Grave Empire by Richard Swan

Grave Empire

Richard Swan

Orbit, 4 February 2025, 
Available as: HB, 509pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356523866

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Grave Empire to consider for review.

Grave Empire ought not to work. Swan has gone back to the world of his Justice of Kings trilogy for a followup, set several hundred years later and with entirely new characters. The setting is recognisable, but beyond a few callbacks to the earlier books, the action is new (though, as the story develops we see that what I might call the theological character of the world is also the same).

There are pitfalls of writing a continuation to a successful trilogy. You may rehash the original, undoing the earlier resolution and making the reader ask what the point was (hello, Chronicles of Thomas Covenant! Hello, Star Wars episodes VII - IX!) Or you may produce something notionally related but not really, and be accused of simply cashing in on the earlier success. Either want you may miss what appealed the first time round.

Swan, however, avoids both of these traps and indeed rather gloriously transcends them. If the first trilogy had a sort of neo-Roman Empire setting, albeing garnished with Northern, rather than Southern, European tropes, Grave Empire picks things up in a more gunpowdery age. The warfare is a bit Napoleonic, the geopolitics more Age of Empires (complete with colonial excesses) than Ancient World. Yet, behind it all, the menace that Sir Konrad discovered, the cosmic horror that drove events in the earlier books, still festers. Only, the re-established Empire of the Wolf has now made the lore that might have allowed it to resists, even more forbidden. Quite the conundrum.

Against that background, Grave Empire gives us some brilliant new characters. There is Peter, a young man recently recruited to the Sovan Army. Swan is good on the motivation for the this, the mix of personal drift, family situation and peer pressure. He also creates a plausible military for Peter to join, and a plausible disillusionment for him to undergo, amidst the coming apart of Sovan political and diplomatic influence and an increasingly precarious strategic position. Peter's arc will lead him to and beyond the fringes of Sovan power and to him becoming the holder of strange secrets.

There's also Renata, a studious if obscure Sovan diplomat in a little-regarded branch of the bureaucracy, that will soon be brought to the centre of matters as the crisis escalates. I rather like the "obscure functionary unexpectedly thrust into the limelight" trope (as a bureaucrat myself perhaps it plays into my wish fulfilment: if only people would actually listen to ME!) and Renata's an ideal subject for it, a mix of high competence and low confidence. 

This opening volume of the new trilogy takes its time, and gives plenty of space, allowing both Renata and Peter to develop and for us as readers to take their measure. (And also introduces a number of others). Plenty else is happening, with military expeditions, plots and a mysterious master-spy whose motives seem deeply dubious, if still rather obscure. Many of these threads remain separate, though Swan uses the alternate viewpoints they provide to provide more information about the "modern" version of his world.

It's a gripping read, one that fairly rattles along in terms of pace and Swan successfully prevents the reader from pining overmuch at the loss of his earlier roster of characters, as she or he might have if it had been set closer in time. 

Recommended.

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

Review - A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

A Granite Silence

Nina Allan
Riverrun, 10 April 2025
Available as: HB, 352pp, audio, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(HB): 9781529435573

I have to say, I paused over A Granite Silence because I thought at first that might be "true crime" and I have a bit of a dislike of that genre. But I love Nina Allan's books and trust her as an author so was curious to see what she had written.

And I am so glad I did that because this is a wonderful book, albeit, at times, a painful one to read. 

But first, about that genre label. Showing how false and misleading these things are, yes, this book is about a true crime - the murder of a young girl, Helen Priestly, in 1930s Aberdeen - but it is also a work of fiction, and many other things besides. Allan gives us a razor sharp analysis of the crime and its aftermaths - and its beforemaths too. But she also wraps that in fiction. The ideas roll around like quicksilver, the book imagining the lives of the various protagonists, often in quite tangential settings and circumstances and far from Aberdeen.  Often, the settings often turn out not to be so tangential at all. There are alternative timelines and lives here too, all of which enrich the central events, and even pieces of clear fiction which might stand as complete stories in themselves. 

In Allan's hands, Aberdeen becomes a nexus, a place haunted by emigrés, journalists drawn to the events portrayed here and by the author herself as she describes her investigation of the murder and the subsequent trial but also fills us in on the wider past, the city and the country. She shows that Aberdeen is a complex place which has actually had many pasts.  There are even some science-fictional elements in this mass of stories, hinting at other worldly goings on.

I felt that A Granite Silence has implicit, but real, connections with other of Allan's books,  particularly The Rift and The Race, both of which turned on disappearances and loss and both of which also touched on wider alternate realities. In A Granite Silence things are more realist, but the exploration, in the second half of the book, of the trial which followed young Helen's murder naturally engages the same sense of multiple realities - that's the point of a trial, surely, you tip out everything on the table and try to sort out all the possibilities?

The book also covers an extraordinary range of other subjects, ranging from a modernised version of Burn's Tam O'Shanter (a poem I studied for O level English literature - at last, I felt as I read this, that has come in useful!) to Harry Houdini's visit to Aberdeen to the development of forensic science to the sheer difficulty of finding what becomes of people, only a few decades back, when there is no Internet to force them to leave breadcrumb trails.

It's difficult to do justice in a short review to the sheer breadth of this book, to its empathy for the poor souls devastated by tragedy nearly a hundred years ago or to the pains Allan takes to show how the great web of connections, of society, while stretched and holed, reaches forward. Far from being preoccupied by a shocking crime, Allan uses her art to get beyond that granite silence, to hear the very stones ringing to vanished footsteps, to futures that never were. The various strangers who people her Aberdeen and then move on are like sonic waves, imaging what can't be seen in the murk of the North Sea waters.

A profound, moving and thought-provoking book, but also a joy to read.

For more information about A Granite Silence, see the author's website here. 

Review - Strange New World by Vivian Shaw

Strange New World

Vivian Shaw
Orbit, 20 May 2025

Available as: PB, 371pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521077

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Strange New World  to consider for review.

I thought that the series of books about Greta Helsing, doctor to the monsters of London, was done, so I was VERY excited to see the e-book only novella Bitter Waters last year. Gloriously it was followed up by Strange New World.  Strange New World does though think mark a definite end.

It was wonderful to meet Greta again.  I have a weakness for characters who, like her, may be tossed around by events and even baffled by what's going, but nevertheless remain level-headed, focussed and competent throughout - rather than becoming so just in time for the third act. 

Of course, it helps a protagonist when their husband is a wealthy vampire, their best friend is a senior functionary in Hell and their circle of acquaintances included the Voivode, Count Dracula himself. Greta has all of those advantages and is nowhere near as hard-pressed as she was in the earlier books. Still,  even it does look as though previous events - the hunting down of harmless monsters by religious fanatics - are being repeated. Greta suffered enough trauma from that to give her pause (I also have a weakness for stories that respect and recognise trauma rather than just ignoring it). Even so, the dangers (to herself, her friends and indeed, the fabric of reality itself) that she has weathered have also left her conscious of just how vulnerable mortals (and monsters) can be and of the need to face them. In Strange New World, those dangers come from a new direction, and the means to overcome must as well.

Without being too spoilery, I'd like to say how much I enjoyed the resolution to this book. It would have been possible to make it a magnificently bloody piece of combat, with the Universe balanced on a knife edge - and indeed there are some nail biting set piece conflicts in here - but the book is concerned  rather with empathy and morality. The solution, if there is one, is therefore going to require compassion, flexibility - and friendship.

That leads us to a much richer, and necessarily messier, conclusion than if it all turned on a knock-down battle, but also to a much better one I think. Indeed, as the book ended I found myself thinking of a perhaps surprising precedent - CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters. Setting aside the question of whether those "letters from a senior to a junior demon" (a kind of infernal Yes, Minister) establish Lewis, the great Christian apologist, as a founder of urban fantasy (I would love that but perhaps... not quite)  I think there is a comparison to be drawn. I think one of Lewis's insights was to explore issues of personality, confusion and despair in the subjects that his industrious demons were trying to mislead, rather than brimstone and temptation. 

Shaw's demons (and her angels) inhabit a different moral universe, not the Christian one, and nobody is actively trying to save or damn anyone. Here, Heaven and Hell are more like rival idealogical systems, and of course, as she makes clear, other mythologies are also available. But, at the root of things I think there are the same issues that Lewis explored - the fatal flaws in human, demon or, indeed, angel, that can lead to dreadful consequences. We are all monsters. We can all be better. We all need love, acceptance and hope. And friendship. Which made the ending of this book, and the moral actions that lead to the resolution and point to a future of hope, so powerful for me.

Which is, perhaps, a good place to end a series. While I will miss Greta, I feel that in these five books have completed something significant, say something significant. 

I will be keen to see what Shaw writes next!

For more information about Strange New World, see the publisher's website here.

Blgtour review - Shatter Creek by Rod Reynolds

Shatter Creek (Casey Wray, 2)
Rod Reynolds
Orenda Books, 22 May 2025 
Available as: PB, 355pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788091

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Shatter Creek to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

This one put me in mind of one of my favourite Springsteen songs, Atlantic City:

Now there's trouble busin' in from outta state

And the DA can't get no relief

Gonna be a rumble out on the promenade

And the gamblin' commission's hangin' on by the skin of its teeth...

Also set in a coastal town that's seen better days, like Atlantic City Shatter Creek sees hard-pressed officialdom - in this case the Hampstead County Police Department - hanging on by the skin of its teeth, threatened by by a wave of murders, by political interference and by the taint of corruption.

Sergeant Casey Wray is back, naturally. She's the woman trying to hold it, and herself, together. Casey - just - survived the violent events of Black Reed Bay, both physically (unlike her partner she's alive!) and reputationally, back on duty after a lengthy investigation exonerated her (though not in everyone's eyes). Now it all seems to be happening again, with her superior officer mistrustful, mysterious calls from a would-be informant, and pressure to resolve the murder of a wealthy political donor without raking up further dirt.

We're in for a tense few days, then, as Casey has to balance the different pressures on her. 

But someone else seems to be interested in recruiting her...

This certainly is not a relaxing read. As with its predecessor, Shatter Creek is a tense book, a window into a high pressure world where nothing can be fixed and just getting to the end of each working day is a minor miracle. Casey's clearly a good cop, and a good friend - she spends as much time sorting out the frictions among her team as in chasing down the suspects - but she's in a tight place. By the time I was a third of the way through this book I was beginning to dread every phone call and text that interrupts Casey's day, because each one piles more and more pressure on. 

As the story progresses, the limited normality and security that Casey has reestablished is stripped away leaving her very exposed. She's pressured to do favours for the politicians - but we just know that if she gives in, it'll blow up in her face. If she resists, though, she'll end up being the fall girl when the enquiry goes wrong, as it seems to be doing.

Through it all, Reynolds keeps a plot moving that is - once we reach the end and see what's gone on - beautifully simply, yet fiendishly complex and misleading as it unfolds. And he makes real a whole train of characters - broken people, who've lost loved ones or discovered someone wasn't what they seemed. Rage, loss, jealousy, greed and pride chase each other down the pages of this novel as though someone had set up a track and field tournament for the Seven Deadly Sins. 

And amidst it all are those broken people, desperately vulnerable. It's not just Casey who's in jeopardy (though she does seem at risk). There's a missing mother and child. Other women are dying, with a particularly nasty form of patriarchy and coercive control on display. Each death leaves a dreadful void for the survivors. Protecting them all is Casey's touchpoint, her still centre in this storm - one of the reasons she's such a relatable and compelling protagonist - but other actors, bad actors, seem more concerned with covering their own backsides, or finding advantage in the chaos.

It is a riveting read, and one hard not to undertake in a single go, though if you suffer from high blood pressure, well, you may want to make sure you take regular breaks... or medication.

For more information about Shatter Creek, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Shatter Creek from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

Review - Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

Paladin's Grace

T Kingfisher
Orbit, 8 April 2025 
Available as: PB, 360pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN (PB): 9780356524313

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of Paladin's Grace  to consider for review.

Stephen is a broken paladin. His god dead, he's trying to find purpose - and to prevent the berserk rage overtaking him, because with the Saint of Steel gone missing, Stephen is afraid he'll lose control and commit mass murder. 

The rest of the time, he knits socks...

Grace is a perfumer. A Woman with Secrets, she's already lost everything - twice - and is desperately afraid it'll happen again.

So when Grace is chased through a graveyard by malevolent priests, and literally jumps into Stephen's arms to put them off the scent, she's being practical, not looking for an offer of rescue, still less for romance. And Stephen's too afraid of letting go and losing control to admit the feelings Grace stirs in him.

And yet. And yet...

Paladin's Grace is a fun fantasy romance. Kingfisher's setting - a medieval-ish town crammed with feuding priests, plotting diplomats and, as the toll of bodiless heads mounts up, murderers - is well realised without being over-serious. Stephen's, and Grace's, sensitivities, are well drawn. Their respective drives to resist romantic entanglement war with natural feelings - STRONG feelings, my goodness, as Kingfisher makes clear - but both, of course, are too embarrassed, not to say confused, to explain to each just what they're going through.

And in any case they have no time. There are murders to solve!

The two protagonists are interesting and fun - Stephen may sound from my description above as though he's stepped out of a D&D adventuring party, but he's an intelligent man, not just an arm with a sword, and a complex one at that, trying to navigate his way in a world he never expected or wanted to live in. Grace is a resourceful and determined woman who's suffered appallingly at the hands of entitled men, and is determined not to fall into any man's power. Her profession as a perfumier gives her an ambivalent place in society, allowing access to privileged circles while not being part of them. (As becomes clear when her secrets, and her life, begin to unravel, her foundations in her profession are shaky too).

Through all this, a developing plot concerning poisonings in diplomatic circler, as well as those unidentified heads, adds tension, putting both Stephen and Grace in danger and driving the story towards a violet conclusion.

While I might, perhaps, have hoped that this violence would come on a little sooner - we know it's coming, don't we? - the anticipation mirrors, er, another kind of anticipation that's building of course in our protagonists. Will they or won't they? Well, fair reader, I don't deal in spoilers, you'll just have to read the book.

All in all, great fun and - I understand - a standalone adventure in a wider world that this author is currently developing with more volumes to be published shortly. I'll be watching for them.

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

Blogtour review - Downlands by Norm Konyu

Downlands
Norm Konyu
Titan Comics, 13 May 2025
Available as: HB, 292pp, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781787743328

I'm grateful to Julia at Titan Comics for sending me a copy of Downlands to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the blogtour for this excellent graphic novel.

I hadn't read Norm Konyu's work before but now that I've seen Downlands I'm a fan. To this 70s child there's a haunting fusion of form and content here, not so much dreamlike as "memories you had forgotten like". And that's even before you add in the folk-horror vibe and rich historical depth.

Set in the ancient countryside and the villages of Sussex, Downlands is centred around James and his 14 year old sister Jen, who dies suddenly at the start of the book. I think it's fair to say the story is centred around James and Jen because her absence is itself a presence that haunts this book. It is (as well as being many other things!) a powerful evocation of loss and dislocation, as James and his parents struggle with their grief and the unfairness of a life lost so young. ("Tea again. I was constantly being offered tea as if it would make everything right.") The supernatural events that flit around the subsequent story reflect that dislocation, but they are clearly intended here as more than a reaction to it - there is something amiss.

Jen's absence isn't the only one. Through the book, Konyu also gives us, via retold stories, fragments of history, postcards, extracts and countless other sources, the stories of the houses in James' street. These include many losses. There have been deaths. There have been disappearances. Young men march away to war, to return changed, it at all. One unfortunate woman is committed to the county asylum. A family perish in a road accident. A cottage burns down and is never rebuilt. 

Other events are also touched on - a famous writer lodged in the street while working on her masterpiece. The local vicar struggles with his sermon. A woman whispered to be a witch has some answers. And, through all of it, a mysterious black dog that only some can see steps in and out of the tale.

It's a puzzle of sorts. James tries to understand what happened to Jen, but discovers that is linked to other, older mysteries. It's not "ancient evil" territory but there is a sense of malevolence, or perhaps, of human twistedness warping a natural ineffableness to darken and taint the lives of those who live in The Street (and especially at one particular address). In the course of sketching this out, Konyu blends many powerful themes, both historical and mythic - excavating the "ghost soil" as it were (and helpfully describes some of the sources at the end)

The story is, as I mentioned, conveyed in a very distinctive style, naturalistic yet stylised, the angles and often muted tones often gorgeous yet chiming with the slightly awkward feelings and sense of disjunction being felt by James and his family. Grief, guilt and disbelief will do that to how you see the world, I think. I have no learning in graphical styles so may be making some huge faux pas here, but to me it also recalled a strand in book illustration from the 60s and 70s - something overlapping between the sparseness of Dick Bruna and those intricate line drawn pictures in 70s Puffin books. I felt very at home with these pages. (That's especially useful since the book encourages you to turn back and forward, making connections between things as later pages shed new light on earlier material).

All in all, a ravishing read, perfect whether as something spooky to send shivers through you in summer hear or autumn fog, as a powerful episode of nostalgia, or as a comforting companion in grief. Or, just if you want a good read!

For more information about Downlands, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Downlands from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones.

Review - South of Nowhere by Jeffery Deaver

South of Nowhere

Jeffery Deaver
HarperCollins, 8 May 2025
Available as: HB, 416pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy

ISBN(HB): 9780008665951

I'm grateful to the publisher for providing me with advance access to an e-copy of South of Nowhere via NetGalley.

In the latest instalment of Deaver's compulsive readable Colter Shaw series (though, I'm not sure Deaver writes anything that isn't compulsively readable) our hero is pitted not only against the bad guys but against the forces of nature itself.

Amidst a general drought, the Californian town of Hinowah is threatened by, of all things, flooding, due to snow melt in the mountains. The levee that protects the town has been allowed to fall into disrepair, and it's threatening to give way. In the heart-stopping prelude to the story, we see travellers on the levee road facing the threat of being swept away by the floodwaters, and later, Shaw's cool analysis of how they might survive (if you're trapped in a submerged car with a pocket of air, it will last longer if you wee on the carpet, apparently, so you'd better hope the car's upright).

How, and why, Shaw comes to be in Hinowah and what allies - and enemies - he has there, will be revealed in the book. At the start he's worrying about a development from his troubled father's past, one that may place the family in danger again. That thread is picked up in the book as something that may feature in future stories, but mostly, this one is about the peril in Hinowah. We see an agreeable set of figures battle against the crisis - Army engineers, a disaster response professional who happened to  than be passing by, the town boss who fancies taking over as police chief and sees the whole episode as a "test" for him, a new police recruit who's who most competent person on his team, and, of course, Shaw himself. 

Laced with Deaver's brand of informed analysis on issues ranging from river law (and law), to flood risk to the history of the California goldrush to modern tech and its insatiable demand for water, and his meticulous plotting, the story isn't without the human touch either - whether it's Shaw himself finding romance or seeing the inhabitants of a small town respond in realistic ways to the threat hanging over them (spoiler: realistic ways doesn't always mean sensible ways). 

There are subplots and wheels within wheels and a feature I love with these novels, a Survivalist family who are not far Right crazies - and whose skills and talents are particularly well suited to the crisis unfolding in South of Nowhere. We also see some bad actors about their business (but what, exactly, is their business, amidst a natural disaster?) and there are some surprises about who is up to what.

As ever, immense fun, and those same bad actors provide enough of a whodunnit/ whytheydunnit element to leaven the straight disaster narrative, if that's your thing, although for me , that drama was nalibiting enough in itself.

Strongly recommended, but if you pick this up, be sure to clear your diary for the next few days because you won't willingly out it down again till you reach the end.

For more information about South of Nowhere see the publisher's website here.