Blogtour review: Tag - You're Dead by Douglas Skelton

Tag - You're Dead
Douglas Skelton
Contraband, 27 April 2017
PB, 266pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of the book and to Gordon who arranged the blogtour and invited me to take part.

Tag - You're Dead is a noir thriller set in Glasgow. It's so noir, you almost need a torch to read it, as protagonist Dominic Queste wisecracks his way from abandoned tenement to remote moorland cottage to a restaurant where a chain-smoking blonde sits in a back room keeping secrets. Queste lards his narration with film references, as does the anonymous killer who takes an interest in him, and wisecracks for his country when cornered by the cops or the Glasgow heavy mob.

The style is authentic, heady and pitch-perfect. But it's not just a matter of style, of pastiche Chandler. Skelton knows how to spin a plot, too - how to spin a web, I should rather say, that catches his characters one by one. There's a pattern, because they're all in the same web. There's no pattern, because... well, that would be telling. It is, in the end, a devilishly simply premise. Devilish and simple and deadly.

Skelton peoples the book with unforgettable characters - Queste himself, his ever sadder partner, Ginty; Queste's backup, slum priest Father Verne and brothers Duncan and Hamish Sullivan who provide backup for the good Father ("We're all going to Hell - the question is, whether we go there alone") who runs a women's refuge and sometimes needs a shield against the dealers and the pimps whose business he's disrupting. They're the main players, but we also see cops, journalists, Glaswegians of every station, and they're all drawn with an eye to the telling detail, all made alive (if, in some cases, then made dead very quickly).

It's a fun read, a sobering one and every page is compelling. It may be a bit cliched that Queste is a grubby angel, that he was himself an addict and isn't above bending the law here and there, but Skelton carries this off with aplomb - partly through making the whole thing so transparent: Queste knows that he's in a noir thriller and behaves accordingly, as do some of the others such as muscle man Tank Milligan who dresses like a hood from a B-movie.

While there are shades of night over all the central characters and Father Verne, again, looks forward to the future battle they won't win, I hope that Queste and his friends appear agains soon because in an ever darkening world, boy do we need some deeper darkness to provide relief.

Review - City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

Image from www.quercusbooks.co.uk

City of Miracles (Divine Cities 3)
Robert Jackson Bennett
Jo Fletcher Books, 4 May 2017
PB, 439pp

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

Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is back, and this time he's out for vengeance...

This is the third and final part of Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy, three books I have found delightful, entertaining and deeply accomplished.

In the world of the Divine Cities, miracles are commonplace, the Dininities walk among us and reality is mutable. But not everyone benefits from this: the Divine is here, but is unequally distributed - and for centuries, it was the people of the Continent who had the miracles, and the people of Saypur who paid the price. In an act of unforseen violence, the Divinities were slain and reality Blinked.

The first book, City of Stairs, explored the moral ambiguities behind this post-colonial situation where the formerly oppressed rule and seek to erase the culture of their oppressors. The focus of that book was the wily spy Shara Komayd, sent to investigate a murder in the city of Bulikov (in these books, the Continent has Slavic overtones and its residents are pale skinned while the Saypuris are darker).

The second book, City of Blades, focussed on Komayd's sparring partner, General Turyin Mulaghesh, brought out of retirement to clear up a mess. Both Komayd and Mulaghesh are delightful characters, professionals, even ruthless professionals, committed to, and masters of, the political game that is Saypuri public life, well connected, realistic, mired in compromise - but seeking a better way. We never actually get to see much of the Saypuri bureaucracy and its machinations, since the books are really about the crises that these two women face when the past won't stay buried and history threatens to turn upside down (again). But Bennett is really, really good at suggesting, at hinting... you just know what kind of organisation stands behind Shara and Turyin, what dangers they face, how high the stakes are.

'It's unfair that the dead leave us... but it's worse that they never really go away.'

Both books also feature Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, a great bear of a man from the North, Shara's sidekick with whom we learn - again hints, few details - she's shared a career's worth of adventures, scrapes and situations. An exile from his people, Sigrud is a lonely figure with a bad habit of continually losing what he values - family, home, honour - until at the end of City of Blades he is forced to flee, having committed a terrible crime.

In City of Miracles, Sigrud gets his own book. We learn more about his past, and what his losses mean to him. About the desire for revenge, and what it cost him and - in the end - who he truly is. Because he's got a part to play in making things right.

And they have gone terribly wrong. Shara has been murdered, leaving her adopted daughter unprotected, and once Sigrud hears about it, it's time for him to dig up his old work tools and come out of the forests to track down her killer and find what was behind the crime.

What follows is a truly white knuckle adventure filled with marvels, squalor, Divinities, spycraft, escapes, deaths - and an implacable enemy, something that can use the shadows to strike and which is very hungry. Sigrud begins simply wanting to avenge Shara, then he realizes that he has a bigger task - and that in the end, time will be against him.

I can't tell you how delighted I was to read this book, to meet, especially, Sigrud again and to see him account for himself and try to redeem himself (whether he does I'll leave it to you to judge). One of the strengths of these books has always been Bennett's characterisation of his three central protagonists. Sigrud's pain, his despair and his loyalty have always shone through but with more focus, in this book, they become nuanced, both more and less than in the previous ones and he has much more of a role in shaping the story. Which isn't to say that he overpowers everyone else: there are some other truly great - and horrible - characters here, including a pair of villains who are the embodiment of creepiness, a tough billionaire businesswoman who habitually clutches an automatic rifle, and a pair of teenage girls - one of them Shara's adopted daughter - who won't be pushed to the margins of things.

There are also some wonderful feats of imagination as the story powers towards its conclusion - my favourite was the Aero Tram which now HAS TO BE BUILT - but the idea of a seneschal (you'll have to read the book!) comes close as does the final release of Bulikov's miracles.

And there's dark humour:

'He takes a long, slow breath. 'In my operational days, there were three ways of thinking about things. There were things you knew. There were things you knew that you didn't know. And then there were the things that you didn't know you didn't know.'

'No wonder we keep having so many international crises' she said  'if you lot are running around talking like that.' "

Look, just read the book. It's brilliant in so many different ways - as a book in its own right, as the conclusion to a dizzying, ground-breaking fantasy trilogy and as an inseparable part of that trilogy.

This isn't fantasy with a Map and Dragons, it is fantasy with telephone, trains and radio yet still in a world of the deeply weird, a world where there is a Divine ecology which has been upset. It has things to say about power imbalances, about revenge and retribution, about progress and backwardness, about grief, loss and exile, but above all it's an epic story - epic not in the "ten thousand warriors thundered across the plains" sense, epic in its humanity, its sympathy and its empathy.

Read it!

Review - The Boy on the Bridge by M R Carey

The Boy on the Bridge
M R Carey
Orbit, 4 May 2017
HB, 390pp

Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy. 

The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world.

To where the monsters lived.

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for sending me a copy of this book, which is one of my most anticipated of 2017, following up Carey's The Girl with all the Gifts.

Like Girl, it's set is a world after the Breakdown. In order of events, you'd read this first because it takes place 10 years or so before Girl. However, I think that - especially if you haven't seen the film - you should read Girl first, because otherwise the revelations in that book, and the way it builds tension, will be slightly spoiled (not least, what the Breakdown was, who the children in Girl are, and what their fate is).

Similarly, don't read this review if haven't read Girl as spoilers for it will arise.

The basic setting of Boy is the same, with fungus-infected Hungries roaming Britain and the last remnants of humanity either holed up in Beacon base, somewhere on the South Coast (a nod to The Day of the Triffids where the human survivors make their stand on the Isle of Wight?) or roaming around as "junkers" - Mad Max extras in battlewagons, pillaging and raping as they see fit. Some of the relationships between the characters feel similar too: an adult mentor to a troubled child, a dislikable researcher, down to earth soldiers who turn out not to be quite so down to earth.

The actual characters in the two books don't, however, really cross over much: Dr Caldwell is mentioned by name here but never appears, and the main continuity is provided by "Rosie" - the Rosalind Franklin, a vast, armoured and tank-tracked mobile home/ laboratory in which the main characters live and work. They're on a mission to find a cure for the Cordyceps plague, yet it's a tense life, holed up in a tiny living space, beset by Hungries and junkers and with - frankly - no progress made.

Rosie turns up, of course, in Girl (she was found abandoned in London) so it's a fair bet that the mission here doesn't go well, although the timeline means we don't, can't, know till the very end of this book precisely how badly. But it does look pretty bad. There seems to be a traitor on board: despite the severity of the situation, Beacon is divided by selfish ambition as the civil and military sides jostle for power (as though being lord or lady of a giant prison camp surrounded by zombies was a prize worth having) and the divisions are reflected on Rosie too with split command, mistrust and hidden agendas.

Against this background, Carey draws the crew with compassion and insight, especially Stephen, the Boy of the title, and Samrina Khan, his mentor and rescuer. Stephen is young, a gifted scientist but clearly has some difficulties with relationships and social settings (he can't be touched, is unable to lie and is barely tolerated by most of the crew). It's not clear whether Stephen is - as his colleagues believe - on the autistic spectrum, or whether he has been traumatised by the loss of his parents to the Hungries, but what does come through is the bond between him and Khan as well as Stephen's obsession with defeating Cordyceps - obsession to a point that may endanger the lives of the crew: the corrosive effect of private agendas, even well intentioned ones, and of a lack of communication, is one of the themes of this book, seen also in the friction between Dr Fournier, the leader of the science team, and Colonel Carlisle, the military commander.

Fournier is probably the least sympathetic character here, essentially a bureaucrat who adds nothing to the mission, who often knows what he's doing is wrong but does it anyway because he's told to, while Carlisle - Carlisle is an enigma. He burned half of Southern England for, essentially, the same reason, who's despised by his men (and women) for it, but who seems to be something near a genius at ensuring the survival of the mission.

Carey makes these, and the other members of the crew, fully alive and their rivalries, jealousies, resentments and gifts create an atmosphere in the lab which you can almost taste. Rosie moves slowly, negotiating a safe route among abandoned cars, roadblocks and other obstacles, with the continual risk of ambush or pursuit: but it's as dangerous inside her as outside, with the need to avoid any of those tensions flaring into open conflict and to keep the mission alive even once Beacon falls silent.

The reasons for that silence and the nature of Cordyceps - at which Stephen steadily chips away - are the main mysteries lurking behind the events of this story, but it's the humanity of the crew, and the humanity - or not - of the 'feral children' who we met in Girl, that drive the book towards a dramatic and emotional conclusion.

Boy is a prequel/ companion that fully lives up to the promise of Girl and which may even indeed be slightly better - for me, the characters were better realised and fact that this was the second book allowed their backgrounds to be painted in more detail (we know more about Stephen's origins than we do about Melanie's, for example) and the wider cast also gave more potential for interactions between them. It also adds to or completes something already in Girl - a discussion about hope for the future: whether it's to be found in doggedly preserving what we have (as the Beacon authorities try to to) or in accepting change and development, even at the cost of enormous loss, and letting something new and different be born.

That's the choice that, in different ways, the characters here all face and again is is a theme that resonates with classic SF in many respects. this is, at heart, a novel of ideas - as well as being a compulsive read, especially in the second half: I only put it down very reluctantly when I was 17 pages from the end but we had to go out!

In summary, I'd strongly recommend this book - but advise you have a few tissues ready as you near the end.

Review - Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon

Cold Welcome (Vatta's Peace Book 1)
Elizabeth Moon
Orbit, 13 April 2017
PB, 431pp

I'm grateful to Orbit for a copy of this book to review.

Admiral Ky Vatta should return to her childhood home a war hero, but on the way her shuttle is downed by sabotage. Marooned in a hostile landscape it’ll take every bit of wit, skill and luck she can muster to lead her fellow survivors to safety, knowing that the mysterious enemies who destroyed the ship are on the hunt, and may have an agent in the group ready to finish the job at any moment. And was the sabotage an attempt on Ky’s own life, or someone else’s?

Reading this book was in several ways an unfamiliar experience for me. I hadn't read anything by Moon before - in particular her central character Admiral Vatta has featured in a whole series ("Vatta's War") and so has plenty of backstory and I don't read a great deal of military SF or spaceopera.

Still - something about this book grabbed me.

In many respects it's a survival tale. When the shuttle goes down, Vatta is left as the most senior officer commanding a ragtag of passengers who just happened to be sharing a flight with her. They're not even members of her fleet. They land in the inhospitable Southern Ocean of her home planet, in the winter, and she's responsible for keeping them safe and leading them back to civilization. It's an appealing concept for a story, made more so by the possibility that there may be a traitor on board the life rafts, and doesn't really depend at all on any SF - survival is survival and, as Moon makes clear in her acknowledgements, the principles remain the same whether you're writing about Shackleton's voyages or remote events on a planet far, far away.

As are the burdens of command, the prejudices, fears and divisions that can doom an expedition, and the depths of endurance that can be drawn on to defy the odds. Those, really, are the themes of this story: there is some plot about Vatta's family, her lover, and wider events which eventually intersects with her story, but mainly it's down to her. The loneliness of command is perhaps similar whether exercised on the bridge of a starship or on a liferaft.

Moon plays something of a blinder here. If, like me, you haven't encountered Vatta before you may find her admirable, but hard to immediately like. (A little too correct and perfect, perhaps (though thankfully not protocol-bound like her aide, Jen). Readers who followed the earlier adventures will I'm sure have got past this, but it took me a whole to be at ease with the Admiral. However, the opening sections of the book are so action filled and challenging that one scarcely notices this - by the time things let up a bit, Vatta has got under one's skin, so to speak. It's a clever structure, helping to introduce a solid and compelling character even if you haven't read the earlier series.

From then on, the book introduces elements of a mystery, as well as some murky commercial rivalries and politics, which both affect Ky in the remote Southern winter and her family, spread across the galaxy. Exactly what is going on is never quite clear - there are further books to come and no doubt some of these events will be explored there. Certainly the book stops right in the middle of things, leaving the reader desperate to know what will happen next. By then, Ky Vatta has set herself a quest. There are some obstacles to achieving it but if we've learned one thing form this book it's that she's not easily put off.

Excellent start to a new series, whether you have already read Vatta's War or not.

Blogtour review - Want You Gone by Chris Brookmyre

Want You Gone 
Chris Brookmyre
Little, Brown 20 April 2017
HB, 432pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy copy of this book via NetGalley, and honoured to be joining the blogtour. (This was one book though I couldn't miss out on the hardback of and I've bought one to go with the other Brookmyres on my shelves).

Sam Morpeth doesn't have it easy. Sam's mother is in prison, she's bullied by the popular girls in her class and she's the only carer for a sister, Lilly, who has learning disabilities.

And it all seems to be getting worse as Sam's benefits are cut and the lowlife move in to take what they claim Sam's mum owes them for drugs...

Jack Parlabane, in contrast, is on the up at last. Still glowing - a little - from his reporting of the Black Widow case, he's now been able to use his contact, "Buzzkill" to get the inside story on a major bank hack. Buzzkill has featured several times in recent books, but now we're going to learn a great deal more about him ("there are no women on the Internet") as he and Jack circle and double cross each other, looking for a way out of a pretty extreme situation.

It's a situation that also draws Sam in, and one where she'll have to dig deep into her history to discover what's really going on.

And to survive.

All while juggling schoolwork, Lilly-care and the labyrinthine benefits system.

Brookmyre gives an achingly real portrayal of real people in real dilemmas: what do you do when your flat is burgled, the TV stolen, and your little sister will just melt down if she can't watch her favourite DVDs at the regular time? As a parent of a LD child I can assure you this isn't a trivial issue but Brookmyre clearly gets it. The need to provide care throws many spanners in the works here, heightening the tension as the story winds to a gripping climax.

What happens to the hacker when they're hacked? (Scary TV of armoured - and armed - cops busting open flats, that's what).

How does an ageing hack in a transforming industry stay at the cutting edge when he's beginning to feel too old even for the partying and definitely for climbing up to 3rd floor windows?

This is a book that ranges widely in its themes - from the camaraderie of hacker gangs to financial fraud (that bank deserved what happened to it), the changing face of journalism: Jack's got himself hooked up with a Buzzfeed style outfit, all beanbags and pool tables and based at an achingly trendy North London address (Hmmm, let's see how long that lasts). We also see the grim reality of the benefits system, for those caught up in its workings. All in support of a thrilling plot with the usual Parlabane shenanigans - whatever he tells himself, when he breaks into an office it's not only in search of the story, it's just as much because he can.

But there's a serious edge. Buzzkill nearly ruined Jack once before (by accident? on purpose?) and has been an ambiguous figure throughout. All the same, he's done Jack some favours. Now, Buzzkill is calling in the debts, faced with an enemy the hacker can't hack. But this could bring all Jack's new-found credibility crashing round his ears.

Will he repay his debt?

Will it be the end of him if he does?

From the ominous preface to the final, suspense-filled pages of the story, this is a book that'll keep you gripped and reading - whether you're a longtime fan of Brookmure or a newcomer.

Blogtour - Faithless by Kjell Ola Dahl

Faithless
Kjell Ola Dahl (Trans by Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 15 April 2017
PB, 265pp

It's my turn today on the blogtour for Faithless. I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for a copy of this book and to Anne for inviting me onto the tour.

I hadn't previously met the team of Oslo detectives of which Gunnarstranda and Frølich are a part, and there is clearly a fair amount of backstory to them - not least in the way that Gunnarstranda drops out of his holiday to get back in on the case even where, it seems, he isn't really needed. And what about Lena Stigersand and her strange, not to say brutal, relationship with Ståle Sender? And the bad blood (seemingly) between Frølich and his boss, Rindar?

I don't know how far these complex relationships develop from previous books, but in any case, Faithless is still an excellent place to pick up the threads and get to know the lives and loves of the detectives. They come across as real people, and that reality only adds resonance to the crimes they're confronted with here.

Kjell Ola Dahl

The first of these is the very  nasty murder of a young woman - found dumped in a skip, her skin scalded by boiling water, her clothes missing. Rape is assumed: but there's a link back to Frølich, and to an old friend of his, which suggests the death may be connected to an ongoing investigation.  The affair wakes something in Frølich's mind and he begins to experience what seems to be PTSD. can he get to the truth without having to go back to some very dark places in his past?

There are also similarities between this crime and a cold case - but that took place 1500km away, and many years ago. As the deaths begin to rack up, Frølich is also investigating the disappearance of Rosalind M'Taya, a young African visitor to Oslo. Nobody else seems to take it very seriously - while it's not spelled out there seems to be a whiff of racism here - but Frølich can't resist picking away at this loose end, even with another major investigation on.

This is a fascinating ensemble cast: it's enthralling simply watching how they react and bump off one another, trying to tease out in one's mind not only who committed the crime(s) but how the team's cohesion - or lack of it - will affect the investigations. It's actually much more fun than the classic brooding loner detective, who we know will wrap everything up on the last page (and go away to brood). Yes, there are characters here who strike out on their own - and get into real danger - but one the whole there is more of the air of a family - a dysfunctional family beset by rivalries and resentments, but still a family.

Bartlett's translation serves the story well, preserving enough of an air of foreignness (which is important - I always think it's a shame if a translation becomes so seamless that you may as well be reading about Milton Keynes or Glasgow) yet making the story readable and clear. And behind that, Dahl's story is taut, at times tragic and always, always absorbing.

So, who is faithless, how, and why? Saying too much would spoil the story, but I think most of the characters are, in different ways - not all of them in bad ways, admittedly, but there is a lot of darkness here, in a book that's set in the long Northern summer days.

I'm now eagerly looking forward to hearing more about the Oslo Detectives.

Review - The Ballad of Black Tom

Image from http://us.macmillan.com/

The Ballad of Black Tom
Victor Lavalle
Tor, February 2016
PB, 151pp
Source: Bought

HP Lovecraft is an author who fascinates and divides, who has had an enduring impact on popular culture yet also repels.

I first read Lovecraft in the mid 80s. I think that his books may have been on a reading list my English teacher handed round when I was about 14, although I'm not sure. I do remember that the three volume paperback version of his complete works I have had to be specially ordered, so I didn't just come across them in a bookshop. It seems curiously appropriate that it's (now) a yellowing, cheap edition which probably wouldn't bear rereading: the pages would most likely crumble away if exposed to sunlight... I far prefer this to any of the handsome, acid free versions now available with erudite introductions and extensive footnotes.

When I first read these stories I had a thrill of recognition. I realised that I'd seen some of them before, in horror/ ghost anthologies. And the atmosphere of others was familiar from TV: the crazed cultists in the woods summoning up a nameless of horror from outside time were the staples of series like Doctor Who or Sapphire and Steel. So it was clear that they were part of the DNA of popular horror, acknowledged or not.

There are though problems with the stories and with their writer which I didn't see at the time. I couldn't read them now without seeing the racism which lies beneath the surface of many: Lovecraft's figure, until recently used for the World Fantasy Award, has now been retired

But the stories remain, and they influence, and they prompt reactions. Some of those reactions come in the form of reworkings, new readings and challenges, which seem especially thick on the ground right now. I reviewed one of these a couple of days ago and The Ballad of Black Tom is another. It's a short book, at 150 pages (but that's something it has in common with many of the originals).

Set in the 1920s, Ballad follows Charles Thomas Tester, a young Black man living in New York who hustles for a living to support himself and his elderly father. Times are hard but Thomas gets by: outside the story he's clearly found a means to occult knowledge - we first see him taking a trip to deliver a book to a mysterious woman who is clearly a devotee of those arts. Where he got it, and how, we never learn - but he knows how to handle such things.

But supernatural horror isn't the only kind here. Tester's life is plagued by casual and not-so-casual racism: to be seen heading the wrong way on the subway train is enough to prompt questions from the whites, and a cop searching his pockets feels empowered to pinch any money he finds as "evidence". Later in the story we see just how cheap Black lives are, in an echo of recent murders (and Lavalle uses the term: murder, as that's what it is).

These experiences build and build through the book alongside Tester's experience of the weird, largely through encounters with Robert Suydam, an elderly white man whose family want him declared insane (they're worried he'll spend their inheritance). Cavorting with the likes of Tester must be a sign of such insanity, surely?

But when we learn what Suydam really wants, we might begin to agree that no, his grip on reality actually is rather precarious. Tester agrees, and might have turned his back on Sutdam, if it wasn't for one terrible event...

This book impresses on so many levels. It delivers all that (neo) Lovecraft should: the cultist, the meddling, the awful reality behind the appearance of the world, pulpy goings on in the backstreets (rather than the backwoods, here) and hints at forbidden, blasphemous knowledge. Yet it manages to be very modern too, despite its setting: the racism here is exposed as a thing done to the characters by their setting rather than being a key to the author's own mind. That frees the story to take a leap of imagination and explore what the oppressed might make of such a hidden reality, how they might choose to turn it against their tormentors. (And there's a cameo of Lovecraft himself that handily feeds back as almost a sort of origin narrative for his whole mythos - which is appropriate given that this whole story riffs off one of Lovecraft's own).

That's a lot to get into 150 pages but Lavelle manages it adroitly, in a story that flies along and demands to be read in a single sitting - and which has greater depth and resonance than any of the originals.

(For a more detailed analysis of both this book and Cassandra Khaw's Hammers on Bone, another take on neo-Lovecraftiana, see this fascinating essay on The Middle Shelf. (As an essay, it needs to reveal a bit more of the plot(s) than a review so you should read the books first).