by TCW | Jan 19, 2024 | Book review
Every year I point out that this is not a book blog but every year there seem to be so many reviews… 2023 has been a comparatively quiet year with only 11 books. Click on the titles to go to the full-length reviews.
As ever, the majority of the books reviewed are historical, but there are a few contemporary novels too.
Historical
Wellington’s Smallest Victory: Peter Hofschroer
I have often visited Siborne’s model of the battle of Waterloo, which is displayed at the National Army Museum. I love it, despite the fact that in one very important aspect it is totally misleading. Peter Hofschroer’s wonderful book explains why and includes lots of fascinating detail on the battle. A must read-title for Waterloo fans.
This Bloody Shore: Lynn Bryant
I’m a huge fan of Bryant’s Manxman series, looking at the Peninsular War from a naval standpoint. This is the third in the series and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
The Gods of Tango: Carolina De Robertis
Obviously I like history and I love tango, so i would be enthusiastic about this book even if it wasn’t simply one of the best novels I have read in a very long time. I can’t begin to summarise how good it is in this snippet. Read my full review and then please go on and read the book.
Three books by Deborah Swift
I’m something of a Deborah Swift fan. She is an astonishingly prolific author and writes historical fiction in several different periods. Two of these, The Silk Code and The Shadow Network are set in World War II while the third, The Fortune Keeper takes place in Renaissance Venice. Swift’s ability to write convincingly about such different periods (she has good line in 17th century England as well) is astonishing and she has gripping plot lines too. Recommended.
The Illusions: Liz Hyder
I should have loved this book. It’s got conjurers, history and supernatural happenings, but it just didn’t work for me. I honestly can’t recommend it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it.
Contemporary
Legacy: Chris Coppel
This is a supernatural horror story: not my usual sort of thing, but the author contacted me and asked me to review it and the opening pages gripped me enough to carry on to the end. It’s a very good example of the genre.
The Retreat: Karen King
A mystery with more than a touch of romance from the ever-reliable romantic novelist, Karen King. It’s a fun, light read, likely to appeal to Agatha Christie fans.
Ailish Sinclair’s dance trilogy
I loved the first book in this trilogy, Tendu. It’s got sex and ballet and a touch of X-men superpowers. What’s not to like? The second in the series, Cabriole, didn’t work as well for me but, so far, the third, Fouette, has me completely gripped.
Me, me, me!
Beside reading all these books by others, I managed to put out two books of my own this year. As with the books reviewed, my efforts were partly historical (Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras) and partly contemporary (Monsters in the Mist). I obviously haven’t reviewed them, but others have said:
I can heartily recommend this thrilling adventure
Amazon review of Torres Vedras
100% recommend
Amazon review of Monsters in the Mist
by TCW | Jan 12, 2024 | Book review
We’re almost halfway through January and Deborah Swift’s latest is published next month so now seems a good time to get my review out.
The Shadow Network takes us back to the world of WW2 espionage that she introduced in The Silk Code. This story features Neil Callaghan from the earlier book but it is a separate story about a different aspect of Britain’s secret war against Germany. It centres on the work of the Political Warfare Executive which pumped out black propaganda to the Reich. It was a significant part of the British war effort, pioneering tactics that we see used in conflicts nowadays. It’s fascinating stuff and deserves to be better known. Swift, as ever, writes with authority and I loved those parts of the book.
The social background to the story also gives vivid insights into the world of the time. The heroine, Lilli Bergen, is a half-Jewish German, who we first meet living in Berlin. Swift gives some idea of the reality of life for Jews at the time. Lilli’s (non-Jewish) father disappears into the camps – her mother is already dead – and Lilli flees to Britain. There, she thinks she is safe until she is caught up in the anti-German hysteria that saw Jewish refugees rounded up alongside Nazi sympathisers and interned on the Isle of Man. Swift catches the terror of Jews who had lived under a police state being suddenly ordered from their homes to live, without family or friends, behind barbed wire.
Fortunately for Lilli, the Political Warfare Executive needs a German singer to entertain on a radio show designed to appeal to German soldiers. The songs are interspersed with propaganda designed to undermine morale.
In her new job she meets an old boyfriend from Germany – somebody she believes to be a Nazi collaborator. Instead of denouncing him to the police, she decides to investigate on her own. It’s a trope of this sort of fiction (one I’ve been accused of myself) that your hero will find themselves in a situation where they have to undertake a risky job without any kind of backup, although they are surrounded by people who could easily help them. Swift does a good job of explaining why Lilli insists on becoming a (frankly unconvincing) Mata Hari even when she has clear evidence that her ex-boyfriend is a wrong ’un, but I did struggle to suspend my disbelief. I had particular problems when she gets engaged to the villain and moves in with him. I know it was wartime and that people let things slip a little, but I was surprised that nobody seems to have thought this was odd. What, to me, was even odder was that, though the man is a cad and a bounder, he accepts that they will share a bedroom without actually having sex. That’s a necessary plot device, as there is a romantic subplot in which Lilli is saving herself for her true love.
Will Lilli save the day and will her apparent philandering be forgiven? No plot spoilers here, but no great surprises in the book either.
Like all Deborah Swift’s books, this is a joy to read and the story bowls along fast enough to skim over the more implausible elements – and you learn a lot about the war years on the way.
The Shadow Network is published in February and is already available on pre-order on Kindle and in paperback.
by TCW | Nov 28, 2023 | Book review
Here we are with Book 2 of Ailish Sinclair’s ‘A Dancer’s Journey’. Think of it as the second act in a three act ballet – the one where everyone runs around in a riot of colour and sexuality (more or less explicit depending on the date of the original production).
We start with Aleks and Amalphia back in the castle after the drama of Tendu. All seems well, but Aleks is worried that Amalphia is being drawn into a permanent relationship without any other life experience. She should, he thinks, live life on her own for a while, meeting other men and finding out what the city has to offer, rather than burying herself in a Scottish rural idyll.
It’s not a totally mad idea and it sets us up for whole novel’s worth of sex and experimentation but – I don’t know, it doesn’t quite do it for me.
Re-reading my review of Tendu, I said Amalphia came over as very young and slightly out of her depth sexually. This goes double (triple, literally at one point) in Cabriole. Perhaps it’s just that I’m a sad old man, but the frantic sex and the constant angst got me down a bit. This is a girl who is beautiful (she always denies it but the modelling shoots give you a clue), talented and sexy, but who spends so much time and energy moaning.
“I was aware that my state of mind was not quite as balanced as it should be; it took very little to send me into a state of dread. A sweet and sickly scent had me recoil and stagger back in the dressing room one afternoon. Someone was wearing the perfume that Michelle had always used… The other girls looked at me and turned away, my role as social outcast more solidified than ever.
At home too, irrational panic would sometimes rise. Was the pain in my legs my own or was I sensing that Aleks was ill or hurt?”
She drifts straight into a job with a well-respected company and I know enough about ballet to have some idea of just how amazing that would be to most people just starting out. Most outrageously, a lover has given her a luxury apartment in London: seven figures worth of property in a city where many young people (especially in the arts) dream of any sort of flat at all. (A dancer friend of mine was kept awake by the sound of rats running across the ceiling of her room.) Does she just luxuriate in the wonderfulness of her life? No, she’s in her early twenties, so she just works on her inner Emo.
What should make it all more fun (for her and the reader) is the sex. Lots of it. Lots of boys, lots of permutations. But it doesn’t really work. She finds that kink (very mild kink, if truth be told) isn’t really doing it for her. And it’s all really quite tame. I live in London. I have dancey young friends. Honestly, Malph, darling, what you’re describing is what people I know call ‘Friday’. (And, to be clear, I have the dullest, most monogamous life you can imagine and even my friends are more exciting than this.)
The story (and the sex) only really comes alive when Aleks returns to the scene which, fortunately for the reader and Amalphia, is quite often. He’s all Ukrainian and godlike, turning her on by speaking Ukrainian in bed. (Side note: why is this sexy? The only time this has ever come up in conversation with my friends was Czechs who insisted that English was the sexiest language for lovers. Perhaps, in the interests of scientific enquiry, I should run a survey.) He is a brilliant character.
There’s another man. I can’t say who because Spoilers. In comparison to Aleks he is, frankly, dull. But nice. And good.
Amalphia is torn. How to resolve the agonising choice she faces: the amazing sex god or the nice guy who truly and straightforwardly loves her.
This is the crux of the book, the point that justifies everything that has gone before. And, sadly, I can’t say anything about it because if I do then Ailish (and possibly you, dear reader) will have to kill me for ruining a satisfying conclusion. Because the conclusion really is good. According to Ms Sinclair, it was too shocking for her publishers to cope with. And, unlike all the sexual shenanigans, it’s genuinely different.
Cabriole was always going to struggle to keep up with Tendu. Tendu had a mad scientist and terrible experiments in a secret dungeon and lots and lots of Aleks (OK, maybe I’ve got a bit of a crush on Aleks) and it was totally insane, but huge fun. Cabriole is more a journey through a confused young woman’s life and I seem to know enough confused young women (at my age, everyone seems young) not to find the fictional versions that exciting. But it’s a fun story and Sinclair writes well and the insights into the ballet world are interesting and, by the end, I’m held again. The third book in the series should be well worth the wait.
Cabriole is available on Kindle at £3.99 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cabriole-Dancing-City-Dancers-Journey-ebook/dp/B0CGJ1QP4G) or in paperback at £13.99.
by TCW | Oct 3, 2023 | Book review
When I was a lot younger, girls used to enjoy books set in ballet schools. Tendu is set in a ballet school but it’s not to be confused with stories like Belle of the Ballet.
Ailish Sinclair’s school is like no ballet school I’ve ever heard of. For a start, there are just seven students. Plus, the school is set in a Scottish castle (familiar to anyone who’s read Sinclair’s The Mermaid and the Bear). Most of the classes are conducted in a dungeon where a sinister ex-ballerina is wiring students up to analyse their brain patterns while they dance mysterious choreography that seems to give them some sort of super-powers.
Within this basic set-up there’s lots of room for the sort of relationship issues which might have been familiar to Belle of the Ballet. There’s the bitchy girl and the sweet girl and the boy that Amalphia (our heroine) has a long-time crush on. Belle of the Ballet probably didn’t have a gay best friend like Justin, but times have moved on since the 1950s and Justin is a lovely character.
I have friends who have been involved with professional ballet, so the bitchiness and the enthusiastic approach to sex was hardly shocking, though the key relationship between 19 year-old Amalphia and her 38 year-old teacher, Aleks, made me a little uncomfortable, as I was reading just as the Russell Brand story broke. As they swung wildly between emotional break-ups and fabulous make-up sex, I couldn’t help feeling that Amalphia, whose point of view we are seeing this from, is basically a teenage girl, wildly out of her depth in this relationship. The suggestion from one of her lover’s friends that she is just vanilla has her desperately trying to become more adventurous in her efforts to keep up with her rich, sophisticated boyfriend. I kept willing her to run. Run now! Don’t look back and keep running.
No spoilers, but she keeps starting to run and then looks back and then there is more passionate make-up sex. It certainly makes for a hugely readable and entertaining story and, in the end, Amalphia is not my daughter, so who am I to judge? Amalphia’s mother isn’t going to be any help. She is (let’s be blunt about this) a bitch, constantly undermining her daughter. So passionate encounters continue unabated.
Aleks has a Past, which intrudes from time to time, and he can’t resist trying to make Amalphia jealous – and she falls for it every time. Did I mention that she’s well out of her depth?
Meanwhile, Michelle, the mysterious ex-ballerina, continues her increasingly bizarre experiments, building towards a climax that is totally crazy but hugely entertaining.
So there we have it: mad experiments, paranormal powers, exciting dance sequences and lots and lots of sex. And did I mention the mystical forces in the old stone circle?
It’s insane, but hugely entertaining. Ailish Sinclair is a lovely writer and I powered through the book, though trying to pull together a remotely coherent review has taken rather longer. Let yourself go and enjoy the ride!
Buy the book
Tendu publishes on Kindle on 20 October and is available for pre-order now at £2.99. Or you can buy the paperback already for £12.99.
Also publishing this month …
The latest Galbraith & Pole book, Monsters in the Mist, will be published in time for Halloween. I’ll be writing about it on my blog on Friday. Watch out for the cover reveal and more news.
by TCW | Sep 22, 2023 | Book review
It’s been a while since I put a book review on this blog, so it must be time for one.
English Eva and her Spanish partner, José, have restored an old house in the Spanish countryside and are planning to open it for wellness retreats. José has borrowed heavily to make their dream come true and is desperate for it to be a success. They decide to have a “soft opening” with just six guests who are offered a half price holiday while any problems are ironed out. Unfortunately for Eva and José, one of the guests harbours an old grudge. Things start to go wrong – little things at first, but by the end of the five-day holiday, there is murder afoot.
Karen King’s latest has distinct aspects of Agatha Christie. Gradually, we learn that almost all the characters have secrets in their past and almost any of them might have a reason for wanting the retreat to be a failure.
As the tension ramps up, so suspicion shifts from one guest to another. I ended up suspecting almost everyone in turn and I didn’t see the answer coming.
Karen King is a well-established writer and the book is an easy read. Her background as a romantic author is reflected in the romance between Eva and José at the beginning and another blossoming romance in the course of the story, but she does not allow these relationships to get in the way of her mystery. She also brings her love of Spain to the book, and particularly of Spanish food. The meals José provides (he’s a trained cook) are described in detail and the book will give you lots of menu ideas if nothing else. Eva’s wellness techniques are also covered which didn’t interest me as much, but that may just be because I’m greedy.
One of the things I struggle with in Agatha Christie books is the way that all the characters/suspects are introduced in a bunch and then I spend the rest of the book trying to remember which one was the pilot’s ex-girlfriend and which had the sister who had an affair with the pianist. This could so easily have been the same, with six guests arriving together and some important relationships between them and their hosts. It’s not a problem here, though. There’s an English couple (she’s the one with a dark memory), an American couple, both weird but she’s weirder, an old friend of Eva (shares a Dark Secret) and a cousin of José (also with a Dark Secret). King makes it easy to keep track of them all and their respective links to Eva and José.
Whodunnit? And will Eva and José’s relationship survive once their own secrets come out? No spoilers here: you’ll have to read it to find out.
A fun read to extend that summer feeling a little longer.
Publishing 13 October
The Retreat will be published on 13 October and is available for pre-order now HERE. It’s just £1.99 on Amazon or £9.67 in paperback.
A Word from our Sponsor
Also publishing in October will be the third of my Urban Fantasy stories featuring the vampire detective, Chief Inspector Pole. Urban Fantasy is a bit misleading here because this story finds the urbane Pole well out of his comfort zone investigating a murder in the mid-Wales hills. I’ll be telling you more (much more) about Monsters in the Mist over the next few weeks.
by TCW | May 5, 2023 | Book review
When I read that The Illusions is a historical novel (it’s set at the end of the 19th century) that combines a story about stage magicians with supernatural elements about people playing with actual magic, I couldn’t resist it. That’s the central idea in my own novella Dark Magic although that’s one of my contemporary books. I wanted to know how another author had tackled the same issues. In fact, Hyder’s story is more similar to mine than I had expected. It pits some regular stage magicians against an evil dark magician, in the same way that mine pits a company of stage magicians against a company dabbling with Black Magic. There’s an additional twist in The Illusions, as some of the stage magicians have real magical powers as well, although they do not reveal these to their friends.
All that said, The Illusions has very little in common with Dark Magic. For a start, Dark Magic is a novella while The Illusions is very long. I had an e-book, so I can’t say how many pages there were but it seemed to take a while to read. It also has quite a large cast of characters. As the story goes on you learn which of these characters are important and which are secondary and the relationships between the important characters become clear. At the start of the book, though, the characters are introduced one by one and it is not at all obvious what they have to do with each other.
The first person we meet is Arter Evans but he dies quite early on. The character who matters is his assistant, Cecily Marsden, always known as Cec. Cec appears soon after Arter, but the opening paragraphs are entirely from Arter’s viewpoint and this makes it difficult to immediately relate to Cec – a difficulty increased by introducing her in terms of what she has learned of magic, rather than how she feels about it.
No matter. A few pages later, Arter is dead and Cec flees to “the one person in all of Bristol that might be able to help”. So we meet Skarratt. There’s a hint that Cec does not like Skarratt. She’s right not to – he’s a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work – but we do not know why she dislikes him so much or, indeed, why he is the one person who might be able to help.
No matter (again), for we leave Cec and are introduced to Eadie. She is picking at a loose thread on her dress. She is, we are told, nervous.
I am not one to insist that it is always a crime to ‘tell’ rather than to show, but it would be nice to occasionally see things internalised. If we were in Eadie’s head we would see that she was nervous. We would not have to be told that she picked up a loose thread “nervously”, nor that she is “reassuring herself” that she does not need to be frightened.
Perhaps there simply isn’t time to get into Eadie’s head, for we are about meet another character, George Perris. They are both there for a séance. Eadie intends to expose such seances for the frauds they are. (I never quite worked out how but I may just not have been paying attention.) Perris’s approach is more direct. He breaks up the séance, causing real distress to the sitters. Eadie is angered by this and berates Perris but, already, she can’t miss that he is “one of the most handsome men she’s ever seen”.
Somewhere in the roomful of characters at the séance there is another significant person in the story, but don’t try to work it out because now we are in Paris at a performance by Valentin, who is seeing visions of a woman called Olivia who…
You see why I was frustrated at this point.
Once the characters have come together and we know the relationships between them, everything makes a great deal more sense. The plot is quite complicated but revolves around a feud between Skarratt on the one hand and Valentin and George on the other. Valentin and George are putting on a magic show intended to cement George’s reputation as the greatest magician in England, while Skarratt is set to wreck it largely out of spite and jealousy. Fortunately for George both Valentin and Cec possess real magical powers with which they are able to foil at least some of Skarratt’s evil plans.
The story draws in the early days of moving pictures (Eadie is developing new techniques, though we learn little of the technology), and a complicated series of relationships as the characters (except the loathsome Skarratt, of course) sort themselves into romantic couples.
The descriptions of tricks from the Golden Age of magic are fascinating, though I fear the author is often as misdirected as the audience. The thing about magicians is that they often seem to do things that appear impossible. This doesn’t mean that they actually do impossible things, but some of the descriptions of the tricks here clearly are impossible. This means that the distinction between the tricks that are being done by expert magicians are difficult to distinguish from those which are being done by expert magicians who are also possessed of genuine magical powers. That, I think, weakens a central element of the idea behind the book. By the end (no spoilers) stuff is happening that is clearly absolutely impossible. In fact, so impossible that you would think even the audience would notice. But perhaps they, like us, are lulled into a false sense that it’s all just a magic show by the number of impossible tricks they have witnessed from regular magicians. It’s still odd that Valentin is prepared to do some of these tricks given that he is supposed not to be letting his friends know about his magic powers. Never mind: it’s a dramatic ending to the book.
The failure to show us how the characters feel, rather than just to tell us what they are feeling, meant that they never really came alive for me. As a result, I found my interest slipping. On the other hand, I was drawn back in by the plot, which zips along. I had the impression that it was written more for younger readers who may be less worried by the rather two dimensional characters and more interested in the plotting, which is fair enough. If that’s you (or a young friend) you may well enjoy this book.
Dark Magic
If you like the idea of seeing real magic and stage magic mixed together, but in a more contemporary context, you might consider reading Dark Magic. All the stage magic in the book is true to life (I’ve spent far too long hanging round with magicians) and the ‘real’ magic is gloriously over-the-top. Reading The Illusions, I did feel that there was an absence of real jeopardy. With all this magic and evil flying about, nobody seems to get really hurt. (There’s one broken limb but it heals rapidly and with remarkably little pain.) For me, a book with ‘real’ magic and a villain like Skarratt really wants to have some seriously unpleasant things happening. Be warned: Dark Magic does do horrible things to its equivalent of Skarratt. On the other hand, it is often laugh-out-loud funny (or so reviewers tell me). I’m not sure that The Illusions wouldn’t benefit from more humour, come to think of it.
Anyway, if stage magic and dark forces are your thing, why not read them both?
Dark Magic is available on Kindle and in paperback. The Kindle edition costs just £1.99.
