes of the common theme where a questing knight is beguiled by a monster, posing as a fair damsel. While in the original stories this, naturally, posed dangers mainly to our chaste hero’s honour, in The Knight Watch it’s a bit more the threat to their sense of purpose, their desire to keep on keeping on. 

That in itself is a big theme for a book whose heroes (and heroine) have been resurrected countless times. When they die, they return to sleep under their own tree, until called to clamber out of the mud because Britain has need of them. This can become wearying, and each deals with that in their own way. Some drink. Some just abandon the questing life. To varying degrees, they have rumbled the way in which they are being used by their boss, Marlowe (yes, Christopher) to further imperialism or colonialism. All, if pushed, will admit that their whole setup - the original warband gathering tribute for a petty chieftain in sub-Roman Britain - isn’t actually the shining example of virtue that later tales painted. (Evan if Tristan, for one, feels affinity for the high Midde Ages ideal).

So it’s a somewhat disenchanted band who are called together to play their part in the Second World War. Lee has fun here exploring the different roles. Lancelot flyies a Spit, a dead ringer for Biggles  with his fighter-pilot bravado (and also in recalling the Great War, flying Camels and the Red Baron - a pointed comparison since James Bigglesworth was of course another hero continually resurrected and reinvented to take on the nation's enemies. Galehaut is a conscientious objector, driving ambulances, Agravaine something of a spiv. Kay has joined Special Forces. And Isolde - yes, Isolde, do keep up, she's part of this too, do keep up, only don't mention Tristan, her ex, Tristan and Isolde are so over (a fine romance, yes, but as we see things told from her point of view, it soured quickly, a few centuries ago, though unfortunately, he's not moved on and to her annoyance, keeps trying to 'win' her back (that's men for you) - and Isolde is working for the Resistance in France where she may just have found herself a girlfriend.

Now, though, the venerable war band be about to shout their last hurrah. There are ways to kill even the unkillable, magics stronger than Merlin's, and with their constant quest for ancient knowledge to pervert, the Nazis - aided by a sorceror-for-hire whom Marlowe, perhaps unwisely, refused to deal with - plus some old enemies of Caer Moelydd, may be about to turn the war band into a weapon of their own.

Almost everyone’s fallen out. Agravaine is just annoying. Isolde and Tristan aren't speaking (well, she's not). The events which led to the fall of the Round Table aren't given in detail but sketched in against a background of Late Antique Britain, and it's clear that deep scars remain - the Knights haven't for centuries worked as a group, they simply tend to run across each other (though there are some intense relationships). So they seem ill-prepared to meet the Nazi occult threat. (Characteristically, as they prepare to do that, Lee again echoes the medieval stories here, having the Knights gather at a requisitioned manor to feast on bully beef and drink bottled beer before they set out on their quest, being are parachuted (with splitting hangovers) into occupied France). 

There are resources to draw on. Even the dreams used to ensnare our heroes, lulling them into passive fantasies of what is lost, can be a source of strength. May, a Knight who found her true identity in 1920s Berlin, uses them to reach her comrades when they are lost. Perhaps her experience of life helps her to see straight when they don't, to resist beguilement (and, her lost paradise, the permissive world of Weimar Germany, is possibly so antithetical that the enchanters find it hard to sustain). There is magic. There are Sten guns and grenades. And, in an action filled climax channelling so many classic war films, there is a castle filled with Nazis to be raided. Who could resist? (Lee again takes the chance to affectionately parody the classics here - for example as an exasperated German officer notes before he's despatched, the Enlganders didn't need to hijack the cable car, they could more easily have approached up the track used for supplies).

It's an explosive climax that marries the gory realities of a post-Roman warband with the WWII films and books I grew up on, so is a win for me. 

This is a book that does a very clever thing - it leans in to, and embodies, classic stories, myths and simplifications about our history, while being very aware of the realities. Of the War itself: 'You must be glad, to have an enemy like Hitler... he makes you look so much more noble in comparison'. This is a Britain that still doesn't accept gap people, still less trans people, an Empite that is busily looting its subjects. And even the verve with which numerous Nazis are despatched in the finale should be compared with the opening sequence in which Arthur and his Knights sack Caer Lloyw, massacring the citizens. 

The Knight Watch is entertaining to the end (I loved the epilogue, where it seems that one of the band may have gone on to inspire James Bond - another English fictional archetype who has lived more than once) but also has both heart and bite, it's an intelligent fantasy with an urgent message.

I'd strongly recommend this book.

Review - Hurricane Room by Kim Sherwood

Hurricane Room

Kim Sherwood
HarperCollins, 21 May 2026 
Available as: HB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008495480

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending giving me access to an advance e-copy of Hurricane Room, the third part of Sherwood's 007 trilogy, following Double or Nothing and A Spy Like Me, to consider for review.

I first met Sherwood’s writing with her Testament, a superb book about Holocaust survival, memory and recovering history. So, you might think, quite different from a thriller? Maybe actually not...

Like the earlier earlier books, in Hurricane Room, besides the overarching espionage plot there's a preoccupation with loyalty, trust, survival and identity - and with betrayal. (In one brilliant passage, a character whose forbears survived persecution in Europe, coming to Britain, muses on her possible alternate identity if they'd gone to New York). While that may seem a departure from the classic Bond novels, one might argue that Bond's romantic light-footedness was always hinting at these, but here Sherwood makes the point overt with tension between Bond and Johanna Harwood, 003, Bond’s ex (and in his mind, his betrayer) who has been trying to find him.

Because, yes, Bond is back! Hurricane Room, Book Three, is where Bond comes in. He has been missing, possibly dead, throughout the trilogy so far. That is a think a good move in technical terms, if perhaps a risky one. Reading the first book, a Bond-less 007 world took a bit of getting used to but Sherwood's depiction of Harwood soon made up for that whereas I think that if Bond had been here form the start he’d have overpowered everything. Instead Books one and two gave us other 00s, 000 up to 013, M, Moneypenny and a transformed Q, creating an excellently realised and updated version of the classic Bond setup.

It's also an unsettlingly timely version. This evening I've been watching on the BBC News the new head of GCHQ, speaking at Bletchley Park (where Sherwood Avenue is cheekily mentioned), warning of the dangers to the UK of Russian covert action, including sabotage of infrastructure and, especially, Internet cables. In Hurricane Room we find one of Sherwood's characters, head of Q Branch, standing up at Bletchley Park to warn of the "everywhere war" already being fought. The finale of this book may be the long awaited and traditional shoot-out, but what's being fought for is considerably closer to reality than in the classic Bond books.

In keeping with that, Sherwood has made her own Bond, with recognisable DNA from the original books and films, but she has yeeted him and his backstory into the last quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of this (the timeline is a bit vague, or he’d be too old). As I said, he’s recognisable, but different. More self aware. Torn between Fleming’s playboy, and… something else. Perhaps Bond needs to grow beyond being 007? Sherwood can hint at that because she’s not writing THE Bond, but A Bond. (The endless debate over  who should play Bond in the films, always in the air, came into my mind here as my mental image flitted around between Connery and Moore - the classics I grew up with. It is though a silly argument overall as there is no one Bond. Who should play Sherlock Holmes? Depends which Holmes). Perhaps the film makers don’t have that freedom because to many fans now the film ones are the the only Bond they’ll be aware of, and the producers have to deliver an ongoing franchise, not a single trilogy.)

Anyway, it is good. A high stakes threat, which as I've said is more plausible than you might expect, chilling villain, final fight in a remote secret base, touches of continuity. As well as translating the Fleming continuity into her world, Sherwood also rounds out Bond’s history in her own, which helps offset the sense you sometimes get in Fleming’s books and the films of an unanchored character. She also keeps the story abreast of recent geopolitics (difficult, given how preposterous real world plotting has got in recent seasons).

The author also has some fun here. Look out for her dropping the titles of earlier Bond stories, sometimes a bit rearranged. ("She'd been loved by this spy before", "eyes Bond once called golden"). But there are also references to other espionage novels: 00 Branch is headquartered at Regents Park, like Mick Herron's spies, and there also references to an "agent runner in the field" - a nod I think to one of John Le Carré's last books (A very good one, if you haven't read it). There are other homages as well,  from near familiar language - One dove was a coincidence. Two were dinner - to names and characters (Vesper, Felix) and of course classic Bondisms (Shaken not stirred). There are the deadpan quips ("Hello Conrad. You seem to have lost face" to an opponent badly scarred in a battle with Bond and Harwood, "I've always been attracted to women walking into water with heavy pockets" - which itself inverts a famous beach scene).

Most of all though, and more seriously, Sherwood plays, in a gently meta way, with the idea of Bond himself. Harwood reflects that "He struck her as a man out of time, awake for the first day in centuries" which is a sense is every Bond revival, I think. Similarly, as events resolve and danger falls away "There was something staged about him now" which is just... so right. Bond as a character, any Bond, in any book, which any actor, has to be stagey, camp, oiled, poised. This, you feel, is Harwood's problem with him, this is why they couldn't be together. Behind the facade of the spy novel there is a deeply felt and resoundingly true relationship here, and we don't know how that will end. It doesn't feel as though it can come to any good...

I'd highly recommend this book, and the trilogy as a whole. This is Bond - this is writing - of the most compelling, truthful and engaging class.

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

Review - The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

The Regicide Report (Laundry Files, 14)

Charles Stross
Publisher, 27 January 2026
Available as: HB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: 
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

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

The Regicide Report is the final volume (at least for now?) of Stross's Laundry Files sequence, something that, in my view, has grown into a SFF phenomenon. Over the past two and a half decades I've followed the story of Bob Howard, necromancer, demonologist and computer nerd, through books that began as stories "in the style of" a series of espionage masters, mutated into treatments of classic monsters from horror, and ended up as pretty scathing criticism of UK politics.

Where is the endpoint of all that? In whose name is the espionage carried out out? On whose secret service are Bob, Mo and their colleagues engaged? Who is the most scary monster in the pack? What is at the summit of politics and public administration?

Why, the monarchy itself, of course. So, in a book which I think could probably only have been published following the death of Our Late Queen, here is the apotheosis of the Laundry, its endpoint (literally) as the unspeakable horror which has consumed the British State turns its baleful attention on the Crown itself. And on the billions of person-years of worship and belief that it has accumulated.

Written according  the normal convention of the series (Bob Howard writing his classified work diaries - but we finally see how and why that exercise is being undertaken) The Regicide Files gives us a complex plot hanging on the dilemma of the Laundry and its duty (enforced by geas) to both the current PM (that nameless horror, who was, in truth, the lesser of two evils - as PMs so often are) and to Her Majesty. 

Long-buried External Assets are being awoken, there's trouble afoot at the Palace and Bob's required to wear a fancy suit and shiny shoes. That last may be the thing he worries about most.

This book has all the notes I love in the Laundry Files: the fiendish plot (fiendish in at least two senses of the term), the dry humour, check-ins with most of the vast array of characters Stross has given us to date and a tight, action-filled narrative.  I don't know if this was planned in advance, but it's a story that derives real heft from the recent death of Elizabeth II and indeed probably couldn't have been published before. If you thought that the Royal funeral in 2023 was a big production, well, just look at THESE funeral games... 

I feel this book provides very much the ending that the Laundry (the series, and the institution) deserves. Bob and Mo get plenty of time (I've missed them in the past few books) and development but we're left guessing about just how events will proceed as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN unfolds and what role the Laundry will play in that. (I'm blurring some detail here so as not to spoil, but I will note that - as evidenced by Bob's being at large to write his casenotes, some form of normality does continue, albeit the warped version of the New Management)

Strongly recommended to long-haul Laundry fellow-travellers. If you haven't read these books yet then no, really this isn't the one to begin with but you have some fun in store if you go back and begin with The Atrocity Archives.  

(It was also fun to see Stross adroitly sidestep issues of continuity in the series...)

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

Blogtour review - The Winter Job by Antti Tuomainen

The Winter Job
Antti Tuomainen (trans by David Hackston)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: HB, 228pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781916788824

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

December 1982, and with Christmas coming up, postal worker Ilmari Nieminen has no way to buy his beloved daughter the piano he's impulsively promised her. Following his divorce - Ilmari has issues with trust, which have torpedoed his marriage, as well as all his other relationships - Helena is the centre of his life. He can't let her down. he just can't.

So he takes on a delivery job. A rather strange one. He has to transport an antique sofa more than 1000km to the north of the country. In the depths of winter. In an elderly British van unsuited to Finland's ice climate. Moreover, he's determined to take diversions on the journey to settle old obligations.

What can possibly go wrong?

So begins one of the strangest road novels I've ever encountered. As if the task Ilmari has assumed isn't tricky enough in itself, there's something... off... about the sofa (and indeed, the whole job) from the beginning. It's soon clear that others want it too - a bruiser called Otto, whose way of dealing with opposition is to knock it down, shows up, as does a pair of bickering political activists, Anneli and Erkki, who want to sell the sofa to fund the Cause.

Oh, and Ilmari also bumps into an old schoolfriend, Antero, he hasn't seen for years (since accusing him of theft, in fact). Antero is down on his luck, and joins Ilmari for the ride. But he, too, has business to settle on the journey.

As winter closes in, and this disparate group heads north in their various rackety vehicles, the stage is set for drama, catastrophe and... friendship?

The Winter Job is highly entertaining, not least in the lengths that the three groups go to acquire, or retain, the sofa. There is violence, double crossing, coincidence and heroism here - to such a degree that it seems as though this unlikely McMuffin has driven everyone clean out of their minds. (At times I was getting distinct Ealing comedy vibes, but the violence lurking here has a real edge, there are some truly gruesome scenes). It's also really enjoyable to see how Tuomainen takes an unlikely scenario and manages to invest the reader in its truth. You won't doubt the commitment of anyone here to the sofa, or the possibility that all this could actually happen.

Above all, though, or perhaps behind all or beneath all, there's more going on here than some bizarre gameshow challenge. All the participants in the Great Finnish Sofa-Off feel, in a sense, lost. They lack friends. They lack trust. They lack something or someone to come home to. Even lone wolf Otto senses this, though he then goes about building friendship in a most self-defeating way. And on those long Finnish miles - sorry, kilometres - there's plenty of opportunity to reflect on what went wrong and how it may not be too late to put is right.

The Winter Job is fun when it's doing slapstick, but also profound and moving, a kind of collective dark night of the soul for Ilmari and the rest - but is it a night they'll all come through to dawn unscathed?

Read this book and find out!

The Winter Job is translated by David Hackston into a lucid and readable English version that must have been a struggle in places given a context and setting that would be clear to the reader of the original but much harder to set out for a foreign reader.  (it's great to see David given credit on the cover).

For more information about The Winter Job, 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 Winter Job from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (it'll always be Smith's to me) or Waterstones.

Blogtour - Extract from The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek

The Winter Warriors
Oliview Norek (trans by Nick Caistor)
Open Borders Press, 11 September 2025
Available as: HB, 448pp, audio, e   
ISBN(HB): 978-1916788763

I'm delighted today to be hosting an extract from Olivier Norek's new historical novel, The Winter Warriors. 

The story...

November, 1939. A conscription officer arrives in the peaceful farming village of Rautjärvi. The Soviet Union has invaded, and for the first time in its history as an independent country, Finland is at war.

Setting off into the depths of winter to face the Red Army, the small group of childhood friends recruited from Rautjärvi have no idea whether any of them will ever return home. But their unit has a secret weapon: the young sniper Simo Häyhä, whose lethal skill in the snow-bound forests of the front line will earn him the nickname “The White Death”.

Drawing on the real-life figures and battles of the Finnish-Soviet Winter War, this is a gripping, page-turning historical thriller from one of Europe’s most acclaimed storytellers.

Olivier Norek

The author...

After 18 years in the French police force, Olivier Norek turned to crime writing - Between Two Worlds was the Times and Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Year 2024. The Winter Warriors is his first historical thriller. While researching for this novel, Norek spent three months (the duration of the war itself) in Finland, experiencing the -35°C conditions in which the war was fought and in which more than 130,000 Russian soldiers died before the Soviet Union signed a peace treaty in March 1940.

The extract...

First Prologue

Light streams over his closed eyes, over his prostrate body and its stilled heart. 

All around him, the last day of war has littered the ground with bodies in their thousands, staining the snow red. Amongst the other corpses, he is no-one. No more precious, no more impor- tant. Elsewhere, he could be a father, a brother, a friend, a husband. Elsewhere, he is everything. 

In death, only their uniforms set them apart. They were ene- mies, now they lie side by side. Here, hands touch; elsewhere, lifeless faces confront each other. They have spent the whole winter killing one another. 

The dead from earlier weeks are half-hidden in the earth. Only vestiges remain: still visible helmets, occasionally parts of their backs. Their arms are like aerial roots, as if growing out of the ground itself, ready to rise, get to their feet, and haunt all those who decided on this war. 

Their blood saturates the ground, their flesh nourishes the trees, mingles with the sap. They will be in every new leaf, every new bud. There were more than a million of them, and when, tomorrow and beyond tomorrow, the wind blows through the branches of the forests of Finland, it will also carry their voices.

There had been happy days, a cherished peace.

There had been a before, in the days leading up to the Hell. 

Second Prologue 

For many years Finland belonged to someone else.

For centuries, it formed part of the kingdom of Sweden. For a further century, it came under Russia’s sovereignty. It was not until 1917 that it gained independence. 

In 1939, therefore, Finland was 22 years old. Twenty-two years are hardly sufficient to make a man, let alone a country. 

In a storm of lead and fire, Stalin’s Red Army, the largest in the world, swept through this neutral, poorly armed nation, launching a bloody conflict known by history as the Winter War. 

The hellish events that are the subject of this novel took place in that year of 1939 at Kollaa in Finland. But also on its isthmus, in Karelia. On the ice fields at Petsamo. From the shores of its gulf to the distant reaches of Lapland. 

Imagine a tiny country. Imagine a huge one. Now imagine them clashing. 

Twenty million shells. The Earth almost cracked in two when Russia pounded its crust in the same place day after day for more than a hundred days. 

Tank columns against old-fashioned rifles. A million Red Army soldiers against workers and peasants. But past conflicts tell us it takes five soldiers to face a single man fighting for his land, his home country and his own people, hands clutching his carbine, a sentinel behind the door of his barricaded farm. 

And a single man can change the course of history. 

At the heart of the harshest of its winters,

at the heart of the bloodiest war in its history,

Finland saw the birth of a legend.

The legend of Simo Häyhä, the White Death.

And yet there had once been happy days, a cherished peace. There had been a before, in the days leading up to the Hell. 

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

Blogtour Review - The Transcendent Tide by Doug Johnstone

The Transcendent Tide (Enceladons, 3)
Doug Johnstone
Orenda Books, 14 August 
Available as: PB, 283pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788626

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

In the third and final part of The Enceladons Trilogy, we follow the mysterious jellyfish hive mind to the Arctic Ocean where the refugees from Enceladus have sought shelter. While the story could continue - and perhaps one day it? - this book draws a line, of sorts, for now, indicating what the presence of this peaceful, aquatic species may mean for Earth and its natives. Sandy reappears of course, as do Lennox, Vonnie, Ava, Chloe and Heather. 

Heather, ever restless, burdened by her life, chose to join with the Enceladons, to become, not one of them but more like them. Even this has not though wholly healed her mental wounds and she has also become concerned that Enceladons themselves may have changed, at last reacting to human aggression not by withdrawing but by retaliating. Boats have been sunk, hunters found dead. Heather wants to know more.

Lennox and Vonnie have been hiding out evading the authorities while missing their connection with the Enceladons. Ava has been caring for baby Chloe, but meets a crisis that she believes on Sanday can help her with. At the same time Lennox and Vonnie are tracked down by a mysterious billionaire, Karl Jensen, who clearly knows more than he should about the Enceladons.

I have been impressed by the way that Doug Johnstone has made each of the books in this series a different story, not just a recap of the same story. In Book 1, The Space Between Us Heather and Ava in particular had difficult personal circumstances which intertwined with an almost Buchan-esque flight across Scotland, pursued by both the authorities and a vengeful husband. Sandy's true nature, and that of his fellow Enceladons, were revealed in the course of this, showing the peaceful Enceladons in contrast to the patriarchal human authorities and attitudes. In Book 2, The Collapsing Wave, a secretive US military operation imprisoned our heroes and sought to control - and perhaps destroy - the Enceladons. Again, human militarism and desire for control were shown, but on a wider stage than in Book 1 and perhaps with wider consequences

Now, in The Transcendendent Tide, just as they seemed to have achieved safety, new threats arise for the Enceladons - and for the little band of friends. Also threatened is Niviaq, an Indigenous Greenland woman who is well aware of the realities of colonialism and might therefore be expected to be wary of the mysterious space aliens as well as the  wealthy private organisation now operating helicopters, ships and private jets from a sophisticated base in her homeland.

I enjoyed The Transcendendent Tide as much for its moral dimension as I did meeting dearly loved, familiar characters. There is action and mystery here - what is Jensen really up to? What's been happening to the sinking ships? - but also a crunchy ethical debate. What steps is one entitled to take - perhaps obliged to take - in the face of threats to life and to a way of life? What might though be lost of a peace loving species take such steps? Heather perhaps acts here as something of a conscience, I liked the way she doesn't judge but wants to know. Her conversations with Sandy are frustrating, limited as ever by the different conceptions the two have of individuality (even after Heather's transformation) and she's forced to investigate herself. But she doubts her judgement and even more, her right to judge.

All in all an exciting and satisfying end (or, I hope, pause?) in this evolving story, with tough choices for all.

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

#Review - Dark as Night by Lilja Sigurðóttir

Dark as Night (Áróra Investigates)

Lilja Sigurðóttir (trans by Lorenza Garcia)
Orenda Books, 10 February 2024 
Available as: PB, 241pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788367

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Dark as Night  to consider for review.

I've become addicted to Sigurðóttir's fast-moving, involving series featuring Áróra and her group of friends and colleagues - Daníel, Helena and, of course, Daníel's tenant, drag queen Lady Gúgúlú.

In Dark as Night, all their lives are about to be shaken up and some answers given - though not perhaps ones we'd welcome. Áróra is still searching for her missing sister, but now news comes of a child who seems to be dead Ísafold reincarnated. And Gúgúlú has vanished din the night, leaving no word - but three menacing strangers are on her track. In both cases, Daníel finds his status as a policeman of little help.

Plus, Áróra's behaving erratically...

I love the moment in a series when he writer can trust the readers, and the characters, knowing that if things get a little strange, the latter will continue to enchant the former. The Áróra we see here isn't someone who, met for the first time, you'll necessarily want to know more about, but we have come to understand and like Áróra and so will be patient with a woman who's been through a lot. Similarly Gúgúlú has been a great support to Daníel while remaining on the margins of these stories so it's good to learn more about here, and indeed to learn things which rather blow open the nature of these stories. As to the latter, I felt there was always a bit more going on than the standard price procedural and it's good to have that confirmed, although I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers. 

Through all this, the relationship between Áróra and Daníel continues to intrigue the reader and deepen at the same time. It's not an easy one - while she may be on the side of the angels she doesn't always play by the rules, and has her own secrets, which are straining things here - but a sense does come through of two people who are at bottom devoted to one another and that each will do anything for the other. (Given the kinds of threats which arise in Sigurðóttir's Idecalnd, the latter is perhaps more a matter of when, than if, some great sacrifice will be needed).

Lorenza Garcia's translation is excellent in what must have been a challenging task given the nature of some of the content, and I would love to ask a few questions about how certain things were tackled!

For more information about Dark as Night, see the publisher's website here.

#review - Lights Out by Louise Swanson

Lights Out

Louise Swanson
Hodder, 5 September 2024 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529396140

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

In Lights Out, Louise Swanson strikes the perfect balance between a 'high concept" thriller and a study of relationships and psychology.

Taking place, like many of Swanson's stories written both under this name and as Louise Beech, in Hull, the story is rooted in the everyday but transcends that ordinariness by having external forces impose something weird on the local population - in this case, a power outage every night, intended to save energy. Reminding me somewhat of the power cuts of the 70s, which I lived through, it also evokes the dislocation of the Covid lockdown and some of the social strains and tensions that emerged than and since (while I think not intended, I also saw some resonance with this summer's riots). So, while the main device is invented, it also feels close to recent experience.

At the centre of things is Grace, for whom the loss of light on these dark winter evenings is a huge deal because she has a terror of the dark following some murky events in her childhood (which will gradually be revealed). It doesn't help that a prowler is abroad, assaulting women when the lights are off - and that someone (whether or not the same intruder) begins to enter her house at night leave odd presents and messages. Creepy or what?

So things get very menacing very early on. In other hands, this could go very wrong - where, exactly, do you go next with the story? - but Swanson knows how to wind up the tension still further, and then stiller further, if that makes sense. There's an almost palpable strain - a kind of mental keening - as Grace attempts to balance her day job (and sometimes night - she works shifts at a hospice) with her fear of the dark, to maintain her relationship with an (obviously no-good) husband, a domineering mother and that abiding mystery (an element of which is that her dad went missing when she was a kid). Honestly, at times I had to put the book down and just BREATHE, so tense does it get. But I never left it sitting there for long.

A book with a strong sense of how hurts from the past can fester - a major theme is the need to remember and confront, and to resist the easy solution of forgetting - and of how parents can mess up their kids' lives (they may not mean to but they do) this is also a taut, nailbitting thriller yet has many tender moments. You'll be rooting for Grace, I guarantee. This is Louise Swanson at the top of her game.

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

#Review - The Chamber by Will Dean

The Chamber

Will Dean
Hodder, 6 June 2024
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781399734127

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

'Never get ahead of your hat'.

The first thing to say is that Will Dean's new thriller The Chamber deserves an award for 'most high pressure novel of the year'. Literally, because the events of the story take place in a diving capsule that's been pressurised to deep sea conditions. Our protagonists are therefore breathing 'helox', a mixture of helium and oxygen - and, as main character Ellen points out, they all speak with squeaky voices which have to be decoded electronically for those outside.

An amusing thought, or it would be, if the events that befall Ellen and her five companions weren't so grim.

The Chamber does a fine job, I think, of portraying the strenuous conditions under which the divers survive. They're meant to be in the pressurised chamber for a month, attending to repairs on North Sea oil equipment on daily shifts without the need for further compression and decompression. Saturation diving like this - 'Sat' - isn't for the fainthearted, it's only for the best of the best. Everyone in the chamber has proved their ability through years of hard work and rigorous (and expensive) training. Ellen is one of the few women working at the top - or perhaps I should say at the bottom - of this industry and the role has cost her, as we find out. As it's cost her companions. They are all risking health effects from the saturation conditions and from the accidents caused by stress on the equipment (there are constant references to rust). The month away from home wrecks family and home life for men and women, though Ellen is subject to judgments which aren't made of her male colleagues. She is seen as sacrificing her family life, they aren't. 

There are also the peculiar economic conditions of the role - everyone is a self-employed contractor - which breed grudges and quarrels in what is a small world of jobs and workers. The nature of the work, providing, as it does, basic accommodation and meals - 'three hots and a cot' - fosters institutionalisation (there are comparisons both with the Armed Forces and with prisons) encouraging the divers back out, away from the perplexities and decisions of ordinary life.

So when things begin to go wrong, with Ellen and her mates imprisoned until a 5-day descompression can be undertaken, the fingers of blame point in all direction.

Dean is excellent at conveying all this through snatches of Ellen's life, chat between the divers, anecdotes about friends a rivals. But beyond that, this is an incredibly tense book. Literally a locked-room mystery, the divers are thrown on their own resources both to investigate what's happening and to protect themselves from further harm. The conditions they're in tend to paranoia even when things are going well, with phantasms and imagination a risk of long, lonely hours, isolation, and pressure. But in a macho world - even for women! - certain subjects are avoided, or at least, kept to be discussed on shore. 

With its lapses in the narration, its room for speculation about what is going on outside the chamber and its sense there are things we're not being told, the story develops an almost eerie mood which Dean contributes to by dropping references to the Scottish Play through the narrative, fitting given the location of the North East coast of Scotland (one of the main characters, it soon emerges, lives in Cawdor). See how many you can get - there is a Malcolm here, I also spotted Dunsinane, a MacDuff, numerous quotes and of course, in the chamber infection control is key so there's plenty of hand washing...

That play, I'd remind you, deals not only with a power struggle but with temptation, with an outside direction to do evil. It's a direction that one may or may not resist. There may be a connection in The Chamber: what is going on outside, and what evils, what temptations, have our characters brought in with them?

The story gets even more tense as we near the conclusion. This one kept me up past bedtime as I had to finish it. A superb piece of writing that I'd recommend strongly.

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

#Blogtour #Review - Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff

Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case
Author Elsa Drucaroff, translated by Slava Faybysh

Corylus Books, 5 March 2024
Available as: PB, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298937

There's a war outside still raging

You say it ain't ours anymore to win...,

- Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case to consider for review, and to Ewa for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

This really was something new for me - an intense thriller, based on real events and featuring as its central character a real person. Rodolfo Walsh was an Argentinian author, who in the 1950s and 60s wrote classic mysteries. He also originated the true crime genre with an account of a massacre carried out by the country's dictatorship in the 1950s. 

Set in the 70s under another military regime, Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case sees Walsh, who was also a political radical, forced to investigate his own daughter's disappearance - or perhaps she survived? - at the hands of the military. For fellow UK readers, this is the same dictatorship with which the UK ended up at war over the Falkland Islands/ Islas Malvinas in the 1980s. While that was towards the end of their rule, in this book they have only recently come to power and are busy disappearing their opponents, their imagined opponents and basically anyone (hair too long perhaps? Studying something suspicious at uni?) who even looks as though they might be an opponent. It is a scar that Argentina still carries, and here we see the wound inflicted: Walsh's experiences here act as something of a microcosm of the suffering that took place.

It's a busy novel, following, first, the military, then, Walsh and the opposition organisation of which he's part, but also a retired colonel with whom he's acquainted. In the gaps, as it were, we see individuals' stories, both of horror - the pregnant woman dragged off to a secret prison - and heroism - the conscript who spies for the rebels. One can't say too much here, because Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case deals in ambiguity. In a truly tense thriller, we are aware of the possibility of double and triple crosses, of ruses and - a nod to the mystery writer at the centre of things - of red herrings.

It would be wrong though to see this is simply a thriller. There is plenty of action, and there are tense scenes with lives hanging by a thread, but at its centre Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case has a truly human perspective. It focuses on the dreams and nightmares (sometimes they are blurred), the lost hopes and the very present fears, and the passions of a group of very believable and empathetic characters.

Aside from Walsh himself, his wife Lila and his daughter Vicki we see army conscripts becoming aware of the horrors being carried out by the regime, and the moral choices they're forced to make - collaborate? Look the other way and try to forget? Resist? We see young people forced to flee the country, and older ones finding their own loyalties divided. There's the dilemma faced by an opposition out of its depth. Everywhere, there is the military, dragging young people away, raging at a political, cultural opposition it can't understand, an opposition that is less about armed resistance than simply about being something else.

In the time period of this story, that rage at the modern world carries the day, despite heroic, desperate but totemic acts of defiance. In the longer run, as we know, it did not, does not and will not triumph. We don't see it but the dictators fall, while the writings of figures like Walsh are still available to speak to us - and their lives and stories can be told by writers like Drucaroff.

All in all, this is a marvellous book, both tense and beautiful, full of hope but so sad. 

The transition by Slava Faybysh is vivid and readable, taking one immediately to the centre of things and capturing the vivid pace of events.

Elsa Drucaroff was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She is the author of four novels and two short story collections, in addition to being a prolific essayist. She has published numerous articles on Argentine literature, literary criticism and feminism.

Her work has been widely translated, but Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case is Elsa Drucaroff’s first novel to be translated into English.

Slava Faybysh translates from Spanish and Russian.

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

#Review - Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry

Good Girls Don't Die
Christina Henry
Titan Books, 21 November 2023
Available as: PB, 336pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803364018

I'm grateful to Titan Books for providing me with an advance e-copy of  Good Girls Don't Die to consider for review.

In the first part of Good Girls Don't Die, Henry presents us with three narratives. Each features a woman being isolated and manipulated in a way that reflects her online activity - almost as if somebody was listening in all along...

In the first of these, Celia awakes in a small town with a husband and child whose identities she can't remember and a cosy restaurant she knows nothing about. At first, all this resembles one of those nightmares where you have to sit an exam with no preparation - Celia's trying to stay one step ahead and not let on that she's all at sea. But then a body turns up, and the deceased's son, the town policeman, has her in the frame for the killing. Her "husband" is creepy as hell and she has nowhere to turn for help.

In the second, Allie's been got up in the kind of short shorts she'd NEVER wear and seems to be on the way to a cabin in the woods with some boys from college - NOT what she set out to do at all. And then, again, the killings begin.

In the third scenario, rather more brazenly, Maggie and a group of other women have been kidnapped and are being forced to participate in a Hunger Games style death-off - a race against the clock through a grim killing maze.

The common factor behind all the scenarios is a cryptic social media conversation, suggesting some common purpose here - but what, and how could such a thing have been set up? It seems as though a single entity - a man? An intelligence of some sort? - is punishing all three women, and, as friends and allies die, their only resource will be their own courage, determination and empathy - needed to discern what is safe and what is a trap. From that perspective, despite the myriad practical hazards, the cruel traps and humiliations, this is a story of coming together and of making common cause against a pitiless enemy, against women being treated as mere toys or as objects for punishment or revenge.

While each story has its own logic and is absorbing in its own way, that overarching narrative is the most engaging and encouraging strand in Good Girls Don't Die, showing continuity with Henry's earlier stories in which women refuse to be treated as things. Fusing together the separate narratives, it puts a different spin on the three different tropes drawn on earlier and shows three women rising above the narratives that would ensnare them.

Strongly recommended! 

For more information about Good Girls Don't Die, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Watchmaker's Hand by Jeffery Deaver

The Watchmaker's Hand (Lincoln Rhyme, 16)
Jeffery Deaver

HarperCollins, 23 November 2023 
Available as: HB, 400pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780008503864

I'm grateful to HarperCollins for providing me with an advance e-copy of The Watchmaker's Hand to consider for review.

Readers who are following Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme books will remember The Watchmaker - an accomplished assassin whose plans Rhyme has frustrated on several occasions and who now, it seems, is targeting Rhyme himself.

If that setup sounds a little familiar, Deaver makes no bones in this book about a comparison with Sherlock Holmes (and, by extension, Moriarty), musing on how both Rhyme and Charles Vespasian Hale (the Watchmaker) resemble the Great Detective and his nemesis, for example in the way that Rhyme, like Holmes, ruthlessly discounts information that doesn't bear on his cases. And in one extended piece of of brilliant analysis here, we even see Rhyme track a suspect down to his hideout through close analysis of soil types, a feat that Doyle employs early on to establish Holmes's abilities. (There are also tongue in cheek references to Rhyme's bafflement at the success of published accounts of his cases).

Evoking Holmes and Moriarty in this way does of course bring with it a sense of foreboding. And it's a foreboding Deaver builds up in other ways as well. One of Rhyme's circle is being sounded out to act as his successor, should anything happen to him. There are signs of vendettas and political agendas within the NYPD, interfering with the case and with the team. And Amelia Sachs, Rhyme's wife, stumbles into danger early on in the book, suffering injuries which will become concerning once we understand what is going on here and how high the stakes are.

Once we understand what is going on...  one of the reasons I so much enjoy this series is the fiendishness of the plots. Deaver gleefully combines so much: personal agendas, criminal machinations, politics, and always, the sprawling, complex mechanism of New York City itself. For the reader, even the seasoned crime reader, understanding what's going on demands something but the rewards are great - out of all these ingredients Deaver draws addictive and ramified stories boasting plots within plots, red herrings aplenty and numerous twists. The Watchmaker's Hand is no exception, indeed I think it may be one of the more devious novels in the series, one which has, as the Watchmaker himself might say, many complications.

That made this story great fun for me to read. As ever, we're given some insight into what the bad guys are doing - but it's far from complete (and indeed, we don't know everything about Rhyme's countermoves either). So the tension is high, with many threats to the team and behind that, threats, as well, to the city and possibly, to the nation. Hale is a worthy adversary and one almost gets a sense that Rhyme is relishing the contest - as Holmes was wont to do.

Basically, explosive fun, in a story that really moves the series forward and which grips from beginning to end. 

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

#Review - Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Starter Villain
John Scalzi
Pan Macmillan, 21 September 2023
Available as: HB, 262pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529082951

I'm grateful to Jamie at Black Crow PR for sending me a copy of Starter Villain to consider for review.

With Starter Villain, John Scalzi delivers a novel that does three very different things at the same time. First, it keeps its feet on the ground. Protagonist Charlie Fitzer is processing bereavement, his father having recently died, and is struggling in an economy that no longer wants his journalistic skills. Secondly, it takes a step into the fantastic, portraying a world of supervillain corporations in uneasy alliance or sporadic conflict - think of that organised crime ecology in the John Wick films, but with a bit more of a James Bond volcano lair twist. (It's always great to have a new and distinct world to explore). Finally - and most importantly - it is deeply readable, fiendishly plotted and genuinely engaging.

I know I should have expected the third, It's a hallmark of Scalzi's, his writing is never less than engaging, but I don't think it can be easy to have delivered all of these. Charlie is a truly complex character, first introduced here after his billionaire uncle - from whom he was estranged - dies, and he is asked to represent the family at the funeral. VERY strange things start to happen to Charlie after that. And to his cats (yes, there are cats in this book). As a consequence Charlie enters a world he had never suspected existed, a world of genetically modified dolphins, wonder weapons and secret bases. He's our gateway into all this, our guide, as it were, but has little to rely on except a strain of common sense and, as it turns out, of decency. (I enjoyed the bit where Charlie supports the dolphins in their attempt to  to unionise). This level-headedness and decency, contrasted with the outlandish schemes and entitled arrogance of the billionaires who inhabit his new milieu, makes Charlie very sympathetic - more relatable than if, say, he'd shown an unlikely talent at combat.

In the circles Charlie is entering, his sense of decency is taken as a weakness and his lack of knowledge of those circles as another, but this Everyman is still able to hold his own in negotiation with the super rich and the reader will be cheering him on and hoping for a positive outcome without Charlie having to compromise his principles (there's an awkward scene where he's invited to choose the method of execution for a captured agent, but I'll say no more about that because spoilers.

I have to say that Charlie doesn't completely lack back-up of other sorts, backup provided by the redoubtable Mathilda ('Til') who's deeply embroiled in Uncle Jake's shady organisation. But generally, he's able to keep far enough ahead of things that she doesn't have to show what she can do. But it's a complex story and as I've said, spoilers. I'm happy to report though that there are double, triple and (I think) even quadruple, crosses going on here, twists on twists and plenty of action. I think Scalzi must have had evil fun simply plotting this - for a fairly short book there is a LOT going on.

I particularly enjoyed this book as being a standalone. While series and trilogies are nice, sometimes as a reader it's great to not be investing in an ongoing narrative. (Although, I'm sure more could be done with the world portrayed here...)

In short, do read Starter Villain. 

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

#Review - The Burning Time by Peter Hanington

The Burning Time
Peter Hanington
Baskerville, 6 July 2023
Available as: HB, 421pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529305265

I'm grateful to Baskerville for sending me a copy of The Burning Time to consider for review.

I was pleased, in reading The Burning Time, to become acquainted with Hanington's journalist hero William Carver, about whom he's written before. Carver is defiantly old school, insisting on his protégé Naz learning shorthand and hewing to the rules of investigative journalism. That marks him out at the BBC as "different" - yet thankfully this isn't a book about how the management want to rid themselves of an irritant, rather Carver is offered qualified support and he navigates a labyrinth of public-private collusion, spin, and cover-up that may go as far as murder.

The central issue is the environment and in particular the COP21 summit in Paris. The PM who's alluded therefore must be Cameron (supported by references to publicity stunts with huskies) although the corrupt culture against which Carver struggles may suggest a different, more recent PM.

The story is told through a number of viewpoints: Carver himself, of course, also Naz, the billionaire scientist and geo-engineer Clive Winner, his right hand woman Jennifer Prepas, and others. Skilful writing by Hanington means that the narrative is never obscured by the variety of plot strands this engenders, nor is it a case of seeing one set of characters bothered and bewildered by things that others - and we readers - know but they don't. Rather, there is a complex yet clear organic narrative being told across many fronts with most of it obscure to most of the participants.

The motives of those we see are correspondingly murky. Yes, we do see a killer at work - but their purpose and employers are not clear at all, while, obviously, creating a nice sense of menace as unsuspecting victims and potential victims go about their business.

A second strand of the story refers to the Pegasus spyware that was discovered being used to monitor, especially, environmental activists and covert activity in the UK targeting those engaged in lawful protest. That, too, will worry the reader that characters they care about may be menaced by those on the dark side. The sense of threat is in synch with wider events, the conviction over the past few years that there are forces who will not stand for change and who will lie, cheat and break the law to preserve their own wealth. Hanington's protagonists therefore seem firmly rooted in the real world, engaged in a very real struggle and subject to real dangers.

Not, then, anything like escapist fiction, but all the same, a tense and well paced mystery that will absorb and engage the reader.

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

 

#Review - The Last Passenger by Will Dean

The Last Passenger
Will Dean
Hachette, 11 May 2023
Source: Advance e-copy
Available as: HB, 496pp, audio, e
ISBN(HB): 9781529382822

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Last Passenger via NetGalley to consider for review.

I loved this book. 

But having read it, I'm not sure I would ever step aboard a liner or a cruise ship (we're told several times that the RMS Atlantica is the former and that there is a difference, but frankly, I'll not take the risk).

The story is narrated from the perspective of Caz Ripley, owner of a café in a small town in Northern England who is, with her boyfriend Pete, taking the trip of a lifetime. Caz has, as becomes clear, lived a hard life, learning to cope both with her gambling-addicted father, whose behaviour ruined the family, and her substance-addicted sister. Caz has come out on top, sort of, but only with a lot of struggle - and she is haunted by many demons.

Caz will face another hard struggle as the voyage of RMS Atlantica goes fatally wrong, leaving her the only person on board an out of control ship. She will have to dig deep to survive, and it will be as much a psychological as a physical struggle. 

I loved the way that in this struggle, Dean takes a perfectly ordinary seeming situation and plausibly turns it upside down. It would be spoilery to tell you what has happened, and in fact the exact details are only supplied gradually, leaving a teasing mystery - is there a plausible way out of this or not? Whether there is will depend not only on Dean's setup but on Caz's courage, resourcefulness and her appetite for danger. It may be that she's inherited fatal flaws form her gambler father...

While is slightly frustrating not to be able to give more detail about what happens, this really is a book you don't want spoiled, with shocks and twists right through. It succeeds though on its characters, especially, of course, Caz whose own history may give her the ability to win through. Or may doom her to destruction. The others we meet are understably less well defined, but Dean has some surprises there to, playing games with our sympathies - it would be dangerous to pick favourites, still less winners!

On the way to the cracking conclusion are plenty of scenes of utter terror, placing us in the position of a character who's enduring, and suffering extremes of cold, hunger and fear. It's a testament to the writing that each off these episodes reads as chillingly true: The Last Passenger had my heart racing and my Fitbit congratulating me on all the exercise I must be taking. There is a great sense of place - of the cold and dark on the unheated ship, of the thousands of metres of water beneath, the vast sky above, both elements deadly hostile and ready to confront Caz at any time.

All in all, a devastating thriller and more than enough to warn me off ever going after the "old grey Widow-maker".

For more information about The Last Passenger see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - #MoscowExile by John Lawton

Moscow Exile (Joe Wilderness, 4)

John Lawton
Grove Press UK, 4 May 2023, 
Available as: HB, 435pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781804710098

I'm grateful to Ayo for sending me a copy of Moscow Exile to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Moscow Exile is a treat, featuring as it does both Joe Wilderness and Inspector Troy (well, ex-Inspector Troy now) and fleshing out their complicated world. That world exists in a web of relationships which cuts between politics, Society, and espionage, meanwhile  hacking into the private corridors, the dining rooms, and some seedy motels of the mid 20th century.

The book covers lots of ground both physically and temporally. We visit Winston Churchill's inner circle in his wilderness years (no pun intended). There's the Attlee and Wilson Labour governments,  postwar Washington in its pomp, with the US still a rising power, and late 60s Moscow, the USSR's decay well advanced. 

Tying all this together are two fascinating characters. Charlie Leigh-Hunt, field agent for MI6 and a bit of a rogue (he has a scam going passing useless intel back to the KGB, for cash) is posted suddenly to Moscow to replace the disgraced Guy Burgess. (But replace him as what, exactly?) Charlotte Mayer-Churchill, a socialite who burns through husbands like party candles, formerly accompanied HG Wells on his travels, including to Moscow, and her Washington parties are now legendary. The story that emerges when the two meet dovetails with Lawton's previous evolving world, forming part of a work that begins to remind me of CP Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence, but for espionage rather than straight politics. (I don't think you'd get a Cold War prisoner swap on Glienicke Bridge in Snow, still less that that goes as spectacularly wrong wrong as this).

That said... yes, I say "for espionage" but the thing about this sequence is that while the context, the legend, to borrow a spooky term, may be espionage (and related forms of criminality) what's really going on here is much more about the heart. These books form a wonderfully nested collection of personal stories. For example, the motivations for shifting loyalties, as exposed here, are deeply labyrinthine. A spy's work-life balance must permit some happiness, mustn't it? Some downtime, some compensation? The various British figures seen here, caught in the amber of 60s Moscow, are all caught in enforced downtime. Whether they sought to be there or are trapped by circumstances, whether they are wanted there by their Soviet hosts, or wherever their residence will be permanent or short term, they are all, as it were, on the bench, watching the game but not playing it. How they deal with that struggle, some adapting well, some consumed by homesickness (for a home that no longer exists), by drink, or regret - it's all finely nuanced and meticulously explored.

The focus here is on the intimate, on people not big events, and the victories and defeats chronicle here for the different factions of spooks are marginal ones at best, the particular intelligence scooped up and passed on pretty much anonymous and the results of betrayal by this asset or exposure of that one far form there centre of the story. It's the people that matter, their histories, choices and plans as much as they're worth in an exchange or left in place. 

I felt everybody - will nearly everybody, perhaps not Senator Redmaine, the leftie-baiting McCarthy like figure who features in the second quarter of the book - was treated with some sympathy. Equally, nobody has completely clean hands: events which have been described in earlier books leave them all compromised or trapped, unable to rise to every occasion as they might wish. From racketeering in post war Berlin to scams such as the one Charlie is running here to outright murder, there are secrets here which also have a value and it's anybody's guess how long they will remain secrets.

All in all, an absorbing, intricate and beautifully paced thriller which I greatly enjoyed reading.

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