Cover Reveal: River Clyde – Simone Buchholz

Today I am beyond excited to share something new with you. A first opportunity to see the cover for River Clyde, the next Chastity Riley book from Simone Buchholz which will be published in the new year by Orenda Books.

Before you scroll down to catch that first glimpse of the FIFTH book in this stupendous series I have the FAQ’s too:

River Clyde releases in digital format first. Ebook will be available from 17 January 2022 with print copies arriving on 17 March 2022.

Once again we can thank Rachel Ward for translating the original German text into English, Rachel translated all four previous books in the series.

Blurb first, cover second and then the handy pre-order links, there is a lot of love for this series and I know you will want to secure this one early to be sure you can get reading as soon as possible.

Chastity Riley travels to Scotland to face the demons of her past, as Hamburg is hit by a major arson attack. Queen of Krimi, Simone Buchholz returns with the nail-biting fifth instalment in the electric Chastity Riley series … and this time things are personal…

‘Simone Buchholz writes with real authority and a pungent, noir-ish sense of time and space … a palpable hit’ Independent

‘Reading Buchholz is like walking on firecrackers … a truly unique voice in crime fiction’ Graeme Macrae Burnet

Mired in grief after tragic recent events, state prosecutor Chastity Riley escapes to Scotland, lured to the birthplace of her great-great-grandfather by a mysterious letter suggesting she has inherited a house.

In Glasgow, she meets Tom, the ex-lover of Chastity’s great aunt, who holds the keys to her own family secrets – painful stories of unexpected cruelty and loss that she’s never dared to confront.

In Hamburg, Stepanovic and Calabretta investigate a major arson attack, while a group of property investors kicks off an explosion of violence that threatens everyone.

As events in these two countries collide, Chastity prepares to face the inevitable, battling the ghosts of her past and the lost souls that could be her future and, perhaps, finally finding redemption for them all.

Nail-bitingly tense and breathtakingly emotive, River Clyde is both an electrifying, pulse-pounding thriller and a poignant, powerful story of damage and hope, and one woman’s fight for survival.

You’ve been very patient so just zip down the page a little futher and enjoy the River Clyde cover in all its glory…

Isn’t it terrific? I love the stylistic approach that has featured for all the titles in this series and River Clyde really catches the eye.

I promised purchase links so you could get an early order in…

Waterstones: https://bit.ly/3EZj8XJ

Kindle: https://amzn.to/3F4nuwu

And I am afraid that’s all I have for you today, cover, blurb and order links with a huge dose of anticipation. Roll on January 17th

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September 23

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Jo Perry

There is a LOT of reading to follow as Jo Perry joins me to take on my Decades challenge so I shall be brief.

I am compiling the Ultimate Library, each week I am joined by a guest who helps me curate my Library. My guests are all asked to nominate ANY five books which were published over five consecutive decades.

This week I am thrilled to be joined by Jo Perry. Jo’s Charlie and Rose books are big favourites at Grab This Book. I didn’t know how the story of a dead man and a dead dog could captivate me or even how it could work! Four books later I am utterly charmed, thrilled and heartbroken by the unlikely duo’s exploits. I could not wait to see which books Jo would nominate, I most certainly did not expect an author from Los Angeles to pick a book which featured my Scottish hometown of Airdrie!

Jo Perry earned a Ph.D. in English, taught college literature and writing, produced and wrote episodic television,
and has published articles, book reviews, and poetry.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Thomas Perry.

They have two adult children. Their three cats and two dogs are rescues.

You can follow her on twitter @JoPerryAuthor

Jo has five books published by Fahrenheit Press: Dead is Better, Dead is Best, Dead is Good, Dead is Beautiful and her latest: Pure. You can buy directly from Fahrenheit’s website: http://www.fahrenheit-press.com/authors_jo_perry.html

DECADES

“USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE. MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.”

Compiling a list of the books most important to one’s intellectual, emotional or writing life would be a difficult task, but to be confined to five books from five consecutive decades is impossible. This cruel game forbids me from including books like Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. But its Fred Astaire grace, its narrative-as-standup, its poignant, haiku’d prose, the slippery delight it takes in its own slyness and shyness, its literary rule-smashing, the exuberant fecundity and clarity of its metaphors, its benevolent voice and radioactive-with-meaning mayonnaise-white spaces on its pages were my first experience of what artistic freedom can produce and the courage and grace required to seize it. But since I’m sworn to abide by the rules of the Decades exercise, I will omit Trout Fishing in America, a representative of a decade I cannot include. Forget I ever mentioned it.

Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady by Samuel Richardson

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Richardson in 80’s, I was no longer the reader who’d fallen hard for Trout Fishing in America. I wasn’t seventeen and greedy for influence, though I still wanted books to illuminate me to the point of ignition and “to [make me] feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off”—which is how Emily Dickinson described what poetry—real poetry––made her feel.

Richardson’s improbable, alchemical masterpiece (improbable because his biography and earlier work revealed none of the ambition, gravitas, or power of Clarissa) burns slowly because it’s long–the longest novel in the English language. And it’s the longest novel in English because it unfolds through letters from Clarissa to her closest friend, and from John Lovelace, the man who would possess Clarissa, to his friend. The plot is simple: Clarissa’s mercenary family maneuvers her into agreeing to marry a toad because the union will benefit them financially. Clarissa knows that the marriage, a dehumanizing transaction, will destroy her life. Lovelace manipulates Clarissa into running away with a promise of protection, then proceeds to ruin her. She dies, her soul and her self intact. Clarissa is a feminist tragedy, a class-novel, and a rape and disempowerment and transcendence novel. The abridged version you’ll find is just plot. A rich, powerful predator entrapping a woman disempowered by society was a story Richardson had already written in Pamela, the virtue-rewarded happy-ending version of this tale and also the first novel in English. Clarissa’s epistolary form immerses the reader in each character’s first-person voice, point of view and experience. These first-person narratives power a deliberate, intense, inevitable build-up to, and unfolding of a catastrophe in epistolary time, not glib narrator-time. The effect is grandeur.

Dance for the Dead by Thomas Perry

“The Old People believed that the place to obtain secret information was in dreams. Sometimes a dream would be an expression of an unconscious desire of the soul, and at other times a message planted there by a guardian spirit. Those were two ways of saying the same thing. If there were such a force as the supernatural, then the soul and the guardian both would be supernatural. If there were no such force, then the soul was the psyche, and the guardian spirit was just the lonely mind’s imaginary friend.”

“’I hear you’re one of those people who could kill me with a pencil,’ he says. Jane answers simply: ‘If I am, I wouldn’t need a pencil.’”

During the 90’s I was mostly reading Babar and the Boxcar Children, childcare books and my husband’s novels, which I’d been reading since he wrote The Butcher’s Boy (1982). During the new decade he created Jane Whitefield, a contemporary, mixed-race (Seneca and white) woman who lives in a town very much like the town where he grew up in western New York. Jane Whitefield is a guide; she helps people in danger disappear and teaches them how to inhabit the new identities she invents for them. Dance for the Dead, the second in the series, has always stuck with me. Being inside Jane’s head showed me how easily the person we think we are can be disappeared, and transformed my sense of the world––there are many more opportunities for violence, betrayal and hurt than I’d imagined; past and present are contemporaneous and this simultaneity can be realized with crystalline precision and emotion on the page. Jane Whitefield is heroic, but she makes mistakes. This second book is where Jane crossed over from fiction to being someone real and important to me.

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

“A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it–and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.”

“’I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic’s. His hair was perfect.’”

Yes, Stout quotes Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” maybe my favorite song.

Parenting means constant worrying about your child’s wellbeing and safety. Maybe that’s why The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout was so clarifying. A few of the things that were revelatory to me: The sociopath is invisible. The sociopath relies on our best qualities to exploit us: our kindness, generosity, empathy, the qualities the sociopath lacks and depends on us to stifle gut-feelings of fear or revulsion or that something is off with him. And we can’t avoid the sociopath. He or she is a permanent member of the human family. One in twenty-five people––ordinary, usually not violent, not usually criminal masterminds, often pleasant or charming––doctors, friends, teachers, caregivers of our children and our aging parents, neighbors, pastors, rabbis, roommates, bosses or colleagues, best friends––will fuck us over every chance he or she gets––usually with our help and tacit permission––and will probably know how to make us feel guilty enough when you catch them at it to do it again.

There are more elegant nonfiction books that I’d add to this list if I could: Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox changed the way I read literature; Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher––reveals so much about language and color and why Homer said “wine-dark” sea and not “blue.” Timothy Egan’s elegiac biography of Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher––but Stout gets the modus operandi of this perfectly selfish predator, most efficient opportunist, manipulator and emotional assaulter down.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

“In one way, I suppose, I have been ‘in denial’ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

“I don’t have a body, I am a body.”

“The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder.”

If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.”

“With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts … and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.”

I arrived in my 6^th decade and became interested in death and, I see now that I was also unconsciously working up to and researching for my first novel, Dead Is Better. I’d read other books on the topic, but Christopher Hitchens’ posthumously collected writings produced while he was dying of esophageal cancer––which killed his father and my grandmother––besides confirming that dying is a bitch––cruel, thieving, humiliating, disabling––is informative, funny, heartbreaking set-your-hair-on-fire enlightening, and heartening, a whatever life one has left-invigorating demo that that sharp thinking produces sharp writing, that sharp thinking requires courage, and that a writer’s relationship to his reader (imagined or real) is incredibly intimate and requires––if it’s going to go all the way––naked honesty––and that writing is a conversation like the ones Hitchens describes with friends as having been among the greatest pleasures of his too-short time on earth.

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan

“Lucas was building a volcano in the middle of his caravan. The volcano, he explained, was the equivalent of a wheelchair for a physically handicapped person. It’s a means of transport, he said. It allows me to make connections. The volcano was constructed out of old shoeboxes, crumpled newspapers, folded greeting cards, balls of wrapping paper. Long feather boas – pink, blue and purple – took the place of flowing lava… …I have struggled with mental illness for most of my life. But the creative part, the creative part has been the most rewarding. He spoke in a soft, slightly distant voice. A moonie, I thought to myself, a gentle lunatic.

The issue was memory. He had none, or very little, or rather all of his memories were hidden, occluded by chemistry, by water particularly – water on the brain they called it – so that every moment was swept away, the specifics of his day-to-day existence like the splinters of a ship in a storm. This is the logbook, he said, thumbing through notes, moments reconstructed in the wake of a disaster. Then he pointed to the volcano. And this is where the memories live…”

“I don’t know. They were leafing through it one night and he turns to a page that has a picture of Elvis on it. Early Elvis. Young Elvis. Elvis where he looks like a flick knife. And just looking at him he feels like he has stuck his finger in a light bulb socket. He says he literally felt his hair rise up into a kind of electrified quaff. And you know what he means. That haircut was aerodynamic. It came from rushing headlong into the future. He asked his friend, who the fuck is this guy? And he says to him, it’s the new singer. But he mishears it as It’s Sinew Singer and his mind is even more blown apart. He mishears it and this guy whose every muscle, whose every vein, every fucking sinew of this body is singing, you know? Fuck Iggy Pop! And then he realizes his mistake though not really because in that moment he became Sinew Singer. He took on the mantle and it was down to him to live up to it. That’s genius right there, if you ask me. In my opinion genius is accidental, is mistaken, is actually wrong at first. And I don’t care what you say. But it’s hard to be wrong in a housing estate in Airdrie. Even though really they’re all wrong! But they want to be right at all costs. They want to have an ironing board, a cooker and a washing machine. A duvet instead of a sleeping bag. A fucking concrete house with four windows. Some shitty car. A hoover. A job like a fucking jail sentence. A bit TV in the living room. To be woken at six in the morning while it’s still dark. And on top of that they want respect. For being right. How is it possible to respect anyone for being right?

?

How fucking simple. How mind-numbingly fucking dull. Congratulations, You did the right thing. You know?…”

“…I think there is something fulfilling for Lucas and for all of us in being able to make ritual use of forgetting and remembering. And of course that’s how I came up with the name Memorial Device. To me it was like Shakespeare…”

“I’m drawn to madness… I admit it… but only if it energises you… or if it destroys you completely… Only if you blow up or go tearing off… into another life… and another life… and another life running after it…”

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan. I am squeezing it into the current decade although I may have read it on the cusp. It’s a fictional memoir about what Amazon.com calls “the post punk scene” in Airdrie, a working-class town in Scotland. I read it as research for a character who is the hero of the book I am working on now who is based on a real person who is also a hero. Anyway, This Is Memorial Device is a novel about rock music built as a series of interviews about a band called “This Is Memorial Device.” The voices transcribed in the interviews are electric currents that crack stuff open like hammers against geodes. If there’s a connection between all the books on this list it’s that they are products of empathy and don’t congratulate themselves for following formulae or achieving a recognizable, conformist aesthetic. They’re poetry.

My thanks to Jo for these amazing selections. My invitations to participate in Decades highlight that the book selection is a very personal choice. Having five books which were each read in five different decades of Jo’s life is indeed a very personal selection and falls within “flexing” of the Decades rules 😉

DECADES WILL RETURN

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September 21

Blood Summer – Steven Dunne

Two detectives from opposite sides of the planet join forces to hunt a ruthless killer in the South of France.

Commandant Serge Benoit is haunted by the terror attack in Nice, a crime scene he can see from his seafront apartment. Dispatched to a remote village, an hour’s drive from his home city, Benoit finds two brutally dismembered bodies. Who are the victims? Where did they come from? And who killed them? Benoit’s only clue is a cell phone with a single number in the memory…

Former FBI Agent, Michael Trent, is a wanted man in his homeland. Unable to return to America, he travels the world as an escapologist-for-hire, helping people in trouble to disappear. In Singapore, he is engaged by multi-millionaire Harry Renfrew who needs to relocate after receiving death threats from the Russian mafia.

After hiding Renfrew and his wife in a rustic French village, Trent assumes Renfrew’s identity to lay down a false trail to confound pursuers. After weeks of incident free globetrotting, Trent arrives in Barcelona for the final leg of his journey. But before he can congratulate himself on a job well done, he receives a shattering phone call…

Normally when I post a review I share the blurb then, in this space, I mention I am reviewing as part of a blog tour or I may thank a publisher for proving a review copy. Today I am reviewing Blood Summer, a book from my TBR pile which I had pre-ordered and received on release as I think Steven Dunne is a brilliant author and I absolutely had to read this book as soon as I could. Well done to past-life me, that was a great decicion you made a few weeks ago.

Blood Summer is in the world and if you like a dark, intelligent and pacy crime thriller then this is very much a book you should be reading.

The action takes place in rural France where two bodies have been found in a luxury villa on the edge of a small village near the South coast. Both victims appear to have suffered prior to death and their bodies were dismembered leaving investigators with little to go on. Commandant Benoit and his colleagues will take short term residence in the village while they conduct their investigations but this is not a small town crime.

Before the murders take place and the police become involved, the reader knows the victims. We have read about their flight from the East into Europe, how they travelled using fake passports and we understand why it was essential nobody knew who they were. For the couple we were rooting for and the former FBI Agent (Michael Trent) who had been employed to ensure their safety, this is a double blow for a reader.

Where did everything go wrong for Trent? Well, perhaps the incident which led to his departure from the FBI may have influenced his subsequent career choices but the memories of an operation which went wrong will never leave him. Now a second operational failure hangs over him and he must rely upon the support of the French police if he his to understand what happened. The problem for Trent is that he is very much a Person of Interest to the police and he must convince them of his innocence.

Despite the dark nature of the murders (and some of the other plotlines) there is humour and heart in this book too. Steven Dunne knows how to pack his stories with punch and I enjoyed every aspect of Blood Summer. Highly recommended.

Blood Summer is available in paperback and digital format and can be ordered here:

Category: 5* Reviews, From The Bookshelf | Comments Off

September 17

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Russel D McLean

We are back. Decades time. And boy oh boy, there sure are some great new books about to wing their way to my Decades Library!

But wait – what’s Decades?

At the tail end of 2020 a “real world” incident happened which I should really tell you about one day. That incident got me thinking…if you had a brand new library and were tasked with filling the shelves; which books would you pick? I knew this was not a question I could answer alone so I decided to ask booklovers to help me. Each week I am joined by writers, bloggers, journalists and publishers and I ask them to pick five books they want me to add to the Decades Library.

Picking five books is easy and does not result in your guests calling you a swine. So I added a wee twist and made the selection process a bit more of a challenge. My guests are asked to add five books to my library but they may only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades. Imogen Church said it was “easy”, RJ Barker called me a “monster” and Russel D McLean…well Russel told me he had fun but there was a bit of name calling.

I leave you in the capable hands of Russel who wants to take us back to 1946 where his selections commence:

DECADES

First up – Gordon, you’re a swine, making me do this! A swine! How can I choose only five books, and one per decade? I mean, my initial list is something like twenty or thirty per decade… how can I narrow it down? How?

At least I know where I’m starting because I think any library worth its salt should have my 1940s choice…

So You Want to Be an Actor by Hugh McDermott, with sketches by Michael Gough (1946)

An odd choice, perhaps, to start my decades; a guide to acting by a Scot who made a decent enough career in movies such as Mrs Minniver, No Orchids for Ms Blandish and the sublime Scottish B-movie, Devil Girl from Mars.

But there’s method in my madness. For Hugh McDermott is my great, great, great (too many greats? Too little? It’s not terribly clear; the McLean family tree is rather overgrown in places) uncle.

I never met him, but upon discovering his filmography, and our family connection, I wanted to know more about him. Especially when I found out about his leading man turn in Devil Girl From Mars. but Uncle Hugh also starred in one of the most controversial movies of its era (controversial for its violence, although the US accents by the all-British cast are… well… controversial in their own way), No Orchids for Ms Blandish (based on the novel by James Hadley Chase)

Hugh’s one and only book, So You Want to be an Actor, is a compact wee hardback volume, full of ever so slightly sarcastic advice for actors of stage and screen… such as this little gem on how to avoid being a ham (after witnessing a particular actor in a play):

The villain on making his entrance… pushed his face through the door, well ahead of his body, and held it there, awaiting a burst of applause that didn’t come. That, my dear Watson, is “Ham” with an of gravy around it.

Naturally, then, given that he also wrote a book, I feel the need to include this in Gordon’s ultimate library (even if it is long out of print, although copies crop up here and there!) finally giving Uncle Hugh his due!

Psycho by Robert Bloch (1959)

In of those pieces of received wisdom I never want to check in case its untrue, someone once told me that Alfred Hitchock bought up the entire print of Robert Bloch’s novel when he decided to make a move from it in order that no one would spoil the surprise twists in the plot. Whether its true or not, it sounds like it should be – after all, Hitchock’s film followed the main thrust of the novel pretty closely, but the book goes into far more twisted detail about the way in which Norman Bates’s mind works, and deepens his relationship to “mother”.

It’s a short, sharp, shocker of a novel (my edition is 151 pages long) that is so tightly constructed you’re always in fear that the springs are about to come loose. But they never do. If you know the movie, then the book provides a different viewpoint and a few unexpected variations that you can see would never have made into the movie. And if you don’t know the movie… hooo boy, are you in for a dark, disturbing treat when you check in at the Bates Motel…

Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes (1965)

Honestly, I could have chosen almost any one of Chester Himes’s brilliant Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones books (thank goodness they spanned a few decades!) but this is the first one I think I read, and it’s a humdinger of a thriller that starts with $87,000 being stolen from a Back to Africa rally, and ends up with cops, criminals and more chasing after a bale of cotton that may contain the missing money.

Himes is one of my favourite US writers – his serious, earlier novel, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, is a chilling account of racism in the USA, but his crime novels deserve to be talked about in the same breath as Chandler, Hammet, et al – and Cotton Comes to Harlem is one of his paciest and most gripping books. If you haven’t read Himes before, you should start here.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick (1977)

Once, during a live event, the magnificent modern author of British Noir, Ray Banks (an author who should be far better known, and whose books deserve to be rediscovered by a huge audience) asked me if I was a Dickhead. After a sharp gasp from the audience, we had to clarify that he was asking if I was a fan of the science fiction author Philip K Dick.

And the answer yes is a massive yes: I am indeed a Dickhead.

A Scanner Darkly is one of Dick’s most personal novels. As his career went on, many of his novels would take and explore aspects of his personal life, including his religious beliefs, and what some might terms as his delusions that he had made contact with a higher power. But 1977’s A Scanner Darkly is personal in a deeply affecting way, talking about the highs and lows of drug use through the medium of a near future thriller. No doubt there are biographical aspects in this story of an undercover cop investigating users and deals of Substance D (D for Death, of course). The cop himself wears a scramble suit when on duty so no one can identify him. Even his superiors don’t know who he is. But his latest target is someone who’s a bit too close to home: himself.

The book is at its best chronicling the everyday life of the protagonist and his group of friends, all of whom are, in one way or another, addicted to or affected by D. The book doesn’t shy away from the seductive allure of drug use either, or the joy of shared experiences, but it doesn’t sugarcoat the tragedies, either. In many ways it’s a better exploration of the drug lifestyle than, say, Trainspotting, because it feels almost too natural in places.

But the SF work here is excellent as well, and the exploration of how it must feel to be investigating yourself is superbly done. Dick was never a master of the science side of science fiction, but his insight into people was second to none, and A Scanner Darkly is his most affecting novel, ending on a sobering reminder of the reality Dick was writing about.

Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky (1982)

No library is complete without at least one book by Sara Paretsky. Into the eighties and beyond, a new generation of women crime writers reshaped and reformed the discussion around crime fiction, and Paretsky is one of the first and best of them. Without VI Warshawski, her brilliantly rounded PI, who makes her debut here; employed to find her client’s son’s missing girlfriend.

Of course, things get complicated fast, and VI needs to employ all of her skills to unravel the complex and dangerous investigation. VI is, even early on, a fully formed character, and Paretsky’s pacy writing style, even in her debut, is gripping and confident.

It cannot be underestimated what an impact Paretsky – along with other writers such as Sue Grafton – had on crime novel in the eighties and beyond (her latest VI novel, Dead Land, was released in 2020).

VI was a realistic and convincing step away from the old, two-fisted and very male PI of the past, using the form to explore more complex themes of class, feminism and so much more, while still creating a thrilling mystery that entertains and grips the reader.

While Paretsky’s proceeded to build her craft since this first novel, deepening her characters and their world, this is where it all began, meaning the book absolutely deserves a place in any decent library (and it remains an absolute belter of a read!).

Russel D McLean is the author of seven crime novels, one short story collection, and a whole bundle of other uncollected shorts. His first five novels, focussed on a PI working out of the Scottish city of Dundee, are currently being re-released in new digital and print editions, with the final book in the series, Cry Uncle being re-released soon. His latest standalone novel – published by the brilliant Saraband – is Ed’s Dead, which was described by Martina Cole as “a really authentic and remarkable read!”

When not writing novels, Russel works as a freelance development editor for several publishers, and is currently working on projects in other forms that he’s looking forward to talking about when he’s allowed!

In the past, he’s been a bookseller, a freelance book reviewer, a roving events chairperson, and a general miscreant.

Find out more about Russel at www.russeldmcleanbooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @russeldmclean, where he talks about the books he’s reading (#russelreads), the movies he’s loving (#russelwatches), the three cats that allow him and his wife to share their flat, and anything else that falls into his brain.

This week I am heading to Stirling where I hope to meet some old friends at Bloody Scotland. Despite my shyness I am really looking forward to finally meeting some of my previous Decades guests and thanking them in person for helping to grow my Library. I also hope to meet some future Decades guests – watch this space!

DECADES WILL RETURN

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September 13

The Ice Coven – Max Seeck

Are you ready for the darkest case of Jessica Niemi’s career?

A young woman’s corpse washes up on a near-frozen beach.

Then, two famous Instagram influencers go missing.

All three have ties to a cult, famous for their cruel and violent worship.

But before Jessica can save the girls, an old enemy emerges and threatens to destroy her.

Soon, she is hunting for much more than just the truth . . .

My thanks to at Maddie at Welbeck Publishing for my review copy and for the opportunity to join the blog tour

The Ice Coven releases this week and I am flagging it up as a book to be watching out for. I really enjoyed this Scandanavian thriller and at times found myself wondering how Max Seeck had managed to get so much story into 400 pages.

Two social media influencers have disappeared after a large launch party for the new album of one of Finland’s best rap artists. The missing pair were once a couple (no longer) and while Lisa Yammamoto was very visible at the party her former boyfriend would not have been welcome. So why have they both disappeared?

More alarmingly for Jessica Niemi and her colleagues is a picture which appears on Lisa’s Instagram feed after her abduction which shows a remote lighthouse and has a haunting stanza below the image which speaks of Death and a frozen tomb.

While looking for leads at Lisa’s apartment Jessica finds the girl was a talented Manga artist and had many characters images on her walls. One image catches particular attention as the clothing Lisa drew on the Manga girl was identical to those worn by a murder victim pulled from the water after Lisa had disappeared.

How does a missing Finnish Social Media star link to a dead Ukrainian woman? Jessica is made lead investigator but the reader knows this is so her new boss can set Jessica up to take the blame if this high profile case goes wrong.

It’s an unusual but exciting twist to have the department head actively working against the lead character and the tension between Jessica’s team is very evident – even to Jessica.

I am scratching the surface of this story as it’s an intense one and I don’t want to reveal too much here. The Ice Coven felt much more accessible than many other Scandi thrillers I have read and that is a huge plus when I am recommending it.

Translation responsibilities seem to sit with Kristian London (who also translated Seeck’s The Witch Hunter). An excellent job completed by London, the prose flows smoothly, there are still some Finnish phrases in the text which reminded me this is very much a Scandanavian tale and bring the story firmly back to its setting. Great stories such as The Ice Coven would not be available for me to read were it not for the work put in by Kristian London and all the other translators who graft to ensure the best books make it to the widest possible audience.

Not the first Jessica Niemi thriller but this can be read as as stand-alone – the author references past incidents and events but at no point did I feel I was missing something important in The Ice Coven as a consequence of not having read the earlier work. So put aside any qualms you may have and feel confident picking up this book knowing a cracking thriller awaits.

The Ice Coven is published in hardback, digital and audiobook on 16 September and can be ordered here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08ZJVQ7JD/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

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September 9

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Tim Glister

Sometimes my new Decades guest arrives in the week they are celebrating a publication date, it’s almost like I can boast successful planning every now and then. Let me jump in ahead of Tim and drop a sneaky cover share of his new paperback, Red Corona, before he has a chance to tell you a bit more about it himself.

LUSH!

Before I hand you over to this week’s guest I had better explain what I mean by a “Decades guest”. Every week I am joined by a booklover who is asked to take on my Decades challenge. I am putting together a collection of unmissable books which should grace the shelves of the very best library collection.

I began this quest back in January and each week a new guest (authors, publishers, bloggers and journalists) select five books they want me to add to the Library. You can see all the previous selections here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library

Choosing five books isn’t quite the whole story though. My guests may only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades. So their choices will come from a fifty year publication span. This can cause some gnashing of teeth but the range of books being added to the Library makes my jaw drop each week.

So it’s enough from me, Tim is waiting in the wings to introduce himself and to share his five selections with you.

DECADES

I’m Tim Glister, the author of the Richard Knox Spy Thriller series. My first novel, RED CORONA, is about the secret battle between Britain, America and Russia to control the birth of the global surveillance age. The second novel in the series, A LOYAL TRAITOR, poses the question: duty or honour, which would you betray?

Over the years I’ve been a library assistant, a bookseller, and a literary agent. Now I’m a novelist. I write espionage fiction, and I read as widely as I can for both fun and inspiration.

For my Decades challenge, I wanted to pick five novels that have blown my mind, and changed the way I look at both reading and writing. These are stories I still think about years after reading them, and recommend to anyone who will listen.

1957 – ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute

Few novels have given me nightmares. This one has. The 50s and 60s were awash with excellent speculative (and mainly) dystopian fiction, but ON THE BEACH stands out for how devastatingly it explores a world that ends without a bang. It’s all so mannered, so polite, so plausible – it’s utterly terrifying, and extremely, deeply affecting.

1962 – LABYRINTHS by Jorge Luis Borges

As Heather Martin has already said, if you could only pick one book for this challenge it would have to be LABYRINTHS. It has no equal. These razor-sharp, mind-bending tales fizz with imagination and vitality, and conjure up entire worlds in just a few pages. Read them and learn the true, awesome power of literature.

1971 – THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL shouldn’t work. We know Charles de Gaulle isn’t going to die, and his would-be assassin is little more than a hollow puppet somehow pulling its own strings. And yet Forsyth is such a master of the thriller and so skilled at creating tension that you end up glued to the pages and rooting for murder.

1984 – HOTEL DU LAC by Anita Brookner

This novel is not what you think it is. It’s shrewd, cunning, deceptive. It takes the best of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier and distills it all down into a biting social commentary driven by a mystery that compels you to keep reading and a heroine that critics have been keen to dismiss but who commands your respect.

1995 – BLINDNESS by José Saramago

Another nightmare-inducer to end on. What would happen if a plague of blindness swept through your city? Blending Camus-esque philosophical plotting with a disarming parable-style narrative voice, BLINDNESS grabs hold of you and beats you up until the very last page. Like ON THE BEACH, technically it’s science fiction, but it feels all too real.

Five stories which blew Tim’s mind and changed the way he looks at reading and at writing! That’s quite the testimony and exactly what I hope the Decades Library will do for other readers. Just last week I picked up one of the recommendations made by Steven Keddie and my next Decades purchase is guaranteed to be Blindness.

A reminder that Tim’s novel, Red Corona, released this week in paperback. If you want to spot how any of these five books helped shape a new story then here is the link you need to grab your own copy of Red Corona: https://www.waterstones.com/book/red-corona/tim-glister/9781786079435

DECADES WILL RETURN

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September 9

Black Reed Bay – Rod Reynolds

Don’t trust ANYONE…

When a young woman makes a distressing middle-of-the-night call to 911, apparently running for her life in a quiet, exclusive beachside neighbourhood, miles from her home, everything suggests a domestic incident.

Except no one has seen her since, and something doesn’t sit right with the officers at Hampstead County PD. With multiple suspects and witnesses throwing up startling inconsistencies, and interference from the top threatening the integrity of the investigation, lead detective Casey Wray is thrust into an increasingly puzzling case that looks like it’s going to have only one ending…

And then the first body appears…

I received a review copy from Karen at Orenda Books and I would like to thank Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to join the Black Reed Bay blog tour.

Hi, can we have our ball back please? Everything was fine until Rod Renolds came along with Black Reed Bay and utterly smashed it out of the park.

I should just stop there. Read it, loved it and basically I didn’t want it to end. The lead character, Casey Wray, is one of the strongest and most interesting new headliners I have encountered for a long time and I want to read more about her. Rod Reynold’s writes beautifully and builds a world around his reader which keeps you hooked on the story he is telling.

Everything starts with a panic call to the police. A young woman is running down a street in a nice residential area but is clearly terrified of something, what is she is trying to escape from? She manages to give the police details of her location but not what the threat is. Then the call ends abruptly and the woman disappears before the police can respond.

Casey Wray and her partner Cullen are investigating but it seems everyone they speak with has a different version of events. Many residents saw the missing woman run down the street and the man she had been visiting (and Casey’s chief suspect) agrees she had been at his home before panicing and running out. But nobody knows where she went and (crucially) nobody wanted to open their door to help her.

Staying well clear of spoilers makes it tricky to outline why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Casey’s missing person enquiries see her stumble into a much bigger concern. This puts Casey and her colleagues into closer contact with other departments within the police and this isn’t the best of time to put her boss under pressure as he is feeling the pinch too. An internal investigation focusing on how a violent and intoxicated suspect was brought under control with “excessive force” means the whole team feel they are being picked on by the top brass.

Casey’s investigation is detailed, compassionate and thorough, the author has given real life and energy to his characters and I was utterly absorbed by what I was reading. This, in turn, made some of the shocking twists more dramatic and gave them bigger impact. The missing woman’s family are anxious, worried, angry and desperate, this rubs off on Casey and on the reader and your investment in this story grows.

Late night phone calls, screaming women and then a body is found, everything is escalating and Casey and Cullen are in the thick of it. This is page-turner central, the kind of book I love to read with the drama and tension you always hope your next read will offer.

Consider me a very happy, satisfied reader. Black Reed Bay – read it!

Black Reed Bay is published by Orenda Books and is available in paperback and digital format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08T65D9XX/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

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September 6

Five Minds – Guy Morpuss

SHARING A BODY CAN BE MURDER

The Earth’s spiralling population has finally been controlled. Lifespans are limited to eighty years, except for those who make an extreme choice: to become a commune. Five minds sharing one body, each living for four hours at a time. But with a combined lifespan of nearly 150 years.

Alex, Kate, Mike, Sierra and Ben have already spent twenty-five years together in what was once Mike’s body, their frequent personality clashes leading to endless bickering, countless arguments, and getting themselves stranded on a Russian Artic freighter. Wanting to buy upgrades for their next host body, they decide to travel to a Death Park where time can be gambled like money. But things go very wrong when Kate accepts a dangerous offer, and one of them disappears.

Someone is trying to kill off members of the commune. But why? Is one of them responsible? Or is an outsider playing a deadly game? It’s hard enough to catch a murderer. It’s almost impossible when you might be sharing a body with them…

I received a review copy from Viper and I thank Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to host this leg of the Five Minds blog tour.

Where to start with Five Minds? How to explain Five Minds? This is an absolute belter of a crime story. It’s high concept, cleverly constructed and has all the tension and thrills I want from my murder stories.

But it’s a bit “different” with Five Minds sharing a body, all taking an alloted time to live while the other Minds are dormant and waiting for their allocated time to roll around again. So readers have five main characters to get to know and we learn they can only communicate with each other by leaving messages for the other people inhabiting their body. Guy Morpuss explains it so much more effectively in the book and being able to see what Kate, Mike, Sienna, Alex and Ben are telling each other allows the reader to understand the dynamics of each character.

Although big decisions need to be made by unanimous vote (thus taking 24 hours) sometimes snap decisions are needed and the Mind which makes that choice has to hope the others agree. This takes conflicted main character to a whole new level!

In Five Minds our commune of Minds are in danger, a synthetic lifeform has challenged Kate to a game. The prize is more time (time is lifetime and everyone can trade some of their hours to prolong their lifespan). Kate has no time to consult the others so agrees to the android’s challenge and from here our Five are in danger. Someone, for reasons they don’t know, is trying to kill each of the Minds within the body.

Within the world where Five Minds is set are game zones. The desperate souls who are reaching the end of their lives can play in the games to try to win more time. Fail and it’s an early death. Our Five must play these games and Guy Morpuss has devised some absorbing challenges for them. The games are physical challenges, there are moral and reasoning dilemma scenarios to navigate or problem solving challenges to overcome. Failure isn’t an option but what happens if a third party is trying to rig the odds against you?

Five Minds is quite unlike anything else. A murder tale in a fantasy reality and obviously this may not appeal to everybody. But if you pass on this excellent book then it will be your loss – how refreshing to have something so wonderfully different to enjoy. Embrace the unusual and go with it.

Five Minds is published by Viper and is available in hardback, digital and audiobook format. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08QB1L1JW/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

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September 4

A Slow Fire Burning – Paula Hawkins

‘What is wrong with you?’

Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She’s seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous.

Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes, that doesn’t mean she’s a killer. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one: good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace?

Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.

Look what you started.

I received a review copy from the publishers. My thanks also go to Anne Cater at Random Things Blog Tours for the opportunity to join the tour for A Slow Fire Burning.

A Slow Fire Burning: a book which took a little while to draw me in – the classic slow burn thriller. And that’s exactly what this story was; even though the prologue tells of a young girl fleeing from a man who seems to have harmed her friend and the first chapter introduces us to Laura as she tries to wash blood from her t-shirt. Indeed the first five pages tell of danger, violence and two vulnerable women so you can’t say Paula Hawkins isn’t grabbing your attention from the get-go.

And once the reader gets past those first five pages there is soon a brutal murder to read about local busybody, Miriam, finds a dead man sprawled on the floor of his houseboat. Miriam tries to keep track of all the activity on the houseboats beside her own so she knows the man in question had entertained young Laura a few days earlier and even finds something belonging to Laura by his body but she isn’t going to leave that for the police to find…why not? I wondered.

Once the murder has been discovered, and Miriam has the chance to chat with the police about what she may have seen, Paula Hawkins takes us through the players in this clever drama. This is when the perception of a slow burn may kick in as we learn about the lives and background of those involved.

The murdered man’s aunt is Carla who recently lost her sister too. Carla experienced the ultimate tragedy many years earlier when her son, as a toddler, died while under the care of Carla’s sister. Her son’s death placed too much strain on Carla’s marriage to Theo and the marriage ended but the couple stay just a few streets apart and Carla still spends time with Theo. Theo is a successful novelist with a smash hit in his past, however, there is a suggestion he took inspiration from events in Miriam’s life and there is a history of bad feeling between the pair. Switch back to Laura, a troubled girl who was injured as a child by a hit and run driver leaving her with a damaged leg, a trigger temper and the inability to always think clearly and rationally. Laura earns a few extra quid by collecting shopping for Irene who is now in her 80s and not as mobile as she was. Irene was Angela’s next-door neighbour. Who is Angela? Well that would be Carla’s sister, Theo’s sister-in-law and the woman responsible for looking after Carla’s son the night he died. Angela died just a couple of weeks before events in the story commenced.

Phew, there are a fair few connections in that ensemble and Paula Hawkins establishes each character and covers their background with great care. She is seeding plot threads and throwing out red herrings and it is skillfully done. Okay it does mean the murder is slightly pushed to the background and this may give the impression we are not getting anywhere but we are, everything is leading somewhere and your reward as a reader is to getting to know these people and understanding their lives because nothing is quite what it seems.

You finish reading A Slow Fire Burning and you know you have finished reading a great story. That’s what we want, a book to set up a cast, push them and stretch their emotions to limits they didn’t know they had and stepping back to see how they react. Unpredictably!

A Slow Fire Burning is published by Doubleday and is available in Hardback, digital and audiobook format. You can order your copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-slow-fire-burning/paula-hawkins/2928377051112

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September 3

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Elizabeth Haynes

Another week has flown by and today I have the pleasure of introducing a new guest who is tasked with the challenge of nominating five new books to be added to my Decades Library. If you haven’t encountered my Decades Library yet then a quick recap will help.

Each week I ask my guests to select five unmissable books which they would want to see added to the Ultimate Library. I began this challenge with zero books and week by week the shelves are filling with some truly amazing titles. If you want to see all the books which have been recommended you can see (and buy) them here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library

Picking five books just seemed a bit too easy though so I added a second rule: each guest must only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades. So their final five choices will come from any 50 year publication span. Flexing of the rules is quite commonplace as you will see in the very near future.

This week I am delighted to pass the Decades curator’s hat to Elizabeth Haynes. Elizabeth was one of the first authors I met after I began blogging. Thanks to the brilliant Encounters festival which North Lanarkshire ran I got to head to Motherwell Library to hear her talking about her books. A fabulous evening was had and if, in future, you get a chance to see Elizabeth at any events make booking your ticket a priority.

Enough from me, let me hand you over to Elizabeth so she can share her five selections:

Elizabeth Haynes is a former police intelligence analyst who lives in Norfolk with her husband and son. Her first novel, Into the Darkest Corner, was Amazon’s Best Book of the Year 2011 and a New York Times bestseller. Now published in 37 countries, it was originally written as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

She has written a further three psychological thrillers—Revenge of the Tide, Human Remains and Never Alone—and two novels in the DCI Louisa Smith series, Under a Silent Moon and Behind Closed Doors.

Next came her highly praised historical novel The Murder of Harriet Monckton (a Sunday Times Summer Read) which is based on the 1843 unsolved murder of a young school teacher in Bromley, Kent.

Elizabeth’s latest novel, You, Me and the Sea is a contemporary story of love and redemption set on a remote, windswept Scottish island.

DECADES

At the time of writing, I’m four days away from my 50^th birthday. I suspect most of Gordon’s guests have also gone through the internal battle wondering where to begin; I suppose the impending half-century made this decision easier for me! So I’ve decided to use the first five decades I was here and use this as a wee self-indulgent trip down memory lane…

1970s: Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O’Brien (1974)

I was born in 1971 so I’ll admit I didn’t read this book until the early 1980s, but it has stayed with me ever since. It’s a post-apocalyptic story of a girl surviving in a remote, sheltered valley, managing quite well on her own and assuming everyone is dead, until a stranger in a haz-mat suit turns up and suddenly everything becomes a lot scarier.

I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager. In particular I loved Ray Bradbury’s short stories, which made me want to write, not for anyone else, just for myself: the joy of creating worlds, inventing people and giving them problems to solve, kept me busy. I think as an only child, and at times quite lonely, inventing people and putting words in their mouths was a form of social interaction. And yes, before I discovered fiction, I did have imaginary friends.

I remember reading Z for Zachariah in a cupboard. Our spare room had a giant, built-in cupboard in the void above the staircase (I say giant, I guess it was about a metre square in terms of floor space) and I built a ‘den’ in there out of stored blankets and old pillows. This was my reading haven in which I could imagine any possibility, including a nuclear holocaust.

1980s: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, by Sue Townsend (1982)

Like Adrian, I was an avid secret diary keeper – I still am – and I saw a lot of myself in him. The desperate desire to be liked, to belong, to understand what adults really meant and how the world worked. My parents also divorced and the effect on me is something I’m only really understanding now – at the time it was just something profoundly life-changing that happened, over which I had no control. Aside from that – finding my identity through a fictional diarist – the book was just tremendously funny, which was very helpful.

1990s: Feel the Fear and Beyond: Dynamic Techniques for Doing it Anyway, by Susan Jeffers (1998)

Cheating a little, because Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway was originally published in 1987, but I only got to read it in the 1990s. This was the decade in which I finished university and started on the career ladder, mainly in temp admin jobs, but notably also selling cars (my first ever job). It’s fair to say I had very little self-confidence, and Susan Jeffers proved to be quite an eye-opener when I read it. It became the book that I gifted to everyone for many years. I still re-read it regularly now. The message behind it is so simple and true: life is so very much better if you can be a little bit brave.

2000s: The Bride Stripped Bare, by Nikki Gemmell (2003)

In the wake of the ‘Fifty Shades’ fever that gave us all permission to enjoy erotic fiction and talk about it afterwards, The Bride Stripped Bare was presented as being ‘perfect for fans of Fifty Shades’ and used a similar styling (along with countless others) – which is a bit of a shame. Originally it was published anonymously, which added to the intrigue, but what sets it apart is that this book is beautifully written. It’s the story of a misfit couple on honeymoon in Marrakech, and the way the relationship unravels afterwards. Told almost directly from the consciousness of the woman, it’s deep and lyrical and searingly beautiful. I’ve never found a writer who is able to speak that truth in quite such a powerful way. This is the sort of writing that I absolutely aspire to.

2010s: All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (2014)

This is the decade in which I was published, and it’s so tempting to choose any one of the brilliant books I’ve read by authors that I now think of as friends, but to do so would be to leave out so many others. It’s a hard choice to make! So I’m going with a book I only read recently, late to the party as always – the tale of Marie-Laure and Werner, teenagers on opposite sides of global conflict, but with so much in common. When they eventually meet – all too briefly – it feels like a pivotal moment for the whole world.

Thank you to Gordon for letting me join in the Decades challenge! And thank YOU for reading. I hope I’ve given you some inspiration for choosing your next book….

DECADES WILL RETURN

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