Tag Archives: book review

#BookReview ‘Only the Brave’ by Mel Sherratt @writermels #crime

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A dead body, a bag of money, and a group of people all lying to the police and each other. Only the Brave by Mel Sherratt is third in the DS Allie Shenton books set in the Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent. Mel SherrattThe sub-plot is a strong storyline here and it weaves in and out of the murder investigation throughout the book: Allie’s beloved sister Karen is expected to die within days. With a head full of grief, guilt, regrets and love for her sister, Allie confronts the underworld of Stoke to find the killer. Is the city’s crime lord Terry Ryder behind it all, even from his prison cell?
Mel Sherratt’s books are good value easy-read novels which get you hooked from page one and don’t let you go. As Karen lies in hospital, Allie must work out which petty criminal is lying to who and why, who has the most to gain and whose fingers are covertly dictating the action. And all the while she dreads having to question Terry Ryder in prison, the man she found herself attracted to despite all her instincts and her much-loved husband Mark. And to top it all, Allie senses someone is following her. Is her imagination running riot? Is it lack of sleep, or stress? Or is she being trailed by the attacker who put Karen into her coma seventeen years earlier?
If I have one criticism, it is that at times it moves too fast. I felt a little like a rabbit in the headlights and would have liked a few pages to catch my breath, to let the clues sink in and try to work out for myself whodunit.

Read my reviews of more books in the Allie Shenton series:-
TAUNTING THE DEAD #1ALLIE SHENTON
FOLLOW THE LEADER #2ALLIE SHENTON

If you like this, try:-
‘Beginnings’ by Helen J Christmas #1SAMEFACEDIFFERENTPLACE
‘Found’ by Harlan Coben #3MICKEYBOLITAR
‘Lord John and the Private Matter’ by Diana Gabaldon

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#BookReview ‘Visions’ by Helen J Christmas @SFDPBeginnings #thriller #romance

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Crammed with Eighties references from Margaret Thatcher, Echo & the Bunnymen and Jane Fonda aerobics to Laura Ashley décor, Visions quickly immerses you in the world of Eleanor Chapman. Visions is part two of Eleanor’s story which started in the 1970s in Beginnings and will ultimately end far into the future. Helen J Christmas‘Same Face Different Place’ by Helen J Christmas is an ambitious thriller series focussing on a single gangland incident which has reverberations across the decades. It is a study of how to react to threats and violence, the nature of victimhood, and the power of fighting back.
There are times in Visions when it covers old ground from book one, but nevertheless the story slowly reeled me in. After the events of Beginnings, Eleanor and her son Elijah live in a caravan in a Kent village, safe from the London criminals who threatened them. Their neighbours, James Barton-Wells and his children Avalon and William become close friends. However Westbourne House, the ancestral home of the Barton-Wells family, is crumbling. When the house is declared a ruin and the repairs too expensive for James to pay, a sinister property developer offers to help. All too soon, his nasty son and equally nasty sidekick bring terror to the quiet village as the tentacles of threat from the past find Eleanor’s hiding place.
There are scenes of nasty violence which remind the reader this is not simply a story of petty crime. Eleanor, her family and new friends must face intimidation, assault, sinister stalking and abduction. At the heart of their survival is a defiance born of knowing they are right.

Click the title to read my reviews of the next books in this series:-
BEGINNINGS #1SAMEFACEDIFFERENTPLACE
PLEASURES #3SAMEFACEDIFFERENTPLACE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Truth Will Out’ by Jane Isaac
‘No Other Darkness’ by Sarah Hilary #2MARNIEROME
‘Himself’ by Jess Kidd

And if you’d like to share a link:
#BookReview VISIONS by Helen J Christmas @SFDPBeginnings http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2q6 via @Sandra Danby

#BookReview ‘The Doll Funeral’ by Kate Hamer #mystery #suspense

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The Doll Funeral by Kate Hamer is a dark, despairing and at times confusing tale of identity and the creeping links of family and genetics across the generations. It is about the difficult adoptive families, about ‘not fitting in’, and how blood families sometimes don’t work either. Ultimately, family is where you can find it and make it. Kate HamerRuby’s mother Barbara is a cleaning lady who nicks small things she thinks won’t be missed. Father Mick knocks Ruby around, forcing her to miss school until the bruises fade. Then on her thirteenth birthday, they tell her she is adopted. Ruby’s response is to run into the garden and sing for joy. Of course nothing is as simple as it appears.
Ruby, determined to find her birth parents, runs away and makes her way to the creepy home of a strange schoolfriend Tom. I found the thread of Tom, Crispin and Elizabeth rather unrealistic and at times gruesome. It does however act as an alternative take on dysfunctional families, wild children and parental neglect. The budding relationship of Tom and Ruby, two outsiders, is touching.
Ruby’s tale is alternated with that of her mother Anna who falls pregnant as a teenager, first abandoned and then reclaimed by her boyfriend. Although I empathised with Ruby, I found her viewpoint rather mature at times for 13. For me, the story of her search for family was complicated by her ability to see ghosts. She doesn’t know their names or identities, so she gives them names such as Wasp Lady and Shadow. Shadow is the most present, speaking with Ruby and passing her information. At times, Shadow seems threatening, at others like a brother/sister. When the identity of Shadow is finally revealed, it was underwhelming and an aside from the key storyline. Almost as if the author had too many good ideas and didn’t want to drop anything. That said, the cover is beautiful.
The portrayal of the forest, both Ruby and Anna grew up in the Forest of Dean, is vivid, at times both reassuring and threatening. The significance of the title, though, passed me by, and I would have liked more of Nana’s folk magic.
This is not a novel I can honestly say I enjoyed. It considers difficult, slippery topics and so, thankfully, there is no neat ending.

If you like this, try:-
‘Mobile Library’ by David Whitehouse
‘The Last of Us’ by Rob Ewing
‘Beginnings’ by Helen J Christmas

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#BookReview ‘These Dividing Walls’ by Fran Cooper @FranWhitCoop #historical

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A young man arrives in Paris seeking respite from his grief, surrounding himself in the solitude of an attic flat loaned from a friend. Alongside him, his neighbours are happy and unhappy, they are getting by, they are lying to loved ones, lying to themselves. These Dividing Walls by Fran Cooper is a multi-layered story of microcosm and macrocosm, of an apartment block in Paris and its inhabitants, of city-wide anti-immigrant protests. Fran CooperA wave of racist violence enters the centre of Paris and the unfolding events are told through the lives of the residents at Number 37. Their lives converge and depart from each other, some are socially-minded, others watch from behind curtains. The young mother stretched so thin in the care of her three young children that she fears she will break. The banker who lost his job but is too ashamed to tell his wife. The homeless man who sleeps in a doorway on the street nearby. The silver-haired seller of art books who mourns her dead son. A young couple, new residents at Number 37, lock their door and turn off the television. The lives of all these people are affected by the xenophobic hatred which enters their street.
These Dividing Walls is at once a tender story and a violent one. Cooper writes with a love for Paris, a city she knows well, and this knowledge is in every sentence. A fond familiarity with Paris shines off every page, gently done, without shouting. The best book I have read this year.

If you like this, try:-
‘Quartet’ by Jean Rhys
‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris
‘Fair Exchange’ by Michèle Roberts

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THESE DIVIDING WALLS by Fran Cooper @FranWhitCoop http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2KC via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Butterfly on the Storm’ by Walter Lucius #thriller

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This crime thriller is the first of a trilogy billed, as many thrillers are, as the new Millennium Trilogy. Butterfly on the Storm by Walter Lucius does feature horrific examples of abuse, it does feature a campaigning journalist, but for me it fell short of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. Without that expectation, I would probably have enjoyed this thriller while at the same time being irritated that so much was crammed in. Walter LuciusThe action starts from page one and doesn’t stop to breathe. A young girl is the subject of a hit-and-run accident in the Amsterdam woods. In hospital, it becomes clear the girl is a young boy, dressed as a girl dancer and sexually abused by Afghan men now living in Holland. I found the portrayal of immigrant life in Holland fascinating and almost wish the author had examined this in more depth but the story spreads out to South Africa and Russia and its tentacles become confusing.
Accompanying the child to hospital is Dr Danielle Bernson who, following medical experience in Africa, is traumatized when she sees the child suffer. At the hospital, they meet journalist Farah Hafez, originally from Afghanistan, Farah’s identity was changed when she arrived as a child in Holland. She too has a lot of emotional baggage. Farah’s boss teams her with a more experienced journalist, Paul Chapelle, who she knew in Afghanistan. On the police side we have the pair of detectives assigned to the hit-and-run case, Joshua Calvino and Marouan Diba, a sort of young/old, idealistic/world-weary, good cop/bad cop pairing. There is a huge list of characters to accommodate the various storylines which include child trafficking, police corruption, political corruption, Russian violence and international terrorism. There is too much going on.
In the Millennium Trilogy, the first book had a clear distinctive story which allowed the reader to get to know the key characters which would move forward to book two. In Butterfly on the Storm, the first book feels like the episode of a television series where the ending has a hook to make you watch next week. This may work with television, but it left me feeling the novel was incomplete.

If you like this, try:-
‘Summer House with Swimming Pool’ by Herman Koch
‘The Long Drop’ by Denise Mina
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BUTTERFLY ON THE STORM by Walter Lucius via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Kf

#BookReview ‘New Boy’ by Tracy Chevalier @Tracy_Chevalier #contemporary #Othello

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When she arrives at school one day, Dee notices the new boy before anyone else and forsees he will have an impact on the world she lives in. Little does she know. This is Washington DC in the 1970s. A new black boy is starting his first day at an all-white school. New Boy: Othello Retold is not the usual novel you expect from Tracy Chevalier. Tracy ChevalierPart of the Hogarth Shakespeare collection of novels by contemporary writers re-telling Shakespeare’s most famous plays, it is thought-provoking, ambitious, but not totally successful. Modernising such a well-known classic drama is always going to be problematic, with readers who love or hate it. Othello, possibly Shakespeare’s most political of plays, is about love, jealousy, sexual bullying and manipulation. Difficult subjects for a school. Some reviewers think this book should be marketed to adolescents but for me, the novel’s flaw lies in its timeframe. The action takes place over one school day so the arrival of Osei and his relationship with Dee charges from flirting, friendship, commitment to caressing, whispering and hurtful jealousy between the hours of nine in the morning and four-ish in the afternoon. There is simply too much to cram into one day. I had less of a problem with the arc from flirting to jealousy, remembering the intense emotions of being pre-adolescent. However my perception of the world in which the story is set was not helped as, being English, I wasn’t aware that the top year of grade school means Dee, Osei, Ian and Mimi are 11-years old. I thought they were older.
How different it would have been to set it across Osei’s first week at school, allowing space for each character to be explored. The nastiness of bully Ian could be explored in depth, instead of passing references to his brothers whose examples of extortion he imitates, and his father who beats Ian for swearing. ‘His father had taken his belt to him early on to make clear that swearing was his domain, not his son’s.’ There is a deeper tale of manipulation & bullying trying to get out. But New Boy is shorter, at 192 pages, compared with Chevalier’s most recent novels – At the Edge of the Orchard, 305 pages; The Last Runaway, 353 pages – so no wonder the story feels constricted.

Read my reviews of Tracy Chevalier’s other novels:-
A SINGLE THREAD
AT THE EDGE OF THE ORCHARD
THE GLASSMAKER
THE LAST RUNAWAY

If you like this, try:-
‘Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold’ by Anne Tyler [also part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series]
‘Foxlowe’ by Eleanor Wasserberg
‘The Lightning Tree’ By Emily Woof

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#BookReview ‘The Gift of Rain’ by Tan Twan Eng #WW2 #Malay

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If you are searching for another world in which to immerse yourself, then this novel will fit the requirement. The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng will suit anyone interested in the Malay Peninsula and its history in World War Two. It is at times tender, brutal, harsh and uplifting. It is a story of love, family, war, of defeat and acceptance. Tan Twan Eng The story opens as Philip Hutton, an elderly man living in a stately house on Penang, an island off the west coast of Malaysia. To his door comes an elderly, frail Japanese woman. They have never met before, but know one person who made an impact on their lives. Endo-san, a Japanese man, once lived on a tiny island near Istana, the Hutton family home. The Gift of Rain is the story of the relationship between Endo-san, a master, sensei, of aikijutsu, and his teenage pupil Philip immediately preceding the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1941 and the following years of occupation.
There are many subtle layers to this tale which left me moved and thirsty for more facts about this period of history. It poses many difficult questions. Like the best novels dealing with war, it challenges you to be honest: what would I have done? It is easy to over-simplify war into ‘them and us’, ‘right and wrong’. At the heart of the story is the island of Penang and the transition of Georgetown, its major town, from a pre-war bustling multi-cultural port to an occupied territory at the mercy of torture and abuse by the Japanese. Some of it is difficult reading, all the more as the place seems alive. The traditions, the cultures, the nature are described vividly. The mix of nationalities on the island is at once its strength but, when war arrives, provide the cracks exploited by the occupiers. Philip is the youngest son of his father with his second wife, a Chinese woman. His two half-brothers and half-sister are English. Philip’s full name is Philip Arminius Choo-Hutton. This mix of races causes tensions, suspicion and betrayal throughout his life.
The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, about the period in Penang shortly after the end of World War Two, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.

Read the #FirstPara of THE GIFT OF RAIN here.

Here are my reviews of other books by Tan Twan Eng:-
THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS …and read the first paragraph HERE.
THE HOUSE OF DOORS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Translation of Love’ by Lynne Kutsukake
‘Moon Tiger’ by Penelope Lively
‘Exposure’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
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#BookReview ‘The Ice’ by Laline Paull @LalinePaull #contemporary #thriller

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The Ice by Laline Paull is a climate change thriller which takes place partly in the Arctic and partly in a courtroom in Canterbury. Sean and Tom met as students when Tom attended a meeting of the exclusive Lost Explorers’ Society and Sean was a waiter. They became friends because of their shared fascination for the Arctic. Both go on to forge careers revolving around the Arctic; Tom becomes an environmental campaigner, Sean a businessman. Their friendship, agreements and arguments are key to this novel. When, in chapter one, Tom’s body is revealed by an iceberg calving from a glacier it is the catalyst for all that follows. Laline PaullTom was known to be dead, having died in an accident in an ice cave on Svalbard three years earlier, an accident which Sean survived. An inquest is called, Sean’s business partners fly in to give evidence and to support Sean who is seeing visions of Tom around every corner. It becomes clear that Sean, now divorced and living with one of his investors, Martine, is not hands-on with his business in Svalbard. Midgard Lodge is an exclusive retreat where businessmen and politicians can meet to do deals. Sean’s upfront motivation is to encourage the capitalists to see the Arctic surrounding them, the polar bears, whales and glaciers, and convert them to environmentalism. With this in mind, he recruited Tom to the business. His partners however – the odious Joe Kingsmith and irritating Radiance Young – set my alarm bells ringing very early on. What exactly goes on at Midgard Lodge and why doesn’t Sean, supposedly the CEO, find out? And how could Tom not ask more questions before signing his contract?
There are some big topics touched on here: the opening of shipping channels over the North Pole, the political and military ramifications, the melting of the ice, the wealthy tourists who demand to see the polar bear they were promised in the holiday brochure, business executives who take the money and avoid asking difficult questions because that’s the easiest and most convenient thing to do. To reduce it to essentials, this is a novel about greed and love. How greed can destroy everything: not just business, but friendships, families and ultimately the ice.
I enjoyed The Ice but was left feeling vaguely dissatisfied. A day after I finished reading it, I realized why: it feels like it started out as a thoughtful novel about climate change, but at a later draft was turned into a thriller. The environmental message seemed preachy at times, the business sections were factual and dry, both of which took the edge off the suspense. Told from Sean’s viewpoint, the lack of Tom’s voice for me made the novel weaker. Perhaps it would have been more thrilling if various viewpoints had been juggled so the lies, risks, double-crossing and betrayals happen in real time, rather than the past.

Read my review of POD, also by Laline Paull.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Surfacing’ by Cormac James
‘Under a Pole Star’ by Stef Penney
‘Thin Air’ by Michelle Paver

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ICE by Laline Paull @LalinePaull http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2zZ via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Distant Hours’ by Kate Morton #contemporary #romance #WW2

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If ever there was a novel in which a house plays the role of a character, this is it. The Distant Hours by Kate Morton is told in two strands, World War Two and the Nineties, involving the three Blythe sisters in Kent at Milderhurst Castle and a South London mother and daughter, Meredith and Edie. They all are connected by the war, the house, and the truth of what really happened when Juniper Blythe was abandoned by her lover in 1941. Kate Morton This is a brick of a book [678 pages], like Morton’s other novels. A little too long for me, the story meanders at times through past and present until it works towards the final mystery. What a mystery, an ingenious storyline and an unpredictable final twist. The story starts when a letter arrives for Edie’s mother, a letter lost for decades, a letter dating from wartime when Meredith was a schoolgirl evacuated to Kent. Edie is fascinated by her mother’s history, but her mother does not talk of it. They are not close, and Edie feels unable to press for information. So she sets off to investigate on her own.
At the centre of the story is the house, and what a house it is: beautiful, crumbling, representative of a time past. When Edie visits the castle in 1992 for the first time, she thinks: ‘Have you ever wondered what the stretch of time smells like? I can’t say I had, not before I set foot inside Milderhurst Castle, but I certainly know now. Mould and ammonia, a pinch of lavender and a fair whack of dust, the mass disintegration of very old sheets of paper. And there’s something else, too, something underlying it all, something verging on rotten or stewed but not. It took me a while to work out what that smell was, but I think I know now. It’s the past.’ Living there, Edie finds the three Blythe sisters, alone after the death of their father.
Morton writes brilliantly about the war years, conjuring up life at this vast castle and in the village of the same name. Running throughout is a mysterious, ghostly, spooky thread based on Raymond Blythe’s best-selling book The True History of the Mud Man. ‘The moat has begun to breathe. Deep, deep, mired in the mud, the buried man’s heart kicks wetly.’
Is the book set at Milderhurst Castle? Is the Mud Man based on a true story? The book is yet another connection between Edie and the castle, she loved it as a child after being given a library copy when ill by her mother. And so the concentric circles tighten.

And here’s my review of another novel by Kate Morton:-
THE CLOCKMAKER’S DAUGHTER

If you like this, try these books with atmospheric houses:-
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom’ by John Boyne
‘The Other Eden’ by Sarah Bryant

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
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#BookReview ‘How to be Human’ by @CocozzaPaula #mystery #suspense

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Paula Cocozza has written a strange but compelling novel about relationships. In How to Be Human, she questions where the lines lie between sanity and obsession, love and infatuation, delusion and self-awareness. Beneath the surface of our intellect, sophistication and technology, we are still animals. Paula CocozzaMary lives alone in a house in East London which backs onto woods, land which other neighbours complain is a unpalatable wilderness of weeds, rubbish and foxes. To Mary, it is the countryside. One day she sees a fox in her garden and believes he has visited her, that the gifts he leaves her are his way of communicating with her. She interprets his movements and snuffles as communication to her, and so validates her belief he understands her as no-one else does. As her relationship with the fox grows, her interactions with other people – her ex-boyfriend Mark, her neighbours Eric and Michelle, her mother, her boss – begin to disintegrate. At the beginning she has some semblance that her friendship with the fox is not usual but she persuades herself that animal specialists do talk to animals so she is not alone in doing this. It is other people who do not understand him. She experiments with different names for the fox – Red, Sunset – but finally abandons this attempt to humanize him.
This is a strange novel, part-psychological thriller, part-study of how wild and domesticated live side-by-side, part-portrayal of emotional disturbance [Mary’s breakdown and Michelle’s post-natal depression]. It is a portrayal of Mary’s two relationships, both controlling, both involving elements of stalking, both where one partner overwhelms the other with claustrophobic caring. Except one relationship is between a man and a woman, the other between a woman and a fox. Events are told mostly from Mary’s point of view and partly from the fox’s, though I found the latter unsatisfactory, stilted and romanticized. Significantly, the fox’s viewpoint disappears towards the end. Some passages of description were too long for me, too indulgent of Mary’s inner world, pushing the boundaries of her madness into psychotic episodes, pushing the boundaries of veracity. It is a strange, unsettling novel, like nothing else I have read. The slow descent of Mary into her fox world is at first believable while being weird but gets stranger as the story progresses. The story did take a while to get going, I almost abandoned it twice. It is a long time before the first line – ‘There was a baby on the back step’ – is explained, so long that its significance is muted and not what I first expected it to be.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear’ by Claire Cameron
‘The Ship’ by Antonia Honeywell
‘Pretty Is’ by Maggie Mitchell

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOW TO BE HUMAN by @CocozzaPaula http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2HM via @SandraDanby