September 22

The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black – Lisa Hall

You know she has been murdered. Can you stop it happening twice?

Two very different lives…

It is 2019 and Lily Jones is living her dream in LA. Sort of. It hasn’t quite turned out as she planned and instead of working as a movie producer, she is cleaning at the prestigious Beverly Hills Hotel. At least she gets to work in the renowned Paul Williams suite, site of the brutal murder of Honey Black 70 years ago, shrouded in rumour and dark glamour.

It is 1949 and Honey Black is about to hit the big time. She may have started out a country girl from Hicksville but now she is a star. And Hollywood had better watch out – nothing can stop her now!

One Hollywood murder…

After an accidental bump to the head, Lily finds herself in Hollywood, 1949. Like a dream come true, she is rubbing shoulders with the great and good of Tinseltown. Including Honey Black… Horrified, Lily realises that the actress has only two weeks left to live before she will be murdered.

Could this be why she has found herself in 1949?

To find the killer and stop them in their tracks?

 

I received a review copy from the publishers via Netgalley

 

A time-travel adventure which will catapault Lily from Hollywood in 2019 back to to the golden era of filmmaking in 1949. It gives The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black an utterly fabulous setting, Lily is one of the most likeable lead characters I’ve encountered this year and I constantly had the feeling I was reading a book which the author loved to write.

Where to start?

Lily is a girl displaced. English born and a lifelong fan of classic movies, she has travelled to Hollywood with the hope of finding a successful career in the industry she loves. She is working in one of the hotels in Holywood, a staff member who’s keen to help her colleagues and is a good friend to them too. She dreams of getting a break and being offered the opportunity to work on a movie but as the story begins she’s offering to help clean one of the suites in the hotel – the room where upcoming starlet Honey Black was found murdered 70 years earlier.

Lily takes a knock to the head while cleaning what had been the room occupied by Honey Black. When she recovers her senses Lily finds she has been transported back in time. It’s 1949. Lily has no money, nowhere to stay, no idea what’s happened and she’s a very modern girl in a very old fashioned world. None of these things are going to make life easy.

But it’s not all bad news for Lily. She is given an amazing opportunity to work as an assistant to an upcoming new starlet…Honey Black. Yes, Lily has arrived in 1949 in the days before Honey is due to be murdered. Has she been sent to the past to avert a murder? Should she try to intervene and change history? Or is it just coincidence and, if so, how on earth is Lily going to get home?

Watching Lily navigate her way around movie sets, Hollywood stars and handle the attitudes and behaviours from 70 years ago is a huge amount of fun. She’s a no-nonsense sort by nature so there’s no hope of Lily accepting the misogynistic culture on film sets or of adopting a demure and deferential persona so she fits in. We are going to enjoy a feisty and independent woman shaking up the world around her.

I loved reading about life in the late 1940s, there are several cameos to enjoy from huge Hollywood stars (no spoilers) and Lisa Hall makes the whole period come alive around the reader. Lily gets to contrast clubs and hotels with the LA she knows so well. She makes friends along the way but ruffles more than a few feathers as she leaps to the defence of her new employer, Honey Black.

As for Honey herself, she’s a small town girl who’s been given a huge opporunity to become the “next big thing”. But if Honey is to succeed she will need to be better than her rivals, behave impeccably, defer to the big bosses and be squeaky clean. Unfortunately it seems soneone wants Honey to fail and temptations, challenges and physical attacks will all need to be dealt with (often by Lily) if she is to finish filming the movie which should propel her to the brightest of spotlights.

There’s so much to love about The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black and it’s all to easy to forget Honey is due to be murdered and Lily is trying to prevent that from happening. I got far too caught up in the world of films, producers and directors, bickering actresses and the social lives of a long-forgotten generation. The writing and scene setting is joyous, the characters are glamourous, whimsical and deeply posessive of their own celebrity. I don’t know if it would be possible to revisit that world given how events pan out (again no spoilers) but I am sure Lisa Hall would find a way to make it happen if we were all to cross our fingers, wish really, really hard and all buy a copy of The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black…there’s a handy wee link just below this paragraph to help you get your copy.

 

The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black is published by Hera Books and is available in paperback and digital format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-mysterious-double-death-of-honey-black/lisa-hall/9781804365946

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April 4

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Stuart Turton

‘Somebody’s going to be murdered at the ball tonight. It won’t appear to be a murder and so the murderer won’t be caught. Rectify that injustice and I’ll show you the way out.’

It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed.

But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot.

The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath…

 

My thanks to The First Monday Crime team for my review copy.

My thanks to who???  Well let me explain…First Monday Crime allow us readers the chance to spend the evening in the company of some damn fine crime writers. They meet on the First Monday of each month in a very accessible location in London town and, while I think it would much more fun if they came to Scotland now and then, I guess London is pretty handy for some folk.

If you fancy popping along to April’s meeting to see what all the fuss is about then the deets can be found here: https://www.firstmondaycrime.com/      It is a free event and the April 2018 meeting is on 9th April (which is actually the 2nd Monday in April but I guess it was easier to move the day than to rename the event…damn these religious festivals interfering with our plans).

The April 2018 panel features John Connolly, Rachel Abbott, Stuart Turton, and Leigh Russell and it will be moderated by Barry Forshaw.  As Mr Stuart Turton is on the panel I have taken the opportunity to peruse his stormingly good novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle ahead of next week’s shenanigans.

To the book:

I had seen a lot of chat about Seven Deaths on the Twitter place before I had the chance to read the book.  The most repeated phrase was “Groundhog Day” so I knew that there was a recurring day…forewarned that it was not a “vanilla” story. What I had not expected was that Stuart Turton had given us a belter of a read which I can only describe as “Quantum Leap meets Agatha Christie”.

Fan-Bloody-Tastic.

If you missed the seminal tv show (which ran for 5 seasons between 1989 and 1993) then you will have no idea why I fell so utterly in love with this book.  In the show Dr Sam Beckett “leaps” into a different body each week.  He looks like the person who’s body he has taken over but he controls their words and deeds and it is down to Sam to save the day each episode to ensure wrongs are righted, history is kept on track or the bully is stopped from causing further misery.

In Seven Deaths we have Aiden.  He has no idea what is happening to him but when he wakes at the start of the book he is in the body of a young man who may just have seen a murder. He is bloody and confused but is guided back to a large stately home where preparations are underway for a very unusual party.  It soon becomes clear to the reader that something very unusual is happening and it is not long before we learn that Aiden is using the body of the first of 8 different hosts.  He will experience the same day inside 8 different people and at the end of 8 days he has to provide proof of the identity of a murderer.

Yup we know who is going to die (clue is in the title) and we know when she dies but Aiden is tasked with working out who the killer is (and proving it). Aiden will have some assistance in his quest – a mysterious figure who appears in a Plague Doctor costume and tasks Aiden with his mission to identify the killer.   Also assisting is Anna, a young woman who seems to understand that despite the outward appearance Aiden will be different people she meets over the course of a single day.  What further complicates issues is that Aiden is not the only person who is body hopping and trying to find the murderer.  Oh and if that was not enough to contend with – someone wants Aiden dead too.

I love a clever book and The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle is a VERY clever book which ticked every single box for me.  It even ticked boxes I did not know needed to be ticked – it is an astonishing piece of story telling and the journey from first page to last was a joy.

There is a LOT going on in this book and I have no idea how the author (or his poor editor) kept on top of all the timelines and character placements…I can only assume that more than a normal amount of migraine tablets were consumed in the making of this book. However, their endeavours mean we get to enjoy this beast of a story. I cannot think of a book like it and I wish I could have the chance to read it all over again without knowing the twists that are contained within.

The phrase “five star read” undersells how much I enjoyed The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle.

 

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is published by Raven Books and is available in Hardback, Digital and Audio. You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seven-Deaths-Evelyn-Hardcastle/dp/1408889560/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1522877576&sr=1-1

 

 

 

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