Category: Squad Pod Collective

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Waiting on a Friend by Natalie Adler 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“When Mark died I thought I’d start seeing him around more..”

From that fascinating opener this book becomes so many things: a meditation on grief; a witness to the AIDS crisis in 1984 New York City; a community’s anger at the gentrification of the East Village; a ghost hunt led by a company called Manhattan Remediation. Renata is a young dyke-about-town who has the ability to see ghosts, which has been happening more and more frequently as her friends have started dying of what has recently been named AIDS. So, when her best friend Mark dies, she assumes she’ll see him again. There’s no way Mark wouldn’t give her a chance to say goodbye, would he? But to her disappointment – and increasingly, her concern – Mark doesn’t appear. Renata has other problems, too. A mysterious, police-like force has begun ridding their East Village neighbourhood of anything abnormal or inexplicable. At first, she’s sure they’re scam artists, but it becomes clear they’re actually trapping ghosts. With her band of lovably eccentric pals and lovers, Renata is determined to fight back against the erasure of her friends’ memories and the sanitizing of her beloved New York.

Renata is our narrator throughout and I felt a kindred spirit in seconds. Her expectation of seeing her friend Mark seems odd at first reading, but when I realised he had died without her and she hadn’t known for a few days I was so sad for her. Mark is clearly the most important person in her life, they shared a living space when either one of them wasn’t sleeping at a lover’s place and it seems unthinkable that she wouldn’t have known. That she wouldn’t have felt it. That the sky didn’t cave in. When people say life goes on this is exactly what they mean – everything carries on as normal while you feel like a shrieking banshee. However, for Renata there’s an added element to this disbelief. She can see dead people. In fact she’s being plagued by the ghost of their friend Francois, who she definitely doesn’t want in her flat. So why hasn’t Mark appeared? It’s hard to accept that the powerful and deep emotions you share with someone have suddenly become one sided. I remember thinking when my husband died, we were so close, how can that line of communication be cut? Years later, a chance encounter with a medium left me questioning again, she definitely had Jerzy’s turn of phrase, his humour and tendency to flirt with the furniture, but why was he talking to her and not me? Renata and Mark had a complicated relationship, they each had lovers, but they did have times when they slept together. There was no possessiveness in life, but in death I could understand Renata’s desire to have him to herself.

I was reminded of Jill in the TV series It’s A Sin and the deep connections the residents of the pink palace had with each other. When her best friend Ritchie starts to deteriorate badly, his family take him back home and cut him off from the people who have lived with him. It’s devastating when Jill travels to his childhood home, only to be told by his mother that Ritchie is already dead. The author picks up on this in the novel, the families unable to live with their child’s sexuality rushing in near the end to claim them. This could be out of love, but is also a way of cutting them off from their community, not wanting the stigma of AIDS to touch their family. Some families quickly and quietly arranged funerals for their children without the people who loved them for who they truly were, often citing the cause of death as cancer so the neighbours didn’t know. I was a teenager at the start of the AIDS epidemic here in the UK and I remember feeling genuine fear. The government leaflet had a gravestone on the front with ‘don’t die of ignorance’ carved on it. I even remember a bizarre telethon type event called First AIDS, presented by comedians and DJs telling us which sexual acts were most risky, how to prevent contracting the virus and how to put a condom on. I was thirteen and I honestly believe that it informed by sexual behaviour from the offset – I was known by my friends in later years for two methods of contraception at all times and I’m sure that was down to how frightening it felt back then. There was enormous stigma and prejudice, but because I lived in a quiet village in a rural county it felt somewhat removed from me. Even though I had an Uncle who was obviously gay in hindsight, we never really talked about it. Reading this and knowing that, a few years earlier than First AIDS, death was a daily reality in the gay community of the East Village really made me realise how far behind and out of touch we were. 

The author skilfully switches tones from crushing reality, to horror and even humour at times which I really enjoyed. She doesn’t spare the realities of a death from full blown AIDS, in particular she tells us the story of Francois who is haunting her apartment. He is an angry ghost, throwing and pushing things, always making a noise and creating a horrible atmosphere, even before he appears. When he does he is known to vomit, pee on the rug and often lets out a terrible scream. Francois was a teacher, but when he started losing weight and sores were appearing on his face he was asked to leave because ‘his face was scaring the children.’ She details the secondary illnesses that would kill someone with the HIV, the lymphoma or other types of cancer or infection like pneumonia. Then there’s the encephalopathy and dementia. It’s no surprise, when we hear François’s story, that his ghost is angry. She talks about the guilt she feels for wanting him to die quicker, to stop his suffering. Renata’s mother, who never let on that she had the same gift as her daughter, said that spreading salt in the corners of problematic rooms helped soak up the negative energy, so she’s been trying baths with mineral salts but it hasn’t helped. There is some comedy in Francois as well as fear and it’s Renata’s irritation with him that made me smile. She knows she can’t live with him, but what to do? Another theme within the book is the gentrification of the neighbourhood, with talk of landlords trying to remove tenants in rent controlled apartments so they can renovate and earn more from a new one. A company called Manhattan Remediation are mentioned, claiming to be able to remove ghosts or entities from apartments. It’s discussed as a possible link to gentrification, a way to ‘clean up’ the neighbourhood. This is a proud community that wants to keep its history and its ghosts. When Francois finally pushes Renata to the edge she calls them and like the fourth emergency service Dr Silverman arrives with a faraday cage. Could this be the answer? 

I was really interested in the community Renata lives in and her job at the vintage shop. She also has other friends who help her sit Shiva for Mark – a Jewish week of mourning where the bereaved stop their daily activities and focus on grieving. Renata’s friends cover the mirrors and prepare food and they talk about their memories. This is a stark contrast to her visit with Mark’s lover Patrick where there is tension and anger on both sides and I was glad she had a loving community around her. The author has captured the resistance and pride of the gay community when they’re coping with stigma and suspicion. The warmth and empathy they show each other is moving. This is such a powerful subject and really succeeds as a piece of queer history in New York City, especially since most US deaths from AIDS occurred in NYC and San Francisco. It really embodies the fear and paranoia of that time perfectly, but also depicts a community of people for whom sex may be fluid but love is plentiful and loyalty is strong. For individuals already stigmatised by their sexuality and estranged from families, this community is their found family and those ties are unbreakable. As Renata observes, if the strength of her grief alone could compel Mark to appear then he would. The addition of Renata’s psychic abilities is a genre-bending idea that mostly works really well and accentuates how lost and confused she feels. I felt her need to keep living too, even though the pull of the dead is so strong. The way she relates her personal grief to the reader, in a time of unprecedented loss, is the strongest part of the book. 

Out now from RiverRun

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Dark Is The Morning by Rupert Thomson 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Sometimes love isn’t where you belong

In a mountain village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, Gino, a troubled young man, realises that his childhood sweetheart Franca can give his life the happiness and stability he needs. They seem made for each other, and move to a remote house in the countryside – but there is something in Franca’s past that haunts Gino.

Descending into pathological jealousy and resentment towards a married man who had been Franca’s lover, Gino is unable to stop himself imagining the worst, and embarks on a violent path that has catastrophic consequences.

There couldn’t be a better book for a counsellor to read than this one, following the life of Gino who lives in a small Italian town on the Adriatic Sea. The setting isn’t a bucolic, sun drenched and charming little town, despite Gino’s upbringing on his father’s smallholding where he mainly grows tomatoes. This is a grittier Italy, perfectly suited to the story and Gino himself. Although there is a sense that there’s a different existence within reach, perhaps the life his father has living off the land or whatever brings his father’s friend Harry back every few months. Whatever contentment is, Gino doesn’t know how to find it or accept it once he has it. Gino was born here and makes the comment that he’ll die here if he isn’t careful. He doesn’t want to live the life his parents have, he has bigger and better things to do. However, it could also be the foreshadowing of what’s to come when he meets Franca again. Franca was at school with Gino and in some senses he feels they’re both outsiders: ‘She was a strange little stringy thing, with a thin face and brown hair’. Franca was nicknamed The Rat by other girls, but then Gino was called Dopey after the dwarf in Snow White. She’s very bold, walking up to Gino and telling him that she’s going to marry him one day something both of them were teased about for years. Now, when his father mentions her, he seems irritated but they do have something in common, an inability to live up to their heroic parents. Gino confided in her when they were thirteen, saying all he seems to do is disappoint his father. Franca seems to get this, after all Gino’s father is known for something heroic he did in WW2 and her father is the local ambulance man. Maybe, she suggests, they could be something different to each other? She’s a realist, saying her father could have wanted a beautiful daughter and she’s aware she isn’t. How can they compare to heroes? They are only human. Gino gets into trouble in his teens and spent time in a psychiatric unit and he admits he’d forgotten his old friend, but the conversation with his father lights up his memory and he questions his choices. With a new view on life he searches Franca out and asks to take her to dinner and they are married in a whirlwind and given the chance to make a home in her aunt’s house in the countryside. Is it possible that Gino has learned from his mistakes and now sees what is important in life? 

If I had a trainee who wanted to understand the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy concept of negative automatic thoughts I’d get them to read this book. Everything Gino experiences is filtered through a faulty lens. Whether this is innate or a result of constantly feeling like a disappointment is hard to tell. At the moment he has it all, but in his mind it’s already unravelling. The house needs a lot of work, but could be a secluded haven for a family. Gino hears that something strange happened to Franca’s aunt here during the war and starts to wonder about it, could an event like that leave something in the house like a mood or a feeling? Is the house unlucky in some way? To be transparent about her past Franca tells him about an affair she had with one of her father’s friends. Although outwardly he seems to accept this confession, inwardly it becomes a nagging concern he can’t shake off. He asks others about man who has a concrete business, telling them he has a friend who’s putting in a pool. He tells himself he just wants to look at him, but can he resist speaking to him or perhaps even warning him off? At the end of her working day Franca goes to a cafe in town to wait for Gino to pick her up after work. He notices that she’s chatting to a man, laughing and passing the time of day and he knows he’s been trying to pick her up. His strangest obsession comes when his son Elio is born, a beautiful baby with amazing violet eyes. Everyone who sees him comments on what a beautiful boy he is and he genuinely seems hypnotic for some people, almost holy. All Gino can see is a boy who looks nothing like him. Neither he nor Franca are beauties so how can Elio be his and inspire such reverence in complete strangers? Being in his mind is exhausting and worrying, the author leaves us unsure what he might do next. Pressure mounts with every page and Harry is the only person who seems to get through to Gino, telling him that perhaps the boy embodies the beauty inside them both. 

Everything about Gino screams of a paranoid personality disorder, his mistrust of others and ability to twist innocent encounters into personal slights and grudges are classic symptoms. He has stopped listening to others and his behaviours become more extreme, including hallucinations that his baby son is talking to him. Franca is disturbed to come home and find Elio screaming in the house alone, while Gino is zoned out in the garden. As readers we’re inside his mind and see his motivations, the wrong patterns of thinking and the way he broods and cultivates grudges that are simply not there. Instead of facing these painful thoughts he directs his anger and obsession outward. If Elio is nothing like him, then someone else must be the father. I genuinely believe that Pierozzi would have carried on his life rarely thinking of Franca and her new husband, but Gino’s places himself in harm’s way. Pierozzi is a dangerous man. He’s described as someone things happened to and that resonated with my idea of Gino. Is this something people would eventually say about him? The way the author builds this difficult inner world is so clever and I was anxious, mainly for Franca and Elio. They are living in the middle of nowhere, with a husband and father who is no longer rational. I was mentally screaming at her to make sure she had somewhere safe to go. 

Franca is very sure of her own emotions and choices. When Gino asks her if she’d still marry him she tells him calmly that her feelings have never changed. However she does have “something of the fox about her. That sudden, absolute stillness, that pricking of the ears, that readiness to flee.” Will Franca be just as resolute if she does sense danger? I felt so sad for her, because Gino’s obsession with her past harms her, even though it has nothing to do with him. Why can’t he see that she has only ever loved him? Despite him leaving and never making her any promises when they’re younger, her love never dies. That shows loyalty, but it’s never appreciated or rewarded. Even the beautiful son they have isn’t enough and I wondered if it was partly about his fears of her infidelity but mainly about his relationship with his own father. They were so different in character and distant emotionally, did he ever wonder about his own paternity? The author bookends this story with Harry as the narrator and honestly I had an emotional reaction to being back in Harry’s steady hands at the end. Being in his world felt safer and the way he frames Gino’s story gives it some closure and structure too. I found myself wondering how I’d work with a client like Gino and whether he could ever be satisfied with his life. This book has emotional depth and complexity, tension and action alongside some incredibly surreal moments too. I would definitely read this author again. 

Out now from Head of Zeus

Meet the Author

Rupert Thomson is the author of fifteen critically acclaimed novels, including ‘The Insult’, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and chosen by David Bowie as one of the 100 Must-Read Books of All Time, ‘The Book of Revelation’, which was made into a feature film by the Australian writer/director, Ana Kokkinos, and ‘Death of a Murderer’, which was shortlisted for the Costa Prize.

His latest novel, ‘Dark is the Morning’, was published on May 7th 2026. Praised in advance by the likes of Chloe Aridjis, Claire-Louise Bennet, Sarah Waters, Julie Myerson, and Philip Pullman, LoveReading subsequently made it one of their Star Books of the Year, saying “Thomson’s writing casts an almost other-worldly spell…Teeming with tension, ‘Dark is the Morning’ represents literary fiction at its most page-turningly thrilling and poignant.” According to the Financial Times, which admired Thomson’s “stunned, post-traumatic prose”, it’s “the ideal holiday read: frictionless at the level of the sentence; stealthy, romantic, and utterly unpredictable in every other way.”

Rupert Thomson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has contributed to the Financial Times, Granta, the Guardian, the Independent, and the London Review of Books. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, Sydney, Rome, and most recently Barcelona. He currently lives in London.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Unreliable Narrator by Araminta Hall 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

YOUR SECRETS AREN’T SAFE.

Ten years ago, Hope left Somerset with a fatal secret and a broken heart. She has spent a decade in the shadows, living a quiet life of penance to protect the man she once loved – the world-famous author Ambrose Glencourt.

YOUR LIFE IS NOT YOUR OWN.

Then, she opens his latest bestseller. To the world, it’s a brilliant work of fiction. To Hope, it’s a betrayal. Every private moment, every dark truth, and every ‘fatal disaster’ from that summer is laid bare on the page.

YOUR TRUTH IS A LIE.

But Ambrose has changed the ending. In his version of the story, Hope isn’t the victim. She’s the villain.

Now, Hope must step out of the shadows to reclaim her narrative. But in a world of glamorous elites and whispered secrets, who will believe the word of an unreliable woman against the word of a literary icon?

Two narrators. One truth. And a secret worth killing for.

I was blown away by Araminta Hall’s last novel, because of how bold and timely it was. I wondered whether she could write something that would capture the world as it is now, crazier and more disturbing by the week. Well it turns out she can. Hope Jenkins takes a job with author Ambrose Glencourt as his personal assistant at his home, Shadowlands. Rosie, as he likes to be called, described the shadowlands as a place of imagination. However, its other meaning gave me a sense of foreboding – a thin place, the hinterland between life and the next, place filled with ghosts and spirits. It made me wonder, was this a place where the line between the real and the imaginary is blurred? The setting is the archetypal bohemian mansion, showing a lot of wear and tear, but still beautiful with idyllic grounds. The sort of place where books and art are piled everywhere, but the dishwasher is held closed with cord and a wooden spoon. Hope is stunned by her surroundings, it’s nothing like her mum’s flat and Rosie’s wife Delia is a fragile beauty who was a model for the artist Siegel when she was younger. Again though, little things stayed in the mind. The way that they call their staff by their Christian names in front of visitors, but Mrs A and B in private seemed odd. Delia seemed very keen to downplay her own artistic ambitions, always saying it’s just a hobby when she has her own studio and Hope can see she’s very talented. Then there’s a painting – in Rosie’s study, amongst the bookshelves he has a nude painting of a very young Delia with her legs wide open. It makes Hope uncomfortable and and she wondered whether that was why he kept it so public, or whether he liked to make other men desire his wife? 

I felt like Hope was dazzled by the Glencourts and the relationship seemed unequal. Whereas staff seemed to stay in the garden and kitchen, Hope and another guest at the house eat and socialise with the couple. Tom is introduced as someone who Delia has worked with when teaching pottery at an outreach for addicts. He and Hope have afternoons to spend together when Rosie has finished working for the day and it’s clear there’s chemistry. Yet I wondered why had Rosie and Delia taken Tom in and what exactly is the nature of their relationship? Is he as taken in as Hope is by this bohemian utopia? Perhaps not, as he discloses more secrets about the couple and explains: 

‘I’m not sure Rosie means everything he says, I think it’s more that he entertains himself by making people feel uncomfortable.” 

Little unexpected touches and comments made me uneasy about Rosie and there’s a very uncomfortable dinner scene that made me feel sick and awkward. Rosie’s dinner guests became horribly familiar, men who think their sex and status gives them licence to manipulate and bully others. We can feel the pressure of that summer building as the heat rises and I was utterly absorbed by it. 

Then we’re taken ten years later and Hope wants to make a statement to the police. We meet our narrator Nat, a young detective trying to get through her day and get home to her wife and kids on time. Nat is our narrator, coming into this ten year old world in our stead and trying to work out whether Hope is just a crank or a mad fan. However, there’s something about this Hope, a strange, sad lady and her journal, from a summer ten years before that catches her attention. This is an utterly different Hope, in fact she’s a woman transformed from that dreamy girl who fell in love with a lifestyle so far from her own. Now she’s working in a school office and doesn’t appear to be looking after herself. She returned home that summer in a state of delirium and shock and it looks like her life hasn’t recovered, although underneath the exterior there’s still a nurturing instinct and an ability to identify victims of abuse. She’s alerted by news of Ambrose Glencourt’s long awaited sequel to The Ruined Girl, his most famous and celebrated novel. Hope buys the first novel and as she reads she becomes more and more angry. This is Rosie’s version of that summer’s events written down for all the world to read and the character based on Hope is definitely the villain of the piece. He has taken the truth and twisted it. The only thing Hope has is her journal and as Nat reads Hope’s journal she does start to wonder whether there’s some truth in this? She’s experienced manipulation and abuse and something about this presses that trigger. She decides to visit Shadowlands for herself and meet the Glencourts, because even if Hope is mistaken about what ended her work with Rosie, something at Shadowlands feels wrong. 

The structure is so complex, playing with stories and asking questions about how they’re told and who gets to tell them. Rosie made my flesh crawl a little, with the arrogant assumption that he can feast on anything to fuel his imagination and continue the important business of making literary art – there’s no downgrading his talent, unlike Delia’s. I really felt how much easier it is to work as a writer when you have money to support you and a mansion to live in. He discards all distractions, even those he’s created himself. I didn’t like his friends either and their little games, enjoying their ability to make someone much younger uncomfortable. Hope wants to be like him, to be able to “make language work that way as if it belonged to me”. What she didn’t realise back then was that there’s no one way to write, because each unique voice is just as valid. It just that certain voices are more likely to be heard because they follow the established narrative. Hopefully, we don’t have to sound like rich, middle aged white men any more. Hope has seen through the shiny exterior of Shadowlands and knows they’ll look down on Nat with her cheap suit and London accent. But could Rosie’s assumption of superiority be his downfall? This book sits perfectly alongside the #MeToo movement and the Epstein Files in that it’s a world operating on the assumption of silence. Hope isn’t silent any longer. Incredibly tense, twisty and timely, I was utterly under its spell from the first few pages. Ambrose Glencourt claims that in fiction “it’s much easier to blow a body apart than put it back together again.” For Hope’s sake I read this voraciously, full of rage and with everything crossed that Araminta Hall could do what Ambrose Glencourt couldn’t.

Out March 5th from MacMillan

Meet the Author

Araminta Hall has worked as a writer, journalist and teacher. Her first novel, Everything & Nothing, was published in 2011 and became a Richard & Judy read that year. Her second, Dot, was published in 2013.

She teaches creative writing at New Writing South in Brighton, where she lives with her husband and three children.

Araminta Hall’s novel Imperfect Women has been adapted for television by AppleTV starring Elizabeth Moss and Kerry Washington

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Witch Trial by Harriet Tyce 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When 18-year-old Christian Shaw is found dead in an Edinburgh park, the city reels – and the shock only deepens when police charge her best friends, Eliza Lawson and Isobel Smyth, with her murder.

As social media explodes and headlines scream for justice, rumours of bullying spiral into something darker: whispers of rituals, obsession, and a teenage pact gone wrong.

Matthew Phillips, a respected heart surgeon, is called for jury duty on the case. But as the trial unfolds – and the girls reveal a chilling defence no one saw coming – he begins to question everything: the motives, the evidence, even his own judgement.

Who’s telling the truth? Who can be trusted?

And what really happened to Christian Shaw?

Let the Witch Trial begin . . .

I finished this book and had to give my head a little shake wondering what I’d just read. Harriet’s one of those writers where I end up devouring the book in a couple of sittings and then wish I’d taken my time because it’s come to an end! This grabs you from the very start as we follow Matthew, an esteemed heart surgeon, for jury duty. He is without question the perfect juror – intelligent, used to making life and death decisions and level headed. However, due to his job he could have easily been excused from jury duty so why does he stay? His colleagues seem incredibly annoyed that he has disappeared and is uncontactable for the foreseeable, because it turns out this is a complex murder case. Although Matthew seems an upstanding character he does seem remarkably keen on having a murder case and with this one he’s truly found the most intriguing. This is one of the most complicated and unlikely cases threaded with fanciful notions of devil worship and witchery. Matthew is our eyes so we view the case at the same time he does, as each witness takes the stand for cross examination. What they must prove is this point of Scottish law: 

“Murder is constituted by any wilful act causing the destruction of life, whether wickedly intended to kill, or displaying such wicked recklessness as to imply a disposition depraved enough to be regardless of consequences.” 

Put simply, the prosecution must prove that the defendants Isobel and Eliza knew that their friend Christian had a heart condition but were reckless enough to bully and fill her with such fear it killed her. Because of the immediacy of the narrative, the reader drinks in each gasp from the gallery and every revelation from the witness box, so much so that it was halfway through the book before I stopped to wonder how such a case could have made it’s way to court? Can someone deliberately frighten someone to death? 

Matthew is observant, he has weighed up his fellow jurors and which ones might be trouble. He has checked out the defendants and wonders whether their appearance might prejudice the witnesses and jurors. Eliza is dressed well, whereas Isobel’s demeanour is surly and uncooperative. She looks down at the floor mostly and has a gothic appearance. She is being painted as the ringleader, but is she or are people being swayed by how she looks? The author adds small details that you barely notice at first such as Matthew’s own appearance. Fully suited and booted on his first few days, he is soon without a tie and then in jeans. His hygiene slips too and a rash starts to affect his hands, itching so badly during the evidence he struggles not to move. He drinks more and avoids his family, staying in his small apartment in the city. There’s also the strange journalist who catches his eye, then seems to disappear. One night she appears at his flat with a bottle and an ouija board, wishing to discuss the more gothic aspects of the case. The suggestion that the girls are practising witches is salacious enough to gain the headlines, but Matthew knows he shouldn’t be talking about the case at all. However, we as the reader are compelled to enjoy the suggestions of animal sacrifice, tarot cards and trying to summon the devil. It’s easy to forget that at the heart of this case are two young girls, who may have been unpleasant and even wicked but surely not criminal? We believe our narrator still, but should we? There are multiple layers to the books final chapters, something that this writer excels at. The occult elements are truly vivid and I found myself engrossed and even believing them in part. This is one of those books, where, like The Sixth Sense, you’ll be going back to see how you missed certain things. The final twists left me awe struck. This is a belting thriller, utterly addictive and compelling to the final page. 

Out now from Wildfire Books

Meet the Author

Harriet Tyce was born and grew up in Edinburgh. She graduated from Oxford in 1994 with a degree in English Literature before gaining legal qualifications. She worked as a criminal barrister for ten years, leaving after having children. She completed an MA in Creative Writing – Crime Fiction at UEA where she wrote Blood Orange, the Sunday Times bestselling novel, winner of a gold Nielsen Bestseller Award in 2021. It was followed by The Lies You Told and It Ends At Midnight, both also Sunday Times bestsellers. A Lesson in Cruelty was published in 2022 and met with great critical acclaim and her fifth novel Witch Trial will be published on 26 February 2026. She is a contestant on series 4 of The Traitors. Follow Harriet on Instagram @harriet_tyce and find her Facebook page @harriettyceauthor.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Paper Sisters by Rachel Canwell

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Lincolnshire, 1914. As the First World War approaches, three women are living, trapped between the unforgiving marsh, the wide, relentless river, and the isolation of the fen.

Their lives are held fast by profound grief, haunted by the spectres of the past. Trapped by the looming presence and eerie stillness of a hospital that has never admitted a single patient.  

Eleanor longs to escape. To make a life with the man she loves, leaving her sister, and all her ghosts behind. Clara’s marriage is crumbling and violent and she yearns for peace and security for both herself and her innocent children. Meanwhile, Lily, a formidable force of will, stands resolute against the relentless tide of change. She will stop at nothing, no matter the devastating cost, to ensure that life, and her family, remain frozen in an unyielding embrace of the past.

The author, Rachel Canwell, grew up with the story of this forgotten hospital. Isolated, stocked weekly and cleaned daily but never admitting a single patient. The hospital was real, tended by her family for over sixty years and set against the ethereal beauty and loneliness of the Fens, is the inspiration for her novel.

The atmosphere in this story perfectly captures the strange isolated feel of Lincolnshire’s fens. I’m Lincolnshire born and bred, further north than the fens but I know the area. It’s a flat, almost featureless place with dykes that drain the fields and the constant smell of vegetable crops in the air. The novel’s focus is on the area of Sutton Bridge, a village with a famous swing bridge built in 1897 across the River Nene. On one bank, an area of several acres is home to a building site where a port is being built and on the other is a hospital, built to service the workers of the port area. Alongside it is the home of the family who will run it. The author’s family waited for many years, ready to run their hospital, but this is not their story. The author opens with a strange and disorienting scene where a family are disturbed by noises at night and venture out in the pitch dark. As they stand on the bank, theres a loud rumble and the sound of heavy things hitting the water. The family can’t see anything, but in the light it’s clear that all their hopes for a future working alongside the port are gone. The bank on the far side has collapsed in the night, even worse one of their sons is missing, presumed drowned, while helping to look for workers. As we join them in 1910 only two sisters remain on the hospital side of the bank, Lily who has barely moved beyond the threshold since her twin drowned and Eleanor who tends to Lily, their garden and the hospital. Their other sibling, Frank, lives down in the village with his wife Clara and their children. It is the three women – Eleanor, Clara and Lily – who narrate our story. 

I felt so strongly about these characters, especially Clara and Eleanor who have always been friends. It soon becomes clear that both are in a similar position. Eleanor is at the mercy of Lily’s health and her moods. She claims to be unable to leave her room and hates to be left alone in the house. Despite being so isolated Eleanor has met and fallen in love with a young man called John who has taken over the village’s smithy. How can she ever plan a future with him if she’s unable to leave the house? Similarly, Eleanor’s friend Clara is at the mercy of husband Frank’s moods and how much he’s had to drink. One of the book’s opening chapters follows the couple and their children on a train to the coast. However, the train hasn’t even left the station and Frank is already belligerent. The author writes this beautifully, with Clara’s hopes for one day of freedom as a family dwindling by the moment. The tension rises as Clara desperately tries to quiet the children, holding herself tightly, too terrified to move and incur his anger. Luckily, his behaviour draws young men from the next carriage and Clara leaves him to fight his own battles. The sudden freedom she and the children have is blissful, laughing as they run down to the sea, removing shoes and socks to jump in the waves. Clara knows her friend Eleanor is under equal pressure, because under a quiet and timid exterior Lily has a core of steel. While Eleanor feels sorry for Lily, trying to respect her grief and many physical symptoms, Clara lives with a bully and she sees beyond Lily’s quiet and apparent shyness, recognising them as control and emotional blackmail. Her interventions at the house, forcing Lily into activity, almost made me laugh. Clara isn’t emotionally attached to Lily so can’t be bullied. This dynamic brings enough tension but soon WW1 will cut a swathe through the men of the village bringing fear and loss in its wake. 

Lily made me furious. Her sly nature is infuriating, always listening where she shouldn’t be and snooping in other people’s things. She seems to struggle with empathy, unable to see what her actions might do to others. Despite keeping her own artefacts of a time when the family were whole, she doesn’t recognise other people’s attachment to keepsakes. She’s quite happy to destroy things if she can’t have her way. John is unsure what to do in order to help Eleanor, if they’re to have a future things must change, but how to bring that about without making things worse? It may not be possible for Eleanor to sever her ties as her sister’s carer. Maybe he will have to come to them and get to know Lily. He doesn’t want Eleanor to think he doesn’t care about her sister, but equally he needs Lily to understand that he’s going to be in Eleanor’s life, whatever that takes. However, when pushed, Lily can be incredibly spiteful and destructive. It’s this selfish streak that sees her making reckless and desperate choices. The only times when we see the girl in Eleanor is when she’s with Clara and their shared history gives us all those elements of female friendship that mean so much – the shared jokes and memories, but also the support both physical and emotional. Eleanor may be in love but it’s Clara who fully knows her and will always hold her up when she can’t support herself. All of these women are trapped: Lily by her memories and fears, Clara by her marriage and Eleanor by Lily and the empty hospital she continues to maintain to her father’s standards. It’s almost a shrine to the dreams of those they’ve lost. Then there’s the isolation of the fen, trapped between salt marsh and the river.

War brings different experiences for Clara and Eleanor, especially when Frank joins up early. It’s like spring comes to Clara’s house because the children can play and make noise, she can run the house in a more relaxed way. She can pop over to sit with Lily giving John and Eleanor some freedom too. John’s is a reserved occupation so he doesn’t have to join up straight away. However, these golden times are short lived. It isn’t long before injury, shell shock and even death reach the village and it’s very hard for any of the women to understand their husband’s or brother’s experiences. Through the male characters we see every consequence of fighting for your country. Meanwhile the women are trying to produce food and help on the land. Even to this day, the fen area of the county still produces huge amounts of vegetable produce, as well as potatoes and flowers. To keep crops growing the farmers need labourers and one solution comes in the form of a prisoner of war camp, situated on the site of the old port, directly opposite Eleanor and Lily. The POWs are mainly German soldiers, who will bunk in cabins and work the fields. The author beautifully shows the tensions between prisoners and those men who’ve been fighting overseas. As a dreaded black edged letter arrives, grief now joins domestic violence, manipulation and alcohol issues. This family is set for an explosive reckoning. I became so attached to these women and their family’s tragic history that I read it so quickly. I already know I will go back and read it again though. Every element – character, setting, plot – is beautifully done and the historical background took me back to a time when my own grandparents would have been working the land and living next to the River Trent further north in the county. This is an excellent debut from Rachel Canwell that had me utterly absorbed and feeling every emotion alongside her characters.

Out now from Northodox Press

Meet the Author

For those close by Rachel will be appearing at Lindum Books on the Bailgate in Lincoln on Saturday 21st Feb from 10.30am

https://www.visitlincoln.com/event/author-shop-signing-rachel-canwell%3B-paper-sisters/104373101/

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Blank Canvas by Grace Murray 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Introducing an outstanding new voice in literary fiction: a sensual, sharp, and utterly compelling campus novel about grief, reinvention, and the ripple effects of telling lies

If I ever woke up with an ungodly dread ― that I could change it all now, turn around, and confess ― I ignored it. I had never been good, and there was no point in trying now.

On a small liberal arts campus in upstate New York, Charlotte begins her final year with a lie. Her father died over the summer, she says. Heart attack. Very sudden.

Charlotte had never been close with her classmates but as she repeats her tale, their expressions soften into kindness. And so she learns there are things worth lying for: attention, affection, and, as she embarks on a relationship with fellow student Katarina, even love. All she needs to do is keep control of the threads that hold her lie – and her life – together.

But six thousand miles away, alone in the grey two-up-two-down Staffordshire terrace she grew up in, her father is very much alive, watching television and drinking beer. Charlotte has always kept difficult truths at arm’s length, but his resolve to visit his distant daughter might just be the one thing she can’t control?

I found myself unsure who to like in this novel about a student on a liberal arts campus, but I became drawn in by the tangle of lies and complicated emotions around Charlotte and her relationship with Katarina. When Charlotte first sees Katarina on campus she’s not impressed and describes some aspects of her as ugly, but I thought she became fascinated by Katarina’s confidence. This stands out in the work she’s producing and her very clear sense of who she is, she also seems to make friends easily, whereas Charlotte is something of a loner. When they first meet Katarina has a lot of opinions, likening the TV show ‘Married at First Sight’ to our ancestors enjoyment of public executions. She sees no distinction between high and low forms of art. Katarina is an artist who has no trouble in taking her work seriously, whereas Charlotte is full of doubts and struggles to meet the workload. Charlotte doesn’t really know who she is: in the car she checks whether Katarina likes a song before confirming that she likes it too; she starts to dress like Katarina and notices her wardrobe has become ‘theirs’. It’s also clear that she feels different and dislocated from a sense of family, as she notices Katarina’s lock screen on her phone where she and her mother are hugging and smiling for the camera she thinks they look like ‘catalogue people, entirely unreal’. When Katarina and her friends ask about her own family she tells them family life was turbulent, she was uprooted from schools and moved around a lot. She also tells them her father died over the summer. Of course this brings sympathy and less questions, but Tamsyn mentions her misgivings to Katarina: 

“If my dad were gone […] I’d feel insane. Totally scooped out. I wouldn’t be able to chill or smile, or fuck or anything.” 

Charlotte tells Katarina that Tamsyn can’t cope with someone’s grief response being different to her own. Even though Charlotte seems attached to Katarina, she says things that suggest she’s just playing out the role of girlfriend rather than actually being present. There are things she doesn’t like about Katarina, in fact she finds some behaviours disgusting, but pushes the thoughts to the back of her mind. As she analyses how she feels she does mention that she loves her – “in a way. The only way I could”. What she has learned is that her story of her father’s sudden heart attack makes people soften towards her and treat her nicely. Although that comes with its own problems, when the following summer Katarina finds them a working stay in Italy. As they’re fed by Guilia and do the work on her smallholding she finds a sense of peace and even contentment, but she doesn’t know how to process or enjoy these positive emotions.

“There was something bottomless about being content. I knew other emotions well, sought them out. I knew how to be in them, occupy them and how to cover them up, so they looked like something else, all wrapped and packaged.” 

Her need to be so tightly controlled is being tested and there may be something else she can’t control. The father she has buried and mourned in her head has been concerned about the growing distance between him and his daughter. He could simply book an AirBnB and fly out to see her, meet her friends and have a catch up. I felt Charlotte’s tension as she tries to control her every response and remember the lies she has told before and be consistent. I was waiting for everything to collapse and found myself concerned about what that might do to her mental health. I also felt for her father, who comes across as a loving and kind man. I found myself wondering whether her lie was rooted in repressed feelings around her dad. What was she angry about and what had happened in her childhood to leave her with no sense of who she is or what she is worth? During the last third of the book we find the answers to these questions, bringing that hopefulness to the book that began to creep in during their time in Italy. Not only does Charlotte have to deal with the consequences of her lies, she must face the reasons she started to tell them in the first place. This was where I started to feel some emotion for her and I think other readers will too. When I used to work with clients, I would use the brick wall analogy. If the wall is unstable, the builder must take it back brick by brick to where the problem begins and fix it before rebuilding. That’s what Charlotte must now do and I had hopes that she would reconcile with her father, find some inspiration for her final art piece and most of all find her sense of self. 

I was impressed by the author’s depiction of Charlotte’s fragile mental state and sense of self. The novel asks all sorts of questions about what makes us who we are – is it the things we like, the people who love us, our achievements or is there a solid, innate character that determines all these things? Is our sense of who we are fixed and unchanging or is it more fluid? The background of university and Charlotte’s choice of a creative subject is interesting because we create and generate ideas that show aspects of our self and the times we live in. One of the tutors explains this by showing his students a female face that can be seen reproduced in many different ways through centuries and art movements, but it is eventually revealed to be variations on the Madonna. He tells his students that every image is the ghost of all the words and pictures that come before it and that is also true of us. The self we are today is the result of every thing, person or experience we’ve ever known, good or bad. It is only by stripping back and rebuilding, accepting all the parts of our self – even the parts or experiences we don’t like and have caused us pain – that we can be content. In that journey, Charlotte might finally be able to create something she can own and be proud of. 

Meet the Author

Grace Murray was born in 2003 and grew up in Norwich. She has recently graduated from Edinburgh University, where she read English Literature and found time to write between her studies and two part-time jobs. Her short fiction has been published in The London Magazine.


In writing Blank Canvas, Grace set out to explore themes of Catholic guilt and queer identity, clashing moral codes and lies, and the opportunity for reinvention presented by moving between countries and settings. Blank Canvas was written over the course of a year as part of WriteNow, Penguin Random House’s flagship mentorship scheme for emerging talent. Grace Murray won one of nine places on the scheme on the exceptional strength of her writing, selected from a pool of over 1,300 applicants.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Winter by Val McDermid 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Winter is the time to snuggle indoors without guilt; to curl up on the sofa with a good book or a box set, a hot drink or a wee whisky to hand.

Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for winter: the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the vivid skies over the Firth of Forth, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks.

In Winter, she takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. She remembers winters from childhood, the thrill of whizzing over a frozen lake on skates, carving a ‘neep’ (swede) for Halloween and being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square, lights twinkling bravely in the dark Scottish winter night.

I was really interested to read Val McDermid’s Winter because I feel like it’s such a maligned season and it’s one that I enjoy. I’m a big fan of cozying up by the log burner with a mug of tea and a great book or film. I love crisp mornings where your cheeks feel pinched and seeing your own breath is still a novelty. I find myself able to do more in Winter, because somehow I feel invigorated by the cooler weather. I love winter festivals like Bonfire Night and a proper long Christmas – the full twelve days. It was joyous to find someone else who is able to enjoy winter in the same way I do and this book is definitely a celebration of the season I hear a lot of moans and groans about. Using creative non-fiction Val takes us through her favourite elements of winter in Scotland touching on nature, local customs and the memories they bring, as well as the comfort of resting and enjoying winter food. 

The narrative was personal and very intimate too, like a stroll with a wise and knowledgable friend. There’s also a forthrightness in her character that I relished. One of my favourite things was her idea of being in step with the season because it’s an important part of how I live my life. I think we are part of an earth that has its rhythms and tides so it’s better for our wellbeing if we live with what our season and body tells us to. This season tells us to eat hearty stews and soups. It tells us to hibernate like bears – nights in watching films with a fire and sofa blankets. It tells us to gather with friends and celebrate light shining in the darkness. Whether we celebrate Hanukkah, the winter solstice, Christmas, Diwali or enjoy a good burn up on Bonfire Night it’s about lighting up the darker months and staving off the melancholy that can come in winter. Val tells us about Scottish traditions of carving turnips at Halloween and the incredible sight of the Norse festival Up Helly Aa which takes place across several islands in January, culminating in the Lerwick torch lit procession which is a real spectacle. I felt nostalgic for a time when the twelve days of Yule were just that and concluded with Twelfth Night festivities where the Lord of Misrule takes charge for a few hours. It was this and the Orkney Christmas Day tradition of The Ba’ that remind me of an old tradition called the Haxey Hood that at least three generations of my family participated in. It takes place on January 6th every year in the small village of Haxey in the Isle of Axholme. There is a Lord of Misrule and a Lady who drops her leather hood so two competing teams can play a long, arduous game to return it. The two teams have to get it back to whichever village pub they play for and it can carry on till nightfall. It’s best described as a cross between rugby and tug of war and results in a few hundred sweaty and muddy men either celebrating or commiserating in the pub. 

My dad’s days of playing are over now but I loved that it elongated Christmas into January and I still keep to that tradition – in fact I can get quite grumpy when people ask me how my Christmas was when it’s Boxing Day! Or when I see people on Facebook who have their tree back in the loft on the 27th December. I spend the whole week saying ‘it’s still Christmas!’ I also get annoyed when people announce a diet on New Year’s Day! What a ridiculous idea it is to diet when our bodies are naturally telling us to eat as if we’re hibernating and there’s a mountain of Christmas food left to eat. Spring is the obvious time for renewal and rebirth, the perfect time to start new resolutions. We should be slower instead of wishing our lives away. We should stop and listen to what the season and our bodies are telling us, instead of being regulated by what’s in the supermarket. I found myself having these dialogues with the author in my head and I can easily see how I’d use the book as prompts for writing therapy. She tells us about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, a February festival, and it reminded me of the carnival and a particular February week in Venice when it unexpectedly snowed. It was magical and there was an excitement in the air as soon as we woke up. Someone had built a snowman outside with olive tree branches for arms and we walked to Florian, the famous cafe on St Mark’s Square and had a very indulgent afternoon tea and a hot chocolate that was thick, silky and warmed me to my boots. 

It’s impossible to read or write a review of this beautiful little book without it conjuring up memories of your own. The illustrations are beautiful too and complement the writing perfectly. It felt like sharing winter memories with a friend and Val’s love of puffins has further cemented her place at my fantasy dinner party. The narrative rambles but it works, perfectly echoing her plea for a steadier and quieter pace of life in this season. Her writing style is lyrical and she draws you into something as simple as a winter walk, a skill I’ve always loved in her crime fiction. It’s perfect for keeping by the bed and dipping in and out of, rather like poetry. I was taken back to childhood and felt like I was given permission to claim this season for resting, relaxing and taking stock of- something I tend to do in that odd week of ‘betwixtmas’. I believe that the more we can go with the natural world rather than allowing the media, retail industry and other people to set our rhythms, then the healthier we’ll be mentally. Celebrate this season, relish its festivals and that Scandinavian hygge that we all read about a few years ago. If we accept this season for what it is, instead of wishing it was something else then we’ll be a lot happier. If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas present for a reader in your life then this is the perfect option. 

Meet the Author

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Appointment In Paris by Jane Thynne 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

1938. Stella Fry is walking home from her job at the film institute and surprised to find a crowd gathered near her home. It’s clear there’s been an accident, but when Stella enquires she’s shocked at the reply. ‘It’s someone called Stella Fry’ a woman whispers and with great presence of mind she doesn’t identify herself. She simply turns and walks away, thinking that Harry Fox is involved. After a night on the sofa at her friend’s flat she’s deciding what to do next when she’s called in for an assignment with Harry Fox, who she’s worked with before. This is a very sensitive case, looking into the death of a man at the POW camp at Trent Park. A man wearing Luftwaffe uniform was found dead in the grounds with a gunshot wound. It’s vital to know what’s happened because Trent Park isn’t just a POW camp, it’s a huge intelligence gathering centre and one of their listeners has gone missing. Stella is enrolled in the ATS to become a ‘listener’ at Trent Park. She will join other German speakers, listening to cellmates through state of the art microphones. The women are recording and transcribing anything of interest and sending it up the chain. It’s an important tool to learn about Nazi positions, their plans to invade Western Europe and their treatment of Jewish communities. However, Stella must also listen to her colleagues, because they have no idea where the murder weapon came from and there is a possibility that the missing operative has been turned. There’s also intelligence about three German spies living within the immigrant community close by. Harry will be on the trail of the spies which brings Lieselotte Edelman into his path, a beautiful young Jewish woman who fled her own country before war broke out. Could she be a spy and could Harry’s desire for her cloud his judgement about her true purpose? 

This is an interesting thriller based on true events and the second to feature Harry and Stella as a team, although this time they’ll be working different lines of enquiry on the same case. Stella comes across as the ideal operative, she blends in well and seems to secure people’s confidences very easily. She’s competent and able to keep secrets, even from those closest to her. As for her own feelings, they’re a little more complicated. She has feelings for her best friend’s brother but he’s become engaged to an American he met through the Kennedy family. Harry also has complex feelings. I wondered how he felt about Stella, but would he ever be able to admit to it? He seems to enjoy his bachelor lifestyle and never gets caught up with one woman. Both take comfort from people they meet in the course of their investigation, but these are war time affairs belonging to people who pass in the night never to be seen again. 

I found the psychological dynamics at Trent Park really interesting. The POWs are treated very well, but that’s designed to lull them into a false sense of security. If they’re treated well and have some freedoms they’ll never imagine that their every word is being scrutinised. One man observes that Stella’s job reminds him of the Nietzsche quote that’s the book’s preface – when we look into the abyss the abyss also looks into us. It’s easy to think their inmates are just ordinary men forced into fighting for their country and some are, but others are sadists and enjoy exerting their power over civilians. The stories of beatings, rapes, casual slaughter and the mistreatment of Jews is horrifying. It shows how people’s basest instincts are woken up and distorted by power. Listening to this everyday must chip away at the transcribers as they process these horrors from German into English. I was utterly drawn into this because it’s a very heightened version of working with in the mental health sector, listening to the worst things that have happened to people takes its toll and it’s vital to take breaks and even extended leave in order to do the job well. I wondered how people coped with the roles they were forced to take during the war and whether we would be equally selfless. My grandad missed the war but did his National Service in Germany in the aftermath and I know what he saw affected him. I can’t imagine how a country heals after such horrific events. Those ordinary people who turned on their Jewish neighbours must suffer from terrible guilt when the full truth emerges, whether they believed the propaganda or participated to save their own skin. I was sure that the truth lay somewhere in this sea of human suffering and I was sure Stella would find it. 

I found Stella’s narrative more compelling than Harry’s, possibly because the historical detail and background were so brilliant. Harry js delving into the criminal underworld on the trail of a gun as well as the spies but Stella’s narrative takes us to Paris as the Nazis are on the verge of invading and taking control. The author really captures the sense of fear and disbelief combined, there’s a sense of unreality as if it could never happen to them. It’s something I feel personally with the rise in far-right politics. We always think it couldn’t happen again or it couldn’t happen here, but it can. It’s very tense as Stella gets closer to the man she needs to bring in, but also make sure she gets out of Paris in time. Another feeling the author captured beautifully was the nostalgia for a time before the war, for Stella it’s a party she attended at Trent Park as she is falling in love with her friend’s brother. Since then they’ve both had roles to fulfil and perhaps sacrificed happiness for duty, it’s the story of many people who missed their chance or passed only briefly, never to see each other again. When Harry and Stella are together they’re a formidable team and there is just a tiny hint of chemistry. This was a great historical mystery and I’m very curious to know where this team go next. 

Meet the Author

Jayne has a passion for historical fiction and loves the research that involves. The first in her Clara Vine series, Black Roses, became a number One Kindle Bestseller. In the UK the series is published by Simon & Schuster. Outside Britain, my novels have been translated into French, German, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish and Italian. In France the series is published by J.C Lattes and in Greece by Kedros. In the US and Canada the series is published by Random House. The TV rights have been optioned by Hillbilly Films who are producing the pilot for an eight part series.

The Words I Never Wrote is published in the US by Ballantine and in the UK by Sharpe Books.

I have also written two alternative history novels under the pen name C.J. Carey, Widowland and Queen High (published in the US by Sourcebooks as The American Queen). I chose that pseudonym because it’s a reversal of my own initials, coupled with my mother’s maiden name. In the UK, the novels are published by Quercus and in France by J C Lattès.

My most recent novels, the Fox and Fry series, feature Harry Fox, a suspended MI5 surveillance operative, and Stella Fry, a former tutor, who are thrown together to solve mysterious murders on the eve of WW2. Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris are both published by Quercus.

As well as writing books I freelance as a journalist, writing regularly for numerous British magazines and newspapers, and also appear as a broadcaster on Radio 4 and Sky. I have been a guest reader at the Arvon Foundation and sat on the broadcasting committee of the Society of Authors. I’m a patron of the Wimbledon Bookfest and live in London.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Silent Bones by Val McDermid 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

It’s delightful to be back in the hands of a consummate storyteller like Val McDermid and to be reading with my fellow Squad Pod friends. She takes us straight into the story and I always feel like her characters are real people going about their business and we just drop into their world from time to time. Here the Historic Cases Unit are working two cases: the death of a high-end hotel manager and the identity of a body found after a landslip in heavy rain on the M73. Tom Jamieson’s death is flagged up by his brother in New Zealand. Thought to be an accidental death, Tom’s brother has footage that shows someone was behind Tom as he left the hotel after his shift and in the staircase where he met his death. If this man entered the steps after Tom and can be seen exiting then he must at least have seen Tom’s fall, or is there a more sinister explanation? The body in the M73 has to have been placed there deliberately. It turns out to be the body of investigative journalist Sam Nimmo, thought to have killed his pregnant girlfriend Rachel before going on the run about eleven years ago. The discovery opens up her murder case as well as Sam’s. I was hooked by the evidence that leads to a secretive book club of successful men who meet once a month in Edinburgh. They’re named the Justified Sinners, alluding to a James Hogg book that’s based on the Calvinist principle that once a person is ‘saved’ they can commit any sin, even murder, and still enter the kingdom of heaven. Is this a joke between literary friends or something more more? Have they stumbled upon an unofficial Freemasons’ club where the members share business tips and inside knowledge? The team start to wonder about the potential benefits of becoming one of the twelve members and whether those benefits are worth subterfuge or even criminal acts. 

Every time I pick up one of the books in this series the same thing happens. I start off slowly, savouring each chapter until about halfway, then I’m racing all the way to the end. It’s superbly plotted, creating a build-up of tension through the short chapters. Each chapter flits to a different viewpoint or separate lead in the cases, causing cliffhangers that last for three or four chapters. This means ‘just one chapter’ at bedtime becomes just three more and finally – I may as well finish. As we near the end of the book those revelations come thick and fast and I had to keep reading till I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I loved the red herrings thrown up in Sam Nimmo’s case as they try to find out what story he was working on. Every lead has to be followed and Jason is tireless on his match fixing leads but is this the story that got Sam killed? The political intrigue is as always murky and fascinating. Between the Independence Referendum and COVID there are plenty of possibilities for corruption and cover-ups. 

What I love most about Karen is her tenacity and absolute belief in her own skills as a police officer. She knows she’s a good detective and believes in the team she’s built, even if Jason and Daisy do bicker and become competitive. She knows how to use their skills and how much free rein to give them. I loved her conversations with the boss, the Fruit Gum and other men who outrank her. She doesn’t allow them any room for misogyny or sexism. When she’s told mockingly that the force can do better than rely on ‘women’s intuition’, she’s quick to tell him that it’s no different from a hunch or copper’s nose, a phrase male officers use frequently. She also won’t be bulldozed into moving their office, stating that it would mean longer commutes and distance from the research and forensic teams they rely on most. She also pushes for what she wants in the course of the investigation. When she doorsteps the Justified Sinners, their facilitator mentions they have plenty of pull with the Chief Constable who calls Karen and tells her to back off. She insists on him supplying a list of members before she does and even follows up in the morning to make sure she wasn’t fobbed off. Even in her private life she’s very sure of what she needs. She is still involved with Syrian refugee Rafiq who’s currently working as a surgeon in Canada. With British and US politics ‘beyond satire’ and political funding becoming ever more shady Karen does worry about their future. She’s flown to Montreal several times but she can’t wait until he has Canadian citizenship and can visit Scotland again, maybe even returning for good at some point. When she has a heartbreaking choice to make she faces it by staying true to herself, because she can be romantic but has a hefty dose of realism too. She can also be ruthless, at one point perhaps a little too ruthless for a softy like me. She has her eye on the end goal, not the other person’s feelings because in her eyes the end justifies the means. The truth is not found by treading lightly. 

I enjoyed getting to know more about Daisy and Jason’s home lives and it’s here where a bit of humour creeps in. Jason and Meera’s stake-out of a football match with the aftermath being a ‘follow that cab’ tour of Scotland’s motorways made me smile. Especially when the reward that clinched Meera’s attendance was a match day pie. Food looms large in Daisy and Stephanie’s relationship too, in fact Daisy eats so much that Jason is sure she has a tapeworm. That’s not a problem for Daisy, in fact she ponders that it might be the only thing that ensures she stays thin. She’s always scoring leftovers from lunches out and between Italian biscuits, french pastries and the South Indian curry that lures a suspect out of hiding I kept feeling hungry. All of this is to balance the darkness at the heart of these cases, where we see powerful and rich people doing what they like, safe in the knowledge that their status and privilege will always protect them from answering to their crimes. It’s also set in dark times and the weariness Karen feels about what’s happening in the world is something I’ve felt myself for the last couple of years, finding myself thinking the world can’t get any worse. Not only is a sex offending, fraudulent, narcissist running the biggest country in the world, but we have politicians here happy to emulate him. The book is rooted firmly in the now with cancel culture, the MeToo movement, the Covid pandemic and all the corruption surrounding it, as well as the cost of living crisis all pertinent to these cases. I think the team are feeling overwhelmed, even without the quagmire surrounding the Justified Sinners and Sam’s quest for the truth. Some characters did behave unpredictably, just like they do in life. The outcome isn’t straightforward and there were people to blame that I genuinely didn’t expect. This is an enthralling read from a writer at the very top of her game. Someone who knows exactly how to pitch a story and keep the reader engrossed until the final pages. She knows that the joy of a book is in the journey not just those final revelations and that sometimes we don’t get the answers we expect and it’s a better read for that.

Out on 23rd October from Sphere

Meet the Author

Val McDermid is a number one bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold over eighteen million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the LA Times Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010 and received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award in 2011. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and in 2017 received the DIVA Literary Prize for Crime, and was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Val has served as a judge for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize, and was Chair of the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She writes full-time and divides her time between Edinburgh and East Neuk of Fife.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Watching You by Helen Fields

Posted on by thelotusreaders

A few of Helen Field’s characters come together in this gripping novel that starts with someone being stalked in Jupiter Artland, the park where Laura Ford’s ‘Weeping Girls’ statues are situated. They become the only witnesses to an unspeakable act. It’s a great setting for a murder with five sculptures, each one of a little girl weeping in different poses. I’m a lover of public art but these are genuinely creepy and have an uncanny quality to them. I can’t think of a more fitting place to be hit with a shovel and buried alive – one of my worst ever fears. It’s a bold beginning and we get three more murders like this, each with a narrator who sounds almost bored and melancholy. It’s as if they’re present, able to recount every detail, but detached at the same time. They’re the literary equivalent of the archetypal TV pathologist weighing a pair of lungs one moment and eating a sandwich the next. It’s clear that Lively, Salter and the MIT have a serial killer on their hands but with each murder so different, how will they build a case? Superintendent Overbeck engages Dr Connie Woolwine to profile the killer and run the investigation, but it does seem to the team that the crimes and potential suspect don’t fully fit. 

The story has several threads, each focusing on different characters. We go back a few years to a young artist named Molly who is being stalked and harassed with even parcels of rotting fruit and maggots turning up on her doorstep. She feels watched when outside and inside she is harassed by parcels and online rumours, or even worse deep fake videos. There’s the usual porn, but stranger and more sinister scenarios like her hurting an animal. It’s taken a toll on her mental health and her career. With the police unable to help she sinks further. We also have a character called Karl Smith, a carer for his father who had a stroke not long after his wife had a cardiac arrest. While surgeon Beth Waterfall tries everything to save her she dies on the operating table. So when his complaint against the hospital isn’t upheld Karl starts to see his mother. It’s mainly at home and she’s very unsettling. She’s clearly never been a nice woman to her son. She is a grotesque figure who Karl finds repellent. Not only is she unkempt and smelly, she likes to unsettle Karl by sitting very close and wafting her rotten breath into his face. She is cruel and determined that he keep up his campaign against Beth Waterfall. DI Sam Lively watches Beth try to save one of the victims, a homeless man with multiple stab wounds, and they strike up a friendship and a fledgling relationship. So when Sam receives a wound to his neck and it’s Beth that treats him, she takes him home afterwards to recover. It’s a gentle romance that works really well and he finds out Beth had a daughter, who took her own life after a campaign of stalking and harassment. The puzzle pieces are coming together, but I knew there would still be some surprises in store and I was gripped, waiting to find out if my suspicions were right. Desperately hoping they weren’t. 

Dr Connie Woolwine is an acquired taste, but is always fascinating. Here I could see how she could really get under the skin of both suspects and colleagues. Brodie accuses her of snobbery, but it’s not that simple. Connie seems to relish having her suspicions about someone, then having them confirmed. She often tells people what she thinks without considering their reaction and it’s this compulsion to see what makes someone tick that might come across as thinking she knows better. It’s not a class snobbery, it’s an intellectual snobbery. I just love working people out, because the complexities of our brains are simply amazing. I’ve recently been reading up on Functional Neurological Disorder where neurological symptoms are present in the patient, without any disease activity. It’s as if the brain simply forgets how to send and receive messages from certain parts of body but without any of the disease activity common to neurological diseases like MS or Parkinson’s Disease. Symptoms range from functional weakness in a limb, to dramatic paralysis and seizures. It’s amazing how powerful the brain is and how it can be doing something so disabling in the background without knowing why, although it’s thought that the brain processes might mental stress or trauma as physical pain. However, this is nothing compared to Connie’s findings about the brain producing a brilliant twist at the end. I’m always pulled in two directions with Connie, she’s utterly brilliant but more than a little odd (talking to corpses) and manipulative, particularly where Brodie is concerned. She knows the power she has over him, but isn’t honest about it. She seems to fully relax and be herself when she visits Midnight, who is living a bucolic existence in Devon with her sister Dawn who has CP. With Dawn, ‘Wooly’ can drop her ‘therapist’s demeanour’ and just be in the moment. Dawn has no guile and has never learned to hide her emotions.

There’s some heart-stopping action here, especially in the finale which is brilliant. Salter and Connie are quite the team, with Salter able to jump in and secure a suspect while Connie has them otherwise engaged. I love that Helen’s female characters are mothers, carers and wives, whilst also competent at work, even formidable. Overbeck is brilliant, always holding MIT to a high standard, ready with a stern talking to and wears three inch heels all day! She tells Connie she’ll give her the name of the her nail technician because her nails are disgusting and it did make me smile. It’s a novelty to see Connie on the back foot for a change. The murder scenes are genuinely scary or moving. I was especially affected by the murder of Mrs Singh who is a lonely older lady, the victim of her own success. She made the huge move from India to Scotland in the hope of her children having a better life and he does, but that means they’re usually far away from you. She describes a boy who grew up with a Scottish accent, as if he was already moving away from her. The many pictures of her grandchildren attest to the distant between them. Her death is brutal and desperately sad. I loved how Helen brought all the puzzle parts together, despite such disparate victims who had nothing in common, not even their deaths. I could see Karl Smith had a rage in him but it mainly seemed to be for his own parents, could he be murdering complete strangers? I became more addicted as the novel went on until last night when I couldn’t leave the last few chapters and stayed up till 2am. Now I keep falling asleep. This is such a psychologically fascinating thriller that’s given me lots of side reading to keep up with Connie’s final verdicts. I can’t wait to see where she and Brodie end up next. 

Out now from Avon Books

Meet the Author

A Sunday Times and million copy best-selling author, Helen is a former criminal and family law barrister. Every book in the Callanach series has claimed an Amazon #1 bestseller flag. ‘Perfect Kill’ was longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in 2020, and others have been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize, Scottish crime novel of the year. Helen also writes as HS Chandler, and has released legal thriller ‘Degrees of Guilt’. In 2020 Perfect Remains was shortlisted for the Bronze Bat, Dutch debut crime novel of the year. In 2022, Helen was nominated for Best Crime Novel and Best Author in the Netherlands. Now translated into more than 20 languages, and also selling in the USA, Canada & Australasia, Helen’s books have won global recognition. She has written standalone novels, The Institution, The Last Girl To Die, These Lost & Broken Things and The Shadow Man. She regularly commutes between West Sussex, USA and Scotland. Helen can be found on X @Helen_Fields