02 Thursday Nov 2017
Posted in review
The winner of Good Housekeeping Magazine’s First Novel competition in 2016, Shadow Man is the debut book by Ms. Kirk. Set in Inverness, it follows DI Mahler and DS Ferguson’s investigation of Scottish Daytime TV celebrity Morven Murphy’s murder, days before her marriage to an ex-football star.
Morven is not a sympathetic character and at first, there seems to be many people who might have wanted her dead. Continue reading
06 Saturday May 2017
The 19th century may be drawing to a close but for Inspector Tom Harper of Leeds, crime shows no sign of ending. Harper not only has to deal with the death of an old lag, just out of gaol and an acid attack on a 13 year old lad in his ex-partner’s wife’s bakery, but an unexpected promotion threatens to take him away from the streets he loves and into the office where paperwork takes over.
As usual, Nickson’s characters are well rounded and believable and I especially love the relationship between Tom and his suffragist wife Annabelle. As with all his historical fiction, the author’s sense of place shines through his prose and I could almost taste the air of industrial Leeds.
I can honestly say I didn’t see the denouement coming and I thoroughly loved the book.
I do hope Mr. Nickson won’t make us wait too long for the sixth instalment.
13 Tuesday Sep 2016
I love reading crime fiction. I especially love reading crime fiction set in Scotland so I began reading Candles and Roses by Alex Walters with a critical approach.
A young couple stumble across a barely buried body in a local beauty spot with vases of roses and candles arranged around the grave. It falls upon DI Alec McKay to investigate the murder, a policeman who lost his own daughter to suicide several years before. Before long more bodies are discovered in very different places geographically, but with the same grave decoration as before. Meanwhile, the young girl who discovered the first body starts to wonder if a young woman who went missing a year before might also be a victim of the killer and decides to take matters into her own hand.
I really enjoyed this book. It’s setting in and around the Black Isle and Inverness was vividly drawn by the author. The characters were believable and sympathetic. Yes, perhaps we have had a lot of cops with personal problems before, but humans have baggage and I don’t suppose any of us reaches our middle years without things in our past that effect the way we deal with the present. I particularly liked the female characters. Walters described them as ‘people’ and made little difference between the expectations of them when compared to their male colleagues.
I enjoyed how the author handled the local voice. Rather than weigh the speech down with thick and heavy dialect, he sprinkles the odd Scottishism which is enough to remind us of where we are.
I won’t spoil the book by telling you the ending, but it left a very interesting question mark over events that I particularly liked. Highly recommended.
I received a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
23 Tuesday Aug 2016
Posted in review
I have noticed, with despair, a growing trend to laud the stupid, the ignorant and those who are ‘keeping it real’ (whatever that might mean. If your idea of a good read is a book with short sentences, small words and small ideas, please don’t even bother reading on with this review. If, however, you like to read a book not just for the plot or the story, but for the language, the imagery and the magic, The Life of Elves might be for you.
Clara is a young girl with a human mother and elfin father and a piano prodigy who’s gift allows her to interpret stories and history and enables her to create clairvoyant links with others, specifically with Maria, a girl who despite having elfin parents passes for a human child. Maria has the ability to commune with nature and to bend it to her will. The girls were adopted by human families as babies, their adoptive parents knowing nothing of their provenance. The elfin council believes that together they can meld together the powers of nature and human art and bring about a utopian period for the world, human and elfin.
So much for the plot. Make no mistake, this is no YA book, and not a fairy tale for children. Instead, the adult reader may, like me, become seduced by the beauty of Barbery’s prose and by the magical possibilities she so eloquently describes.
The Life of Elves is hard work: sentences go on for clause after clause after clause and at the beginning I found myself struggling to make sure I was parsing each sentence properly. But after a while the music of the prose, its magic, pulled me in and totally entranced me. In the first few pages I cringed at the detailed descriptions of the girls, or the setting. I thought that the entire book would be over-written and that I’d have to slowly wade through it or give up. Instead, I found myself looking forward to indulging in the rich world the author created.
I guess this is a Marmite book: you’ll either hate it or, like me, fall in love.
I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.
30 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in review
Like Chris Nickson’s other Tom Harper novels, “Skin Like Silver” is set in Victorian Leeds. The book opens in October 1891 with the discovery of a decomposing body of a baby in a box at the post office. That same night, Soapy Joe’s soap factory catches fire and a significant part of Leeds station is destroyed. In the aftermath a body is discovered in the rubble, covered in the molten steel from the station girders. When they discover that she did not perish in the fire, but was stabbed, multiple times, Inspector Tom Harper sets out to discover who she was and why someone would want to kill her.
The woman is identified as Catherine Carr, the estranged wife – and ex-servant – of a wealthy man. She is involved with the suffrage movement but outside of her work and suffrage meetings, lives an unremarkable life. Who could be responsible for her death? And why has her brother escaped from the asylum after hearing of her passing?
Nickson’s attention to historical detail is as accurate as ever. Skin Like Silver is populated with real people and characters so well detailed you find them totally believable.
Just as CJ Sansom’s Shardlake has a hump, Tom Harper has his own disability in the form of progressive deafness. So many modern detectives have complicated families and alcoholism as their burden and it is a pleasant change to read about a man whose family life is strong.
I could almost experience the metallic tang of the fog that played such a prominent part of the story and loved the author’s attention to detail.
Skin Like Silver is up to the same high standard of Chris Nickson’s other books and if you like historical crime, you’ll love this.
05 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in review
I’m a big movie fan, especially of the Golden Age of Hollywood so I was intrigued to read Angel of The Abyss by Ed Kurtz.
Graham Woodard, a film restorer in Boston, receives a phone call from L.A., asking him to come to the west coast and work on the restoration of an infamous, and thought to be lost, silent movie. The Angel of the Abyss is the Holy Grail of lost films and it’s star, Grace Baron disappeared after filming, adding to the intrigue.
Woodard heads to L.A. but soon finds he is involved in a business in which the body count is rising faster than a Spielberg opening weekend box office.
It soon appears that a race is on between the restorer and whoever it is trying to keep the film under wraps.
Kurtz tells the story from three character POVs and in two timelines. We switch between the present time and 1926 when Grace Baron was filming her one and only film role. The author does the time switch well. The dialogue from the 20s zings like a Capra movie and I got a real sense of place from his prose. I also enjoyed the thriller taking place in the current timeframe, but the one thing that did irk me about the book was the extra viewpoint character, Graham’s friend Jake. Without giving away any of the plot, I do understand why he used him, but I wish he had found another way around it as it spoils an otherwise brilliant novel for me.
Having said that, if you enjoy fast-paced thrillers and are a fan of the movies you could do worse than pick up a copy of Angel of the Abyss.
N.B. Apologies for the poor quality of this review but I am having fibro-fog day and finding words is difficult.
18 Thursday Dec 2014
Tags
I have read several of Brookmyre’s earlier novels but this is the first Parlabane story I’ve tackled, and what a treat it was.
Jack Parlabane, an investigative journalist tarnished by the recent real-life press investigations, finds himself unhirable and wanted for questioning by the police. Continue reading
19 Sunday Oct 2014
A young girl goes missing in Edinburgh, presumed abducted. No one sees her go, but in the station toilets not far from where she had stood with her mother, a black swan is found, severely mutilated and in a pool of blood.
And the black swan’s wings are missing.
The number of missing girls gets higher, each disappearance accompanied by a broken bird, and no one can fathom how they were taken.
What follows is a police procedural following brothers John (a cop) and Alan (an investigative reporter) as they investigate the missing girls.
So far, so “Stuart McBride.”
But you wouldn’t expect a straight detective story from a writer with a strong back catalogue in well written horror and, as usual, Meikle delivers.
Thanks to Alan, the Granger brothers find a sandwich-board nutter who seems to know a lot about what may have happened to the girls and it’s at this point that the story begins it’s shift into fantasy and horror as we are taken to the land of the fae where an evil is building, intent on tearing down the barrier between worlds.
The book has a real feel for Scottish myth and folklore yet the author manages to make the transitions between worlds believable and natural. The horror is well described and gory without being gratuitous and the book marries the Scotland of a dark Brigadoon with the Edinburgh of Rankine to create an interesting tale of evil ambitions, myth and 21st century detective work.
Being a Scot, I appreciated the setting. I read a lot of horror and it was refreshing for the setting to be somewhere other than America.
A good, satisfying book which leaves the reader with the hope that the sequel the author sets up isn’t long in coming.
4 poodles
08 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in review
I don’t know about you, but when I’m browsing for a new book, the opening paragraph is of vital importance. If the first paragraph grabs me, I’ll buy the book. And when the first line is as good as that in Craig Russell’s The Long Glasgow Kiss, I want to take it home and feed it strawberries and chocolate.
“Some concepts are alien to the Glaswegian mind. Salad. Dentistry. Forgiveness.”
Come on, you know it doesn’t get much better than that.
Our narrator in this tale of missing persons and boxing is Lennox, a Canadian who has settled into the life of a private investigator in post-war Glasgow. And if you think the ‘violent Glasgow’ tag so often used by the media is a modern invention, you’d be wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Russell’s Glasgow is one of petty thugs, gangs based on religious affiliation, crime lords and…more thugs. Never has the label ‘tartan noir’ been so accurate.
In making Lennox Canadian, Russell has loaned his character just enough exoticness to make his smart-mouthed narration believable. This is a man who cares about whether he dons a fedora or a borselino and whether his sap ruins the line of his fine wool summer suit. I think I might love him…
It is also a very, very funny book. I found myself sniggering frequently at such bon mots as,
“They say Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Glaswegians must have twice that many for the different kind of rain that batters down on the city…”
or
“A Scottish acquaintance had once tried to reassure me that tweed from the Isle of Harris was less scratchy, explaining that this was because it was traditionally soaked in human urine. I could have been accused of being picky, but I preferred couture that hadn’t been pissed on by an inbred crofter.”
I am deliberately not telling you what the book is about. Not a hint of a plotline shall pass these lips. I want you to go buy it and enjoy each twist and turn as it happens on the page. And if you don’t, I’ll set Twinkletoes on you. Trust me – that’s something you and your shoemaker don’t want to happen. Not if you want to keep dancing…
08 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in review
I don’t know much about Russian history. I know that there was a revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century where the Tzar and ruling classes were overthrown; I’d heard about the whole Anastasia thing and I knew that Russians were always the baddies in the best James Bond films. I have never read Crime and Punishment either so it was with some trepidation that I began to read R.N.Morris’s The Cleansing Flames where he takes Dostoevsky’s character, Magistrate Porfiry Petrovich and follows him and his underling, Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky as they navigate the officialdom and revolutionaries in Russia of 1872.
And it was a revelation.
Morris’s opening chapter is beautifully written and he describes a vodka warehouse fire with such detail I could almost feel the heat. I particularly loved that Virginsky ‘could hear its savage, drunken roar’. But this is not a book where language is used at the expense of character or plot.
Virginsky is a man torn by his growing support for the revolutionary cause and his work as a magistrate. There is also a hint that he may suffer from some form of OCD as he has a habit of counting things in times of stress. He has an uneasy relationship with Porfiry Petrovich at the beginning but this develops and changes over the course of the book.
The Senior Magistrate is drawn almost like a Russian Poirot,all tics and artifice hiding a sharp intelligence and warm nature and he manages to navigate the corridors and red-tape of officialdom with cunning and good humour.
And so to the plot. When a body is discovered in the thawing Winter Canal and an anonymous tip off is received by Porfiry Petrovich, both men are drawn into the world of intellectual terrorists whose aim is to overthrow the aristocracy and bring all down to the level of the Russian peasant. Virginsky infiltrates one such terrorist group and Morris very skillfully shows his character’s internal struggle with both sides of his personality. These terrorists all have other, code names in addition to their own and the chief of these is Dyavol – Devil – whose identity is unknown to only a few at the very top of the cell. The terrorists use disinformation to manipulate Virginsky and it is not until almost the end of the book that we discover which side the junior magistrate will embrace.
This is Virginsky’s book, despite it being the fourth Porfiry Petrovich novel. In many ways the older man plays a supporting role to his young colleague but the story does not suffer because of this. The only criticism I have of the book it that I found the Russian names difficult to remember and it took me a little while to get used to the Russian naming convention – Pavel Pavlovich and Virginsky being the same person, for example. But that is down to reading the book in many short bursts rather than a few longer sesions.
All in all I found the book a highly enjoyable read and will definitely read more by this author. if you like historical fiction, especially historical crime fiction, I’d highly recommend giving R.N.Morris a try.
