Review - Bay of Martyrs by Tony Black and Matt Neal

Bay of Martyrs
Tony Black and Matt Neal
Freight Books, 23 March 2017
PB, 220pp

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

I was intrigued by both the setting of this book - Australia's South Coast - and its creators, comprising Tony Black, practitioner of Tartan Noir, and Australian author/ journalist Matt Neal. An unfamiliar setting is always a great beginning for a crime story, giving an excuse to look behind a well maintained facade and spot the areas of damp, of rot and decay... And what could be better than a pairing of a crime writer and journalist?

Set in the coastal town of Warrnambool, this is a story of drugs, misbehaviour, cover up and murder and of a journalist - Clay Moloney - who, reluctantly, lifts up a stone and finds something nasty underneath. At one level, it's predictable: the discovery of a body (young waitress Kerry Collins) on the beach at Bay of Martrys. The burned out hack assigned to the case. The obstructive police, and an air of things not being quite right. An editor applying pressure. Murky local politics.

At another it's fresh and distinctive - there is the dissonance of all this taking place under the clear Australian summer sun, not the dreich grey of a Glasgow or Edinburgh sky, and the outsider viewpoint provided by Moloney's new Irish colleague, photographer Bec, who's come to Warrnambool to - actually, that's never quite clear, only that she's been rattling around the world a bit too long and wants some stability. Where better than the picturesque South Coast?

The unlikely partnership are slowly drawn into solving a mystery, but only gradually, and with no idea what doing so will cost. Their quest draws on Moloney's roster of shady contacts: if the death at the heart of this story hadn't already spoiled any idea of an idyllic life by the sea, the cast list of drug dealers, sex workers and corrupt officials would do so pretty quickly. As would Moloney himself, whose drink and drug sessions only seem to become more uncontrolled as he gets nowhere in discovering how Kerry died.

This is where the noir element truly comes in - a bruised, unclean man who nevertheless has the insight and the drive to root out and expose evil. Moloney is a magnificently drawn example: not by any means a likeable man, not even one you might want to share an evening drinking with (not least because of how it might end) but in a curious way, an admirable one.

Black and Neal do give some backstory to explain his attitude and history but actually it doesn't really matter too much though I think it will provide themes for future stories . I do hope so, because now we have Moloney, I want to see him dig deeper among those golden sands and seedy backstreets...

Strongly recommended if you're into gritty crime, or like your fiction in new locations.

Blogtour - Don't Wake Up Q&A

Today, I'm honoured to be joining the Don't Wake Up blogtour, host some Q&A with author Liz Lawler.

Alex Taylor wakes up tied to an operating table.

The man who stands over her isn't a doctor.

The offer he makes her is utterly unspeakable.

But when Alex re-awakens, she's unharmed - and no one believes her horrifying story. Ostracised by her colleagues, her family and her partner, she begins to wonder if she really is losing her mind.

And then she meets the next victim.

So compulsive you can't stop reading.

So chilling you won't stop talking about it.

A pitch-black and devastatingly original psychological thriller.

A suspenseful and gripping start to a book, I think - so I wanted to hear a bit more about Liz and how she writes.

And here she is...

BBB: Did the character of Alex come to you before the plot or did the plot come to you first and suggest her?

LL: The plot came first, but Alex’s presence was always there from the beginning. She was simply waiting to be named. I tried calling her other names, but she didn’t answer until I called her by her name, Alex.

BBB: How much control do you have over your characters? Did the book ever take completely unexpected turns?

LL: I think I only have control of my characters until I try and get them to do or say something that doesn’t suit them. I kind of know it immediately if I try and force them into a situation that they’re unhappy with, and until I rewrite what they want to do or say, they go silent and moody.
In answer to the second part of the question, yes, the book did suddenly take an unexpected turn. I found at one point I had this character that kept appearing, trying to muscle into the story; a really interesting old man who kept following Alex and I really enjoyed meeting him, until I realised that this wasn’t the story he was meant to be in. He has his own story to tell at another time.

BBB: Your book opens with a brilliant premise – right in the middle of things, then carries on at breakneck speed. Was it always going to be that way or did it take time to get it right?

LL: Well firstly, thank you for that lovely praise! When I wrote the first draft of this book I felt as if I had run a marathon in the character form of Speedy Gonzales, desperate to get to the finish line to know the ending. There was no let-up day or night as I ran with the story and then when I got to the end I had to return to the very beginning and run the same route again, only much slower. I think in the final drafts I was crawling through it, a bit like in a search and rescue mission, looking for anything hidden or dropped along the way. But I must confess, I always do things at breakneck speed. It’s a wonder that I’m still standing. As a child I was frequently called Dizzy Lizzy.

BBB: The book’s being called a psychological thriller – would you agree? Would you place it somewhere else? Or are these all just labels?

LL: I’ll only agree if the readers agree. But I am pleased that it’s been placed in this genre. I do think genre labels direct the reader in the direction they want so that when they see the word crime, thriller, romance, they know what they’re getting; that what’s on the label is what’s inside the cover.

BBB: What inspired you to write in the first place – and how did you get started with your writing career?

LL: The simple and most truthful answer would be life. What we see, hear, experience affects each of us differently. We can all look at the same thing, but not see it in the same way. I am always imagining scenarios that take me away from reality, sometimes to a kinder world, very often to a sunny beach with delicious cocktails at hand, but more often it is to a dark place where I then have to search for a light, a way out. Writing allows me to find the light if I want to. Or else – I’m just a complete fruit loop.

Writing started for me very unexpectedly, on a morning after I’d just dropped the kids off to school at the end of the summer holidays. It was never something that I imagined doing. Writing a letter or an essay would have emitted a groan from me. But on this day, almost compelled; I picked up a pen and began to write. Since that door opened, even when I try, I can’t shut it.

Liz Lawler

BBB: I know it’s early days, but how has it been so far – how does it compare with what you expected?

LL: Terrified. Exposed. Waiting for the axe to fall. Shocked that someone liked it. Shocked that someone loved it! Embarrassed that someone didn’t like it!! On the whole a bit of a rollercoaster, my least favourite thing to be on. A couple of weeks ago I went on a children’s rollercoaster; you were allowed on it if you were 1.1 metres, which is three foot seven inches. As the ride began I looked back at a very small boy, who had been refused entrance and was crying, desperate to get on it and wished I could change places with him. Then cutting through all my worries and fear I hear the voice of my darling mum, telling me to pack it in and be thankful that I didn’t get stopped from going on this ride – that there were many more willing and less afraid people wishing to take my seat.

BBB: And what comes next?

LL: Alone time again with just me and the characters inside my head waiting to tell this new story. They are waiting for me to put back on Speedy Gonzales’ sombrero to start the beginning of the race all over again. Hopefully I will tell their story strong and true.

BBB: Finally, a question that isn’t (directly) about the book. You’re trapped in a lonely mountain cave and the rescue party will take several days to reach you. You have plenty of food and water, and you can have one book with you. Which would it be?

LL: Firstly, it would have to be a very big book as I know how quickly I read a story. Secondly I would choose a book I haven’t read before. So without hesitation I pick War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. So very many people in years gone by have strongly recommended that I read this book and I am ashamed to say that I still haven’t. So please show me to this cave in this lonely mountain. My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.

BBB: Liz, thanks for answering these questions, and best of luck with Don't Wake Up (and with your future projects!)

Don't Wake Up is available now, published 18 May by Bonnier Zaffre in e-book with the paperback coming in August. You can get the e-book here or pre-order the paperback here.

Blogtour review - Block 46 by Johana Gustawsson

Block 46 (Roy and Castells 1)
Johana Gustawsson (trans Maxim Jakubowski)
Orenda Books, 31 May 2017
PB, 308pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of the book and to Anne for organising the tour (read her blog!)

This is the first in what's clearly intended to be a new crime series, featuring Canadian profiler ('Behavioural Insight Analyst' or BIA for short) Emily Roy and French true crime writer Alexis Castells, both currently based in London.

To add to the international flavour much of the action in this book takes place in Sweden, and its roots lie in the second world war German death camps. Roy and Castells need to untangle the threads of history while negotiating several different cultures, each with different expectations and assumptions.

The actual background to the book is as polyglot and interesting, it having been written and originally published in French and indeed having won several awards.

Johana Gustawsson

That's a lot of background, and I was slightly concerned that it could overwhelm the book itself. And indeed there is a fair bit or orientation needed on starting it. We're introduced to Emily and Alexis in a setting of swish Mayfair parties and an exclusive jewellery launch; we have a backstory going on starting in 1944 as Erich Ebner is flung into the living hell that was Buchenwald camp; there are crimes in London which require the introduction of detectives from Scotland Yard and then soon one in Sweden - so we also meet a gallery of Swedish police officers, including the lugubrious Olofsson (who really doesn't like Emily being brought in).

That is an awful lot to establish, and it's a credit to both Gustawsson's writing and plotting, and to Jakubowski's translation, that it works well (as with any detective story you need to pay close attention: but I take that as a given). The story is soon moving and with a tantalising narrative from the killer we begin to see, not the solution, but the shape of the puzzle that Roy and Castells will have to solve (and yes, we do have a crime writer and a profiler working a case where most of the active investigation takes place abroad - irregular as anything I suspect but just go with it, it works fine).

That puzzle relates long ago events in the titular Block 46 to a series of grotesque murders taking place in both England and Sweden. But how could they be linked?

There is a meaty, challenging mystery at the heart of this book, and some great characters. I liked Emily a lot - maybe a bit of a nerd, you'd think, perhaps even one of the now sometimes fashionable almost-autistic. Actually, I was relieved to discover, Gustawsson isn't using that trope, there's a different reason for Emily's slight social distance, one we only learn at the very end of the book. Like several other characters (including that annoying Olofsson) she has stuff she's getting over. Indeed the presence of this meant that at time the book read as though it was in the middle of a series, not the beginning, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Gustawsson go back and write a prequel or two since she's obviously mapped out a lot about her characters. (I, for one, want to hear more).

While covering some dark subjects this is an excellent read, and it becomes more and more compelling throughout. Jakubowski serves it well in his translation by NOT making it read everywhere just as though it had been originally written in English: there is actually a slight sense of cultural distance maintained which helps to build unease as the death toll grows and the detectives are forced out of their comfort zone.

So, overall, really a promising start to a series and, as I said, I can't wait to read more about Roy and Castells.

Review - Wicked Wonders by Ellen Klages

Image from tachyonpublications.com

Wicked Wonders
Ellen Klages
Tachyon, 23 May 2017
PB, e 288pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have an advance e copy via NetGalley.

I hadn't read any of Klages' work until getting my hands on Passing Strange last year (silly David) so was very pleased to be able to catch up (not least because in two of the stories we meet characters from that book). It is great that the book lived up to expectations in every way.

These are serious, funny, tough, tender and varied stories. Above all, they have heart and offer hope. In many, women or - especially - girls - struggle with constraints, actual or impending loss or change, and things aren't made easier by the strictures of society: a woman accidentally falling pregnant is placed in an impossible position by her partner. A girl is misunderstood by her mother, forced into a mould that doesn't fit her. Another girl is about to lose everything. In all these stories there is, though, hope: the comfort of a good friend, a chink of light or a realisation of power and potential.

Friendship is at the centre of many of the stories: new friendships, old friendships renewed after decades, unlikely friendships suddenly tested, as in the longest and most intense of the stories, Woodsmoke, an account of two girls spending a summer at camp. Apart from the dawning relationship between then - they don't start off friends, Peete is pretty resentful to begin with - this story is shot through with a kind of childhood luminosity. This is NOT a sentimental story - it has great clarity and honesty, but it shows the glory of enjoying life, of enjoying the moment and - I hope - promises a future of support and solidarity.

The experiences here are common ones: clearing a house after the death of a parent (touched on a couple of times, including in a piece of non-fiction, The Scary Ham), the coming of a new sibling, two women meeting for coffee and cake, a mother putting her child down for the night. But the everyday is made strange - passing strange, perhaps: those two women (in Mrs Zeno's Paradox) meet across time and space in a variety of cafes as they halve their cake and halve it again, the child is being nursed on Mars, the schoolgirl settling down to play boardgames on a Friday night at her boarding school ends up an Alice in Wonderland style adventure - and in San Franscisco, a sorceress can fold space through origami.

Not all the stories are actually fantasy or science fiction: Woodsmoke, for example, is entirely naturalistic (although infused with a sense of the magical) and Sponda the Suet Girl and the Secret of the French Pearl while fantastical in setting (a thief, an inn, a quest for treasure) actually contains nothing not rooted in real science (Household Management is similar, though rooted in a different kind of fiction). Many of course are, and in some it's a twist of magic that provides that little glimmer of hope from the future.

As well as the stories themselves, the book contains a shrewd (I think!) introduction form Karen Joy Fowler and a piece by Klages herself describing her approach to writing and the genesis of some of the stories. Both provide useful insights but in the end the stories stand alone in their wit, courage, fellowship and above all, humanity.

This is a collection of stories that I felt better for having read. Strongly recommended.

For more information about the book see here.

Review - Dark Cities

Dark Cities
ed by Christopher Golden
Titan Books, 16 May 2017
PB, 400pp

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

Everyone knows a street that doesn't feel right. Where the light from the streetlamps feels sour and spoiled, like bitter honey. Where the shadows are too deep and too dark, and creep up on you when you're not looking...

I love a good anthology and this collection of horror stories attracted straight away. There is so much to say about the city, so much to appal - whether it's those unexplored turnings that might take you into a strange new place from which you can't return, an abandoned building in which... who knows what... may lurk, all the layers of lives and history which are there just under the surface, or just the oddness of life among all those mostly anonymous people. 

As with any collection, the various contributions grip and enthral to different degrees, but this is overall a very strong collection. For me the first and the last stories in this book were the most unsettling. In The Dogs (Scott Smith), the first story, Rose knows that her pastime meeting up with men off Craigslist may be risky but she knows what she's doing. And surely an apartment with three friendly dogs can't be too wrong... can it? This is a story that keeps you guessing and is truly horrific, though I felt the author did perhaps employ one over used device that wasn't really needed.

The last story, The Crack by Nick Cutter,  was queasily upsetting. As a father I know that feeling when the young baby just won't sleep. As a father I also find the determination of the father in this book - the mother hardly features - to stamp his will on the helpless infant repulsive, crossing the line into abuse. The supernatural that creeps up on both of them is scarcely registered at first, bound up as Daddy is in making his little boy into a strong man: in many respects, in this story, it's the human that's the monster and in that respect it fits well with the overall feel of the book, although as the events mainly take place within a single house it arguably isn't particularly a city story. 

In Stone (Tim Lebbon), our unnamed narrator, unable to sleep well after the suicide of his friend Nigel, roams the streets of the city at night. One of those nights he spots a woman and follows her. Lebbon creates a nice balance between the haunted, despairing life of the narrator and the darkness of the city and its brooding dominance over those it notices.

Like Lebbon, in The Way She Is With Strangers Helen Marshall leaves much unsaid. What exactly did happen to Mercy's daughter? How is it affected by her having come to the city? Again there are dark secrets here and one senses that the progression of events mirrors something private we're not quite seeing. Atmospheric, creepy and despairing.

MR Carey's We'll Always have Paris has a lighter tone, welcome after the preceding dark stories. Inspector Philemon is one of the city's top detectives and is assigned to investigate a series of horrible murders. He jostles with rivals in this, such as Riordan, of the Garda and it becomes clear that somehow, Paris has become scrambled up with Dublin, New York, Berlin, London... just what's going on and how is it associated with the murders? An inventive and disturbing story.

With Good Night, Prison Kings, Cherie Priest dials us back towards the grim in a powerful tale of a murdered girl seeking revenge as does Amber Benson in What I’ve Always Done, an unsettling story of obsession, revenge and love gone sour, showing how in the city, anything can be  a trap. Traps are a frequent theme in this book - the city's a maze and it's a maze set with snares. But not everything wandering it is monster and in Grit by Jonathan Maberry we meet on of the good guys, albeit one who's definitely a bit tarnished – bounty hunter Monk Addisson, who has a very strange relationship with his fugitives, which  can last beyond their deaths.

Dark Hill Run by Kasey and Joe R Lansdale features a rather different pursuer and a pursuit that lasts years then we're back to the traps with Happy Forever by Simon R Green, the sad story  – of a girl frozen in time

In The Society of the Monsterhood by Paul Tremblay the threat and tension comes from the unseen narrator and the people of the neighbourhood ('we') who have taken against a group of bright kids offered a free place at a suburban school. Somehow the situation seems to conjure a monster: but is it real? This story is very powerful, the style giving a real sense of the exclusion of the little group and narrator's complicity. Field Trip by Tananarive Due addresses exclusion in a different form - a short trip on the subway leads astray young teacher taking her class home from a trip?  With a powerful and unsettling background in racial prejudice and police violence this story literalises the idea of people becoming nothing. 

With The Revellers by Christopher Golden we encounter some real 24 hour party people! In New York! Endless PARTY! But what happens when you can't find your way out again? Ramsay Campbell asks the same question, in a way, in The Stillness. Campbell has an unerring eye for the creepy, the wrong, in modern life. If you've ever seen a living statue in full sunlight on a crowded street and thought about it, um, then imagine meeting one at dusk in an empty ally.  

Imagine it following you home...

Moving from the modern world back to fantasy, or sorts, in Sanctuary by Kealan Patrick Burke, which, with The Crack and Graffiti of the Lost and Dying Places was my favourite story in the book, a young boy exists in two worlds. There is the normal one, where he is wounded by a family break-up, and a truly strange place (the pub has darts made from bones wrapped in leather). He seeks sanctuary, but in which of the worlds? And from which? And why is the end coming?

Matter of Life and Death by Sherrilyn Kenyon is a story to make the publisher tremble! Helga East, the author from Hell is dead, and her editor rejoices. But something strange is afoot in the bank building across the way. And even stranger things begin to happen in their office. A spooky and twisty story - written with some feeling about authors and publishers...

In Graffiti of the Lost and Dying Places,  Seanan McGuire evokes an eerie sense of dissolution as a rundown district is gentrified, gradually killed off by the encroachment of a shiny new financial quarter. What might the old bricks and plaster do when attacked so?

Overall, a strong collection with something for everybody.

Review - The Switch by Justina Robson

The Switch
Justina Robson
Gollancz, 18 May 2017
PB, 360pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for letting me have an advance copy of this book via NetGalley. (It's one of those books I will also buy a copy of, I want a real book to put on my shelves...)

I just loved this book. Loved it to bits. It is sharply written ('I felt like I was ruining an otherwise perfect world, and I couldn't ruin it fast enough', 'Nothing's easy when everyone's paranoid'), clever ('the body holds all the feelings that the person doesn't want to acknowledge'), well observed ('I was in love with my fantasy of being the tough guy, the survivor, the one in charge', 'the real trouble is the people who all benefit from things as they are') and utterly, utterly scathing in its condemnation of hypocrisy and prejudice ('Someone leaked a picture of her holding hands with a woman she knew outside school. Inquisition. The usual.')

Nico Perseid is an orphan. His only friend, the only person he trusts, is Two. In a rigidly orthodox, religiously trussed society, they share a deadly secret: they're both gay. Nico's and Two's world is a bizzarely unequal, upstairs-downstairs kind of world where the masters and mistresses live in Harmony while the scum, the dregs, the rejects are left to the crime cartels - and drone policing - in the underworld of Chaontium. The day that they flee their orphanage and drop over the wall into Chaontium, the two friends are free: free to run with the gangs, live under piles of garbage and scrabble for enough to live on as best they can.

So the years roll by without any way out. Until one day, Nico is made a very high-stakes offer...

I first read Robson's work when she was putting out her Quantum Gravity series, which features that sassiest of transhuman heroines, Lila Black, so it rather made me smile to see the cover image for The Switch - there's a definite similarity there: in one, the kick-ass woman in her tight combat outfit, dominating the cover, in the other the muscly hero, sans shirt, doing likewise. A bit of payback for all that fantasy and SF decorated by attractive young women. And why not? You definitely should judge this book by its cover and inside Robson happily turns the conventions - or perhaps I should say, the conventions of a couple of decades ago because happily things are changing - on their heads and inside out. What's more she does so intelligently and, as I said above, with point.

Because in The Switch, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, is as Nico points out, fundamental. His very existence is an affront, a crime, to the strictures of The Alchemy, the weird, concocted religion - part molecular biology, part astrology - that rules Harmony and which despite everything, still commands part of his respect. The stage is set for rebellion, a journey of self-understanding and the pursuit of liberty (not to say, happiness) - and this is central to the book. It isn't some redress-the-balance diversity chucked in, it's the burning, corruscating moral heart of what Nico (and Two) are.

If that all sounds a bit worthy, it isn't. The book has a stonking good plot, introduces a whole gallery of truly rounded characters, and Robson's writing is at its most versatile. She's able to range with a few paragraphs from Nico's introspection, alone in a hostile city, surrounded by those he fears and who hate him to one of the most bewitchingly erotic scenes, I think, I've ever read as he tears down barriers of fear and restraint to finally be himself with a fellow 'two suns' (the phrase used by The Alchemy for his sort - that astrological gobbledygook again, which seems bizarre but here, goes hand in hard with cutting edge science).

I don't want to give ANYTHING away about that scene in advance. But when you get to it. It just... Well.

So, is there anything actually wrong with this book? Not that I could see. It is of the plot-within-a-plot, what the heck is really going on sub-genre, with revelations, betrayals and reverses coming at us steadily - nothing is ever as it seems, from the opening section, where Nico is under sentence of death, to the end, when we finally discover what The Alchemy is really up to (or do we?) Not everyone enjoys that sub-genre, and you really have to trust your author.  Having read the Lila Black books, I would always trust Robson, so I'm OK with that - if you haven't read your work before I'd simply urge you to go with it, she really knows what she's doing. (There's even a nice line in sardonic references -  from the hints of Culture to 'Nico, you're our only hope' to 'Go back to the start, do not collect any goods and chattels')

So buy this book and read it for the zinging story, the real challenges here to stereotypes, assumptions and conventions, the characters - but most of all because it is, at heart, first rate SF.

Review - Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

Image from www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Rotherweird
Andrew Caldecott
Illustrated by Sasha Laika
Jo Fletcher Books, 18 May 2017
HB, 456pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for am advance copy of this book via NetGalley. I also bought a copy - well worth it even if only for Sasha Laika's beautiful, brooding illustrations.

You won't have heard of Rotherweird. The town is hard to reach (you have to go to Hoy, change for a taxi to the Twelve Mile Post, then await the Polk Land & Water Company's charabanc). It's forbidden to write about it, and the inhabitants don't welcome outsiders.

Nevertheless, it's a fascinating place, almost an independent kingdom nestling within the English countryside. Created by fiat of Elizabeth I because of - well, that would rather give the story away. Let's just say, because reasons...

Into this somewhat baroque, somewhat Dickensian world come four strangers: Jonah Oblang, the new history teacher for Rotherweird School (forbidden to teach anything earlier than 1800), Sir Veronal Slickstone, the well-known business tycoon, and his wife, Lady Imogen, and son, Rodney. (Some of these may not be all they seem).

The newcomers soon collide with the townsfolk and countrysiders (forbidden to remain in town after 7). Oblong is intrigued by the disappearance of his predecessor, Flask. Sir Veronal has plans for the town. Lady Imogen and Rodney are there to support him, but do they have ideas of their own? And will the Mayor, Sidney Snorkel, welcome a challenge to his authority?

This is an immensely enjoyable,  Gothic(ish) / steampunk/ Gormanghast-esque romp with Dickensian overtones. We see a mysterious small town whose secrets are gradually unwrapped - but only partially, to a slew of different characters in different degrees, so the reader has a distinct advantage over any. We see an existential threat - to the town, visible and hidden - develop alongside a slightly petty jostling for status (but nonetheless, a dangerous jostling). There's a tension between the absurdity of the rules that govern the town and a growing realisation that they have a purpose - a serious purpose. There is the unravelling mystery, and a sense that, even behind what are told, something else is going on.

It's a book with swags and swathes of atmosphere, created not only by the prose but through those illustrations (best seen on paper). Rotherweird itself is a great imaginative creation - a city of narrow streets and towers with bridges and walkways between them - but Caldecott doesn't let the start of the book lapse too much into descriptions: the action picks up quickly, with the setting gradually filled in as we need to know more.

To go with the twisty location there's an impressive roster of equally twisty and well drawn characters, many with impressively Dickensian names. Here it's helpful that we're given a list, to prevent confusion of Godfrey Fanguin with Gorehambury, or Gregorius Jones with Hayman Salt (which would be a risk otherwise - as I said, the action gets going quickly and the characters take a little longer to establish themselves).

I have to say that the plot is outrageously complex (more so, as becomes clear by the end, than you would actually suspect through most of the story). Not everyone likes that kind of plot. However - in my view - there's nothing wrong with a complex plot as such, and in any case Caldecott keeps the story spinning along and doesn't allow the story to sag. Indeed perhaps the complexity is as much a hint that there is more to explore in Rotherweird as it is embellishment to this story.

Overall, this is a fun, often funny, exciting and highly readable story. Get it now.

Although the advertised publication date is 18 May this book is already widely available in shops (at 13 May)