Book Review: The Change by Kirsten Miller (HQ)

The Change is an unusual mix of feminist fantasy and crime thriller, featuring three female, middle aged protagonists who’ve had enough of sexist injustice and male entitlement.

Harriet, who has given up on a thwarted career in the advertising industry, finds a new lease of life in exploring the potential of the many strange things she can cultivate in her garden, and is known locally as The Witch. Jo, who has supernatural strength, runs her own gym called Furious Fitness, after losing her senior role in a hotel chain. Nessa, a retired nurse, has a gift which has been passed down through the women in her family, which leads her to the bodies of murdered and forgotten women in order to bring closure to their families.

When the three women are brought together, they embark on a mission to identify and avenge a series of murders of young girls. These girls all have in common that their disappearances have never been taken seriously and their lives never valued by the authorities. They are easily written off as prostitutes or runaways. Jo, Nessa and Harriet find ways of combining their gifts to uncover the truth of what has happened and to apply some unorthodox justice.

There is a lot to like about The Change; the three female protagonists are refreshingly different and there is a real sense of strong, older women taking the lead, ignoring the usual conventions and forming a formidable sisterhood to focus on the young female victims of crime.

It did take me a while to finish this book, and I think this may have been related to the number of chapters giving the back stories of various characters; it didn’t achieve the pace or the page-turner aspect for me that many crime novels do. From the point of view of a lesbian reader, the story’s initial promise in terms of the women’s relationships didn’t play out as I had hoped, and there was a lot of focus on finding fulfilment in relationships with men. I did enjoy the combined qualities of Harriet, Jo and Nessa and would read further stories should these three characters find their way into future books.

Book Review: The Cliff House by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown)

The Cliff House is set on a remote Scottish island featuring a luxury house that’s designed for getting away from it all in style. When bride-to-be Jen and her party of friends set off for a hen party weekend, it’s apparent that there are already some tensions within the group, which includes both Jen’s former and future sisters-in-law, as well as friends who no longer speak to each other.

There are early hints that all may not be as it seems within the house, such as the playlist that emanates from speakers in every room, flooding the house with songs that seem chosen specifically to make the guests feel uncomfortable. The story unfolds from multiple perspectives and it soon becomes apparent that many of the women have secrets.

When the private chef is found murdered and a mysterious figure called The Reaper starts to send out commands to the women, it becomes clear that everyone is in danger and that at least one long-concealed secret will need to come out for the guests to make it to the end of the weekend.

The Cliff House is an enjoyable read; a thriller with a hint of the escapist holiday read about it too. I liked the idea of the tormenting playlist, with many of the songs being ones I know and love from years ago and there was definitely a dark sense of humour running through this element. The changes of perspective from one chapter to the next meant that there was plenty to try to work out in terms of the women’s secrets and which one would ultimately hold the key to their escape.

Book Review: One Day I Shall Astonish the World by Nina Stibbe (Viking)

One Day I Shall Astonish the World charts 30 years in the life of Susan, PA to the Vice Chancellor of Rutland University. On a life-changing day in 1990, Susan meets not only her future husband, Roy, but perhaps more significant to the story, her future on-off friend, Norma.

Norma is the daughter of the owners of The Pin Cushion, a dressmaking shop at which Susan has a Saturday job. Although both young women are intelligent and ambitious, it’s made clear by Norma’s mother that Susan is not to regard Norma as a personal friend, and the scene is set for Susan’s life as perennial underachiever while Norma soars.

If you’ve read any Nina Stibbe books before, you’ll know that she excels at uncovering the humour in small, every day events, and Susan makes a sharp-eyed commentator on all she sees as her life ambitions are gradually thwarted, from dropping out of university when she discovers she is pregnant to learning to take a back seat while Norma hogs the spotlight at every opportunity.

There are darkly funny moments throughout the novel, such as the dogging-related death of one character and Susan’s ponderings on whether her mother’s life-changing train accident could have been inadvertently caused by the writer Ian McEwan.

The narrative takes us right up to the coronavirus pandemic, and there is a change of pace in the last few chapters as we’re suddenly taken out of a novel that feels strictly fictional and into events that most of us will be able to empathise with as Susan and her family are faced with a health crisis.

One Day I Shall Astonish the World is a fairly gentle yet absorbing read, detailed throughout with mischievous observations of the less attractive aspects of human nature.

Book Review: The Rack by A.E. Ellis (Vintage Classics)

The Rack, the only published novel by playwright Derek Lindsay writing under the name A.E. Ellis, was first published in 1958 to critical acclaim. It has recently been republished in an attempt to restore its status as a classic. It’s not difficult to see why this has happened now, as The Rack captures a brief period in medical history when knowledge about how to treat a condition was evolving quickly. In this case, the condition was TB and the novel is set in the late 1940s.

Protagonist Paul Davenant and some fellow students are sent as a party to a sanitorium in the Alps to be treated for TB. While most of Paul’s contemporaries have straightforward cases and are able to move through the programme of treatment and return to their former lives, for Paul it is just the start of a long, frequently painful process.

Paul is treated by a succession of doctors whose primary aim seems to be the cementing of their own reputations rather than providing empathic patient care, and as well as brutal medical procedures he has to withstand numerous episodes of grandstanding by the medics, each of whom promises to have the solution to his health woes if he will just invest another three months.

There are also various friends who drift in and out of Paul’s life during this period, displaying a range of poor social skills. Paul tolerates everything placidly; at times it is hard to know whether he is a rather passive individual or just a man who has been driven to clinical depression by the endurance test he is on. Things pick up when he meets and falls in love with another patient, Michele, but even this relationship seems to bring Paul as much distress as it does happiness, as they navigate issues including Paul’s dwindling funds and Michele’s need to go back home to Belgium.

The Rack is a lengthy read at over 500 pages and, due to the subject matter, it is not an easy one. I am glad to have read it, as it gives a unique insight into patient care just before the corner was turned and effective TB treatments became available. The descriptions of sanitorium care were fascinating as well, giving many insights into the running of these large institutions that were once commonplace.

Book Review: Sundial by Catriona Ward (Viper)

Sundial opens with a portrayal of family life for a fairly dysfunctional family: Rob, her husband Irving and their daughters, Annie and Callie. Irving in particular seems to be a person with no redeeming factors; he’s given to sudden acts of brutality towards Rob, has lots of affairs and creates a home environment of unpleasant tension. There are early hints that Rob has a problematic back story, and when elder daughter Callie starts to exhibit some seriously concerning behaviours, Rob takes Callie on a trip with her to Sundial, the now-abandoned desert home of Rob’s childhood.

As was the case with Catriona Ward’s last novel, The Last House on Needless Street, there isn’t a lot that can be said in a review of Sundial without giving away too much of the plot. We learn about Rob’s early life as she recounts events to Callie, all the while trying to figure out how to stop her daughter’s violent tendencies from escalating. Sundial could again be described as a gothic horror, and the events Rob revisits are as unpredictable as they are terrible.

I’m not a huge fan of content warnings, but I think it’s worth saying that there are themes of animal testing and cruelty throughout Sundial, in addition to excessive human cruelty. Catriona Ward’s horrors are so effective partly because they don’t over-rely on supernatural events or explanations; they are grounded in the kind of extreme events that humans can make happen. I find this type of horror to have far more of an emotional impact than the more magical variety, and because of this I would say that Sundial is hard-hitting and probably best enjoyed when you are feeling resilient enough for a challenging read.

Book Review: Nasty Little Cuts by Tina Baker (Viper)

Nasty Little Cuts centres on events that take place in the early hours of one Christmas Eve between married couple, Debs and Marc. Debs comes downstairs to find what she initially perceives to be an intruder in her kitchen, but it isn’t, it’s her husband with a knife, and things unfold from there.

The novel takes the form of lots of short chapters, with the minute-by-minute action of Christmas Eve morning interspersed with flashback chapters giving insights into the family history leading up to the Christmas Eve events.

I was left in two minds about this book. There’s no doubting that Tina Baker has a talent for creating suspense as well as realistic, relatable characters – I particularly liked the down to earth humour of Debs, her sister Kelly and their mum, Shirley, and was intrigued by the sparse depictions of Marc’s side of the family.

On the other hand, I just found this all a bit gruelling to read. It was clear from the outset that there was going to be a descent into violence of some sort, and between the flashback chapters showing the gradual disintegration of a marriage and the real-time drama around who would make it out of the story alive/well, I just found it all a bit much. I had quite quickly had enough of the Debs and Marc pairing and just started rooting for their kids and Lulu, the dog, to come out of the whole saga unscathed.

I would like to read more by Tina Baker in the future; she is skilled at breathing life into her characters and not flinching from describing the small, every day details that make us human. This story was just a little heavy-going for me.

Book Review: The Girl Downstairs by Iain Maitland (Inkubator Books)

When Philip Adams spots a homeless girl who looks a bit like his late daughter, he becomes preoccupied with the thought that his life might be happy again if only she will come to live with him.

The early chapters of The Girl Downstairs have a slow-burning, almost hypnotic quality to them, letting us see the small, every day details of Philip’s lonely life with his dog, Fluffy, his burgeoning obsession with the homeless girl and the nightmares that disrupt his sleep. Philip lives on his own in a cottage, surrounded by farmland and a few neighbours he does his best to avoid, a setting with a touch of the gothic which is only enhanced once the heavy snow starts to fall.

Aspects of Philip’s previous life creep into the narrative, alongside his increasing preoccupation with finding the homeless girl again and persuading her to move in. His tendency to overthink, over-prepare and over-imagine possible scenes with the girl quickly start to feel intrusive and predatory.

As the narrative progresses, Rosie, the homeless girl, becomes a sort of second protagonist in the novel. While we come to understand the life history and motivations of one of these complex characters, the other seems destined to remain slightly out of reach.

The Girl Downstairs is a truly psychological thriller, so the book’s power comes mainly from its emotional twists and turns. We are invited over and over to re-evaluate the things we think we know about its characters, as the story swings from the sinister to the heartbreaking and back again. Glimpses of possible true happiness are portrayed so seductively that I started to root for this along with the characters, and Fluffy the dog is a great addition, bringing out the best in almost everyone and reminding us that few lives are entirely without other sides and other possibilities.

Book Review: Darkness Falls by Robert Bryndza (Little, Brown Book Group UK; publication date 7th December, 2021)

When I read Nine Elms, the first book in Robert Bryndza’s series featuring Kate Marshall, I wasn’t sure this series would be for me. For all that it was fast-paced and a bit of a page turner, exactly the sort of novel I turned to during the lockdown, it also seemed to contain rather a lot of ‘stranger danger’ type graphic violence. Something obviously drew me in, though, because I’ve since read the second novel in the series and now Darkness Falls, the third.

I think this is a series which is definitely getting stronger with each book. Kate, having started out with the police and then become a university lecturer, is now running her own detective agency with sidekick Tristan, who continues working at the university part-time. The partnership between Kate and Tristan is a strength, with both characters contributing to the breakthroughs in the cases they find themselves handling. There’s a sense that the author is becoming more confident in bringing Tristan forward as a main character, exploring his sexuality more and his life outside of the detective agency.

Darkness Falls finds Kate and Tristan taking on the case of Joanna Duncan, a journalist missing for 13 years. Joanna’s mother wants to find out once and for all what happened to her daughter, years after the case was closed unsolved by the police. What starts out as a gently-paced, rather sad story soon picks up momentum as Kate and Tristan look into the stories Joanna was working on prior to her disappearance, and the story that follows is well-plotted, exciting and full of developments which keep several suspects in the frame until the closing stages.

I think it helps that the second and third books in this series have more of a focus on crimes already committed and on uncovering what has happened, while still maintaining some on-going peril. While Nine Elms just contained a few too many scenes for me of victims being stalked and killed in real time, I think the subsequent books have been strengthened by putting more focus on the detective work and building up an established cast of characters. 

Book Review: Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (Faber and Faber; publication date 4th November, 2021)

It’s a long time since I’ve read any surrealist fiction. When Otto and Xavier set out on their ‘non-honeymoon honeymoon’ on a train called The Lucky Day, with their pet mongoose, Arpad, in tow, my first instinctive thought was that Arpad wouldn’t actually be a mongoose and it would be some in-joke referring to their dog. But no, he’s a mongoose, and he isn’t even the only one on board this mysterious, sparsely-populated train. To read and enjoy Peaces, you need to quickly develop an acceptance of its strange surroundings and characters, and not overthink these as the novel has bigger fish to fry. Helen Oyeyemi is such a skilled writer that this is surprisingly easy to do.

Peaces seems almost written to have you on your toes as a reader from the outset. Various scenarios invite you to think about things having more than one interpretation. Descriptions seem designed to make you false-start; the fleeting character of a nurse is described and only later referred to as male; The Lucky Day’s owner, Ava Kapoor, is introduced in all her theremin-playing otherworldliness and then described as having a ‘BBC Geordie’ accent. More important plot points have more than one interpretation, too; when Xavier first catches sight of Ava, she is holding a sign which either says ‘Hello’ or ‘Help’; Otto recalls running into a burning building and being asked by a man to either ‘help’ or ‘stop’ his son.

There is a story here and I won’t spoil it, except to say that as with all the best literary fiction, the novel leaves you asking questions and thinking about broader concepts. The small group of characters on board The Lucky Day are all there for a reason, and the narrative does build nicely towards an ending. The bigger meaning to it all is probably open to interpretation, and I found myself thinking of two different things – the idea of identity and validation, and the fallout that can happen when people aren’t seen by others as they would wish to be, and the thing that happens when we break up or lose touch with people and never see them again, so they stop existing in our lives. I don’t have all the answers, but I did enjoy my time on board The Lucky Day.

Book Review: The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett (Viper Books; publication date 12th January, 2022)

I must be one of the few people not yet to have read Janice Hallett’s previous book, The Appeal, but I’m certainly aware of all the fuss it attracted and I jumped at the chance to read a review copy of her forthcoming novel, The Twyford Code.

The Twyford Code begins with a letter from an Inspector Waliso to a Professor Mansfield, asking the Professor to examine some transcripts of audio files taken from an iPhone belonging to a missing person. The introduction reminded me straight away of the beginnings of some classic epistolary novels, and intrigued me.

The transcripts themselves are then presented, as dictated by Steven Smith. It soon becomes apparent that Steven has had a bit of a chequered past and, on his release from prison, is recording the files while he tries to solve a mystery that’s been on his mind for years, concerning an old school teacher of his who went missing on an unofficial school outing. The Twyford Code is set up as a kind of mystery within a mystery, as we don’t know what has happened to Steven himself.

The Twyford of the title refers to the fictitious author, Edith Twyford, a children’s author who has fallen out of fashion and whose books are thought to contain a secret code. Steven believes that his teacher’s disappearance has something to do with her attempts to crack this code. The descriptions of Edith Twyford and her novels bring to mind Enid Blyton, and there’s a sly humour that runs through The Twyford Code.

I don’t want to give too much away about this novel, other than to say it’s complex and very cleverly constructed, and you may well be tempted to re-read parts of it when you reach the end, to see for yourself all the things you missed.

I have, of course, now obtained a copy of The Appeal!