Review
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Another fantastic magical history! Finding a way to weave an alternate plot into established history is no easy task, and often historical fiction finds greater freedom by looking at minor figures, on the fringe of history, to find the wiggle room to invent. But, as HG Parry so recently showed with her Shadow Histories duology,…
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Brian McGilloway’s earlier work, The Last Crossing, published in 2020 and nominated in 2021 for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, was his first standalone novel, departing from his established, and bestselling, Lucy Black and Benedict Devlin series. That book was a beautiful, devastating story of regret and revenge caught in a…
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This debut novel by Rosie Andrews is a slow burn for much of its first half—building atmosphere, hinting at shadows, but keeping its cards quite close to its chest—before diving (pardon the pun) into a more authentically horrific vision as it gains considerable, and welcome, momentum in the second half. In 17th century Norfolk, Thomas…
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This is a very engaging expansion of the world of Dr Moreau, though it does suffer somewhat from the perennial problem for stories that rely heavily on huge time jumps: is it a novel, or a gathering of short stories? Barnes does a lot of work to scaffold the connectedness of these stories, but it’s…
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Ask me right now who my favourite author is, it’s HG Parry. And, A Radical Act of Free Magic is my favourite book. It’s probably the closeness of just finishing, and I’ll probably qualify the feeling later, but today: no book beats this one.
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This is an extraordinary book; unsettling and challenging, unexpected and compelling. Iris isn’t an easy character to connect with when you first meet her—goofy is an horrendous term to describe her, given where the rest of the book goes, but it’s the first impression one gets. It undermines her, it invites us to judge her,…
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The third instalment of the Black Iron Legacy, The Broken God, is a fantastic book, once again refreshing the world that Hanrahan is building and adding amazing new voices and faces to his extensive cast of saints, devils, mobsters and monstrosities. This book puts the Dragon-led criminal families of the Ghierdana to the fore, with…
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It’s been nine years since the last outing for Detective Inspector Ben Devlin, and he’s been sorely missed. In this new procedural, he’s investigating the murder of a convicted killer and rapist, with the evidence suggesting the man was killed by his own victim, twenty years after her death. The part to unravelling this mystery…
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The follow-up to the excellent, frenetic Beneath the Rising, sees our odd couple (increasingly at-odds couple) Nick and Johnny thrown back together and back into the fray against Them, the vast cosmic horrors seeking to gain entry to our world. In the previous book, the truths behind their tense dynamic — she, the child savant,…
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The prolific Mr. Campbell shows no signs of slowing down and produces another compelling and chilling read, close on the heels of last year’s, The Wise Friend. This time he goes back to his own past, setting a tale of opportunistic spiritualism and post-war grief in his home city of Liverpool in the 1950s. This…
Damien Kelly 