#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 - The Dirty South by John Connolly

The Dirty South (Charlie Parker)
John Connolly
Hodder & Stoughton, 20 August 2020
Available as: HB, 470pp, e, audio
Source: HB bought from Goldsboro Books
ISBN: 9781529398298

The Dirty South is one of those books published in 20202 that I ought to have got to last year but didn't (it was 2020, after all...) It's out in PB on 1 April - and definitely one to look forward to. 

As somebody who only started reading the Charlie Parker series three or four books back, and so isn't up on all the continuity, it was good to be able to read this relatively standalone prequel, set before Every Dead Thing. Parker is already on the hunt for the killer of his wife and daughter, a quest which takes him to the town of Cargill in Arkansas, where young Black women are being murdered in a particularly grisly, staged way.

Cargill is a poor, dead-end town effectively ruled by the Cade family. The Cades have plans for the place - they want to lure a Government contractor to build a research centre, attracting good jobs and lucrative contracts. Nothing must be allowed to impede this, especially not bad publicity about the deaths of a few Black girls. Jarel Cade, the country sheriff, will make sure of it...

Bringing Parker head too head with a world of corruption and wrongness is not new for Connolly. However The Dirty South stands out in a number of ways. 

First, this isn't - quite - Parker as we know him. At first he's focussed on nothing more then revenge, so when he concludes that these killings aren't related to his family tragedy, he shakes the dust off his feet and drives away. But not for long. Through this book one can see Parker watching, processing, judging, examining the grief and guilt of those around him and - in the end - deciding to help. 

Also, this isn't a book overtly about supernatural evil (though there are some hints about the Karagol, that dark lake from which the town is named). But it remains a book about evil. Connolly is as adept as ever at conveying evil and corruption - which certainly are to be found here - and accordingly The Dirty South seems at times to weep taint, it's as though Parker is prodding and squeezing a decaying corpse, watching the humours leech out. There is almost a physicality to the evil that is exposed - the corruption reaching out tendrils to local politics, including the State capital and politicians, as well as to souls. 

All that is wrapped though round a fiendishly difficult police procedural (for certain values of procedure - the Cargill Police Department and its Chief, Evander Griffin, are short of resources and support so a lot of what they do is rather... improvised). The investigation takes in cold cases, past corruption and incompetence and a firm desire to look the other way. It all makes for a tense, engaging read with an explosive conclusion.

Of course there are familiar features here: I don't think Connolly is capable of writing dialogue that isn't smart and on the nose, or of deploying villains who don't give off that feeling I mentioned before, that sense of moral taint, of dirt, and this book shows that off brilliantly. We meet a variety of compromised figures, from bent police to corporate fixers to those who dance to their own dark and secret desires. All are too, too credible.

I would strongly recommend, whether you're a long term reader of this series or whether you'd like a place to get into it. (And - we get an explanation of Parker's name. No, he's not named after the jazz musician).

For more information about The Dirty South see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - The Cut by Chris Brookmyre

The Cut
Chris Brookmyre
Little, Brown, 4 March 2021
Available as: HB, 416pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781408712153

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

'Truth is, you never really get away with anything. You're always living with the consequences.'

The Cut is, like Brookmyre's last novel, Fallen Angel, a standalone crime novel although set in the same reality as his other books (I spotted clues!)

Its two main characters, Millicent (Millie) and Jerome (Jerry) couldn't seem more different. Millie is - or was - a make up artist, brilliant at creating gory deaths in the low-budget horror films of the 1980s and 1990s. But she's been away now for more than twenty years, and is, in her 70s, getting to grips with the 21st century and her different place in it.

Jerry, a young man of colour, was brought up by his gran in a little Ayreshire town, subject to bullying and prejudice (and sometimes running with the wrong crowd). As at home in the 20s as Millie feels out of time, he's started on a film and politics course in Glasgow, but getting into some hot water in the halls or residence, gratefully takes up the offer of a place in the tenement flat Millie shares with two other women.

What seems initially to be a classic comedy of opposites forced to rub along soon, however, takes a much bleaker tone. Jerry has secrets, and Millie has darker ones. Both reach out from their pasts to threaten, and they will need to pool their talents if they're to survive.

I loved the interplay between Millie and Jerry. Millie is almost in shock, mistrustful and ill at ease and indeed (little bit of a CW) early on she's verging on suicidal. Basically her life and reputation were destroyed 20 years earlier. She's been in an environment where trust is next to impossible, and there is a palpable sense that she's just waiting for the hammer to fall and her hard-won, fledgling place in the modern world to be snatched away. And if she's bound to fail, wouldn't it be better to pull the lever herself? Jerry has a similar dilemma. Uni isn't really for people like him, is it? Surrounded by (apparently) self confident, posh English types ('Born three-nothing up and convinced they'd scored a hat trick'), he is acutely uncomfortable, and possessed of a similar, self-destructive drive to jump first, before he's found out.

Not the most promising pair to deal with the consequences when Millie spots, by chance, a photograph which casts a new light on the catastrophe that destroyed her life. But following up that information has brought those consequences down on them, and they have no choice. The way they go about this, come to rely on one another, and find out just how much they have in common was a joy. Interspersed with that story is an earlier timeline, following Millie at her work on a gore-fest in the later 80s (a film which later came to be regarded as cursed, 'so horrifying that it didn't even get as far as being banned'). She was at the top of her game, and I loved Brookmyre's depiction not only of the somewhat louche goings on around the film ('it's not a real party until an ambulance turns up') but of the thrill of the business itself - the making-water-flow-uphill sense of actually pulling off a production, keeping the backers on side, dangling promises of tax breaks and of stardust, of being touched with the glamour of the movie business. (Alongside this we also see the tedium of long hours on set, everyone waiting while a shot is set up, with money burning all the time).

Featuring numerous escapades, capers and near escapes, the story basically pits Millie and Jerry as (apparent) innocents against some very shadowy and avowedly professional (and rather scary) figures from that dark corner where politics, the media, organised crime and the spooks hang out together. You wouldn't put money on our heroes surviving, but this is the movie business and both may be able to call on some unexpected resources.

As ever, Brookmyre's writing is spot on, from the entitled English students in Jerry's class ('respectable middle-class kiddies from Melton Middle and Crumpetshire') to the great unmentionable ('it's awkward when there's a Brexity relative around for Christmas dinner' - and indeed the book is a glorious romp through a very Continental film culture) to the fallout of the Leveson enquiry after which Brookmyre's clearly ENTIRELY FICTIONAL press and media baron, who seemed very shaky when giving evidence '...made a ****ing miraculous recovery though, didn't he?' There's foreshadowing, in the comparison of a Parisian hotel to the Continental from the John Wick movies, and in a certain escapade with a wheelchair. There are film references galore as Jerry and Millie try to score points off each other. (Jerry's gran ran a video rental store back in the day, when there were such things: he grew up on "video nasties" and one target of Brookmyre's scorn is the hypocritical campaign against them - 'it was always the same when there was a cultural phenomenon of which the British establishment disapproved'). 

And when all the secrets are revealed, and the events that set everything in motion are finally revealed, the book proves, indeed, to a have a very contemporary resonance. What had been hidden all along would have seemed very different if it had come to light earlier, making this a book truly of its (two) time(s). Brookmyre balances a thrilling and high-jeopardy series of events with a real satirical edge and a dash of truly ghoulish humour.

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

#Review - The Thief on the Winged Horse by Kate Mascarenhas

Cover design by
studiohelen.co.uk

The Thief on the Winged Horse
Kate Mascarenhas
Head of Zeus, 12 November 2020
Available as: HB, 390pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley & bought HB
ISBN: 9781789543803

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Thief on the Winged House via Netgalley to consider for review. I have also bought a copy of what is a beautifully produced (as well as written) object.

I'm coming to The Thief on the Winged House a little late. I saw it being raved about in the Autumn and what with one thing and another I hadn't got to it, then picked it up just before Christmas - and LOVED it. 

The book is set in an imaginary corner of Oxford, or actually, I think, a real corner, a little island ('eyot') which in our world is undistinguished but here, hosts a little cluster of streets and a workshop that manufactures magical dolls. These can impress upon their owner whatever emotion - fear, love, determination - is bestowed on the doll by its maker. The sting in this is that the ability to instil these emotions was discovered and refined by four sisters - Lucy, Rebecca, Sally and Jemima - in the early 19th century. The four founded Kendricks Workshop, which still flourishes today, staffed by their descendants, but women are now forbidden to be the 'sorcerers' who create the magic. They are, apparently, too emotional, and not strong enough, to handle the work.

The book explores the consequences of this injustice, but it does so much more than that.

First, the central idea is pitch perfect, and is developed and explored beautifully. The idea of magic, emotionally dominating dolls is creepy enough to enchant and entice, and somehow the fact that they only seem to occur within a capitalist framework of marketing and possession only makes them more so. Mascarenhas links this notion to a sense of confinement throughout the book, symbolised by a valuable doll caged in iron railings to prevent theft (we are told) but also by the generations accepting lives on the eyot over any alternative and by the control that Conrad, the current owner of the workshop, exerts over all, especially of course the women but to a lesser extent everyone (and including his brother). Yes, some members of the families have broken away but that seems more like flight, a desperate escape during the night, than an adult and equal parting. Confinement on the eyot only seems accentuated by trips to, say, real Oxford locations such as Wetherspoons on Castle Street from which one will, eventually, have to return - these locations in turn accentuate the depth of the setting and its sense of reality. I live near Oxford and I can really imagine getting off the bus on the Aningdon Road and making my way to the eyot.

The eyot and its workshop are a little world to themselves, with their magic but also their rather archaic society, but the they are portrayed so sharply coexisting with the modern world around. Kids tend to be educated in the Eyot school but wider opportunities are available in the Oxford schools - the resulting struggles and tensions have shaped several of the central characters. Nor is the eyot free of modern world problems: we see domestic violence and alcoholism, for example.

The central characters are strong too. While events kick off with the arrival of a young man, Larkin, claiming to be the long-lost heir to one of the four sisters, at the heart of the story are two women, cousins Persephone and Hedwig. Flashbacks give us more detail about their lives - Persephone's difficult relationship with her alcoholic father, Briar, and Hedwig's upbringing by a single mother (not easy given the eyot's somewhat outdated mores). The two are well realised - Persephone wants to join the workshop as a sorcerer and is baffled and jealous when returning prodigal Larkin wins an apprenticeship while she's jeered at by the men. Hedwig works as housekeeper for Conrad. She's able, within limits, to manipulate him and wield a little power from the shadows. It is though a precarious position and Larkin's arrival makes things even less steady.

And then, a valuable heirloom doll is stolen...

This is, on the face of things, a simple story, with a central mystery - who stole the doll known as the Paid Mourner? Things are confounded somewhat by the eyot's belief in a fairy figure, the Thief of the title, who apparently bestows both good and ill on the residents, but as the story makes clear, the actual existence of this person is problematic and they are as much a tool to be used or an emblem to be appealed to as a real power. That whole aspect is delightfully murky, baffling outsiders in general and especially the police called in to investigate the theft. 

Behind that, though, we need to focus on the characters, on their hopes and dreams, their secrets and their desires. Desires are especially important, upsetting as they do both our protagonists' plans and their self-images - particularly for one couple who share a powerfully charged night in the Randolph Hotel, Oxford's best, Mascarenhas fully rising to the challenge of a sex scene that is not at all embarrassing but tender, erotic and rather moving.

In short, this book fully justifies the praise it's been getting whether you want to approach it as fantasy which it absolutely is (it has MAGIC! There may be FAIRIES!), crime (a baffling and well-plotted mystery), a story of the human heart (those well-rounded and convincing characters; I'd defy anyone not to shed a tear or two at the situations they're in and the truly modern dilemmas they face) or even, I suppose, a contribution to the idea of Oxford as a place of colliding histories, identities and a refuge of odd little worlds and communities. 

Or as all of those. This book is a gem and you should read it (but do so slowly ands reflectively, it's one that really pays you back for giving it some focus and space).

For more information about The Thief on the Winged Horse, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Last One at the Party by Bethany Clift

Cover design by Jo Myler

Last One at the Party
Bethany Clift
Hodder, 4 February 2021
Available as: HB, 355pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781529332124

I'm grateful to Hodder for an advance e-copy of Last One at the Party via NetGalley to consider for review. I have also bought a hardback copy from Wallingford Bookshop, my usual enablers in these matters.

There is so much in Last One at the Party. It is a brilliant premise, admittedly not original but executed with verve and empathy, creating such a good, readable book.

Our narrator - we never learn her name - is, literally, the least lone at the party. (She points out that this is her won't, she's always the one left behind collecting the lost coats and cleaning up the house). She's the only person to have survived the End of Days - a sudden, distressing and inevitably fatal virus which sweeps the world before any measures can be found to contain it. Set a few years in the future, there are call-backs to the current covid-19 pandemic but 6DM is in a different league.

We're never told why she survived - this isn't a painstakingly researched pandemic book, nor would it be in character for our hero to understand such matters - she tells us herself that she's not very practical and changing a lightbulb is at the limit of what she can manage. When disaster falls, she struggles to deal with her husband's body, and then sets off into London for a several weeks's booze and drug spree, occupying the best hotel rooms she can access and looting Harrods for fancy bags and scarves.

If you are the sort of reader who lusts after the complexities and details of survival post apocalyse - food stocks, medical supplies, firearms, fuel and so on - you will I think probably leave the book there. That isn't what Last One at the Party is about AT ALL. Our protagonist has an almost wilful lack of survival skills and refuses to acquire them now she needs them. She also refuses to carry out what seems like a basic act of mercy, which left me really not liking her much in this part of the story.

What she does have, though, is self-awareness. As she narrates her story, she recalls her earlier life and the layers of expectations it created for her; her ideal parents, with their romantic outlook on life, her girl friend Ginny, who has mentored and mounted here at work; her self-destructive gay best friend Xav; her husband James. It becomes clear that she was in a mess before the pandemic and I even began to suspect that the helplessness we see at the start of the book was as much a mask as any of the other "selves" that she seems to have developed through life. As the book continued I became more and more fascinated and intrigued by this complex, human and constantly developing character. It's almost as if, to be who she really is, she needs to lose everything and everyone. Then she needs to find a way to live with herself - the one successful response to the pandemic has been the distribution of vast stocks of suicide pills, a continual temptation, and the narrator has also managed to source ample supplies of Tramadol.

It is, at least to begin with, a relatively safe, abundant world that she falls into. There is nobody else around to fight for the large stocks of food left behind - everyone died so quickly that shortages didn't develop - and electricity and water continue to operate for some weeks (the main feature of this apocalypse that felt a bit off, I suspect power would be gone in days - though car satnav would probably work for ages, those satellites aren't going anywhere). In a sense that provides a cushion, allowing the narrator to come to terms with her loss (well, not really come to terms, but to begin to). It's understandable, I think, that she goes a bit off the rails, with no immediate need to be practical.

That does change, but the book never gets to full-on "Survivors" mode with the solution of practical problems the overriding driver. There are some sticky moments, dangers, and crises (the ultimate one leading to a situation of great jeopardy which the narrator is able to meet with determination and skill) but the real drama here always arises from the earlier choices the narrator made, and her sometimes brutally honest assessments of them.  We see her happy and fulfilled as a music journalist before a crisis brings that to an end, then, again, happily working for a shipping journal and globetrotting to write up a port or a tanker (she learns at one point to make a fishing net - so, maybe not as impractical as she claims). We see that end, and her changing as she thinks she must to satisfy others - husband, co-workers, her parents. 

Her life seems to get darker, with the eruption of 6DM coming almost as a deliverance. What would you do if you were suddenly alone to enjoy, intact, all the goodies of life? This book certainly made me ponder what I'd do, where I'd go, if freed from the need to worry about the everyday. Making a new world, a new life, must be about more than stockpiling fuel and rigging solar panels, it has to start within oneself. That's the insight that Clift so brilliantly explores in this book and it is so much more interesting than mere practicalities. In fact, it's a cracker of a book and one I'd strongly recommend. (In the end, the empathy and insight of Clift's writing even won me over to sympathise with her protagonist, despite some misgivings at the start - if you find yourself hating her at one point, give it some time, keep going).

For more information about Last One at the Party, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Big Blind by Lavie Tidhar

Cover by Pedro Marques

The Big Blind
Lavie Tidhar
PS Publishing, November 2020
Available as: HB, 164pp
Source: Signed HB bought from the publisher
ISBN: 9781786365989

I ordered the signed edition of The Big Blind last Autumn and forgot all about it. Then it arrived as a very welcome surprise in February, I leafed through it to remind myself what it was... and found I was sitting there at midnight finishing it.

All that despite it being a close study of a poker player and poker games - something I know almost noting about (cowboys in saloons? Something something raise you? Poker face?)

Tidhar's story follows Claire, a young Irishwoman whose father was a legendary poker player. She was introduced to the tables young, given a bit of money and left to get on with it. Later she ran wild (though, I have to say, she doesn't sound VERY wild - drinking and smoking seems to be the sum of it). Now she's considering life as a nun (she's a novice, she hasn't taken final vows yet: still time to decide what she really wants) but sneaks out and night to play for money, which she donates anonymously to the convent.

Or perhaps, Claire can't bear to lose all of her former life, and she's found a way to play and yet satisfy her conscience? 

That question hovers over this book. What is Claire really at? In conversations - with Mikey (who she meets over cards), with her mother (who's aghast that Claire may be going the way of her father), with the other nuns, with a priest at Confession - Claire dodges round and round this issue. Told to stop playing, she absconds by bus to play the Big Game, which could lead to a place at a televised London championship. Aghast at what she's done, explaining it to that priest, has she accepted that she can't go back? Is she inside looking out, or outside looking in? Tidhar handles this spiritual dilemma delicately, embedding it in a compelling story that's driven by a succession of poker games.

I don't, as I have said, know the first thing about poker, so the detail here is lost on me. Yet it's still clear from Tidhar's commentary where we are in the game, who's going down and what the risks are. This is as nail-bitingly portrayed an account of an epic contest as you could wish for (I assume that if you know your poker it's even more than that!) The depiction of the relatively tight, closed and familiar world of the professional and aspirant players (it, too, has its novices and its sworn members) is also good, showing us a community, a little world. The championship itself is interpreted and commentated by a pair of slightly cheesy TV presenters (complete with fourth-wife jokes) who act as a kind of chorus, further clueing-in the reader to what's just happened and why it might, just might, be rather remarkable.

A really enjoyable book, different from anything I'd read by Tidhar before (but then, I think that every time I open one of his books). Recommended. 

For more information about The Big Blind, and to order a copy, see the PS Publishing website here.

#Blogtour #Review - Deity by Matt Wesolowski

Deity
Matt Wesołowski
Orenda Books, 18 December 2020 (e), 18 February 2021 (PB)
Available as: e, PB, 249pp
Source: ARC
ISBN: 9781913193485

I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater for an advance copy of Deity to consider for review as part of the blog tour.

It was about time I caught up with the Six Stories world. These books feature podcastist Scott King's take on a recent mystery, presented not from all angles, as he admits, that would be impossible, but through - yes - six episodes, six stories, six perspectives.

In Deity, the focus is on recently deceased musician Zach Crystal. You have heard of Crystal, who burst into celebrity in the 90s and then grew increasingly weird and reclusive. You'll have heard the rumours, of visits to his remote Scottish compounds, Crystal Forest, but young fans. Of cover-ups and non-disclosure agreements. Of hush money and deaths in the forest. Of the fire that took Crystal's life.

Well now, Scott King is going to sift fact from fiction, and truth from rumour. To give a rounded picture, letting those involved with Crystal speak for themselves - the fans and the critics, the former colleagues, those who came up against Crystal's formidable PR machine, and those who know him early in his career.

Between these accounts we get Scott's own contextualisation, and also a transcript of a late TV appearance by Crystal, a sort of apotheosis of his strange and tragic life. It isn't just the #MeToo accusation that make his life notorious - Crystal Forest is located in a region of the Grampian mountains haunted by dark folktales, takes that seem to have taken root in Crystal's life, music and imagination. The two threads are entwined in what happens here: but are those stories of things stalking the forests a cause of his paranoia Or are they the result of it? Or a distraction from the scandalous rumours that engulfed him in the end?

Wesolowski weaves together all these threads expertly. It's a deliberately obscure, complex story. We have many examples before us now of celebrities - musicians, actors, DJs, impresarios - who abused their power and access. We have many examples of how even apparently selfless humanitarian work can be a cover, or even a means of gaining access to the vulnerable, so the outline of Crystal's life will seem familiar, spark connections. But at the same time, Wesolowski is at pains to show how there are always other versions of the truth, other perspectives, available and to leave open a shifting gamut of realities to explain what happens here. There is still altruism in the world. Crystal has his passionate defenders. Some of his accusers may not bear much scrutiny themselves, and the early lives of Zach and his sister, Naomi, who started out singing together are such that they also arouse genuine pity.

It is an absorbing and at times, genuinely scary story, told in hints and suggestions, rags and patches, less a linear narrative than a piece of truth crystallising slowly out of a murky solution. Each time I though I had the answer another narrative would pull the rug out form under my theory, before Wesolowksi spiralled back to a similar, but different, perspective which would then itself be laid low. I genuinely did not know where this was going and - whether you see it as a crime novel, a story of the supernatural or a chronicle of human frailty - the ending will I think come as a real shock.

I the course of the story, Wesolowski revisits themes and contributors form earlier Six Stories, adding to the complexity and inner reality of his invented world, and also hints at consequences for King from the choices he makes in the course of this book, perhaps setting up future books to complicate and develop that reality further. While sometimes dark in subject matter, I felt the book - by taking to fiction - was able to illuminate some recent high profile scandals and in doing so it creates a totally readable, indeed often compelling, narrative which I'd wholeheartedly recommend.

For more information about the book, see the Orenda Books website here - or any of the stops on the blogtour (see poster below).

You can buy Deity from your local bookshop - check whether they are doing click and collect - or from UK Bookshop dot org, Hive Books, Blackwells, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.