Month: Jul 2021

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Beresford by Will Carver.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

This was my first introduction to the work of Will Carver. My fellow bloggers and Squad Pod members kept telling me about how great his writing is, but I’d not taken the plunge till now. I started the book last night and finished at lunchtime today, because I was hooked from the end of the first chapter.

Abe Schwartz lives in a one-bed furnished flat. An apartment building called The Beresford. The bell rings and he’s the one opening the front door to a stranger. Before that, he’s dragging a dead body into his room, mopping up blood and asking himself, What the hell just happened?

Maybe I’m a bit weird, but a cracking beginning like that really is so darkly delicious I can’t help but read on. I was then blown away by the originality and inventiveness of the writer and the explosion of historic and popular culture references the book created in my mind.

The Beresford is an old forbidding looking building in the city. In my imagination this first conjured up the Gothic towers of the Dakota Building, where John Lennon lived and was killed back in 1981. Inside The Beresford are a number of apartments, bigger and better appointed than you would expect for the money. They even have large roll top baths. The perfect size to dismember and dissolve a body. The building is presided over by a lovely old lady called Mrs May, who starts every day the same way. By brewing a coffee while the taps run, then enjoying a bath with bubbles, followed by eggs with her cold coffee. She has a routine, and is found at the same time every day pruning the roses in the front garden. As any fan of the film The Ladykiller’s knows, you should never underestimate sweet looking, little old ladies. Of course she has time to pray each day, but to whom and for what? In fact when I first encountered Mrs May praying, I hoped there would never be a film version of the book. She knows everything that happens at the Beresford because the same thing happens over again – some people leave and some people just disappear. Occasionally they stay. For a price.

The atmosphere is strangely claustrophobic and reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby. I loved the tone of our narrator, who is quite matter of fact, and cleverly combines both horror and humour. I also loved the sense of history the author creates about this quirky building. These stories and urban myths reminded me of a documentary I’d watched about the Chelsea Hotel, again in New York, showing how each generation of residents impacted on it’s history: from the original collective of 1920’s writers; 1960’s musicians and artists like Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen; from the death of Dylan Thomas in the 1950’s to Sid Vicious killing Nancy nearly thirty years later. It’s legends are almost bigger than the hotel itself and it’s often claimed as the most haunted hotel in NYC. It’s somehow bigger than just a building, it’s almost an instant portal to the past. The Beresford is described in a similar way is as if it could only belong on old news reels or sepia photographs. Yet there it is, still standing on the sidewalk in the 21st Century. The myths about The Beresford give the place a sense of longevity – it was there before you and sure as hell will be there after you. Sid Vicious told the Associated Press that the Chelsea Hotel “…is a vortex – an artistic tornado of death and destruction and love and broken dreams”. I think second floor Beresford resident Sythe, artistic impressionist and sometime pyromaniac, would probably say the same thing.

Interspersed with the comings, and often darkly humorous, goings of the residents are sections entitled ‘What do you Want?’ We don’t know who the speaker is, although I will admit I imagined a few of these monologues in the voice of Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus from The Matrix. It’s as if we are having our world explained to us, but in a way that lifts the scales from our eyes. This is what’s really going on. These sections address beauty pageants, social media usage and even the way we buy our books. We like to think we ‘discover’ something in a bookshop, but we’re directed to it by placement, marketing, and demographic. Or perhaps by book bloggers? They know so much more about us than we think they do. Ever talked briefly about a subject at home then found an advert for the very same thing on your iPad? It’s listening. In a piece that I loved because it’s unsettling and so close to the truth, our narrator tells us:

You are being told what to watch, who to vote for, which team to support and which God to believe in. You want the truth? All of these things serve to obscure the greatest lie of all. The fruit and vegetables are placed at the front of the supermarket because the colours draw you in. Everything behind is bad for you. But you just see the colours. You buy into them. You believe them. It’s easy to do as you are told.

You are not where you think you are.

Finally, when lovely, peppy, young Christian Blair joins the residents she strikes up a friendship with Abe. Mrs May thought they might get along, just like Mrs May knows a lot of other things. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about the residents of her building. He takes her to the building’s side entrance where they get into the Art Deco lift to access other apartments and convention suites. The side where they live is just two floors with it’s own front entrance, but this is bigger, especially at the top, where apparently a couple fell to their death on the sidewalk. Abe calls this side the ‘bad side’. There’s a man who sees them and calls out. The couple break into a run for the old elevator and hope he doesn’t get there before the slow mechanism starts to move. They then burst out into the street laughing. Maybe one day the author will venture further into the other side of The Beresford? If so, I’ll be waiting – but I’ll probably stick to reading in the daylight hours.

Meet The Author


Will Carver is the bestselling author of the January Series – Girl 4 (2011), The Two (2012), The Killer Inside (2013), Dead Set (2013) – and the critically acclaimed Detective Pace series, which includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were selected as books of the year in mainstream international press. The books in this series have also been longlisted/shortlisted for the Amazon Readers Independent Voice Award, Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, Not The Booker Prize and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award. Will spent his early years living in Germany, but returned at age eleven. He studied theatre and television at King Alfred’s Winchester, where he set up a successful theatre company. He currently runs his own fitness and nutrition business and lives in Reading with his children.

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Lost Girls by Heather Young.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

This slow, but sinister tale concerns three generations of the Evans family. The Evans women that is. In 1935, Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s summer cottage, set by a lake in a Minnesota backwater. The woods are searched, the lake is dredged, but there is no sign of Emily – the child their mother dotes on the most. Unable to leave the place their sister vanished, Lucy and Lilith Evans go through their father’s subsequent suicide and nurse their mother till she too dies,

Sixty years later, Lucy the quiet middle sister, starts to write the story of that summer, when everything changed. She writes for her Great-Niece Justine and hopes she will understand what happened and set things right. She knows Justine will find it, because she chooses to leave her the house in her will and it comes at the right time. Justine has two daughters and lives with her boyfriend Patrick, but of late his behaviour has worried her. Does he just care about where she is and what she’s doing, or is he controlling her? The house on the lake becomes their refuge, their only neighbour is a taciturn old man who lives at the lodge.

The author tells her story through Lucy and Justine, across the two timelines, as the old mystery and the new drama play out. It’s a structure that works because the past always illuminates the present. The story starts out slowly, setting the scene and giving the reader a deep understanding of these characters and their motivations. The early chapters are almost hypnotic, then the pace builds. By the time both stories reached a crescendo, I was completely drawn in and my partner had to keep me supplied with of tea. I simply didn’t want to move till I finished it.

There’s an incredible sense of place in the novel. We see the lake at different times. In 1935 it’s summer and the family are there all week, with their father joining them from town at the weekend. We see the place as a child would see it: pools to swim in, trees to climb, forests to explore and under one of the cottages some kittens to play with. The place has a warmth and benign feel to it on the surface, that is at odds with an undercurrent that keeps bubbling up. Lilith wants to be more grown up than she is, dressing up a little and sitting with the slightly older kids. Lucy’s voice is anxious constantly where her sister’s antics are concerned, but it’s not clear where the fear comes from. Is she just afraid of her older sister leaving her behind or is something more sinister at play? There’s also a definite ‘middle child’ feeling to her observation that Lilith is catching her parent’s attention by pushing their religious boundaries, and baby Emily is never away from their mother’s side. Emily is definitely the favoured child, but again there’s something odd about the way their mother clings to her, sleeps with her every night and becomes hysterical if she slips out of sight.

By comparison, when Justine and her girls arrive at the lake house it is winter. Instead of feeling like a place to holiday, the landscape is bleak and the remoteness feels threatening. There’s constant talk in town of storms to come, people preparing to be snowed in and getting their supplies. Instead of being a welcoming family home, the cottage has definitely seen better days and there is a haunted quality to it. It’s not just the portrait of Emily set above the mantle with two candles under it. It’s not just that Justine feels like the child’s dark eyes follow her round the room, there’s a sadness and a sense that something terrible happened here, like an imprint left on the air. Matthew at the lodge house also seems a little scary on the surface, but he does plough the drive for the girls to get to school and Justine finds he’s left her a brand new snow shovel just before a blizzard hits. It felt like the remaining Evans girls has needed a place to heal together, without a man in tow. However, the place itself needed to heal and only this generation of the Evans girls could do it.

There are clues everywhere, and different characters hold separate parts of the puzzle. Justine doesn’t want to be like her mother is, always running to the next place and never feeling settled and at peace. She doesn’t want it for her girls either. When danger does come to the lake for a second time, will Justine be the Evans girl who makes the right choices? This was a slow burning tale, that crept up on me and drew me into this sixty year old mystery. I was compelled to read to the end and find what secrets were buried at the lake, and what sort of closure the remaining Evans girls could find.

Meet The Author

Heather is the author of two novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, The Distant Dead, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel and named one of the ten best mystery/suspense books of 2020 by Booklist. A former antitrust and intellectual property litigator, she traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.

Posted in Random Things Tours

This Shining Life by Harriet Klein

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Wow, this is heartbreakingly sad, but so beautiful too. Rich is dying. Funny, charming, Rich has a love of cheese and throwing parties. He has a son called Ollie who is neuro-diverse and a wife called Ruth who is coping with so much anyway, how will she cope with his death? The book covers Rich’s attempts to live, while dying. There’s also the aftermath of his death where Ruth and Ollie have to learn how to cope without the most important person in their life. Ruth finds it very hard to accept that her time with Rich is now limited and she has no idea when he will die. As time passes, Ollie finds it harder too. He doesn’t understand what it means to die. So, Rich devises a plan and involves his son in choosing gifts for those he loves, as something to remember him by. Ollie loves puzzles and he sees the presents as clues – he thinks each gift has a hidden meaning that his Dad chose to teach him the meaning of life.

The story is told through the important people in Rich’s life and it begins with Ollie. Ollie has realised that the gifts went to the wrong people and he must rectify the mistakes, because otherwise he’ll never understand life or death. He is starting to come apart at the seams but has anyone noticed? Ruth is struggling to cope with his obsessive rituals and her grief is all encompassing. In counselling we refer to ‘complicated grief’ – this can happen when a death is: unexpected with things unresolved or left unsaid, a sudden decline or an accident, the result of a crime, long-term health related with caring roles attached, complicated by circumstances such as being out of touch or at odds with each other, or where a disease is hereditary. Here, Ruth and Ollie haven’t really had time to prepare and their lives have had to adapt very quickly. Ruth can’t fall apart because she has to be there for Ollie, but it is wearing her down and she needs to deal with her own feelings too. I liked the way the author brought in other voices, from Ruth’s family to Rich’s own mother and father, each with their own grief and needs.

The author is a great observer of human behaviour and family dynamics. We can see how grief passes through this family, less like ripples on a pond and more like a shockwave passing through everyone in the vicinity. I talk with clients about the circle of grief – this is a series of concentric circles with the person experiencing the bereavement in the centre, next their spouse or partner, then in layers outwards until we get to the wider community. This is a simple tool that works well in the context of working with an individual because in that space, they are the afflicted person. We show how grief is expressed outward – with people in the outer circles expressing grief outward to family, friends, then they go to workmates or the wider community. Then comfort is expressed inwards, with those in outer circle ‘shoring up’ those further in, giving them the strength to support those in the inner circle. People in the outer circles should not be expecting comfort from those in the centre. Yet, grief is rarely so neatly expressed and the circles are often breached. This could be because of narcissism or lack of boundaries. However, more likely, what happens is shown very clearly in this book. Everyone is at the centre of their own circle. Ruth has to show comfort outward to Ollie and to Rich’s parents who are both struggling with their own grief and the added complication of dementia. Some people simply can’t put another’s needs in front of their own.

When we face a huge upheaval or loss in our lives, we experience it through our own filter. Made up of our own experiences, the emotions we find it easy or difficult to express, our own bias or prejudice. The author has written such an authentic story of loss by exploring each character’s filters, their earlier life experiences and the unique relationship they had with Rich. We each grieve in a unique way because of the unique way we connected with that person. In dying, Rich has given them all the secret, of the meaning of life. It’s in the connections we have with another person and in a way Ollie is right – the gifts do hold the secret. Rich has bought each person something he thinks will remind them of him, in the context of the relationship they had. Knowing each person will miss him in a different way. His life was all about encouraging other’s to enjoy everything life offers and all its variety. I thought the book was emotionally intelligent, full of complex and interesting characters and explored beautifully what happens when such a big personality is taken from a family. A final mention must go to that beautiful cover, with Ollie using his binoculars to focus on the beautiful variety of life in the world. Simply stunning.

Meet The Author

Harriet Kline works part time registering births, deaths and marriages and writes for the rest of the week. Her story Ghost won the Hissac Short Story Competition and Chest of Drawers won The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Other short stories have been published online with Litro, For Books’ Sake, and ShortStorySunday, and on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Bristol with her partner and two teenage sons.

Posted in Red Dog Press

Far From The Tree by Rob Parker.

Posted on by thelotusreaders

If a man is guilty, the son is often guilty by association. What was that saying? An apple never falls far from the tree. That’s what everyone would think.

This is my first time reading Rob Parker and it definitely won’t be my last. It only took a couple of pages for me to be drawn in to DI Brendan Foley’s complicated world and from a personal perspective I loved that it was partially set in my family’s stomping ground around Liverpool. The fact that I knew every setting as the story unfolded added to the gritty reality of this brilliant crime novel. DI Foley’s life becomes very complicated when a trench containing 27 bodies, in various states of decomposition, turns up in woodland on his Warrington patch. It encroaches on family life immediately as he has to leave his son’s own christening to attend and his wife Mim has to hold the fort. However, things become even more complicated, and terrible, for his family, when one of the 27 turns out to be Brendan’s nephew Connor.

We learn how conflicted the Foley family are as the case develops further. The strength of character it has taken for Brendan to be different shines through. I loved the balance between the family story and the case in hand, and the tension between the two as the answers to one seem a little too close to home. Each character was so well drawn I could imagine them clearly. I loved DS Madison, policewoman and part-time boxer. She’s loyal and disciplined, so when she’s asked to bend the rules she has a hard choice to make – does she stick to the letter of the law or trust her own moral compass? Sometimes the legal route isn’t the ethical one. Hoyt also stood out as a colourful character, combing pomade through his hipster beard while taking phone calls from the public. Every one of them will have their loyalty tested and family is the threat used to change loyalties in ways unthinkable before. Some members of the team have terrible choices to make and will act in ways they never imagined possible to keep their loved ones safe. The tension is these scenes is unbearable, especially the one with a body bag and a child’s toy rabbit.

The action is incredible and the way the author writes is almost filmic in these moments. He has a way of starting these scenes with something unexpected and so startling, you have to go back and read it twice to make sure you did read it – like the man having his nose shot clean off! That set piece as two motorbikes unleash automatic weapons on a van full of men is so fast and slick it could have come from a Christopher Nolan film. As the final showdown approached I couldn’t tear myself away from the novel for a second. As the action bounced between a boxing match, the police station and a house in Huyton (no surprise there!) events left me breathless. It’s amazing what we might do when those we love most are in danger. I love how the author explores what pressure like that can do to someone and how blurred the lines between good and bad really get. There’s no holding back on how bloody and terrible these crimes can be, and it was slightly disorientating to see so much violence in a place I visit for fun. I’ve stayed a few times in the Titanic Hotel and have often wondered what goes on in the tiny industrial units that line the surrounding streets. It made me think what might really be going on behind the facade of an auto spares unit!

This was a great read, engaging from start to finish and with a lead character I was truly rooting for. His wife Mim was clearly a strong woman who could take the helm when necessary but was also able to tell Brendan straight when he wasn’t on the right course. Strangely, it is his dad, with whom he has the most conflict, who tells him where his loyalties should lie. There are times you should be home with your wife and family. The ending wasn’t what I expected, but left me realising there is light and shade in all areas of life. Even with something we imagine is very black and white, like the law, there are always shades of grey. It’s simply a case of how much compromise we can live with and how far the apple really does fall from the tree.

Meet The Author

Rob Parker is a married father of three, who lives in Warrington, UK. The author of the Ben Bracken thrillers, Crook’s Hollow and the Audible bestseller Far From The Tree, he enjoys a rural life, writing horrible things between school runs. Rob writes full time, attends various author events across the UK, and boxes regularly for charity. He spends a lot of time in schools across the North, encouraging literacy, story-telling and creative-writing, and somehow squeezes in time to co-host the For Your Reconsideration film podcast, appear regularly on The Blood Brothers Crime Podcast, and is a member of the Northern Crime Syndicate.