#Blogtour #Review - Black as Death by Lilja Sigurðardóttir

Black as Death (Áróra Investigates, 5)
Lilja Sigurðardóttir (trans by Lorenza Garcia)
Orenda Books, 23 October 2025 
Available as: PB, 225pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788848

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Black as Death to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

I read this excellent book with a degree of sadness because it is the last in the Áróra Investigates series. Of course the set up - Áróra has returned to Iceland to look for her missing sister Isafold, so her adventures from book to book, that quest aside, are somewhat secondary - meant that once the mystery of Isafold was solved, Áróra would probably move on. 

In the previous book, Dark as Night, Isafold's body was discovered so I knew what was coming. But I'm still sad!

At least - fortunately for the reader, if not for poor Isafold and her sister - some doubts remained about the circumstances of her death, so there is at least this final part to the sequence. And in tying them up, Sigurðardóttir gives us a final, spectacular conclusion to the story, a book to keep you reading till into the night as we hear Isafold's sad story in her own words, even while Áróra and her friends and colleagues struggle to join the dots.

Be warned - if issues of domestic abuse and coercive control are triggering for you, you may prefer to look away, because Isafold's story is, sadly, an example of this. While that was implicit in what we already knew, the chapters in Isafold's voice here are harrowing, the more so, I think, because we already know the outcome. What we don't know, of course, is exactly how she, her abusive boyfriend, Björn, actually died. The solution to that will tie into a present-day narrative that Áróra & Co unravel, a mixture of money-laundering, smuggling and criminality in the shadier parts of the city. It's a gripping and complex tale in itself - a generous gift really from Sigurðardóttir because now she's built up her protagonists (Áróra herself, Daníel, Helena and of course the fabulous Lady Gúgúlú) into such real and complex personalities, frankly I could just read about them all day, I don't need plot, all I need is to see these wonderful characters revolve around each other.

As they do. All their stories advance, and they're all left on cliff edges (though not perilous ones). We want to know more, and maybe one day we will.  The book would be compulsive if that's all there was to it. But as I said, there is more, the crime plot here murkier than ever, the twists handbrake-grade and the peril (for some) real. For her last adventure, Áróra really has something to get her teeth into - which is good for her because otherwise the sense of loss, of guilt, that now catches up with her might be just too much. Certainly her normal distraction - lifting weights at The Gym - isn't enough any more, so she throws herself into the case.

Perhaps too much...

All in all a magnificent ending to this series and a fantastic crime novel. And one well served by Lorenza Garcia's translation, giving us an English text that hums along. I'm so grateful to translators who provide a window into other languages and cultures, as Garcia does here.

For more information about Black as Death, 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 Black as Death from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith (always Smith's in my heart!) or Waterstones.

#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.

#Review - The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

The Lamplighters
Emma Stonex
Pan Macmillan, 4 March 2021
Available as: HB, 368pp, e, audio
Source: advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781529047318 

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

I know I'm not unique to have imagined, and wished for, the opportunity to live in a lighthouse. Alone, surrounded by the sea, in a cosy world of my own, with no-one to disturb me (and lots of books) - who wouldn't want that? 

Well, as this book suggests, that vision is rather based in privilege. Nice maybe (in the imagination) to spend those days alone, in a cosy, warm space, well fed, able perhaps to come an go. I'm, obviously, imagining a rather cosied-up lighthouse with all the comforts. It wouldn't be so pleasant if the accommodation is basic, the food tinned, with an essential but basically boring and repetitive job to do and, worst of all, if one is required to spend eight weeks in the tower (and longer if the weather's bad when changeover day comes).

Emma Stonex has I think captured the essence of that life for the lighthouse keepers she describes here. Three men - of course all the keepers would have been men - who disappear one night just after Christmas in 1972, leaving no clue as to what happened (or, if you prefer, too many clues, enough to make the whole thing a mystery). 

Arthur, the Principal Keeper. 

Bill, the reliable Assistant. 

Vince, the new boy, and with a troubled life behind him

Looking back on events twenty years later, Helen, Jenny and Michelle remember their lives with Arthur, Bill and Vince. A novelist, Dan Sharp, (who is present only as the women's audience: he is a shadowy figure seen only in the reactions of others) wants to investigate the whole mystery, interviewing the women and leading them to reflect on their lives before and after the disappearance. What secrets may emerge?

That's a very bald synopsis and frankly I struggle to sum up the themes of this complex, enchanting book. There is just so much here. The Lamplighters is one of those books that forms an irreducible image of itself, and I worry that my clumsy efforts to analyse, to discuss it may only give a wrong impression. That would be a shame because I want to persuade you to read this book. It comes at just the right time - so much of it is about separation, about bearing the apartness, the distance from one's family, from the wider world. Some chapters give the womens' accounts of this, of their loneliness in their little cottages within sight - when it's lit - of the Maiden light. Others give the mens' perspective. Both suffer, I think, in different ways: the women managing children and keeping up a facade of normal life, only to have their worlds overturned when their men come home. The men, enjoying a certain sense of camaraderie but also hobbled by a male reticence to open up. And all the time, watching each other, in case the strain becomes too much for one of the companions with whom they're trapped.

It's a pressure cooker atmosphere for both, and as the story unfolds we learn about all kinds of misunderstandings, suspected infidelities, desires and secrets. Everyone here has suffered losses, is running from, or denying, something: acts they've carried out, things that have been done to them, misfortunes that have affected them. The periodic separations endured by these families prevent these things from being digested, accepted and understood, feeding instead an atmosphere pf psychic claustrophobia, a darkness in which the strange can seem dangerously plausible. 

Stonex creates from this an, at times uncanny atmosphere where for whole scenes it's impossible to be sure whether what's being described is something we can assume really happened, is being dreamed or imagined or is an insidious mixture of all three. It is, I suspect, the sort of unreality to which isolation, stress, lack of sleep and monotony can easily give rise - perhaps one many of us have approached (in a lesser way) during the days of lockdown and covid. ('The effects of being quarantined are serious. It isn't a normal state for a person').  There is then something of the horror story in The Lamplighters, but delicately done and arising from the complex twists and secrets of the human mind.

But there is much more to this book than that. We also see the contrasting roles of men and women, the assumptions about how they will live and what they want. The three women, especially, are well drawn and deeply interesting: Helen, inheriting the status of her Principal Keeper husband ('she was Mrs PK, it was her obligation') but ill at ease with it. Jenny, who seems to live to nurture a grievance - but is there something darker behind that? And Michelle, rather different from the other two, not only younger but  a free spirit in the early 70s and the girlfriend, not the wife, of Vince. Michelle is determined to prevent Vince's memory being blackened but (the only one of the three now in another relationship) seems to be trapped with a controlling, suburban husband ('he didn't like her reading. Said it put fancy ideas in her head') from whom she has to hide her interest in the Maiden rock mystery. 

Against the women the men can seem, at times, like rather pallid creatures whose chief occupation on the lighthouse is the consumption of deeply unappealing food and prodigious quantities of tobacco (I mean it - the amount of smoking that goes on in this book, it's a wonder to me that anyone survives a week and I was rather grimly amused when in one desperate episode they run out). They mark their friendship by swearing a lot and seem to avoid each other as far as they can. But they, too, have their subtleties and their dark secrets.

As in any closed, dedicated community, lighthouse keeping has, it emerges, something of an ethos, common to the keepers themselves and their wives and girlfriends. It's partly a sense of duty, partly an idea of being alone together. 'I've had my light safe here' muses Arthur 'shining through the dark and I'll keep it shining'. He doesn't mean, or not only, the lighthouse lamp. There is an almost mystic sense of connection symbolised by that lamp, connection across years and across miles - and not always in a comfortable sense, we are told several times how unbearable to the women it is when they can see the beam of the lamp across miles of sea, knowing their men are at the other end, unable to communicate with them across that gulf.  There is also obsession here, actually scary levels of obsession, and of guilt.

This is the kind of book that hooks you at first with its juicy mystery - but once you get twenty or thirty pages in, you find other things to enjoy: the hauntedness of the lighthouse and the sea, the dance between the six main characters, the teasing revelations of their earlier lives and the different ways in which the women have, or have not, come to terms with their interrupted relationships. 

There is an answer here, in the end, to what happened, or a possible answer, but by the time we reach it, the mystery has almost dissolved into the wider story, and I found myself caring much more about Helen, Jenny and Michelle and about where they would go next and whether they would ever heal. 

A truly affecting book, with some beautiful writing ('melancholy sanded a nook in his heart', 'Big swell, bright day, grease the fog-jib and oil the lenses') and a booking I'd strongly urge you to read. 

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

Review - Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Cover art by Tommy Arnold,
design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy, 1)
Tamsyn Muir
Tor, 10 September 2019
HB, 444pp
Audio narr. Moira Quirk, 16 hours 50min

I read Gideon the Ninth as an audiobook.

Well. This one has me truly gobsmacked. Genuinely new and different, a cross between an Agatha Christie ruder mystery set in a crumbling laboratory (who will die last?), a dark tale of necromancy and the undead (bones! So many bones!) and far future SF it's... like nothing I'd ever read before.

Add a compulsive, mystery-driven narrative, SO MUCH COMBAT, a dash of romance and tragedy - oh, buy it, just buy it!

What's that? You want me to tell you a bit more before you part with your hard earned pounds, dollars or Euros (yes, I can dream of an international audience!).

Oh then. Gideon, of the title, is a young warrior for the Ninth House. The crumbling House, the House where all the kids died (except her and heiress Harrowhark), Keepers of the Locked Tomb, shadow cultists. All Gideon dreams of is getting out of the grave of the Ninth and joining the Cohort to fight the Emperor's enemies.

So it should be her dream assignment to accompany Harrow as Cavalier when the Emperor summons the Houses to provide him with new Lyctors. Each House is to send its best and brightest to compete for the honour... except for the Ninth, which will send Gideon and Harrow.

Oddly, this doesn't thrill her, perhaps in part because Gideon and Harrow HATE one another. And Gideon's reluctant, sulky, teenage scorn carries her through much of this book as she's forced to learn to fight with a dainty rapier instead of her trusty broadsword, to paint her face white as a Death Cultist and to remain SILENT in the creepy corridors and chambers of Canaan House, where the Lyctorships are to be awarded.

This isn't a straightforward contest, rather the Cavaliers and their Adepts are left to find their way through a maze of devilish traps and dangers to discover the dreadful necromantic secrets that constitute Lyctorhold. The tasks are set by the seemingly gentle and rambling priest Teacher who however warns them that they are IN GREAT DANGER.

And then, as they say, the murders begin...

This was a fun book to listen to. Quirk's narration is glorious, she doesn't so much present as inhabit every character, whether Teacher's wavering bonhomie, Harrowhark's aloof poshness or Gideon's ongoing teenage sulk. It's just stunning. If you want something to convince you of the value of audio, this would be a good place to begin.

Beyond that, though, Muir's writing is excellent. Despite the plethora of characters, the heart of this book is the relationship between Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus - two lonely, spiky women with very different places in the world, outlooks and intentions. In many ways it's one long bicker, laced with sarcasm, rancour and distrust. Yet Canaan House is so deadly, the assembled representatives of the House so treacherous and double dealing, that if there is to be any chance of getting out alive, they need to work together - and to find ways to make allies, something that comes naturally to neither.

So much fun, so much combat (the fights here are something else) and it's all going along swimmingly... then Muir somehow takes things up yet another level, bringing this book to the emotional pitch of a tragic opera, a fable or a ballad. The ending just destroyed me. If I was gobsmacked already that had me doublegobsmacked. A cold, dark universe just got colder, darker. I'm desperate for the next part, counting down the days.

For more about the book see the Tor website here.

Review - The Dollmaker by Nina Allan

The Dollmaker
Nina Allan
Riverrun, 4 April 2019
HB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via Netgalley.

I really enjoyed Allan's last two books, The Rift and The Race, and I was eager to read The Dollmaker. Those books were twisty, substantial ostensible science fiction/ fantasy which invited the reader to wonder if what were - on the surface - fantastical stories should simply be taken as such, or whether the weird turns, contradictions and coincidences were (or also were) indicative of ruptured relationships and individuals' breakdowns. The answer wasn't clear, and that, perhaps, was one of the most satisfying things about them.

The Dollmaker presents, I think, the same choice, but from the other side of the genre fence. This is ostensibly a naturalistic, if increasingly odd, story which also acts as a framing narrative to a series of fantastical short stories (described as modern fairy tales) allegedly written by 'Ewa Chaplin' and translated from the Polish. However, the subjects and provenance of those stories seem to be coupled with the themes of the 'real world' story, something Allan's protagonist Andrew Garvie uneasily begins to realise.

Are we dealing with confirmation bias - the characters in The Dollmaker reporting on one book among many they've read that seems to reflect their own lives?

Or is there more?

To explain further, in this book we meet Andrew Garvie, the dollmaker of the title.

We meet him first as a small boy, later a small man. While we're introduced early to this interest in dolls (he is aged eight) and we might expect that to cause him trouble with a traditionalist father and cruel schoolmates, the fact of Andrew's stature and condition is in contrast something that only emerges slowly - indeed part of the unrolling impact of this book is his seeing himself reflected (and traduced, and distorted) in Chaplin's stories. The world 'dwarf' is often used in these, and this is only one of the ways in which the stories, many of them about people marked out - a girl with autism, a soldier who lost his legs in the Great War and, yes, people like Andrew - echo the 'real life' of The Dollmaker.

Garvie has, we learn, answered a personal ad in a dollmaking magazine:

INFORMATION WANTED ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF DOLLMAKER EWA CHAPLIN AND/ OR FRIENDSHIP, CORRESPONDENCE. PLEASE REPLY TO: BRAMBER WINTERS.

He is on his (leisurely) way across southern England to meet Winters at her home in Cornwall. The Dollmaker interleaves Garvie's travels and observations with Chaplin's fantastical stories (a young actress with a wealthy and older husband begins a relationship with a disabled ex soldier; a teacher struggles with her feelings when a gill with autism arrive sin her class; in a near future Britain, a theocracy has banned representations of humans and an artist is publicly tried for blasphemy; a country exists where Fae are as real a menace as rats, and treated in a similar way) and with Winters' letters to him. From them (and it's not clear whether he has received them all, or whether some were sent as he travelled) we learn about her early life. She has been twenty years in a hospital after some incident which (at first) she only uneasily alludes to.

It's clear that Garvie has become - what? Infatuated? Obsessed? - by Winters (again reflecting Chapman's stories). He sees himself as setting out to rescue her in some way, even though it's not clear she wants or needs to be rescued. There seems to be more going on here than a shared love of dolls and Allan teases a bit, drawing out the journey and making it a bit of an epic. Garvie presents as a somewhat old-fashioned character, regretting the turmoil of modern Reading (the English town, not the activity) or the state of architecture in post-war Exeter. Something about the reflections on these places, as well as his visits to lesser known towns off the tourist map and the leisurely nature of his journey (he takes days to do a trip you could surely manage by train in a day?) put me in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.

Garvie seems to be an unreliable narrator. He certainly is in terms of what he tells Bramber, for example not letting on that he's coming to find her but I sensed that a lot of what he tells us is mysterious or incomplete. What about Ursula's sudden disappearance? Or the twins he mentions several times but never explains? So by the point where - in the last quarter of the book - a single telephone call seems to cast doubt on other aspects of the story too, it almost begins to look as if Chaplin's fairy tales are more solid, more certain than real life itself (despite their themes of alternative universes and the way they trespass on reality). Perhaps this is similar to the way that Garvie sees his (assumed) relationship with Winters as totally real - while being quiet cold and unsympathetic to the very real troubles of his friend Clarence's autistic daughter, Jane.

It's a dense novel (in a good way!) which had me flicking backwards and forwards in my Kindle checking for repetitions, echoes, foreshadowings, for loose strands suddenly appearing in a different context and resolutions to things that seemed to stop midway. I think that in a sense the story here is like one of those 2D or 3D representations of a 4D object, the compression producing odd effects and conjunctions which have their own patterns and rhythms.

An excellent book, one I enjoyed a lot and would strongly recommend.

Hive Books | Blackwell's | Waterstones | Amazon 

Review - Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

Universal Harvester
John Darnielle
Scribe, 2017
PB, e-book 214pp

This is another book I finally managed to catch up with, and 'read' as an e-book. I think my experience of this book was really added to by listening to it, by the sense of complicity, Darnielle himself reading the story in an almost - almost - deadpan voice, making the most of its asides, its speculations.

In places, he refers to alleged alternate versions where something different happened and characters had quite distinct lives as a result and this gives the story a breathing, almost alive quality as do the hints that what we're told is the knowledge of an all seeing, all knowing observer with access to secrets, records and facts. (For example, in one place his characters decide to report something to the police - but, he then just in, we no that no such calls were received that evening - almost as though he had a file of evidence open on his desk).

That all-knowingness contrasts with the teasing, leisurely unwrapping of the central mystery here. Jeremy is a young man working, in the mid 90s, in a small, local video rental store in Iowa. So recent, and yet a different world, a world of clunky analogue technology on the cusp of being swept away.

One day, customers begin to return tapes to the shop, complaining that the films they rented contain... other material. Disturbing, strange material that it is hard to watch through. Gradually, Jeremy and then store owner Sarah-Jane, begin to be pulled into investigating just what is going on. We too are drawn in, learning nothing quickly but happy just to absorb Darnielle's prose: allusive, conversational, looping, deeply rooted (I think) in the prairies, the lives of ordinary people living in small towns and on grey farms and in the snows of Midwest winters. The story is as much about how Jeremy, Sarah-Jane and their immediate friends and family react to what seems a sinister mystery - how they avoid knowing and circle round the issue: the dynamics of groups of people not seeing or saying things. A lot of this book is about choosing not to know things about other lives.

And then the pitch rises and something bad happens - and Darnielle is away into the history of a certain character, taking the story into a wholly new direction, employing the same rapport, the same easy style and leveraging the trust built up with the reader to tell a rather different tale, that itself loops back and becomes relevant.

It's a book where you feel that little details count, although there is never a complete picture in which you can see how they fit. A story where the present feels very indebted to the past - whether the unknown past of the Native people who gave their names to places like Tama and Sioux City and Iowa itself, or the more recent past of which Emily wonders '...what shed'd already missed, what had gone missing from Iowa before she ever got there'.

If you ever listened to those Lake Wobegon monologues in A Prairie Home Companion and thought, 'Surely there must be something darker there?' then here it is, a breathing out, almost, of the Gothic.  It is in many ways a perplexing book, a tricksy book and I see that many reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads have confessed to not understanding it. I don't think I really understand it, either, but I do get it - if that makes sense. It's one of those rare books where 'understanding' is beside the point, you simply need to experience it.

Deeply weird but also deeply satisfying.

Review - Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

Image from http://www.orbitbooks.net/

Strange Practice (Greta Helsing No 1)
Vivian Shaw
Orbit, 27 July 2017
PB, 353pp
Cover and design by Will Staehle

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

For me, this was one of those knock out, near perfect books that - in any genre - comes along all too rarely. This time it's urban fantasy, but urban fantasy as seldom seen: smart, grounded, fresh and funny. As if to underline the difference, the cover itself is strange and beautiful. It's woodcut-y, stylised, with a touch of the macabre medieval - but modern detail in the background, as if one of those broadsides from the days of the Great Plague had come back to haunt us. (Once you've read this book you'll beleiev it might).

Excellent, unearthly work from Will Staehle who I last spotted illustrating this.

Strange Practice introduces us to Dr Greta Helsing, doctor to the monsters of London. Whether she's preparing surgery on a mummy whose bones are showing 2,000 years of wear (the proper spells will be used, naturally), treating a baby ghoul for an ear infection or, indeed, helping the leader of the ghoul tribe with his depression, Greta is there, dedicated to her patients, doing the job she loves, carrying on her father's work. She is a doctor, and monsters are, as she explains at one stage to a troubled vampire, people.

Ah. Vampires. Van Helsing and vampires. That must be the, er, meat of the story? Stakes, garlic and deserted churchyards? Because in this book we have not only vampires but, indeed, vampyres as well. (The difference is the diet).

Actually, no. Greta's relationship with Ruthven (he prefers you drop the "Lord") and (Sir Francis) Varney is civilized, professional and respectful. Her relationship with old friend of the family and former demon Fastitocalon is tender. These are, as I said, people and Shaw is excellent at portraying a whole society, by necessity a shadowy and secretive one (the threat of pitchforks and flaming torches is never far away) but complete in itself, a vital part of London and with its own pulse, its own hierarchy, its own personalities. You sense all that just as you sense modern London too.

Greta is unusual in being a normal human who inhabits this world, but she's not the only one. We also meet Cranswell, researcher at the British Museum (useful) who with Greta, Ruthven, Varney and Fass, is going to take on something rather nasty and rather unusual in this book. And Greta has a couple of assistants who help out with her practice - one of them a witch.

Because the balance between monstrous and mundane London has been upset by a series of killings of both humans and monsters. The threat is coming closer and closer to home. As with the monsters, and with Greta, Shaw sketches a frighteningly plausible brood of troublemakers, determined to upset the harmony of a diverse London, and whom our new friends must confront.

And behind them is something even worse.

The resulting story is just right - it has tension where it's needed, a dash of humour, it doesn't take itself too seriously and it takes an honest look at the difficulties such a varied group of beings would encounter (in particular there's a real touch of sadness about Varney, who is pretty hard on himself and sees nothing good in his life). And it's a well-plotted, satisfying mystery too.

Along the way, Shaw nods to some classic vampire (and vampyre) literature - Dracula, obviously, but also the writings of Polidori and others, taking characters from earlier books which then become backstory (you can do this with Victorian classics if your protagonists are near immortal bloodsuckers!) That helps to round out her characters and give a sense of reality outside this book.

So, a rollicking adventure with real substance, rooted enough in the traditions of the genre to have real weight, while also firmly located in the modern world. Combine this with sharp writing and great characters and - since this is described as the first Greta Helsing novel - you have what promises to be a great series.

Oh - and there's a real surprise towards the end, when a most unexpected character turns up who will, I suspect, be back...

Review - 13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough

13 Minutes
Sarah Pinborough

Gollancz, 18 February 2016
HB, 416pp

I'm grateful to NetGalley for an advance e-copy of this book.

Sarah Pinborough is well known as a horror writer. With recent books she has blended her horror with YA (The Death House), detection (Murder/ Mayhem and The Dog-Faced Gods) and even fairy stories. Now she turns more squarely to teenage life even than in The Death House.

You might think a story of a young woman who was drowned, died for 13 minutes but then returned to life would be a tale of darkness and haunting, and of course this is - but not in the kind of supernatural way you might expect. Pinborough continues to surprise, though, and you shouldn't take anything on trust: the group of teenagers affected by the events in this book may be ordinary but that doesn't mean everyone is happy, secure or - perhaps most of all - safe.

Tasha Howland is a successful girl, popular at school, leader of the cooler-than-cool clique known as the Barbies. So how did she end up, the middle of one night, in an ice cold river, clinically dead? 13 Minutes follows Tasha's attempts to rebuild her life and to make sense of what happened to her. The story's told from multiple viewpoints: mainly Tasha's onetime BFF Becca but we also see a lot of Tasha herself, of the detective assigned to the case, and of Becca's boyfriend. There are texts, transcripts of sessions with a counsellor, newspaper cuttings and excerpts from Tasha's diary. And it all comes together, oh so cleverly, oh so slowly. Pinborough has written a very clever book, on several levels.

First, she gets under the skin of the sixth formers - Tasha, her cohorts Jenny and Hayley, Becca and her uncool friend Hannah. The book revolves around them and to a great extent they form a little world of their own, looking out, everything seen through their motivations - rivalries, anxieties, popularity and unpopularity. There is history between them, but we only discover it gradually. The author was, I understand, a teacher and I'd guess a very good one - the observation and understanding here is razor sharp.

Secondly, she... oh I don't know if I should even say. No spoilers, but this book is tricksy. There are lots of narrators here, OK? Are they all telling themselves the truth all of the time? Are there things that are known but hidden, not referred to, lurking under the surface? Are there things, under the surface, that even the confident, sassy teenagers don't know about?

And then, the book is so skilfully plotted. It seems to be one thing and then something happens - you'll know it when you reach it, you might even see it coming a little way ahead and congratulate yourself, but watch out, it's the consequences that matter more than the event itself.

From that moment the rather careful choreography of the group of girls - not friends, but pushed into shifting alliances by the event that befall Becca - changes pace, as though a performance of Swan Lake suddenly turned into The Rite of Spring - and secrets emerge like little dancing devils. It becomes more and more clear that something is badly wrong, but Pinborough keeps a final understanding from the reader till almost the last page, when the book closes with frenzied action.

It is, I would say (as one who'd a long long way from teenage) a realistic, not moralistic, portrayal of teenage life. There's a bit of sex, there are drugs, but it's not a book about those things or their Dire Consequences: they aren't markers for Out of Control Youth or Moral Decay, just stuff the characters are coping with. If such things bother you, be aware.

Most of all though, it's a great read. Pinborough continues to delight her readers, refusing to be confined to simple genre categories and increasing her range all the time.

Goodness knows what she'll do next.