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
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.
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.
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
Mention Seattle to me and what comes to mind is Microsoft, Frasier and rain. But Seattle is also the setting for Emerald City, the new book by Chris Nickson.
It’s 1988 and Laura Benton is a music journalist at The Rocket, a publication at which the author also worked in the 1980s. It’s a male-dominated world where Laura feels she has to constantly prove herself in order to be taken seriously. When Craig Adler, songwriter and lead with local band Snakeblood dies of a heroine over dose on the eve of the big time, there’s no reason for anyone to be suspicious. But when Laura discovers that Craig had been clean for a year she suspects there may be more to the story than meets the eye. Then the threatening phone calls start, warning Laura to leave the story alone. But who is making the calls, and who has most to gain from Craig’s death?
Nickson successfully conveys the warmth he feels for the city and he obviously knows the Seattle music scene. But as with his historical fiction, the author weaves enough of his knowledge in to add authenticity without ramming it down the reader’s throat.
I enjoyed learning more about Seattle: my previous experience of Washington State music started and ended with Nirvana. I liked Laura immensely but was less keen on her boyfriend who came across as whiny and needy, and from the stories the other characters related about the victim, I know I would have loved him too.
Seattle: Microsoft, Frasier and rain. After reading The Emerald City, I can now add music and the setting for some fine crime fiction to the list.
