Review - Whisper in the Wind (Sunder City, 4)

Whisper in the Wind

Luke Arnold
Orbit, 29 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 377pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521626

I'm grateful to Orbit for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Whisper in the Wind to consider for review.

I recently suffered a clash of fictional worlds when I came across Luke Arnold, writer of this fantasy noir series, playing the lead role in a TV version of Scrublands, the first book in a detective series I am also reading. I hadn't realised Arnold was also an actor. I am very impressed that he finds time to keep Sunder City rolling along too.

I had in fact thought this series was paused with the last instalment. At the end of One Foot in the Fade, Fetch Phillips, Man for Hire, had hung up his metaphorical gumshoes and settled down to run the café - more of a greasy spoon - that he inherited from his friend Georgio. No longer will Fetch suffer from interfering in other peoples' business, chasing for the magic that he helped to banish from the world. Not Fetch.

The trouble is, a man will pick up entanglements. When a nameless news sheet editor begins circulating a samizdat journal in Sunder City, thumbing a nose at the authorities, and a series of outrages begin for which a bunch of kids congregating in Fetch's café may take the fall, he is leaned on to un-retire. (To make matters worse, someone seems to know the secret of Fetch's role in ending magic, and to be willing to reveal it...)

What follows is a baffling, dangerous chase though the back alleys and gilded boardrooms of Sunder City, and a still more baffling and dangerous chase though the moral landscape of Fetch's mind. There is a sense that, having thought he was out of the game, had evaded the difficult choices and found himself a role in the shadows, he's now being challenged to step back into the daylight to atone for what he did and make the best amends he can. That dynamic may have been what was driving Fetch in the earlier books, but he was always satisfied in the end with little achievements. Now, he faces more difficult choices. 

It's interesting to see how this character, who Arnold has developed into a complex but well-rounded man over the space of four books, gradually realises the magnitude of what's at stake. Starting by acting to keep himself out of the limelight, he realises that is no longer longer viable. Only through the network of friends he builds up as that decision crystallises does he find the strength to do that must be done. Establishing that network takes him to new places and sets wheels in motion that, one trusts, may lead to real change in Sunder City. But it's at a cost for Fetch's comfort and safety.

Whisper in the Wind is a complex fantasy mystery but also a mystery with a very creaturely (I won't say human because, well, not every person here human) focus. It's a book with great heart, and moves the Sunder City series on to new places and new things. I await the next part eagerly!

For more information about Whisper in the Wind, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour Review - Murder Tide by Stella Blómkvist

Muder Tide (Stella Blómkvist, 3)
Stella Blómkvist (trans Quentin Bates)
Corylus Books, 4 July 2025
Available as: PB, 220pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917586016

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me advance access to an e-copy of Murder Tide to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

More Stella! One of the highlights of my summer, this new outing for the refreshingly unconventional Icelandic lawyer, and for her pseudonymous author, lived up to expectations. Stella - the lawyer - is thrown into a slew of cases which have her questioning her life choices and thinking of the future (and not just of the health of the Stella Fund). Stella - the author - has great fun putting her alter ego through the wringer, and misdirecting the readers.

Case 1. A prominent financier and politician is found drowned (the especially grisly drowning predicted by a psychic, who insists on sharing her visions with an annoyed Stella). The accused is a fisherman who lost his quota and trawler in the financial crisis and blames the dead "quota baron" for doing him down.

Case 2. A figure from Stella's past, a man she helped to put away for drug smuggling, now seeks her help to get him off serious charges.

Case 3. A young woman whose mother lodged sensitive family papers with Stella, turns up to claim them. Úlfhildur wants to know who her father is. This gets Stella ruminating about her own daughter and whether she ought to be able to track down her dad...

Behind these cases, a complex web of family relationships and wrongs - imagined and actual - to be unpicked.

Peppered throughout with the aphorisms and hard-earned wisdom of Stella's mum, Murder Tide is a fast moving and, at times, shocking, slice of Icelandic noir. One of Stella's cases will touch on organised crime and set formidable enemies on her trail. Another will expose a charlatan preacher who's in no hurry have his past laid bare. Politics, corruption and racketeering lurk in every shady corner - and danger too.

I thought this book brought us a much more reflective and sober (well, kind of sober!) Stella than in the previous two books in this series. She now has much to lose - not only her kid, Sóley Árdís, but her lover Rannveig. I sensed Stella regrets that now there are people she loves, her enemies have new ways to pressure her. Accustomed to sailing close to the line in her legal practice, and to bearing danger as she does so, Stella now faces new vulnerabilities. She may, even, whisper it, be growing up.

That doesn't, though, dampen her fighting spirit. Murder Tide is a book in which Stella has to use every trick, call in every favour, work every contact and be ever on her guard against the mysterious - yet also, hidden in plain sight - opponents with whom she's engaged.

Not all of them are where you'd expect.

And some are not above switching sides.

It makes for a switchback of a novel, a book where the battle lines are blurred and all is shades of grey. That's always been true of these novels of course but I think the evolution of Stella's personal life has raised the stakes here, as well as the dangers she faces. It's a short book, but one that is packed with incident and where the outcome is on a knife edge to the very end. Entertaining, mysterious and great, great fun to read.

As ever Quentin Bates' translation captures every nuance and tone in this twisty book, giving the different characters their due and sketching their place in Icelandic society without it sounding as though that's peopled by English types! It's unobtrusive but lucid, conveying the plot perfectly.

With a major plot thread left fizzing away, I am CERTAIN there will be a book 4 to follow soon and I can't wait for it.

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

#Blogtour #Review - The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz

The Kitchen (Chastity Reloaded, 2)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 11 April 2024
Available as: PB, 226, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788077

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

It's SO GOOD to see Chastity Riley return. She must be the most morose woman in noir and, confusingly, every minute spent with her is a joy. Which may be a strange way to welcome what is a very, very dark story.

In this one, Chas is winding up a difficult case, a particularly distressing instance of trafficking which has left its young women victims especially traumatised. Getting her head round the ins and outs, Riley is convinced that the perps will go away for a very long time. We see her coming and going, doing her courtroom thing, as another case looms, one in which young men - possibly, abusive young men - have been dismembered. Somehow Riley can't work up her normal head of outrage over that.

Throughout the book, we are also invited into the head of another woman - or perhaps,  a series of women, it's not made clear - each short episode another example of abuse by men. It could be that this is a series of events befalling by one girl/ woman - the subject is growing older as they proceed - or it could be a potpourri of everyday outrages. Either alternative points at a grim reality. 

Closer to home, one of Riley's own circle also suffers, perhaps stoking her fury further.

As the city swelters in unaccustomed heat the resulting behaviour of its residents is mercilessly described and dissected in Riley's sardonic internal monologue, which remains as sharp as ever, indeed knife-keen when it comes to the abuse suffered by women. There is a sense that in The Kitchen events are especially aligned with Riley's sensibility. It's as though, attuned to the unheard vibrations of her familiar Hamburg, Riley now finds herself in such sympathy with them that she and the city are in resonance, in such harmony that she encapsulates and articulates the pain suffered by Hamburg's women as well as the deep sense of injustice when nothing is done about it. The fact that those doing the nothing are often Chas' colleagues only heightens the tension. Surely, one feels by the end of this story, some revelation must at hand? 

While of course some of Riley's usual gang do feature, the sense of her leading her crew is rather muted. She feels much more on her own than normal (and that's saying something, I know). Yes, Klatsche is around, Riley both reaching for him and pushing him away. Yes, her team are at work. But there's a muffled quality to Riley's work here, she only really seems to sharpen up when she's catching up with retired Faller, who's taken to sitting outside an old lighthouse ostensibly fishing. There seems to be a deep communication between the ex-colleagues, though at a level that isn't put into words for us, the readers.

So, as ever, Chastity Riley makes her murky way though the murky city, navigating by tapping into the strange rhythms and currents of nighttime Hamburg, a kind of pilotfish for her more orthodox colleagues, feeling what they don't feel and suffering wounds that they don't, or won't, see. Deeply alone, even more so than usually, hers are the insights that will crack open the case, and on her shoulders will fall the moral the moral decisions that will result. How does she bear it? Drink and cigarettes, in the main, it seems.

I'd strongly recommend The Kitchen. It isn't a nice book - you just have no idea! - but it is a neat one, an intense story deftly communicated by both author and translator (Rachel Ward is on top form here, conveying the little sallies and the flavour of Riley's deceptively stable but not really narration).

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

#Review - Noir Burlesque by Enrico Marini

Noir Burlesque
Enrico Marini
Titan Comics, 26 September 2023
Available as: HB, 228pp, e  
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB):

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with an advance e-copy of Noir Burlesque to consider for review.

As one would expect from a Hard Case Crime graphic novel, Noir Burlesque is a very visual, very cinematic story that carries the reader along, scene dissolving into scene, its characters performing for the reader at various levels - providing an entertainment, but also engaging in what seems to be a dance of death - of which there is plenty here.

Some of that performance is of a decidedly adult nature and both for the explicit content and more particularly the violence, the publisher's site gives it a 17+ rating and I'd agree with that. One effect throughout the book - that it's all in monotone, except for the red - accentuates the impact: red is the colour of burlesque dancer Caprice's hair, and of her car, but also, of course, the colour of the blood that's liberally spilled here.

The dance here is mainly between Caprice, now performing nightly at the club belonging to her mobster boyfriend, Rex, and Slick, the ex-lover who left her to fight in the war (the book is set in the 50s New York). Slick is back now, and there is a question about whether the two will pick up where they left off and if so, what Rex will make of that (well we sort of know don't we!)

That central question runs through the story, alongside various killings, couplings and double crosses. Complications abound. There is a rival, Italian gang on the scene, Rex's boys being Irish (I would add to the CW above some very frank slurs addressed at the Italian mobsters by Rex's crew). There is a McGuffin in the form of a stolen Picasso. Besides Caprice, there is also another sultry femme fatale - and there are even some innocents who may be in danger (the principals here are though mainly far from innocent).

Wreathed in cigarette smoke, noir atmosphere and amorality, Noir Burlesque has a satisfactorily twisty plot, a vein of grim humour, a tarnished hero in Slick (while he's often hunted and is a criminal, he of all those who appear actually went off to fight Nazis) and even some comic goons to lighten the mood at times.

Entertaining and fast moving, this is a story that needs to be read at a single sitting.

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

#Review - Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Titanium Noir
Nick Harkaway
Hachette, 18 May 2023
Available as:  HB, 256pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472156938

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me a free advance e-copy of Titanium Noir to consider for review.

The title of this book is particularly apt. The noir is real. 

Cal Sounder is a typical outsider detective, a loner - but not exactly though choice - scraping a living on the mean streets. The book features femmes fatales, a powerful company that seems to pretty much own the city, and cops who have negotiable allegiances. There are shady nightclubs, down-at-heel offices and a deep lake apt for hiding bodies.

It also has... giants.

In what I took to be a near-future world - while seamy and hardscrabble, there are mitigations in place against global heating: for example electric vehicles, and the wealthy can afford the filters needed to extract the carbon so they can enjoy a log fire - a wonder drug called Titanium-7 can heal all ills, at the cost (or with the side benefit) of boosting growth and strength. Those who have taken the drug once are stronger and larger, those who have had two or three courses are the Titans, huge, powerful, and longlived. The only problem is, the drug is also titanically expensive, and with its recipients essentially immortal, there are implicatiions to creating too many of them. This moral problem, of an ongoing 'speciation' separating Titans from common humanity, is an ethical dilemma that haunts the story.

Sounder's speciality is, in many respects, managing this issue. He earns his living keeping Titans in line, mediating between them and between them and humanity, preventing things getting too heated too quickly. Neither a cop nor a traditional PI, he's called in when a scientist is murdered, a scientist who just happens to be a Titan...

The story that then develops is a delightful mosaic of the hard-boiled and the fantastical. Cal's backstory, which is gradually revealed, shows him to have feet in both the human and titan camps, with consequent vulnerabilities - and secrets. The price of digging into the case may be to touch some delicate toes, not least those of Stefan Tonfamecasca, the billionaire owner of T7. But it may also lead back to Cal's own scruffy front door, and his relationship with a member of the Tonfamecasca clan.

Titanium Noir was for me a delight to read, whether I was enjoying Cal's hard-boiled affect, seeing him get way WAY in deeper then he realises, or enjoying him hustle his way out of danger in the underside of the city. In the course of all this Harkaway takes us to some truly memorable scenes, whether a club where anything goes, a revolutionary commune or the (underground?) lair of a monstrous crime boss. There's a lot of riffing off the classics with talk of being sent to the bottom of the lake wearing concrete overshoes, wisecracking goons, and Sounder seen by both cops and villains as an irritating but necessary part of the furniture. That gives him a narrow and tortuous safety zone if he wants to reach the end of the book, and also a narrow line which he manages to (mostly) walk between hope and despair, corruption and martyrdom. Because somebody has to, right?

HIGHLY recommended, and great fun.

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

#Review - Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Untamed Shore
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 16 February 2023
Available as: HB, 282pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529426328

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher Books for an advance copy of this new UK edition of Untamed Shore to consider for review.

Silvia Morena-Garcia is an impressively versatile author, ranging between genres (SFF, romance, thriller, horror) and themes and, in my experience, she never disappoints.

In Untamed Shore she gives us a noir-tinged thriller which evokes classic films of the 40s, 50s and 60s. Close your eyes and it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine this story taking place in black and white, acted out by the chiselled profiles and dangerous beauties of Golden Age Hollywood - even though it's set slightly later, in 1979. That dating is important as it gives Untamed Shore the ability to reference and build on this stock of imagery so that Viridiana, our protagonist (herself named for a film heroine) comments knowingly about actors, themes and atmosphere.

And indeed that's entirely fitting. Into Viridiana's provincial world, to the little town in Baja California where she spends her summer watching the dead sharks rot, dodging strutting boys and resisting her mother's plots to marry her off - into this world comes a trio of fascinating strangers, American tourists who've taken a house for the summer.

Introduced to them by her father's friend, 'the Dutchman'  Reinier, Viridiana takes on the role of guide, translator and secretary to Ambrose, his wife Daisy, and her brother, Gregory. There's a certain implied louche glamour to the the three, a sense of a past, of money and, soon, of danger. Staying in their house, Viridiana is well placed first to pry out secrets - to overhear things but also to locate what's not being said - and then, after a death, to become involved in those secrets.

At the same time, Moreno-Garcia shows us a young woman growing up in this back of nowhere town, yearning for the bright lights of Paris, or of Mexico City where her father is. But don't fall into the trap of seeing the place or its people as unsophisticated or backward. That's the mistake that Ambrose, Daisy and Gregory make, as well as others who come arrive later, once the trouble starts. This book isn't written from the perspective of the strangers who come to town - strangers who don't even bother to speak the language - rather it's an affectionate and almost loving depiction of things (even if it is a warts-and-all depiction) from the inside.

What matters to Viridiana is her future - that life away from the town. She studies the impact on that future of all the undercurrents here, the swirls of gossip and reputation, the formalities represented by the Mayor or the local policeman. She understands - as the strangers don't - what can be managed, whether through an understanding of who is in what card game on a Friday night or from knowledge of who has interests where.

The book put me in mind, to a degree,  of the typology of true crimes set out by the author George Orwell in his essay The Decline of the English Murder. Writing during the Second World War, Orwell lamented the displacement of the classic domestic murder (generally a middle aged husband ridding himself of his no longer wanted wife) beloved of the British Sunday papers, by a more public style of killing - and by younger killers, of both sexes, swimming in an atmosphere of drink, dance halls and flickering Hollywood. In actual fact the first type of killing remains with us of course - domestic violence doesn't go away so easily (as we see here) - but the second sort is and was incontestably more glamorous, if that's not a crass word to use, and Moreno-Garcia hits all the same notes here in telling a story that has femmes fatales, guns, hoodlums and duplicity in spades alongside a genuine streak of moral ambiguity. 

I don't think there's anyone in this book who is altogether admirable, but nearly everyone is understandable - Moreno-Garcia gives us complex and real characters and to a degree you can sympathise with most of them (though I didn't take to Ambrose).

If you've read Moreno-Garcia's recent books, you will recognise some of the themes and settings here  in Untamed Shore. Again we have a young woman growing up in a backwater who wishes to go places, a gloriously evocative portrayal of place and of being a certain age, watching an exciting world and fearing it will pass one by. While in others of this author's book these things come together via the supernatural, here it's a more prosaic, if also more criminal, route - it'll take every bit of Viridiana's determination to pull herself out of this mess - but there is a great sense here of her takes a chance in both hands when it comes. It's a wonderful read, and I'm glad to see this UK edition so that more readers can find there way to this story.

Strongly recommended.

For more about Untamed Shore, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Needless Alley by Natalie Marlow

Needless Alley
Natalie Marlow
Baskerville, 19 January 2023
Source: Advance copy
Available as: HB, 322pp, e, audio
ISBN(HB): 9781399801799

I'm grateful to Baskerville for sending me an advance copy of Needless Alley to consider for review.

'This was Savile Row smut, nicely tailored and nothing vulgar. Smut for gentlemen rather than players. Smut for the officer class, no doubt of that...'

Set in the early 30s Birmingham, Needless Alley explores the contradictions of that city - the powerful and wealthy with their country houses and vast incomes from manufacturing, and the demimonde. The bridge between the two is William Garrett - Billy -  a private detective whose trade is to facilitate divorces for husbands who wish to be shot of their wives.

William is a complex character, a man who's reinvented himself. Marlow (what a name for a writer of noir!) explicitly pitches him as that man who is not himself mean, but who walks those mean streets. William though has his flaws. He confesses to being drawn by money. he is in a dirty trade, operating honeytraps to obtain compromising photos of those inconvenient wives so they can be divorced. Most of all, to the modern eye perhaps, he's distanced from his origins. Not physically, because the canals where he grew up are only a few hundred yards from his office on Needless Alley, but emotionally and socially. William has smoothed away his Brummie accent and there's some bad blood (never explained) between him and the barge people, bad blood that gets him a kicking at one point in the novel. It feels as though he's shut the door to where he came from

Still, it's his old friend Queenie that William turns to when he gets into trouble, his accent slipping - I loved the way that Marlow played with the characters' speech, you can hear them all clearly in your mind as you read the book - and we then learn a bit of what binds him to her and to his other friend Ronnie. Ronnie plays the honey in William's traps, and he's also another who has a foot in different worlds, more so than even William realises.

This book takes us to those worlds - to clandestine Queer bars, to haunts of artists and sex workers, to the tenements of the poor and to the locations of seamy photoshoots, where powerful men pay to watch the models pose, to closed factories and far-right politics, to the struggles of desperate people to stay one step away from destitution. A perfect noir setting, Marlow's Birmingham is a city whose residents are still struggling with the legacy of war - William clearly suffering form what now we'd call PSTD - and, as I said, struggling to get by, but one where every new opportunity (and every willing victim) is being exploited.

William finds himself a refuge from all this for a while, an unexpected refuge, but in doing so he brings more trouble on himself than he could have imagined. When reputations are threatened, his hard-won status will count for little except to identify him as someone who doesn't know their place and who can therefore take the blame for whatever is really going on.

Needless Alley is a beautifully written novel, a very material book. Natalie Marlow dwells on the physicality of her city - the heat of the Summer, the stink of the canals, the Birmingham brass of a bullet  casing, the new steel handcuffs on the model in that photography session. And always the cigarette smoke, the drink, the noise, a cacophony that lets up only briefly when William finds... well, that would be a spoiler.

I loved this book. I loved William. I loved Phyll, his unlikely ally in the spiral of blood and deception he enters and his guide in some of the hidden places he needs to walk. I loved spotting familiar locations transformed. I loved its engagement with the toxic mess that is British class. Most of all I loved its exploration of a vibrant, jostling city - and of the darkness just beneath the surface. A glorious read.

(CW that the book does deal with themes of rape and abuse and there is one fairly gruesome description of a murder scene).

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

#Review - Gun Honey by Charles Ardai, Ang Hor Kheng and Asifur Rahman

Gun Honey
Charles Ardai (writer), Ang Hor Kheng (artist) and Asifur Rahman (colourist)
Hard case Crime (Titan Comics),  3 May 2022
Available as: PB, 112pp
Source: Review copy
ISBN: 9781782763468

I'm grateful to Titan Comics for a copy of Gun Honey to consider for review.

This volume collects issues 1-4 of a comic following the adventures of Joanna Tan, the arms dealer and smuggler to whom the title refers.

The story occupies a murky territory between espionage, thriller and crime: Tan is actively supplying weapons for nefarious purposes (whether or not she has any scruples about what she does is one of the central questions here - one which for me wasn't, quite, answered in this volume). That brings her into touch with criminal gangs, terrorists and corrupt politicians and indeed these blend into one another in a manner familiar in pulp.

As was the central premise here - when a law enforcement agency reaches out for help, it seems to be making an offer Joanna can't refuse. So the story gets darker, moving from the daring set up of the opening pages, where she poses on a beach to catch the eye of a tycoon as part of a job, to an attempted infiltration of a crime syndicate.

Through all this we're introduced to Joanna's past, and (perhaps) to the events which still motivate her now. It seems the world she's moving in now isn't so far from where she grew up, and she has motives which may mean that consequences and ethics take second place.

Or she may not. As I said, there is an atmosphere of amorality here which feels as though it fits a world of super yachts, remote island dens of pleasure and general lawlessness.

This uncertainty, and the twists and turns of the plot, keep the story readable throughout and the atmospheric drawings - using both a clear realist style a degree of grainy murk - contribute to that, especially when capturing the seedier locations and events. In relation to the latter, I would warn that there are some very explicit scenes here - both of killings, and also of Tan, as she picks her way through an exploitative, male-dominated world (or at least, it was till she took a stand).

Further episodes of Gun Honey are promised, so if you missed the originals, this would be a good place to catch up on the story so far.

For more information about Gun Honey, see the Titan Comics website here.

 

#Review - One Foot in the Fade by Luke Arnold

One Foot in the Fade (Fetch Philips, 3)
Luke Arnold
Orbit, 28 April 2022
Available as: PB, 434pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356516189

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of One Foot in the Fade to consider for review.

One Foot in the Fade is the third book in the Fetch Phillips archive, and in my view, the best yet.

In the first two books of the series, we've seen Fetch, the "Man for Hire" in post-magical Sunder City - a sort of cross between an oil rush frontier company boomtown and a de-magicked City of Oz - inhabit the spiritual mantle of a noir detective, walking the mean streets, getting dirty, getting things done. But in One Foot in the Fade, Luke Arnold pivots and very firmly doesn't repeat the trick, giving us instead something rather different, forcing Fetch to confront some hard truths and, perhaps, grow up a bit.

To fill you in on the background, in case you haven't read the other books, in the world of Sunder City, there has been magic but it has dried up. (And Fetch was largely responsible for that - he has a Past, which is trying, with little success, to atone for by 'bringing the magic back'.) As a result this is a society where magical creatures - from elves to vampires to genies - are slowly dying, and where much of the "technology" that was previously relied on has failed. The result is an adjustment to 30s-style industry, proceding apace here in the hands of Thurston Niles and his corporation. The atmosphere of the stories is therefore bizarrely jumbled, with axes, swords and barbarian adventurers jostling alongside firearms, cars and telephones. Arnold is very good at drawing all this together so that it makes sense, creating a unique atmosphere and sensibility in his writing, one which I really enjoy.

Well, in One Foot in the Fade, things get real. Fetch thinks that he has, at last, a lead on a way to restore the magic to his world. That takes him out of Sunder, one of a bizarrely mismatched party of adventurers, seeking a cursed artefact guarded by a castle full of (now ex) Wizards. It's fun seeing Fetch, his friend the straight-talking, hard-drinking librarian Eileen, a fading Genie, a taciturn werewolf and young whippersnapper Larry, set out bickering in a sedan car (that Larry nicked from his dad). There are of course many adventures along the way and, rather to my surprise, a sense that Fetch is actually growing up, becoming more willing to listen to others and even to learn things.  

What none of that alters is his obsession with restoring the world. It's become clear over the first two books in this series that there is a price to what he's trying to do, but the unappealing nature of the alternative - Niles's industrial revolution - has only made Fetch dig his heels in and search harder for an answer. Now that he thinks he's found one, he becomes positively obsessed and there seems a real danger that the quest will cost him everything - friendships, safety, perhaps even his life. After all, what else can he do? In that sense, this book moves way beyond the themes of the earlier two, posing questions about responsibility, self-deception and acceptance, questions that Fetch spends most of the book avoiding.

That, perhaps, makes the ending to this third book slightly more downbeat than the previous ones - I don't think you can really say there is a victory here, though perhaps, instead, Fetch finds some space, some clarity, some understanding of what he's about and how to proceed. That still, though, leaves him with a mountain to climb before he can reconcile with the new world he's living in, but at least it's a start.

STRONGLY recommended.

For more information about One Foot in the Fade, see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Design by Faceout Studio
(Tim Green)

Velvet Was the Night
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Jo Fletcher Books, 17 August 2021
Availablele as: HB, 281pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB):  9781529417944

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Velvet Was the Night to consider for review and for inviting me to take part in the Social Media Blast.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an awesomely talented and eclectic author. There is much more to he writing than her recent stand-out horror Mexican Gothic, in recent years she has has books published across multiple genres including SFF, romance, thriller, noir, and, yes, horror, often with crossover elements but always with action and heart.

In Moreno-Garcia's latest, Velvet Was the Night, we meet Maite, a young secretary in a Mexico City legal firm. Maite is something of a daydreamer and even perhaps what would now be called a geek - happiest retreating in the evenings to be with her books, records and comics. At 30, the patriarchal society around her (Maite's mother and sister included) are inclined to judge her as virtually an old maid, and Maite has bought into this to a degree, but I sensed that she gets far more fun and commitment from her own interests - and especially her favourite comic, "Secret Romance" - than she's had from any actual partner.

Also prominent here is Elvis, a tough who's part of a clandestine government militia used to break up demonstrations and target radicals. This is Mexico in the early 70s, a country haunted by the spectre of revolution, awash - or so the government believes - with Communist agents and sympathisers, and deeply penetrated by CIA operatives. Elvis has had a hard life and membership of the "Hawks" (who really existed, as Moreno-Garcia explains in her Afterword) has given him discipline, a purpose in life and, of course, a living.

The two figures circle round one another after Maite's neighbour Leonora, a well-to-do student affiliated with the radical scene, vanishes. There is a classic McGuffin in the form of a missing camera and film, which all sides want, and which might either be the spark for an uprising, evidence of oppression and torture, or a useful bargaining chip in the struggle between different arms of the security forces (of which there is a veritable alphabet soup). Maite is, at the start, wholly innocent of the deep waters she's getting into. She just wants paying for looking after Leonora's cat, so that she can get her car back from the mechanics and not have to travel to work on the bus, exposed to the attentions of gropers and worse. But in the best traditions of noir, innocence is no defence and if she wants to survive, Maite's going to have to wise up very quickly to the world she's in...

I loved this book, which - while being a wholly different story and set earlier, has thematic continuity with Moreno-Garcia's Untamed Shore, also featuring a young woman who becomes involved in murky goings on, and who ends up leaving her hometown for a more glamorous life in Mexico City. There is a similar examination of a woman's place in a male-dominated society, and a similar nuanced treatment which refuses to cast things in terms of victimhood: Maite is dissatisfied with her life and in particular her job, but she has carved out a space for herself in which she can live on her own terms. Like Viridiana in Untamed Shore, Maite is a quick learner and even more, a brave person who continues her investigation - as it has become - even when the warning signs begin to appear that she may be getting too deep. She's drawn, I think, at some level, to a potential adventure - her reading of sensationalist comics priming her to the potential for plots, conspiracies and Gothic revelations. Maite was already coping with her mundane office life by weaving a fictive world peopled by characters (boyfriends, enemies, allies) from her reading so it's perhaps not a big step to find herself in the kind of story they might inhabit.

Of course, this exposes Maite to real dangers that threaten the little world she has made, and which won't neatly resolve themselves in the last panel. Elvis (his codename, but which he prefers to his real name) is, he discovers, in something of a similar position with his best friend (his only friend) AWOL and his boss, the enigmatic El Mago, issuing increasingly frantic orders (such as to rough up a priest - which Elvis, though not at all religious, considers to be crossing a line). For both Maite and Elvis, reality and fiction seem to be crossing over and certainties dissolving. For both, it is perhaps a process of coming awake, even as life is getting darker and stranger.

The action here exposes that darkness - a period of Mexico's history when protesters were beaten and shot, opposition figures disappeared and factions within the ruling party struggled for primacy. It is a period that I know very little about and Moreno-Garcia's story shines a bit of light on it, while resisting stereotypes (Elvis and his crew are not, for example, bad men so much as poor ones doing a job) and allowing her characters room to breathe and to express themselves in the culture of the time, particularly its music (which plays a similar role here to that of cinema in Untamed Shore). Moreno-Garcia has included in the book her Spotify playlist for the book, which is well worth checking out. 

I hope that in the description above I haven't made the book sound too doozy. It is, above all, a great read, atmospheric, exciting and soulful, bringing alive a particular place and time. Moreno-Garcia allows her characters to speak, more, she allows them to sing, and what a song this is. I'd strongly recommend.

You can find out more about Velvet Was the Night from the Jo Fletcher Books website here, which includes links to purchase, as well as from the other social media listed on the poster below.

#Review - A Pair of Nightjars

Cover photo by Nicholas Royle

Tower Block Ghost Story
TSJ Harling
Nightjar Press, April 2021
Available as: PB, 16pp
Source: Subscription
ISBN: 9781907341533

 

My Nightjar Press subscription is one of my favourite things I've spent money on recently, providing me with regular short stories told from a variety of viewpoints and across genres, but always beautifully written, sharp and with that sense of haunting the imagination, even after you have finished reading. Here are two that I've read recently.

Doing just what it says on the cover, Tower Block Ghost Story abandons traditional gothic trappings, placing its brilliantly-paced narrative of unease and unrest into a setting of concrete stairwells, urine-smelling lifts and double front door locks.

Here Sade is living with her 'handsome boyfriend' and with fibromyalgia, sometimes only managing to move between the bed ands the sofa. She's alone in the flat most of the time, so she notice things.

Sounds. Items out of place. Sudden draughts.

The supernatural is introduced in a rather matter-of-fact way - from the first sentence - so we know what to expect. But we DON'T know what to expect, as Sade picks away to discover what - or who - is sharing her living space with her. Drawing out the tension from page to page, Harling keeps the reader on the hook almost to the end, delivering a superbly creepy and empathetic glimpse of the supernatural, more disturbing for the contrast with the absolutely mundane - with the real hooks of the horror the link with everyday, not supernatural, evil.

Cover photo by Nicholas Royle

The Elevator

Imogen Reid

Nightjar Press, April 2021

Available as: PB, 11pp

Source: Subscription

ISBN: 9781907341557

The Elevator has a haunting beauty all of its own. Opening with the (never named) narrator entering the elevator of the title, pursued (perhaps) by a staggering man, we feel their need for escape even if not understanding why. 

The escape is a journey illuminated by fluorescent lights, surrounded by metallic surfaces, accompanied hints of blood (whose?) and by that pursuer, who seems to be following the lift on a surrounding spiral staircase. The claustrophobic atmosphere inside gives way to memories of a room which seems the elevator's twin, descriptions, features and memories of one echoing the other.

There is a story here - told in glimpses of memory, the contents of a bag strewn over the floor of the lift, the recollection of an old Bakelite telephone - but it's presented in dreamlike logic, or as a puzzle to be worked over.

Deeply atmospheric, this story seemed poised between noirish atmosphere and a clinging, almost Gothic, atmosphere of horror and entrapment (will the narrator ever get away or do they remain in a loop?) It gave me a lot to think about, but even more to feel.

You can buy Tower Block Ghost Story from Nightjar Press here and The Elevator here.

 

#Blogtour #Review - The Assistant by Kjel Ola Dahl

The Assistant
Kjell Ola Dahl (tras Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 13 May 2021
Available as: PB, 293pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9781913193652

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance review copy of The Assistant and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in this blogtour.

The Assistant takes the reader to a fascinating epoch - Norway, on the brink of the Second World War, where former smuggler, Jack Rivers, and ex-cop, Ludvig Paaske, run a detective agency together. (Rivers is the "Assistant" of the title). In the best traditions of noir, a woman turns up one morning at their offices and inevitably, trouble follows...

Actually The Assistant goes to two fascinating periods - alongside the 1930s story, other chapters hark back to the 20s, a world of Prohibition, speedboats, hideaways in remote fiords and gangsters' molls. This was an aspect of Norway's history I was totally unfamiliar with but am now obsessed by! Hard drink, banned from sale, is being brought in under the noses of the authorities and distributed from flatbed lorries and via corner shops and village groceries. The police (led by Paaske) and Customs are relentless in their pursuit (at one point Jack's boat gets fired on by a naval vessel) and we're witness to daring escapes, stake-outs and betrayals. 

Jump forward again to 1938, and that young woman in the detectives' office dangles an apparently simple job - she thinks her husband in unfaithful, and wants him followed. But this will lead the pair into a fiendishly complex affair involving Nazi spies, Communist saboteurs intent on stopping arms exports to the Spanish insurgent forces - and some old scores. Of course we know, even if Jack, Ludvig, Amalie, Julie and Bjerke don't, that all this is taking place in a looming shadow of war, invasion and occupation. 

I loved the way that, in this book, Kjell Ola Dahl juggles the personal and the national, even the international. Everyone we follow here was involved in the chases and chicanery in the 20s which were deadly serious at the time but now, looking back, seem rather like games. However, things were done - promises made and broken, betrayals carried out and accepted - that left faultiness, faultiness which persist to the later 30s, reasons for suspicion, regret and revenge. In 1938 it's as though the wars and rumours of wars have brought all that back to the surface, injected a new sense of jeopardy, of higher stakes but also - for some - an open door to opportunity. 

The characterisation here is excellent. Paaske, a bit of a fusspot, a man with routines, obsessed with the state of his shoes (and judging others by theirs) but also a man missing his daughter, lost somewhere in the European maelstrom. Jack, still a bit Devil-may-care (though less so than we saw in his 20s escapades) but someone with regrets, especially about his mother's death which he missed, being in jail. Julie, a femme fatale if ever there was one. Amalie, distinctly ambiguous, a woman who has come far, clearly has secrets, and who moves in many different circles - but who nevertheless still cares for her brother, now committed to an asylum. There's a sense they have all been waiting fifteen years to begin the dance that starts now. Despite that, though, the moves are uncertain, intentions conflicted and - it seems at times - the outcomes all bad.

I really enjoyed The Assistant. (Can you tell?) There are some familiar themes and tropes but they are given new life and force and expressed in a totally different milieu from what you might expect. Yes, guns, girls, smoky clubs and spies. But also, political idealism and cold-eyed men (and women) with a lightning calculus of guilt, innocence and motivation. So much of the action is about who is second guessing who and where that will lead. Who is bluffing, and what they'll do if called. It's really, really intoxicating and often very visual: a couple of episodes take place in a villa with large, lit up windows so that key events are seen by other characters as though on a theatre stage or the silver screen itself, pointing up the theatricality, the film-like quality of the whole series of events that plays out - with the drama maintained at high pitch till the last moment of the last reel.

Don Bartlett's translation feels classic noir, falling into an easy, raconteur's style that yet points up the atmosphere of a foggy morning in Oslo or a dark night out on the fjord. 

An intoxicating read, best enjoyed, perhaps, late at night with a glass of the hard stuff to hand and rain pouring down outside...

For more about The Assistant, see any of the stops on the tour (listed on the poster below) or visit the Orenda website here. You can also follow links from there to buy the book, or else get it from your local hughstreet bookshop, or online from Bookshop dot org, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

Hotel Cartagena (Chastity Riley, 4)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 4 March 2021
Available as: PB, 214pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN: 9781913193546

I'm honoured to be taking part in the blog tour for Hotel Cartagena, and grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne at Random Things Tours for providing a copy of the book and inviting me to take part.

Well, this one is certainly something different!

I've been following the Chastity Riley stories from the beginning and thought I knew what to expect, but in this fourth episode Buchholz  shakes things up somewhat. In fact she throws all the rules out of the window - the window being that of a 20th storey hotel bar above the Hamburg docks. That's where Riley has come with her collection of damaged friends and colleagues to celebrate Faller's birthday. Yes, it's an office party (of sorts) for Hamburg's CID and their hangers on, and as you will expect if you think about that for a moment, it turns out not to be an ordinary party AT ALL.

The gang's all here - introduced one by one: Faller, Brückner, Calabretta, Klatsche, Carla, Rocco, Stanislawski, Riley herself of course - with their placing carefully spelled out. Even before anything else happens, Riley notes the tensions and suggests that 'we have a situation'. 

And then, hostage takers storm the bar...

This is therefore in many respects a very different book from the previous ones in the series, which all follow the patten of a criminal investigation - but also, very similar, in that the same people are present (except for one), the atmosphere - a kind of exhausted noir - is the same, and the ultimate motivation for what happens is rooted in the same criminal underworld. 

We get the familiar punchy, irony-laden chapters narrating both events in the bar (from Riley's point of view - 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') and, going back several decades, the life of a man - Henning, later Henk - who is intimately related to what happens. His is a compelling life history, even though told in miniature (this is a short book and Henning is only part of it). Buchholz gives us, in a relatively small space, a deep feeling for this man who, on a whim, hopped on a ship and worked his passage to South America (you can still do that?), found a home, fell in love... and suffered unimaginably. 

It's also a heist, because what happened to Henk underlies a complex, carefully planned operation in the attack on the hotel bar. We see this unfold, and some of the planning and preparation, at the same time as the police response and the dramatic endgame. One of the crew is missing from the bar: Stepanovic got distracted by a pretty face on his way to the party, so ends up shivering in a tent in the street, playing at being a hostage negotiator (it gives him an in, at least). Personal life and police work come into conflict as the various men with whom Riley is, or has been, involved (again, 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') endure the waiting, trying to work some angle with kidnappers or authorities).

And all the time, the clock is ticking.

We've seen all these characters before, generally in Carla and Rocco's bar. They are free spirits who have come and gone through the pages of Buchholz's stories. Now she has, rather cruelly, constrained them. It's almost a laboratory experiment, a test of how all the distinct personalities we've come to know and, yes I'll say it, love, will change under extreme conditions. 

But Hotel Cartagena is much more than that. As I've said, Henning/ Henk's story is compelling and his development as a person is riveting and all to credible. The previous books sketched the Hamburg underworld for us as a pretty dark, dangerous place but Hotel Cartagena makes it seem like a kindergarten, compared with the more elementary, more ruthless world that Henk stumbles into.

As ever, Rachel Ward's translation here is sharp, lucid and colloquial. Some chapters verge on poetry, rendered in terse, rapt lines. In other places we get dreadful puns ('The Wurst is yet to Come' - literally true for one character). Always, the deadpan tone of Riley's internal monologue, the dry wonder at how bad things can get, is maintained, the effect building through the book until a final, unexpected climax that knocked me right off balance. 

There's a change of pace, a rising of the stakes, in Hotel Cartagena, compared with its predecessors which makes it - and I would have thought this next to impossible - even better than they were, even tenser, even darker. At the same time I think there is also a sense that under the pressure, some block in Riley, something which has trapped her in her familiar sardonic circles, has shifted and she may be on the move. To what effect, we'll have to wait and see in future books - which I'm now very impatient for!

If you haven't been reading this series (in which case I envy you about to discover it all for the first time!) Hotel Cartagena would be a good place to begin, giving a taste of the mood and tone - and the characters - without being spoilery about earlier events. 

For more information about Hotel Cartagena, see the Orenda Books website here - and the marvellous blog tour entries on the poster below.

You can buy Hotel Cartagena online from UK Bookshop dot org, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. And also of course from your local bookshop if they are doing click-and-collect, as many are. (For my local shop it's more of a "David-sends-email-and-collect" and if I'm lucky they have the book in anyway so actually much quicker...)

Review - Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold

Cover design by
Emily Courdelle

Dead Man in a Ditch (Fetch Phillips, 2)
Luke Arnold

Orbit, 24 September 2020

Available as: e, audio, TPB, 416pp

Source: advance PB copy

ISBN: 9780316455879

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance copy of Dead Man in a Ditch.

Fetch Phillips, soiled hero of Last Smile in Sunder City, is back for another bout of wrestling with guilt and of attempting, somehow, to atone.

This may be a fantasy world, replete with (formerly) magical creatures, but Fetch, a Man for Hire, is noir to the core and wears the hardscrabble Sunder City like a ratty old trench coat. It is him, and he is it. From his shabby office to the women who come - trailing clouds of danger - for help, to the mean streets themselves, Arnold's command of the atmosphere of noir is pitch perfect, as this novel gets underway with a desperate woman whose husband has vanished, a gambling den and brushes with a police force desperate for results when a wealthy financier is murdered.

Of course, as readers of the first book will know, there's a whole other layer of darkness and guilt underlying Fetch's cynicism. This is a world from which the magic has fled, and it fled with Fetch's boot on its backside. All the beauty, all the power, all the wonder of a whole magical world is gone, and it was (largely) his fault. The survivors of that remember, and he would do anything, anything to atone. But there's nothing to be done. So Fetch sits in his office and opens the whisky bottle.

Now, though, there are rumours that the magic is returning. A particularly horrible murder has been committed in a way that can only be magical and, against his better judgement, Fetch is drawn into the investigation...

I liked and enjoyed this book. In fact I actually enjoyed it more so than its predecessor, because - while there is the odd flashback to Fetch's earlier life, to establish what he had done and why - most of it takes place in the present, which I feel gives Dead Man in a Ditch greater focus and pace. Bigger issues are also at stake here. Sunder City was ruined in the Coda, when the magic died, as it depended on underground magical fires for power, so the ill effects of that event spread to the human world as well. Ever since then, Sunder has shivered, lacking heat, light and industry. 

Now, a new energy has come to town in the person of go-ahead Thurston Niles with his modern business methods and smart, grey-suited goons. Maybe this is what's needed to help Fetch's world move forward? The story therefore sees him caught between his regrets at the passing of the old world, his desire to cling on to what he has salvaged, and the need to find a way to better his city for the sake of all those shivering, starving humans (not to mention shivering, starving dwarves, gnomes, fairies, elves and the rest).

So we see Fetch conflicted, guilt and regret driving him one way, hope and logic another. He isn't helped when a figure from his past appears: that should have made things simpler but Fetch is too honest to trust simple - he's more likely to take it down an alleyway and try to beat the truth out of it. His sense of self-loathing dovetails neatly with that noirish framing, giving us a powerful sense of why he is so self-destructive, so gallant and yet so despairing.

Fetch is an engaging character, seemingly resigned to the continual hard knocks that being a Man for Hire in Sunder City guarantees (one wonders how much more he can take), seemingly sympathetic to the hatred that many in the magical community have for him, yet never - quite - surrendering to self-pity and - generally - trying to do the right thing. He outshines everyone else in this book, though, which is perhaps at times a pity - when he is verbally sparring with that face from the past, for example, it never quite feels like a contest of equals. 

All in all a great read and one which ended just when it should, leaving me wanting to read the next book NOW and anticipating what catastrophe might hit Sunder next.

Recommended.

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

#BlogTour #Review - Blood Red City by Rod Reynolds

Blood Red City
Rod Reynolds
Orenda Books, 23 July 2020
Available as: e, PB, 386pp, audio
Read as: PB
ISBN: 9781913193249

I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part in the blog tour and providing me an advance copy of Blood Red City to review.

Blood Red City is an intense, adrenaline-pumping thriller set in London one hot summer. It's a London both achingly familiar - the sweaty Tubes, the amiable, heaving late evening crowds on the South Bank, the cab offices - and, in our current pandemiced world, utterly foreign (those crowds!)

In this close, yet far-off place, we meet Lydia, a thirtysomething journalist whose career has beached on the celebrity desk, and Michael, who also deals in "information", carefully turning a blind eye to just what that "information" might be used for. Lydia doesn't have a drink problem but is in circumstances ('Two drinks making Lydia philosophical') where perhaps one has to look carefully to conclude she doesn't have a drink problem. She is going nowhere professionally, feels guilt over the support she's had from parents, and wavers on the edge of money troubles in a tiny cheerless flat with a flatmate she seldom meets, as they work different shifts. Michael has his demons, which he's adept at ignoring or dodging.

On the evening of those two drinks, "Lyds" receives a video by email, a video which shows a murder on the Tube. It may be a big break for her, and for the ex-collegue who's sent it, a way back into the game. But as she investigates, bunking off her night shifts writing bilge about celebs, it becomes clear that it could also lead to darker places.

Michael already has one foot in that darkness and for him the video means something else - an unknown factor in his carefully managed, amoral world. A factor that could mean danger, that he's not in control, has missed something. He needs to shut it down.

The two investigate, their paths crossing, both of them tripping wires and raising red flags in London's murky cash-rich strata of corrupt bankers, lawyers and politicians. Meanwhile Michael has an ailing mother, beloved sister and hated father to handle: Lydia has her boss/ lover and a lot of loose ends.

It all makes for a winning noir formula, at heart very simple - a woman, a man, and a murder - yet also bafflingly complex as the pair run down dead ends, miss the significance of clues, work contacts and sail close to the law. The degree of tradecraft - journalistic and detective - is simply joyous, Lydia and Michael employing the best of their skills to coax secrets from London's seamier residents for all the world as if they were squeezing juice from rotten fruit.

And there is rot here. Dirty money, favours traded, rules bent or dodged, investigations stymied. An ex Mayor on the make. Oligarchs and those who eagerly serve them. Layer upon layer of fronts, cut-outs and shell companies. It has a ghastly feeling of reality, as though Reynolds has pulled back the curtain on an amoral world we all suspect is hidden just out of sight.

And yet there is some morality here. As in the best of classic noir there are lines not to be crossed, attempts to walk those streets without becoming mean, grubby compromises, and regrets. But where everything is so dirty, who can keep clean? With money to be made, who won't, in the end, join the game? As I read this book my speculation about who would bend and who would break was as intense as my efforts to work out what was going on and why. In the end, it was the former - and those glorious, well-drawn characters of Lydia and Michael - that was the most compelling. Here are protagonists you will really care about, even if they can behave shabbily. Reynolds has given us a glorious, compelling story, a fast-moving, heart-in-the-mouth chase set against the magnificent background of London in all its pomp, all its grime and shabbiness.

This book is a winner. My advice - get it, before it comes looking for you...

For more information about the book, see the Orenda website here.

There are many more stops on the tour - see the poster below and collect them all!

You can buy Blood Red City from many places. Your local independent bookshop may, even in current circumstances, be able to get it for you. You can buy online from Hive Books, which supports local bookshops. You can also order from Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Cover by 2Faced Design

Untamed Shore
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Polis Books, 27 February 2020
HB, 282pp; e; audio, 8 hr 1 min (narr. Maria Liatis)

I listened to Untamed Shore as an audiobook downloaded from an online subscription service.

Silvia Morena-Garcia is an impressively versatile author, ranging between genres (SFF, romance, thriller) and themes and, in my experience, she never disappoints.

In Untamed Shore she gives us a noir-tinged thriller which evokes classic films of the 40s, 50s and 60s - it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine this story taking place in black and white, acted out by the chiselled profiles and dangerous beauties of Hollywood - even though it's set later, in 1979. Actually, that setting lends Untamed Shore the ability to reference and build on this stock of imagery so that Viridiana, our protagonist (herself named for a film heroine) comments knowing about actors, themes and atmosphere.

And indeed that's entirely fitting. Into Viridiana's provincial world, to the little town in Baja California where she spends her summer watching the dead sharks rot, dodging strutting boys and resisting her mother's plots to marry her off - into this world comes a trio of glamorous strangers, American tourists who've taken a house for the summer.

Introduced to them by her father's friend, the Dutchman Reinier, Viridiana takes on the role of guide, translator and secretary to Ambrose, his wife Daisy, and her brother, Gregory. There's a certain implied louche glamour to the the three, a sense of a past, of money and, soon, of danger. Staying in their house, Viridiana is well placed first to pry out secrets - to overhear things, find things - and then, after a death, to become involved in those secrets.

At the same time Moreno-Garcia shows us a young woman growing up in this back of nowhere town, yearning for the bright lights of Paris or of Mexico City where her father is. But don't fall into the trap of seeing the place as or its people as unsophisticated or backward. That's the mistake that Ambrose, Daisy and Gregory make, as well as others who come to the place later after the trouble starts. This book isn't written from the perspective of the strangers who come to town - strangers who don't even bother to speak the language - rather it's an affectionate and almost loving depiction of things (even is a warts-and-all depiction) from the inside.

What matters rot Viridiana is her future - that life away from the town - and she studies the effects on that future off all the undercurrents here, the swirls of gossip and reputation, the formalities represented by the Mayor or the local policeman and which can be managed through an understanding of who is in what card game on a Friday night or who has interests where.

The book put me in mind of a typology of crimes set out by the author George Orwell in his essay The Decline of the English Murder. Writing during the Second World War, he lamented the displacement of the classic domestic murder (generally a middle aged husband ridding himself of his no longer wanted wife) beloved of the British Sunday papers, by a more public style of killing - and by younger killers, of both sexes, swimming in an atmosphere of drink, dance halls and flickering Hollywood. In actual fact the first type of killing remains with us of course - domestic violence doesn't go away so easily (as we see here) - but the second sort is and was incontestably more glamorous and Moreno-Garcia hits all the notes here in telling a story that has femmes fatales, guns, hoodlums and duplicity in spades alongside a genuine streak of moral ambiguity. I don't think there's anyone in this book who is altogether admirable, but nearly everyone is understandable - Moreno-Garcia gives us complex and real characters and to a degree you can sympathise with m most of them (though I didn't take to Ambrose).

If you've read Moreno-Garcia's last book, Gods of Jade and Shadow, you might see this as something as a companion with some similar themes. Again we have a young woman growing up in a backwater who wishes to go places and who takes the chance in both hands when it comes. There, the opportunity is an unlikely liaison with the god of death. Here, it's a more prosaic, if also more criminal, route - but death features as strongly here, and it'll take every bit of Viridiana's determination to pull herself out of this mess.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and Maria Liatis's narration is excellent throughout, conveying both Viridiana's characters and, somehow, the characters of the little town itself.

Strongly recommended.

For more about the book, see the author's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Mexico Street by Simone Buchholz

Mexico Street (Chastity Riley 3)

Cover design by kid-ethic

Simone Buchholtz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 5 March 2020
PB, e, 227pp

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for a free advance copy of Mexico Street and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

If you've read Buchholz's previous books, Blue Night and Beton Rouge, you'll know to expect the doom, pared down, noirish atmosphere, the short chapters, the sense of desolation as Chastity Riley, Hamburg state prosecutor, narrates her life. The language is so hard, so abstracted that sections read almost as prose poetry and on the surface it is so bleak that it could repel if it weren't for a streak of, I don't know, a... something... in Riley's tone, a self-knowingness, a sardonic interest in the world's follies and failures that keeps her, and therefore us, engaged.

In this third bulletin from Riley's life we find her even more moodily lonely. She seems to be smoking more (how?) drinking more, and to be losing even the limited family she had: no Klatschke, of course - his flat a looming emptiness in Riley's psyche - so we don't see the bar but we hardly vist Rocco and Carla's café either and those cosy, spontaneous evenings where the place goes from public bar to family party without trying seem long gone, the little coterie split and uneasy.

Rather, much of the book's airtime is given over to Riley's and her colleagues' investigation of a young man dragged barely alive from a burning car (in this book, cars are burning everywhere - night by night the fires spread across Germany, then Europe, until news bulletins begin to report them from all around the world). Tracing what happened to him leads her to a secretive group of families living by crime on the fringes of German society, an interrelated web of feuding cousins and macho fathers and brothers (and trampled wives, sisters and daughters). Buchholtz writes movingly of the plight of these women and sympathy for them is one thing that prods Riley out of her ennui.

I always enjoy the Chastity Riley books, not only because they have a uniquely dark vision of life but because Buchholtz shows how this darkness coexists with blissful, unaware, lives often very close (geographically or emotionally - I suppose that's why I missed those evenings Riley used to enjoy the café). Well, that contrast was never so strong as in Mexico Street and alongside Riley's investigation we also see, sketched out, lives on the dark side of that wall and the voices of those who want out. It makes for compulsive, if disturbing, reading, the end in one sense already determined by the opening of the book but also wide open as there are people out there Buchholz has made us care for, care about (despite the bleakness! Despite the darkness!) and we want to know more about them

It's a short book but, my goodness, it packs in a tremendous amount. And Rachel Ward's translation serves the story, serves the mood, so well too.

Recommended without hesitation.

For more about Mexico Street see the Orenda Books website here.

You can buy the book from your local bookshop, or online via Hive Books who support high street bookshops, or from Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

The tour continues - look at the poster below for the wonderful bloggers lined up for this book!