I have genuinely struggled to read this month and I’m relieved to be at the end of it and taking a much needed break. My home is in chaos because one of the cats is seriously injured, so keeping him safe and indoors while allowing the others to roam normally is difficult. If I separate Max from Dolly he gets very vocal and upset, but if we let him free to see her we have to block off the cat flap. The girls have started to tap at the window when they went to come in, but why is it always when I have my lap tray on my knee? It’s like they can sense me writing or doing my embroidery and want to cause maximum disruption, my lap is then free for cat cuddles of course. Minka is very outdoorsy and has taken over catching vermin, something Max is famous for. Max really wants to be out but although he’s healing he’s not ready yet. The bones seem to be healing well but the muscles and ligaments need plenty of rest yet. He broke his hip joint and his pelvis in several places then in the sacral area his ligaments had become detached leaving the spine separated from the pelvis. He’s walking now and looking a lot more like his old self, just with a slightly twisted walk. My dad has been struggling with his health meanwhile mum is trying to look after him as best she can as well as spending time with grandma who died last week at the age of 93. I sat down on the last day of September to write reviews but I couldn’t think straight. My head felt like a huge ball of chaos and I get weird neurological symptoms when I’m tired or overloaded. I took Max for his anti-inflammatory injections and the vet stopped and fetched me a chair. Apparently I was rocking as if I was about to faint. I’d gone white and when I took my glasses off my pupils were moving back and forth making me feel dizzy. I’ve read way more books than the four above but haven’t typed up my reviews as I’ve found it easier to use a pen and my reading journal so there are lots more reviews and snippets of my own writing coming soon.
This historical murder mystery by the author of last year’s smash hit The Betrayal of Thomas True, A.J. West. You may have seen him on Insta travelling around book stores with his worldly belongings in a camper van. I’m not going to give you my review because it’s due on a blog tour this month, but I’ll give you a preview and some background. We’re drawn into the story of Thomas Lewin and his brother William who went to the Chittagong hills in India. Thomas was a tool of empire but as far as English dignitaries go he did make some effort to speak to local chiefs in their dialect and kept local customs. He also had a relationship with a local woman called Dari who was referred to as the ‘wife’ of the great Thangliana. Everest is his daughter, drawn into the murder of her Uncle William who was killed thirty years after their return from India while acting in the West End. Everest isn’t sure about the murder, or the man kept in Broadmoor for committing it, especially when her father kept telling her about a curse. A.J.West has taken the historical details and written a great murder mystery with gothic and mystical elements and a very forthright female investigator. I fell in love with the journal entries that cover this family’s adventurous lives and particularly one written from the perspective of William’s wife Isabel who I was captivated by. It’s also incredibly witty and packed with colourful characters. Look out for my full review coming soon.
One golden summer. One missing treasure. And a secret that binds two lives together.
Every year, Alice’s father gives her a treasure. Then on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, her final gift vanishes – along with the fragile certainty of her world. Alice runs, towards New York City and away from the memories of that last summer at the orchard where she grew up. Across the Atlantic, Tom has always felt that something is missing from his life. When he finds a long-forgotten letter, it leads him away from Sevenstones – the house at the heart of his family for generations – and towards a truth no one has ever fully told. From post-war London to 1960s New York, Alice and Tom’s stories become entwined. But will the secrets of their past bring them together, or break them apart?
I always think that the good marker of a book is when you find yourself thinking about it days later and this book brought up so many feelings! While we start with Alice’s devastating story of her early years, it was Tom’s narrative where the book came alive for me, with his early life in Dumfries and Galloway only a stone’s throw from my favourite yearly holiday destination. The descriptions are so vivid, from the hand to mouth existence of Tom and his father, their total connection with the seasons and each other. To be torn from all of that and transported to post-war London by his mother’s family feels so unjust. As Tom deals with new expectations, the fractured feel of the city and its bomb sites, we start to sense a secret behind all of this, only hinted at and never made clear to Tom. A promise was made in wartime, one that couldn’t be broken and has it’s roots in a house called Sevenstones where a key was left under a stone at the door for anyone who needed an interlude from their wartime duties. It’s a secret that follows Tom throughout his years at school and eventually across the Atlantic. Each section of this book is so evocative of its time and place and it is such an incredible example of how trauma is passed down through families. It made me think about world events that have affected previous generations of my family and why they made the decisions they did for their children.
When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden. In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door. But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while trying to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.
Wow I love this series and at the sixth book in it just gets better and better. These cases are never tidy. There’s always something that doesn’t quite fit or can’t be explained. I imagine this is the norm in real life police work, but often detective fiction is way too cleanly tidied away. Here someone always knows more than they’re willing to say or are more involved than you imagined. Then there’s the burden of proof needed for a conviction. Then there’s how everyone in Akranes is interlinked and having grown up in a small rural town I can see how it’s easy to think we know everything about another person. The truth is that we rarely see the full picture, just our part of it coloured by our own experience. Even within families there are things people know but no one talks about, there are different versions of the family history, things we’re open about and things we bury. Even so, how far would we go to protect those we love, especially our children? Throughout this series the people of Akranes are like a wider family, burying each other’s crimes and collectively forgetting the truth. The impact of one generation’s choices affecting the next. This is the scariest truth about monsters, they don’t look like storybook monsters, they can come out in daylight and ‘on the surface they’re just like ordinary people.’ This is a dark psychological thriller, full of atmosphere and a detective who always digs deep into her cases, even when it makes her personal life uncomfortable.
London, 1911. Coronation fever. Suffragette unrest. A city crackling with tension.
When a policeman is found brutally murdered on the streets of Kensington, blame falls on the three women seen fleeing the scene. Their sole witness? Stephen Pike: ex-borstal boy, under-butler extraordinaire and assistant to the most unconventional detective in London, Miss Decima Stockingham. Sharp-tongued, fearless and bored of behaving herself, she’s the only one able to see that this case is not what it seems.
Aided by an invisible network of maids – their eyes and ears in every house in London – this unlikely duo must catch the killer before time runs out. But in a city dazzled by ceremony and divided by change, you never know what might be lurking in the shadows…
It’s impossible for me to start this review without declaring my undying devotion to Miss Decima Stockingham who intelligent, entitled, sweary and short-tempered. On meeting her long-suffering servant Stephen Pike, other servants from the apartments that line Kensington Gore commiserate that at least he isn’t indentured to the mad old cow in 89C. He doesn’t correct them because largely their only impression of this woman is her morning bellow for her egg and her propensity to fling books out of the window until it arrives:
“I was under the impression that boiling an egg was a quick job, but apparently you’re rearing the chicken by hand and fetching the water from fucking Spain.”
Underneath this exterior is a sharp-witted woman who doesn’t mind appearing contrary and rude if it gets her the results she needs or the information she’s seeking. This character is begging for a TV series and Olivia Coleman. Her foil is Stephen Pike, driven to distraction by her demands and her willingness to place him in dangerous situations. He’s equally comic, mainly physically, in one scene he’s lured to a union meeting at the pub which soon descends into an evening of rounds, a drunken football match, injury and a hefty hangover. He may seem ordinary to the untrained eye but Miss Decima can see a sharp intelligence, observational skill and an ability to put a pattern together that makes them a formidable team. We meet them just before the coronation of George V and Queen Mary is just around the corner. The suffragettes are ramping up their civil disobedience and taking direct action to gain the vote. The author uses this backdrop for the labyrinthine murder mystery our mismatched pair are investigating. I loved the mix of comedy, suspense and action in this second book in the series and I’m now dying to read the first.
Below is my October tbr stack.
