The London Cage

Image from fledglingpress.co.uk

The London Cage
Mark Leggatt
Fledgling Press, 29 June 2016
PB, 399pp
Source: Advance copy from the publisher (thank you!)

A man who doesn’t exist discovers a weapon that doesn’t exist. The retreat of the glaciers has revealed a Cold War secret that should have lain buried for centuries, with the power to bring down the communications and defence systems of every country on the planet. Including his own. He is faced with the choice of betrayal or survival, but either way, he’ll lose.

Then an old man tells you, “If I had the choice between betraying my friends and betraying my country, I should hope I have the guts to betray my country.” Your country needs you, but if you give up the secret, your friends and those you love will die.

The second Connor Montrose thriller from Mark Leggatt is guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat.

One of the really nice things about blogging book reviews is the opportunity to see and read books from new authors and small presses which otherwise it would be so easy to miss among the flood of published books - tens of thousands a year I gather.

Some of those authors are clearly going somewhere, and I'd include Mark Leggatt in that group. For sheer, knuckle-clenching, relentless action and thrills to compare with The London Cage I think you'd have to go a long, long way.

Essentially an extended chase, the story begins with Connor Montrose conducting surveillance in a London restaurant for his shadowy boss Pilgrim. Pilgrim has close links to British intelligence, yet seems to run his own operation. Perhaps he's doing the spooks' behest but deniably? Or maybe he's a player in some way which requires him to stand apart? Either way, he's happy to employ Connor who became a marked man in Leggatt's last book, Names of the Dead, high on every CIA watch list from here to Kabul.

However, this history comes back to bite both Connor and Pilgrim when the operation goes badly wrong. A man is killed and Connor is on the run, with the CIA on his heels in the person of the unspeakably vile Kane. It's soon clear he will do anything to nail Connor, who seems have put a spoke in some operation Kane had under way (it is some time before we learn exactly what is going on here - there are secrets within secrets, as you'd expect in this kind of novel).

So the mayhem spreads across London, with shootings, explosions, car chases, low flying helicopters, speedboats, the works. To a degree one has to suspend disbelief here. Working in central London I know just how tightly things are locked down after even a minor incident: what goes on here would have the Tubes, the buses and most public buildings in lockdown, yet Connor and his colleague Kirsty basically weave their way amongst the general public with normal life seeming to go on undisturbed. But I can forgive the book that for its sheer narrative drive and meticulous plotting - the way that Leggatt has thought through what happens and makes it, in each moment, perfectly credible, for example rarely or never resorting to coincidence or luck to bring his heroes through.

One also has to suspend disbelief at some of the character interactions. Kane is pretty nasty but rather a 2D baddie, and his debates with the MI5 team (who are apparently working for him) and especially their polarised US-UK hostility need I think to be taken with a pinch of salt, as does the Russian ambassador in his brief appearance.

No matter. These are minor things as most of the focus is on Connor and Kirsty - who between them are daring, plucky and resourceful protagonists with more than enough personality to carry the story. Indeed they dominate it so much that the details of the conspiracy almost seem beside the point. In the (brief) sections where they draw breath and try to work out what's happening, or when Pilgrim discusses it with his peers, I was really waiting for things to get moving again so I could enjoy more of that action. And I'm not a habitual reader of action thrillers. it's that gripping.

I won't spoil the book here by explaining what's going on except to say that it's just the kind of cynical realpolitik that you'd expect in a good techno-thriller. Connor and Kirsty are good people in a corrupt, rotten world, walking the mean streets without themselves being mean.

If Leggatt can keep up this supercharged, action driven pace into future books (...and if his characters don't flake out from sheer sustained tension...) then I'd expect his books to be widely read and loved in coming years. A name to watch.

Alice Blogtour: This is Not Wonderland

Image from www.titanbooks.com

I'm delighted and really, really honoured to host a guest post today by Christina Henry whose book Alice is published in the UK today - you should read it:

"In a warren of crumbling buildings called the Old City, a hospital echoes with the screams of the poor souls inside. Inside, there is a woman. Her hair, once blonde, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn’t remember why she's in such a terrible place. Just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood...

Then, one night, a fire at the hospital gives the woman a chance to escape, leaving her free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago."

For more on the book see here and for my review, here. Now - over to Christina

This is not Wonderland

Christina Henry

It’s always a tricky thing, walking in another story’s footsteps. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is a tale beloved by millions, so embedded in our cultural memory that nearly everyone can conjure up an image of Alice – from the original story, a film remake, a video game or one of many re-imaginings done by assorted authors through the years.

Alice has taken on the quality of myth, a character no longer bound to her creator or origin story but a modern-day legend open to interpretation like those other contemporary fairy tale figures from Neverland and Oz.

I wanted to write my own story of Alice, but I wasn’t certain where to begin. When I wrote my first book, BLACK WINGS, I heard the characters speaking before I saw them, before I had an inkling of a story. That series is really driven by sound in my mind – the sound of the dialogue going rat-a-tat-tat. Because of that I never really thought of myself as a visual writer – a writer who saw things in her mind before she wrote them – until I wrote ALICE.

I played around with a few different story ideas, but nothing really stuck. Then I woke up one morning with an image in my head – a girl under glass, a girl with sad terrified eyes and wings like a butterfly. That girl wasn’t Alice, but she stayed with me.

Then one day I saw Alice. She was covered in blood, wearing a torn dress, somehow magically reappearing from a place where she was supposed to be lost forever.

Now I had Alice and my butterfly girl and I needed to draw a line between the two of them. That was where the story was. I had that line in the Old City. In the original story Alice follows a muttering white rabbit with a waistcoat and watch. In my story the Rabbit is not Alice’s unwitting guide but the very heart of her nightmares, though she does not remember exactly why. I constructed the geography of the Old City like a rabbit’s warren on steroids, full of twists and turns and terrors unforeseen.

I populated that city with pimps and killers and crime bosses, the kind of people a nice girl from the New City should never know, but Alice wasn’t a nice girl anymore. She’d come out of the Old City broken, and how would my damaged Alice survive in a place like this?

She needed a guide, a helper, someone more dangerous than the dangers around her. Again, I saw him – gray eyes and a red-stained axe in red-stained hands. Carroll’s Mad Hatter became my mad Hatcher, a murderer who loves Alice and killing things, not necessarily in that order.

Hatcher has visions of monsters, too - one monster in particular. Alice doesn’t believe that monster is real but she’ll find out soon enough. This is not Wonderland, but I hope you’ll take this journey with Alice and Hatcher.


Next stop on the blogtour: Off With Her Head

Review: Alice by Christina Henry

Alice

Image from www.titanbooks.com

Christina Henry
Titan Books, 28 June 2016
PB, 325pp
Source: Advance copy from publisher

In a warren of crumbling buildings called the Old City, a hospital echoes with the screams of the poor souls inside. Inside, there is a woman. Her hair, once blonde, hangs in tangles down her back. She doesn’t remember why she's in such a terrible place. Just a tea party long ago, and long ears, and blood...

Then, one night, a fire at the hospital gives the woman a chance to escape, leaving her free to uncover the truth about what happened to her all those years ago.

First, I should say this isn't Lewis Carroll. No way. This Alice isn't the sunny, slightly perplexed heroine who on a dreamy summer's day followed the Rabbit underground, had delightful adventures and was home before dark.

Rather, she's a woman who was betrayed, traded and abused: taken into the heart of the Old City where women seem to be little more than the playthings (and worse) of the bosses who run the place.

Mr Carpenter. The Walrus. Cheshire.

The Rabbit himself.

Alice is also, though, the woman who carved her way out of the Old City, knife in hand, covered in blood. She was locked up in a grim asylum for ten years, forgotten by her family, dosed on "powders" and starved of hope. But she survived.

You might says she has unfinished business - with the Rabbit, with the others.

If only she could remember exactly what it was...

This is a remarkable book. There is the reimagining of a classic story - not a trip to Wonderland but rather to a nightmareland, a kind of evil twin, twisted and brutal but complete with little cakes, size changes, mysterious coloured bottles of medicine (even butterflies). Everything - even the fantastical - is well realised and scarily convincing. More, the central characters are credible, fallible and compelling.

Alice herself is battered and hurt, but she keeps getting up and going on, with a little help from her friend, Hatcher. She refuses to fail: she also refuses to let what's been done to her drive her to mere revenge. A recurring motif as she and Hatcher struggle through this book is Alice's desire to free those she encounters - the other unfortunates in the asylum, women imprisoned in the dives of the Old City, even a mermaid. Sometimes she can do something, sometimes she can't, but she never loses the will to try.

And Hatcher. What can I say about Mad Hatcher? He hasn't given up on revenge. Sometimes a red mist descends: sometimes we see why he, too, was locked up for ten years. How he got his nickname. And we learn what he has lost. Together, he and Alice are a formidable pair, both desperately vulnerable yet also so strong. In the asylum, they keep each other sane (sort of). Together they escape and support each other. Yet Alice has no illusions about Hatcher: there is a thing that sometimes seems to possess him, and she may not always be able to bring him back...

The Old City is a truly vile place, fought over by gangs, sometimes street by street, shut in (the folk in the New City don't want any of the contagion to escape) and vast in scope, taking days to cross. When that asylum burns to the ground, and Alice and Hatcher are left homeless, marked out as escapees by their hospital gowns, their future looks bleak and indeed the gang soldiers soon close in. Alice rapidly learns that the one thing you don't want to be there is "interesting". Yet there is also kindness and refuge to be found there, albeit fragile and fleeting.

Beginning as a quest for survival, turning into a hunt for the monster that escaped the asylum with them, this is an adventure with great zest, a book that simply makes the pages fly past. While it is grim in places - and explores some dark themes - Alice's determination not to be dragged down, and the continual, bizarre glimpses of Carroll's story, set that grimness off just enough for me (though I think there are scenes that could be triggering for some) and provide a glimpse of light at the end.

And did I mention that Alice and Hatcher are actually hunting the Jabberwock?

This is truly original, truly strange and above all, a great read.

Best of all, like its forerunner, the story isn't all done: there is a - a sequel, The Red Queen, coming very soon:

The land outside of the Old City was supposed to be green, lush, hopeful. A place where Alice could finally rest, no longer the plaything of the Rabbit, the pawn of Cheshire, or the prey of the Jabberwocky. But the verdant fields are nothing but ash—and hope is nowhere to be found. Still, Alice and Hatcher are on a mission to find his daughter, a quest they will not forsake even as it takes them deep into the clutches of the mad White Queen and her goblin or into the realm of the twisted and cruel Black King. The pieces are set and the game has already begun. Each move brings Alice closer to her destiny. But, to win, she will need to harness her newfound abilities and ally herself with someone even more powerful—the mysterious and vengeful Red Queen...

For more about Alice, see here.

Next stop on the blogtour: Off With Her Head

An Android Awakes

Image from http://elsewhen.alnpetepress.co.uk

An Android Awakes
Mike French (text) and Karl Brown (artwork)
Elsewhen Press, 2015
PB (graphic novel size), 202pp
Source: Review copy from publisher (for which I'm very grateful)

This was the strangest book I'd read in a long time.

It's not an ordinary story, told largely through text with perhaps a few illustrations.

Nor is it a graphic novel, with text and pictures deeply intertwined in the storytelling. Rather, it plays with forms. Sometimes, a single picture supplements the text. Sometimes, a series of images follow it, adding atmosphere and detail and indeed, spinning whole new lines of plot that weren't suggested in the text.

And sometimes, the pictures come first, setting up the written part.

And throughout the continuity of the illustrations cast allusions over the text, hinting or showing things never overtly described. Literally, show not tell. The illustrations therefore add a whole new layer of meaning to what would be perfectly good stories in themselves, suggesting correspondences between characters or events in the universe of An Android Awakes that simply wouldn't otherwise be there, giving the book real depth and resonance.

It is the near future. Far enough ahead that intelligent, self-conscious androids seem common - though close enough to now that it seems plausible for one of those androids to be driving a 1964 Ford Mustang Convertible. Driving, because in this book androids seem to have taken on all the roles of humans. Our hero, Android Writer PD121928, lives the life of an aspiring author, continually getting rejection letters from his publisher. The book is mostly composed of PD's stories, with some linking narrative so is in some sense a short story - and as such collections will do, it illuminates the author's life and concerns.

PD's wife Samantha has been disappeared by the publisher and he's provided instead with an allowance for prostitutes. It's as though somebody, somewhere has settled on a certain idea of the bohemian writer's life and is trying to make it real, but without really understanding the reality. So a book is rejected for being one word too long, and the reasons given for rejections actually get more  bizarre after that. One might suspect that these aren't real responses, just patterns generated by Markov chains from some immense database of rejection letters...

PD has a deadline: he only gets so many tries before he's deactivated, and as the rejections mount he becomes ever more erratic - for example giving successive stories the same number, which seems to fool the system, at least for a bit. But the stories also get better and better. They begin to refer to each other, to feature common characters and themes. Some of this reflects PD's own situation - with frequent occurrences of a lost wife or husband and references to that same car - while others, perhaps, hint obliquely at how the androids came to rule (they clearly do). The stories feature human astronauts and explorers and describe the bizarre fall of the human race. They also show glimpses of the development of androids as humans replace parts and subject themselves to gruesome augmentation processes. There are also repeated glimpses of a shadowy organisation, the Bureau of Scientific Discoveries, and of android bounty hunters stamping out conspiracy theories. Parts are distinctly noirish in tone.  Mockingbirds - rarely killed - recur constantly. Somewhere in all this, once senses, are the stories of PD himself but also of the near future world he inhabits. But it's broken, fractured, seen through a Kaleidoscope.

The stories are very good in themselves, even without this sense of a larger whole, of a wider story. Some are very funny: for example the android thief who steals buttons (including robbing banks for them) or the superhero angels who Fight Crime but are brought down by a prudish bishop who objects to their nakedness. But the connections between them are such that you'll want to read and re-read, to go back and check things, hunt through the pictures for references: this book is a ramified, knotted artefact, existing beyond the normal two dimensions of the page - or perhaps I should say it's non Euclidean, both the generator of a warped space and acted on by that warping.

I'm not really sure if it has a beginning, a middle and and end - something I was taught in O level English was the very essence of a story - however, it clearly is a story, complex, immersive and deeply, deeply weird. Reading it is a truly different experience and I urge you to draw up a cool can of oil, rest your servos for a bit, and interact with it through your optic sensors...

For more about An Android Awakes (and it's a fascinating more!) see here.

Remembering Bella (2007-2016)

This is not a post about books, rather it is a shameless descent into self-inudulgence. I'm not asking anyone to read it: just pass over it if you want.

Friday 24 June was, for me, like a bad blues song. I woke up that morning and found that we'd left the EU... and then my dog died. I'm not going to write about the EU. Enough of that s***. I am going to write about the dog.

We first met Bella in 2007. The previous November, we had a house fire and we were living in rented accommodation while things were fixed (a tip: "smoke damage" doesn't just mean a bit of cleaning, it's like nothing you ever saw). We wanted there to be something nice for the children to look forward to when we moved back in, so we decided to get a dog. We bought Bella, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel,  as a puppy. She was born on 14 February 2007 - Valentine's Day - and was the sweetest, loveliest thing you ever saw. From that first sight of her - too small to climb the steps of the house, we had to make a ramp out of bricks for her - to the last, resting under a blanket at the vet's, she was a darling.

Yes, she could be annoying. She loved to lie in the front window and bark at other passing dogs (we live on a  popular dog walking route so this could be a pain). She was practiced at nicking food, and defended her space on the sofa relentlessly. She had a habit of guarding things in general. But she was simply so friendly when visitors appeared, or we met anyone out (not other dogs...)
Who are you?

Aren't I handsome?

Wouldn't it be an honour for you to stroke me?

Don't walk past! Look at me!

She was in many ways simply shameless, an utter lapdog, prone to overeating, not over fond of walks.

She was also a good dog, patient with our autistic daughter who is fearful of animals but would stroke Bella's head and coo at her.

We loved her.

On Monday, she was off her food (unusual). A couple of days later, with no improvement, we took her to the vet. Scans showed an obstruction in her stomach: this turned out to a tea towel she'd eaten, but after it was removed she declined further. The vet now thinks that there was a problem with her stomach which was making her eat stuff she shouldn't, and may have caused the overeating. Drugs might have helped but we were told they probably wouldn't, and there was a risk because of the surgery.

Rather than let this go on we decided to call a halt. She was lying flat when I saw her, breathing with difficulty and rasping and barely able to lift her head - but she did, and she recognised us, and I held her and stroked her and I held her as the vet gave her more anaesthetic to end things, and that noisy breathing stopped and she relaxed and became still.

She was a true friend, loving and loyal. She leaves a great hole in our lives, a big dent in the back of the sofa - and an awful quietness when all those other dogs go past her front window, as though they owned the place.

Rest in peace and rise in glory, little dog.

Bella, 14 February 2007 - 24 June 2016. You are missed. pic.twitter.com/CjRotvX6xd

— (((David))) (@Bluebookballoon) June 24, 2016

New Pompeii

Image from titanbooks.com

New Pompeii
Daniel Godfrey
Titan Books, 21 June 2016
PB, 459pp
Source: Advance copy from the publisher (thank you!)

I honestly don't know how to categorise this book. SF? Fantasy? Historical? It's probably all three but above all it's a rollicking good adventure.

Godfrey plays with the ideas of alternate timelines, of changing history. Here, that's done through mysterious technology owned by the sinister firm Novus Particles. NovusPart has found a way to transport matter - including people - from the past. There are limits to this. They can't fetch anything from less than 30 years ago, and they're forbidden from retrieving humans unless they are about to die (to preserve the timeline). But within those boundaries they can do a lot - for example,  saving the population of ancient Pompeii and installing them in a replica city for study (and exploitation).

Nick Houghton is a down-on-his-luck Classical scholar hired to advise on the project. But transported to the fake Pompeii, he finds that all isn't well: you don't try top boss the Romans around without facing consequences...

In parallel with Nick's story, we also follow Kirsten, a young woman who apparently disappeared from a Cambridge college. She sees a different side of NovusPart from Nick. One of things I enjoyed most about the book was the contrast between Kirsten's rather horrible plight in her relatively brief episodes - which give the book some drive, especially at the start before the Pompeii stuff really gets going - and Nick's immersion in the reality of Roman life. The two strands don't seem to be coming together until an event which transforms the way you see the whole story. That left me wanting to read more about both and I do hope that Godfrey follows this book up with a sequel.

The book is also good on devious plotting. It has interlocked machinations by NovusPart and its founding triumvirate, by Roman leader Barbatus, and by a mysterious anti-Novuspart faction, tangled timelines, imposters and missing information which taken together mean there is a surprise on almost every page. While not perfect - there are a few characters Godfrey could have done more with (Felix, for example, and Maggie) - it's a gripping read, laced with genuinely thought provoking ideas and narrative twists. And the encounter between ancient Pompeii and the modern world is well realised, a great "What if..." full of dramatic potential which is fully exploited.

And you'll learn some history too!

Definitely recommended.

Coming soon: Welcome to Nightmareland

I'm excited to be taking part in the blog tour for Christina Henry's books Alice and Red Queen - a gritty and warped take on Lewis Carroll's originals.