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.
by TCW | Apr 11, 2023 | Book review
Another Tuesday, another review of a book by Deborah Swift.
One of the things that really impresses me about Swift’s writing is her ability to move, apparently effortlessly, between different historical settings. Last week I was reviewing her 17th century Italian renaissance novel, The Fortune Keeper, and this week we are in World War II. Life in London during the Blitz is wonderfully evocative, with trips to a Lyons Corner House where you eat Shepherd’s Pies that are mainly potato and beetroot is everywhere. Normal life continues between air raid warnings. It’s spot on.
I can hardly mention the plot. It starts with Nancy being betrayed by her fiancé practically on the eve of their wedding. She flees her quiet life in Scotland to move to London where she gets a job in the offices where her brother works. When she applies, she has no idea that she will be a decoder with the Special Operations Executive – part of the lifeline supporting field agents in occupied Europe.
She soon finds herself falling for a young man who has arrived to shake up the way the SOE codes its messages. So far, so clichéd (and the opening pages with the cad in Scotland did leave me worrying that the book might all be a bit of a cliché). But suddenly the plot kicks into gear with twists and turns that continue throughout the book. Infuriatingly, as a reviewer, I can’t say anything about any of them because any clue as to what is coming will spoil the story. (The title is a spoiler in itself, which annoyed me. I bet that was the publisher’s choice and not the author’s.)
What I can say is that the romantic betrayal that the story starts with is just the first of many betrayals we are going to discover. This is a story about loyalty and betrayal: betrayal because of cowardice or betrayal because you have to sacrifice your friends for your country. It reminds us that not that long ago London was full of people with secrets, determined that no one should ever learn what they were doing for their country – or for the enemy.
Swift writes about the experience of agents in the field and how they can (or more often can’t) survive in a world where German troops are everywhere and where nobody can be trusted. There are scenes of considerable violence. I complained in a review of another Deborah Swift book that she couldn’t write a fight scene, but the fight scenes here are terrific – and she is not afraid to depict the horror of killing with bare hands or whatever tools are available. One agent kills someone by hitting them with a spade and the reality of that killing and how it feels to murder someone so up close and personal is chillingly spelled out.
Whatever you do, don’t get attached to anyone. The body count is high and the human costs of Occupation are graphically captured. Usually you can reassure yourself that it will all come well at the end, but I kept turning the pages worrying about who would die next.
The book ends without the irritating cliff hanger that too many authors put at the end of the first book in what is clearly going to be a series. (OK, someone survives. But I’m not telling you who.) The fact that there will be a Book Two leaves the end of The Silk Code mildly anticlimactic. There is still a war. There will be more deaths. But briefly, until the next book starts, we are allowed an interlude of something almost like peace.
This is a brilliant book, one of Swift’s best. I can’t wait for the next one.
The Silk Code will be published on 17 May and is available to pre-order now at the ridiculously low price of £1.99: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silk-Code-sweeping-heart-breaking-historical-ebook/dp/B0BY95RMCJ
Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras
While you’re waiting for The Silk Code to publish, why not pass the time with Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras? It’s set almost a century and a half earlier but Britain is again at war and spies and counter-spies are still vital to the country’s military success. The story of the Lines of Torres Vedras (like the activities of the Special Operations Executive) is true but Burke’s adventures (like Nancy’s) are fictional. Both books, though, feature espionage and counter-espionage, political back-stabbing, and occasional bloody violence. You may well enjoy them both.
Unlike The Silk Code, you can buy Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras today on Kindle or in paperback.
by TCW | Apr 4, 2023 | Book review
I’ve got a new book out this week: Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. By now I’m getting a bit tired of talking about it (though I’ve forced myself to put a paragraph or two at the end of this post). I’d like to talk about a book by someone else. It’s particularly good to be able to talk about a book I’ve really enjoyed. So here we are with The Fortune Keeper, the third of Swift’s Italian Renaissance series.
The story starts with Giulia Tofana, introduced in The Poison Keeper, still living in the Jewish ghetto in Venice with her lover Fabio. Things have changed, though. She has had two children who both died and she and Fabio have adopted Mia, a young girl now on the cusp of womanhood. The new setup marks a sharp change of gear from the previous story, The Silkworm Keeper. According to a historical note at the end of the book, this was driven largely by the need to adapt the story to take account of new information about Giulia Tofana that has turned up since the first in the trilogy, The Poison Keeper, was written. Whatever the reason, it’s worked out very well. The Poison Keeper is a brilliant book, but keeping the plot going for a second in the series was a stretch and I wasn’t sure that a third would work. The reset that the new research has made necessary means that The Fortune Keeper is able to draw a deep breath and, to a degree, start again, bringing new life to the series.
Not that we are starting from scratch. Several characters and incidents from the previous books feature crucially in the plot. Although The Fortune Keeper works as a standalone novel it would benefit a lot from a brief summary of the key points of the earlier books to guide any new readers.
So what does The Fortune Keeper offer? Firstly, a wonderful view of Renaissance Venice. I don’t know a lot about Venetian history but I found Swift’s Venice completely convincing. It’s rich but decadent. The palaces are already crumbling; the tides regularly flood houses and businesses. It’s a city where corruption runs deep. There are gamblers and whores everywhere (though Swift resists the temptation to titillate with sex). We are in the Renaissance, so Mia is able to go to lectures on astronomy. There are new and better telescopes, but they are as often used to produce more precise horoscopes than to research the heavens. Some people are pointing out that the earth moves round the sun but the Inquisition are busy and awful penalties await those who dismiss the Church’s cosmology too openly.
We follow Mia through marketplaces, into silk workshops, on visits to an old astrologer and on and off gondolas and the Venetian equivalent of buses, traghettos, larger vessels that run to timetables. Life is governed by those traghetto timetables and the state of the tides and, as Giulia and her family live in the Jewish ghetto, by the times that the ghetto gates are locked.
There’s a little about the Jews, tolerated because they were the city’s bankers but not really trusted. (Apparently the Venetians were 300 years ahead of the Nazis when it came to making Jews wear yellow badges on their coats.) We learn, too, about the guild system among gondoliers, but this isn’t an essay on Venetian society. It’s a thriller and a romance, starting slow but building up to a dramatic and bloody climax. And, like all the best thrillers, it has a wonderful villain. The man is a fraud, a swindler and a serial killer – but he does have style.
The climax is, perhaps, a little rushed. It’s a bit like those movies where people move in the shadows, shots ring out, the villain collapses and the hero stands over him as the credits roll. Personally, I prefer the Lee Child approach to violent denouements. I want the hero to feint with his left and lead with his right and only as he lies helpless (some blackguard probably hit him from behind) does he draw the pistol concealed in his boot and bring the villain down. Maybe that’s just me but I think that if you are doing the big fight scene, go all in or go home.
Since I wrote this, I’ve read Swift’s latest, The Silk Code, where the fight scenes match anything Lee Child has done, so I’ve no idea why this one didn’t work for me. It’s quite a minor quibble in any case. The important thing is that mysteries are solved. Some relationships are cleared up (no spoilers), others not. Life moves on. As do Mia and Guilia. It will be interesting to see where Ms Swift takes them next.
Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras
I can’t get completely free of Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. It’s published on Friday and it’s already available on pre-order at mybook.to/TorresVedras. It’s the seventh book about James Burke. (I did a quick run-through of the others on my blog on Friday, if you need to keep up.) It’s set in Lisbon in 1810 where James Burke is hunting down French agents who are trying to discover the secret of the Lines of Torres Vedras. What are the Lines? And what is their secret?
Read the book to find out: £3.99 on Kindle and £7.99 (special launch offer price) in paperback.
by TCW | Mar 10, 2023 | Book review, tango
My blog is called History and Books and Dance and Stuff so a historical fiction book about tango ticks pretty well all the boxes. And The Gods of Tango has quite a lot of Stuff too. In fact it’s a vast, sprawling work about tango and Buenos Aires and Italy and sexuality and those old tango perennials, love and death.
I can’t begin to discuss the plot, partly because there are twists and turns and I don’t want to spoil it for you and partly because the 384 packed pages defy synopsification. (Is that a word? It should be.)
What you need to know is that the story starts in 1913 with Leda arriving in Buenos Aires, leaving a narrow life in a village just outside Naples in search of opportunity in the New World. In the first of many shocks in the book, all her plans are thrown into disarray before she has even left the boat and she finds herself struggling to survive in a city that seems to teeter forever on the edge of madness.
It’s a story packed with characters, all so perfectly drawn that you never get lost, but one of the biggest, most important, characters is Buenos Aires itself and particularly San Telmo, a part of the city I feel particularly at home in. The danger, excitement and opportunity of the city is perfectly captured. It is overcrowded and filthy (even more so in 1913 than now). Yet, as today, it holds you. Leda knows that Buenos Aires destroys its children, yet she cannot bring herself to leave. A peaceful life in a small Italian village is no longer something she can settle for.
Leda falls in love with tango. The music, she thinks, can save her. And it does, though it means she must sacrifice everything. (No spoilers, but ‘everything’ isn’t too much of a stretch here.) She carves out a life in the violent world of tango. She is there as tango moves from the bars and the brothels to the dance halls and eventually the grand clubs and cabarets, even achieving an international respectability. But for Leda, it is always about the music of the people, starting with the rhythms brought from Africa with slavery. (The Gods of Tango is unusual in featuring a black bandoneon player whose grandfather was probably a slave. Argentina used to have a substantial black population but no one talks about that now.)
If you are interested in the history of tango (you’ve probably realised I am), then The Gods of Tango is worth reading just for its description of how and why the music developed through the Golden Age. But the book is much, much more than that. I’ve never read a book by a woman which understands so well the reality of being a man. And when she deals with different aspects of sexuality, she writes better than anyone else I have read, or ever expect to read.
De Robertis has won prizes and fellowships and is definitely a ‘literary author’, a label I am generally suspicious of. But this is someone who has earned their reputation through extraordinary hard work as well as an exceptional ability to write. Leda’s life in Italy was researched in Italy. De Robertis reached Italian emigration to Argentina and Afro-Argentinian history (an area which, as I’ve mentioned, is generally overlooked). She studied the violin as well as tango history and learned to dance. She has explored Buenos Aires today and developed a deep understanding of its history. And she writes fantastic prose. (I just said that, but I’m saying it again.)
I’m getting carried away. All I can say is that this is an astonishing book.
Read it.
by TCW | Mar 7, 2023 | Book review
This is a straightforward supernatural horror story. It isn’t the sort of thing I would usually read, but the author contacted me and asked if I might be interested in reviewing it. I read the first couple of pages and found myself immediately drawn into the tale, so I agreed to take a look.
What made this story work for me was the detailed and credible scene-setting. Our hero is first shown at home with his wife and two kids. It’s very well written and you warm to all the characters. The approach reminds me of Spielberg’s classic movies. Before we meet the aliens, we spend time getting to know the main characters in their everyday normal lives.
Eventually, of course, we find the supernatural intruding when a mysterious mirror is delivered to the home in the middle of the night. Now we have a classic, ‘Don’t go alone to the haunted mansion’ moment. Obviously if you receive an old mirror with no indication of where it came from, the thing to do is to lock in in a shed until you can get the local priest to exorcise it. But no: they hang it on the wall.
Spooky things follow, rather nicely described. The loft is over-run by rabid racoons and other critters, huge poisonous spiders appear in the fuse box. The horror is real but it can all be explained away – and is. ‘No, you fools! Run now! Run for your lives!’ But, despite living with what is pretty obviously an interdimensional portal, everyone just goes along with normal life until the Truly Evil Thing comes to do what Truly Evil Things do.
I’m not giving details because Spoilers, but, in any case, it’s not immediately clear what the Truly Evil Thing is doing because the details are deliberately left vague. Vague is good in horror. The things you glimpse from the corners of your eyes are always scarier than the hi-res CGI creations that fill your vision.
Sadly, all horror stories have to have some sort of resolution. Here, this is mediated through a mysterious Native American who hops through time, putting an end to Truly Evil Things. For reasons of plot, the mysterious Native American can’t directly kill the Evil Things himself, but has to recruit others to act on his behalf. Fortunately our hero is an expert sniper (a detail already carefully set up in the story) and it is for him to do the actual killing and hence save his family.
At this point we are introduced to a powerful but secret group of people who assist the Native American. This is exciting but also somehow mundane. Our hero, up to then a wonderfully detailed three-dimensional character, is now reduced to a comic book hero. The Truly Evil Thing has to emerge from the shadows to be defeated and turns out to be something you might well have seen in one of the less memorable episodes of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
I don’t blame the author for all this. It’s the rules of the genre which mean that, paradoxically, the climactic moments of action are always the least convincing, uninteresting parts of the book. In fact, Chris Coppel pulls it off because the amount of detail that we’ve had before we move into standard horror territory means that we are invested enough in the characters to ignore the hoariness of the horror tropes that Coppel has to deploy to make the plot work. That, as far as I’m concerned, is very impressive writing.
The story is clearly setting up for a series. I don’t think I’ll be back for more (it really isn’t the sort of thing I’d usually read) but, based on this opening story, I think the sequels could be rather good.
