Book Review: Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver

On a long train journey over the weekend I sat down with Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst, and I devoured it at one go.

There. That’s probably all you need to know but I feel I ought to make a bit more of an effort to tell you what I loved about it, and the book certainly deserves it. It’s a complex, compelling, dark, twisted, wonderful, readable book.

It’s set in the early part of the twentieth century and it’s the story of Maud, a child when the story begins. Stuck in a house on the edge of the fens with a wealthy but eccentric father, an irritating younger brother (who, being a boy, is granted seniority) and a long-suffering mother whose endless pregnancies almost all seemed destined to end in miscarriage or death, Maud has a grim coming of age.

I quote from the blurb. “When [her father] finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past.”

There was so much to love about this book. The sinister fenland with its lingering spirits is drawn as a place that would drive anyone mad. Even Maud, a practical young woman, begins to believe in evil things that creep around the corridors of Wake’s End, the house, at night. The characterisation is wonderful, the story telling extraordinary, so that I was drawn into it and just kept reading and reading and reading.

If there was one thing I didn’t like about it, it was the prologue and epilogue that brought the story into the 1960s. Yes, there was information there that tied up the loose ends of the story, but I didn’t feel it was necessary and slightly weakened the whole thing for me. Not much, though, and certainly not enough to stop me recommending it to anyone looking for a darkly satisfying read.

Thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

A Front Page Affair by Rhada Vatsal: Book Review

Anyone who knows me knows I love a cosy mystery. If they know me really well, they might know that the things I like most are complex, engaging characters, a believable setting and a good plot. In this respect, Rhada Vatsal’s A Front Page Affair, partly delivers.

Kitty (real name Capability) Weeks is a New York socialite in the early months of the First World War. Europe is getting deeper into conflagration and America is poised on the edge of war. Kitty, an aspiring journalist with the society pages of a New York newspaper, is sent to cover a party at an uptown country club, only to find herself witness to murder — and of course, she’s determined to track the killer down.

I very much wanted to like this book, and it does have a lot going for it. It has a clever setting and fictional events are cleverly woven in with actual historical ones. The plot was clever, focussing on the diplomatic manoeuvrings around America’s potential entry into the war, and there were twists and turns aplenty, although, if I’m honest, some of them stretched my credibility a little bit too far (no spoilers, but surely no FBI agents would allow a member of the public along on a mission to intercept a killer just because she happened to be interested in the case).

So far, so good, but the element of the book the rather disappointed me was the characterisation. For me, any book has to be driven by the characters. I want to feel engaged by them. I want to care about them. In this book, I didn’t, and the end result was that I felt the whole thing was rather superficial. Characters came and went. There was no depth to them, no complications. Kitty herself was a spoiled rich girl and never really stopped to think about anything, except in passing. The minor characters, too, weren’t clearly drawn in terms of character (describing someone’s external appearance is only part of it) and, for example, all the FBI agents tended to merge into one in my head as I read.

I realise I’m being fussy, here, and other people may look for different things from a book. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but just one that didn’t give me what I’m looking for from a cosy novel. If you want a pacy, light read with a few twists and  lot of fascinating (real-life) background about New York in 1915, then this is definitely your book, even if it wasn’t mine.

Book Review; the murder of Patience Brooke by JC Briggs

So, here’s my second book of the New Year, and a very good one it was, too. JC Briggs’ The Murder of Patience Brooke is the first in a series of historical mysteries with an intriguing premise — that Charles Dickens works with the police to solve a series of murders.

I’m not the world’s biggest Dickens fan, which doesn’t matter at all, and know very little about him, which possibly does given the references to his insecurities about his background and his uncertainty about his marriage. I felt there was a layer in this book that I’m rather missing out on; but maybe I’m wrong. And even if I’m not, there was plenty here to get stuck into as Dickens and his friend, Superintendent Sam Jones, set out to solve the mystery of the murder of virtuous and mysterious Patience Brooke, found gruesomely displayed outside the home for fallen women which Dickens established.

There was so much to enjoy in this book. The plot was engaging and gathered pace as our heroes began to run the villain to earth. The central characters were rounded and appealing and Dickens’ unhappy marriage (and large family) was cleverly contrasted with Jones’ happy, but childless, one. I did feel that many of the subsidiary characters were less rounded and more caricatured — though in fairness, that’s true of Dickens’ novels so maybe it was a deliberate nod to the master, even though that particular element didn’t work for me.

I had a few niggles. I found the writing a bit clunky in places, to the extent that it detracted from the dram of the closing scenes, and I was distracted by the use of ‘street speak’. (Is there really any value in using ‘sed’ for ‘said’ or ‘woz’ for ‘was’ when they sound the same?) And there was one point where a conversation referred to two different characters called Crewe and Carew, which had me momentarily confused.

It wasn’t the detectives who stole the show, though. It was Victorian London. The descriptions of the old city, its glories and it hell-holes, its sound and smells, its muffling fog, its early mornings and threatening darkness, were fantastic. If there was no other reason for me to read more in this series (and there are many), the setting alone would keep me going. London is the protagonist in this book, far more striking and capricious (and believable) even than Dickens himself.

Thanks to Netgalley and Sapere Book for a copy of this book, in return for an honest review.

Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield: Book Review

If I’ve taken my time to get round to reviewing Once Upon A River, it’s because I don’t know quite how to approach what must be up there with the best books I’ve read this year. 

These days I don’t read much literary fiction and haven’t read anything by Diane Setterfield, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The story begins at some point in the late nineteenth century, in the Swan Inn on the River Thames. It’s winter and the regulars are sitting telling stories when and injured man staggers in and collapses — and he’s carrying a drowned child. 

The man survives and the little girl turns out not to be drowned but that’s the beginning of the mystery. The child can’t be identified and there are three families who are, or claim to be, missing a daughter of that age. The wealthy Vaughans lost their daughter, Amelia, to a kidnapper and she was never returned. Little Alice went missing when her mother committed suicide, and housekeeper Lily is improbably convinced that the girl is her little sister, Anne. That’s the plot, but it’s so much more complicated than that. And it’s a tale made wonderful by the telling. 

I’m a sucker for a proper setting, for a book that’s bedded into its landscape, and this book follows the river. All the families are tied to it. It gives and it takes away, a constant presence and a constant risk. The book is peopled by a multitude of characters, far too many to mention individually, but every one of them is believable and their lives are woven together.

Diane Setterfield tells a tale that twists and turns like the river itself, revealing secrets and surprises at every turn and leading to a satisfying conclusion. The real lives are woven with the folklore of the river and the ever-present spectre of Quietly, the boatman who appears to those who fall into the river, taking those whose time has come to the darkness of the river and returning those who aren’t ready to die to the safety of the bank. 

Once Upon A River is a compelling, moving book, and I absolutely loved it. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Death of a Radical by Rebecca Jenkins: Book Review

Death of a Radical is the second book in Rebecca Jenkins’s series of historical crime novels featuring Raif Jarrett, agent to the Duke of Penrith and veteran of the Peninsular War. I read and (on the whole) enjoyed the first one, certainly enough to want to persist with more of the same.

The second book has pretty much the same flaws as the first, plus an additional weakness and an additional strength, which leaves me ready to give a third book in the series a try though I won't be putting publication date in my diary. Jenkins writes well (overlooking the short sentences and head hopping, which are my pet peeves but not necessarily bad in themselves) and I think she knows it. The problem is that she doesn’t have the balance right. The book feels more about the writing than anything else and as a result, the action is obscured.

In a mystery the plot is crucial and the writing should enhance it, not obscure it. In this book there there were several occasions when I had to go back and reread a scene because I wasn’t sure exactly what happened — something I occasionally do if I’m tired and reading late at night, but don’t expect to do repeatedly when I’m reading of an afternoon. For me that blunted the excitement that the book ought to have, and made it quite a slow read — something that was amplified by the unnecessarily detailed descriptions of everything from the weather down to the colour of a lady’s ribbons. It was a nice enough read, I suppose — but I wanted more action from a book that sets itself out as a mystery.

Stripping away the writing leaves the plot a little bit exposed and this is the weakness that the first book didn’t have. The whole thing never quite held up for me: I would give examples, but can’t because of the risk of spoilers, though I can say that the connection between the various murders was never quite strong enough for me, and nor did I really understand exactly what the killings were all about. Again, it may be in there but I couldn’t find it under the elegant prose. (Sometimes there’s a value in plain speaking.) There seemed to be a lot of scenes which didn’t pull their weight in terms of advancing the story — something else which slowed the pace and made the book drag — although when Raif finally decided to take action, he did so dramatically and the conclusion was satisfying.

This feels a slightly mean-spirited review, so I’ll redress the balance with what I did like — the characters. I love the way Jenkins has set up the whole series. Raif is complex and fascinating, ideal protagonist material (even if he does spend rather too much time standing around not doing a lot) and his relationships with Charles, the Duke’s son and with Henrietta Lonsdale are nicely drawn. All the minor characters are fascinating, too, although perhaps we don’t need to see quite as much of all of them as we do in the book.

I don’t like giving stars and this book illustrates why. Do I rate it for its obvious qualities, or do I rate it for how I felt about it? I did like it, but at the same time I struggled to get through. Jenkins has created a wonderful set of characters who seem desperate to be set free from the weight of her description and allowed to act. It’s a good book, and well-written. As literary fiction it would be terrific, but somehow, as a mystery, it doesn’t quite deliver.

Thanks to Sapere Books and Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Review: The Drowned Village by Kathleen McGurl

I’ve told you before that I’m a binge reader, and I’m finally getting round to addressing my new year's resolution, which was to read a book a week for a year. Whether I shall fulfil that resolution is open to some doubt, since I haven’t kept a note of every book I’ve read and have had to try and cobble something together.

This is inevitably problematic, because looking at my Amazon account will tell me that when I downloaded a book but it doesn’t tell me when I read it. As anyone with the dreaded to-be-read pile knows, a book can sit waiting its turn for a long time. My current (honest) list stands at only thirty, though I must have read more than that. I think I can reasonably add the full-length unpublished manuscripts I’ve read for friends, which gives it a healthy boost, but still leaves me 16 books short of my target.

I can do 16 books in two and a half months. Easy.

The long and the short of it is, it’s book review time again. This time I won’t be posting my review on Amazon or Goodreads because I’m reviewing a friend’s book, but I will say I loved Kath McGurl’s The Drowned Village. It’s one of those what’s-not-to-like books that could have been written to my own specifications for a contemporary romance.

Best of all, Kath has set the book in one of my favourite places, Haweswater in the Lake District (it appears thinly veiled as Bereswater, but I wasn’t fooled).

It’s a dual timeline story, about a mystery in the village of Brackendale Green (real life Mardale Green) which was flooded in the 1930s to create a reservoir. In the present day, Laura goes to the Lakes to recover from a broken relationship and visit the dale which her grandmother left as a child. An unusually hot summer has revealed the village and her grandmother, Stella, begs her to retrieve a mysterious package from one of the old cottages, to solve a decades-old mystery. The origins of the mystery form the second timeline.

i’ll give away no spoilers, but I will say that what Laura and new friend Tom discovered was the key to a terrific mystery. Kath kept me guessing to the very end as to how it would be solved, and there were a couple of gut-wrenching twists as the truth of an old injustice was revealed.

In the story the village re-emerges during a drought, just as it did this summer, and I walked every step of the way with Laura and Tom. The plot is great and the descriptions terrific. If I was very picky I would say that the bit where Laura’s ex turned up drunk wasn’t really necessary for the story and felt a bit cliched, as well as begging the question of what she’d ever seen in him in the first place. But that’s a minor thing, and the only criticism I have.

I loved it.

The Drowned Village by Kath McGurl. Published by HQ

Review: A Snapshot of Murder by Frances Brody

Cosy historical mysteries are back in fashion, and my goodness, does that make me happy. I love the classics of 1930s crime — Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh are my favourites — and I went into raptures a couple of years back when publishers began reprinting other books of that era. 

The cosy historical was, I suppose, the next logical step, and I can’t get too many of them. A Snapshot of Murder is the tenth in the Kate Shackleton series by Frances Brody, and it’s the second I’ve read. (You don’t need to read them in order, which is fine by me.) Set in the 1920s, the books feature war widow Kate Shackleton, who runs an investigative agency.

In A Snapshot of Murder, members of the local camera club (Kate lives in Leeds) set off to Haworth, for the opening of the Bronte Parsonage Museum…but one of them doesn’t make it home alive. It’s difficult to review crime novels without giving spoilers, so I won’t say any more, other than that there were twists and turns aplenty and a satisfying conclusion (though there was one loose end left untied, which still troubles me a little).

There was a huge amount to love about the book. In particular, I adored the settings and the historical detail. I don’t know the Haworth area well, I’ve been there recently enough to recognise many of the places, but even if I hadn’t the description would have given me a clear idea of what it’s like. And the author used real locations, too, so that I could follow the action on the map. (Yes, I like to do that when I’m reading.)

I mostly liked the characterisation, though I did have a problem wth Kate herself — odd, because although there are several points of view, she’s the only one in first person. This ought to make her more accessible, but somehow it doesn’t. As in the previous book I read, I found myself failing to warm to her, or sense any emotional engagement, even when she looked at photographs of her late husband, or came face-to-face with the man whose marriage proposal she had previously turned down. 

I like to live the story with my protagonist, especially if they’re written in first person, and I felt that I was always looking at Kate from the outside. I suspect that may be what the author intends, because scenes from the point of view of others — unhappy wife Carine, for example, and Kate’s uber-enthusiastic niece Harriet — were much more engaging. But I wish I’d warmed to Kate rather more than I did.

I think it was this, together with the short sentences which gave the whole book a slightly clipped tone, that hold me back from raving about it. That’s a personal view, of course, and in all other ways it was a terrific, clever and engaging book. I’ll certainly be reading more of the series.  

I received this book from Netgalley/Little, Brown in return for an honest review.