Tag: Book Review

Posted in Personal Purchase

It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

It was the night she almost died.

Newly divorced and feeling a little lost, Jane Trevally agrees to accompany a man she doesn’t know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath.

She’s offered a drink. She steps inside.

And then she hears a scream.

Jane runs.

Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a dog who’s been found near her home. A dog whose owner has just been reported missing.

A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house’s secrets – secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.

And she can’t stop thinking:

It could have been her . . 

Lisa Jewell really is a must buy author. I can’t remember a time when I was disappointed by one of her novels and as she mentions in the acknowledgements, this is her twenty fourth! I gelled with the main character Jane very quickly, perhaps because I related to her a little bit. I don’t have a mansion house, but I do have rescue animals, step-children and a similar turn of phrase – a couple of her lines genuinely made me laugh out loud. I never expected to hear the line “with all due respect, Stuart, I’m not sure what could actually be worse than Daisy being abused by a pervert dressed as a clown.” It’s also a good point to mention that I actually hate clowns. Hate them all. They scare me. I don’t like masks, mime artists or anything else where someone is trying to change their face. This might have been the reason I found this novel particularly creepy. Jane comes across as an independent, forthright and opinionated woman of middling age and I loved those qualities in her. Basically she’s the perfect investigator because she’s quite happy to ask uncomfortable questions and to suspect the worst of people, although I don’t think she imagined returning a lost west highland terrier would lead her into the darkness of the Black family. Under her exterior she has a big heart and whether it’s her rescue dogs or her step-children she’s always there, especially for Dexter who she spends a lot of time with. When she comes across the strange disappearance of a young girl called Daisy from a local AirBnB she didn’t imagine taking a step back into her past and the house she fled from many years ago. 

This particular house is a brilliant setting, residing in a quirky little part of London called the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath. I had to look it up because it sounded so odd and fell in love, because it’s almost like a village within a city. The house Jane is looking for is at the far end of a lane and quite isolated, but Jane knows it as soon as she arrives and meets a man called Stuart who lives there with a woman called Jessamine Black, Daisy’s mother. She’s worried that Daisy hasn’t returned home or to the house she rented to revise for her exams. There’s Déjà vu for Jane as she sits on the same sofa she sat on years before, because nothing much has changed here. Of course our houses do tend to represent us and they often stand in for our bodies when we dream about them – the attic in particular standing in for our psychological state. This doesn’t bode well for this family because the house is untidy and unloved. Being nosey, Jane sees that Stuart has left a drawer slightly open she peers inside. There are the secateurs he was looking for, but also some handcuffs, white leather gloves and a plastic clown mask. Needless to say I’d be back on a train before that drawer was closed. From there Jane is hooked and gets the chance to house sit for a friend in London so she can follow up on Daisy and her hunch that something very dark has happened in that house and the family that live there. 

Though Jane is our main protagonist we have flashback chapters from Stuart’s perspective and we see how he meets Daisy’s mother Jessamine at his local pub. Stuart has been homeless for many years, but has been living in a coveted spot in a squat with several other people. He’s noticed Jessamine a couple of times and there’s something winsome about her big eyes and waif-like frame, but he realises very quickly that she has a drink problem. Always arriving immaculate at opening time and then slowly becoming more messy as it gets towards the end of the school day as she seems to scurry off to be at the school gates. When she becomes very unsteady on her feet one day Stuart turns Good Samaritan and helps her to get home. This is how he ends up meeting her daughter Daisy and takes Jessamine up on her offer to stay, which he does for a few days. As these flashbacks continue we see that Jessamine is not the victim Stuart originally thought she was. She has the ability to be neglectful of her daughter, prioritising alcohol and is surprisingly manipulative. Stuart is surprised that Jessamine’s mother doesn’t say anything to her daughter and he wonders if he’s imagining that something is off about her too. There’s a total lack of accountability, particularly from Jessamine who at one point tries to cut off his ear, then saying “I know I’m a handful” like she’s bought another pair of shoes or had one too many at a hen night. When Stuart comes under pressure to return to the squat or lose his space he decides to return, but will Jessamine agree to that and what might she do to ensure he stays? Jane realises he has largely been there for Daisy and while he has been a great stepfather, he has enabled Jessamine. It’s as if everyone in the house turns a blind eye to the issue and he worries she will drink herself to death. He’s also found some things disturbing. He doesn’t know who Daisy’s father is, but no one else seems to know either. In the outhouse there are metal rings attached to the walls and a chair, as if someone has been chained up there. There’s a room upstairs referred to as the au pair’s room, but there hasn’t been an au pair for some time and no one talks about Jessamine’s father or brother either. The family story is that the brother ran away to join the circus and Jane is wondering if he is the clown? Like Stuart she’s starting to wonder about this family and their generational trauma.  

This is a great plot, revealed deliciously slowly as Jane begins to realise that other women have gone missing in that part of Hampstead Heath. She and Dexter put their heads together and start to investigate in earnest, unearthing photos of the missing women and several incidents across the country involving a clown. Dealing with those allegations send to her to drink, asking Dexter to fix her anything that “will take the edge off the thought of that tiny masked clown pulling a scarf out of a woman’s ear in a car park with a hard-on.” Another laugh out loud moment. Jane relates to Daisy struggling to survive in this dysfunctional family, because she did too. Her parents neglected her and her brother until they were malnourished and practically feral. This is probably why she takes her role as a stepmother so seriously, she knows what it’s like to have no one from a very young age. I thought the twists and turns were done so well here, paced beautifully and not rushed as they sometimes are in thrillers. I read the end and felt satisfied, like every question had been answered and I wasn’t having to turn back through the pages and read it again to be sure I’d understood who’d done what.  Nevertheless I still managed to devour it in a couple of days and I’m sure you will too. This is as thriller that comes highly recommended for it’s grasp of family dynamics and psychology of trauma, but I fear I will always be on alert for tiny little clowns from now on.                                                          

Meet the Author

LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.

Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs, The Family Remains and The Night She Disappeared, all of which were Richard & Judy Book Club picks.

Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over thirty languages. She lives in north London with her husband and two daughters.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Under Story by Chloe Benjamin 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

WHAT IF TOMORROW WAS ALREADY WRITTEN, BUT YESTERDAY WAS YOURS TO CHANGE?

At an isolated research station in Antarctica, biologist Laurel Salter washes dishes for a living ten hours a day, six days a week. She tells no one why she left her career, or why her marriage ended.

But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo, her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind.

Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them – to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?

And this time, live it differently.

Once read, never forgotten, Under Story is a genre-defying exploration of the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love.

This is my book of the year so far and I can’t stop talking about it. I’d read it on NetGalley in the spring and I was desperate to review but it felt too early. So when I found out my fellow squadettes were reading this in August I had to join in. I was quite simply blown away by this complex and beautiful story of science, loss and second chances. I still think about it all the time. Our heroine Laurel is a scientist, studying fungus and how it grows but for some reason that isn’t clear at first, she’s on a research station in the Antarctic, away from her former husband Eli and without any fungus in sight. When she develops a fascination in the Arc that appears above the pole she thinks about its significance, but when she becomes aware there is a matching basin underneath the water, her imagination becomes fired. Could this possibly be a portal? A gateway to a different world? She knows Eli won’t be far behind her because she remembers his theory of the ‘duoverse’, the idea that at the moment of the big bang time and space was formed in two directions: our universe, the planets and the development of the world we know and in the other direction it’s complete opposite. I am not a scientist, in fact I barely have GCSE Biology, so I wasn’t aware of any background to this idea so could drift with it and enjoy two incredible minds exploring ideas. I was fascinated with Laurel’s experiments with fungus growing in a maze and whether it moved in a specific direction. She was disappointed to find it tried out all routes then doubled back on itself, but then a second batch made straight for the right route as if it had learned from the previous batch’s mistakes. It felt like a demonstration of Jung’s collective consciousness:

“Ideas spread and somehow we’re all plugged into them.”

I often feel this about ideas, like when several books come out on the same subject at once. It reminded me of something I’ve read before – that ideas are hanging in the air and if we don’t grab them someone else will. As Laurel presents her paper at conference she’s asked some particularly tough questions by one delegate who is unimpressed with her work, claiming she’s applying a human lens to interpret her results. Laurel’s retort is to ask why the delegate is assuming that all intelligence is human? Laurel knows that we like to separate ourselves from animals and plants, safely in our own superior category, but oxygen from our atmosphere is running through our veins and the word human comes from the Latin word ‘humus’ meaning soil. Thinking that we are of the earth is the only thing that comforted Laurel when her dad died. She thinks about how bronchi in our lungs branch like trees and how a ‘neural network in the brain is structured like a galaxy’. I loved reading these aspects of the book and really appreciated how cleverly the author plants these ideas in the first part of the book and they grow in the second part. 

Our characters are fascinating, Eli and Laurel are a couple who were made for each other but their relationship is real and they face tough times, particularly devastating events crash into their lives but I never doubted their love for each other. It’s fascinating to watch their characters face the concept of the duoverse, not just whether it is a portal, but if it is what will their relationship look like there and will going backwards fix whatever tore them apart. I felt both were analytical and might even appear cold at times, but in the moments of heightened emotion we really see who these characters are and the deep wells of love they hold. It was two other characters that caught my imagination though: Gloria and Mr Nakamura. I absolutely loved Gloria who is Laurel’s mentor in our universe and her house in San Francisco was so brilliant I wanted to live there: 

‘It was an old Arts and Crafts house on Prospect Avenue, dark wood with purple roses growing in the garden and ivy trailing over the windows. Inside was enchantment; half melted candles, cabinets of oddities, a Maine Coon cat the colour of midnight.’ 

Gloria is intelligent, feisty and an incredible mentor to Laurel and I had a feeling they would meet in any universe. Mr Nakamura is a character from later in the book who is an ‘overtaker’ – a thought I’ll leave with you – who’s incredibly wise and understanding, helping with the difficult parts of life’s journey with dignity. Every character springs to life and has a backstory. 

The book’s settings are incredible. First the frozen wasteland of the Antarctic and its different scientific research bases are fascinating. I had no idea how many were there, but McMurdo is like a mini town and it’s the tiny details that give it authenticity. Many of the scientists go home for the winter months when it’s impossible to go outside and cabin fever can really kick in. Some people have an ‘ice-wife’ or husband who they’re in a relationship with in the summer months, then go home to their real spouses in the winter. Bits of the real world come through, such as the disappointment in a second Trump presidency, but it feels like a different world and the perfect place to avoid reality too. Every world the author presents to us feels absolutely real even though some of it seems impossible. I was on tenterhooks wondering about the duoverse under the ice and if Lauren is right whether they’ll ever be able to return? I found myself wondering how this world would look as time scrolled backwards. I was genuinely scared for them but also full of admiration for their bravery. The mirroring is so cleverly done, showing how life always comes full circle and we’re often helpless at the end and the beginning, if we’re lucky enough to lead a full life. As someone who worked in nursing homes in my twenties this really made me think of the role of nostalgia and how often elderly people hanker after experiences from their childhood. Laurel wants her mother’s blueberry pancakes, to watch a film she’s seen a million times and disappear into a favourite book because there’s comfort in it. It might seem like science has sent them on this potential journey, but it isn’t. The totally unscientific emotion of love is what pushes them on, but also guilt, hope and desperation. Loss is a huge theme in the novel, something that always hits me in the heart, and I was deeply moved by how the author dealt with grief across the novel and how the scientific concept of a duoverse changes this experience. This novel was moving, profound, invigorating, deeply intelligent and so full of life. I kept thinking about the symbols of the cover, the circle and the tree, the same under the ground as they are over it. As Laurel observes: 

“A line implies before and after; a circle says And then, and then…” 

Out 1st September from Tinder Press

Meet the Author

Chloe Benjamin is the author of THE IMMORTALISTS, a New York Times Bestseller, and THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS. Her third novel, UNDER STORY, will be published in September 2026.

A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, THE IMMORTALISTS was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

Originally from San Francisco, CA, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

The Girl With Seven Lives by Vikas Swarup

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Devi is a fighter. Growing up in the slums of Delhi, she has learnt that survival comes at a cost – and naturally, that means she’s made a few enemies along the way. 

Now she’s being held captive, her life up for sale in an online auction, where the highest bidder will determine her fate.

With her existence hanging in the balance, Devi proceeds to give her captor ‘a confession to beat all confessions’ – as over the course of a single night, Devi unveils the secrets of her seven extraordinary lives.

Devi is the ultimate survivor – a girl from the gutters who dares to rewrite her own destiny. But will she survive the longest night of her life?

Vikas Swarup’s heroine Devi grabs hold of you the minute she starts to tell her own story in this episodic novel set in Delhi. The opening brings Devi to the lair of an unknown assailant who tells her he has seven people on the phone line who want to bid for her destiny. This auction will take one night and seven stories, stories she thought were secrets. As Devi tells each tale her kidnapper will take a bid on her life and he hopes to reach seven figures. However, Devi’s circumstances have not been easy and the fact she is alive is down to her cunning and experience. Has the kidnapper underestimated his prisoner or are Devi’s lives finally running out?

I was hooked from the first story as Devi explains how she started in a family home in the slum area known as Rail Basti, because the train tracks ran straight through the centre of the huts. This was Devi’s early childhood and despite the poverty she has happy times. She tells us about her annoying brothers, the eldest a maths prodigy and the youngest a terrible bedwetter, the daily sequence of trains that seem to rattle the ground under their hut and depth of water that rises indoors in monsoon season. Change comes when her parents choose an unorthodox plan to make an almost life-changing sum of money and fortune seems to turn almost immediately. Devi is an intelligent, funny and excitable nine year old and sometimes it’s hard to read about her daily life, never mind the more perilous and painful circumstances she finds herself in. She learns through necessity, takes chances where she sees them, soon inured to the fact that the only constant in her life is change.

The author’s visceral descriptions of the slums, the crime and violence and particularly the treatment of young girls of her caste are a hard read. He conjures up a picture of her family home perfectly with deftly layered descriptions of their space and the surrounding crowded alley ways:

“Sanitation in the slum was non-existent. The open surface drains looked like a river of green, clogged with garbage and plastic trash. For toilet the men would go with their lotas to the railway track. Mercifully for the women and girls there were a few communal latrines at the southern end of the slum that afforded a degree of privacy, though the long lines in the morning meant waits up to an hour.”

Once the family’s circumstances improve a little there are small improvements to daily life, like the arrival of a television that keeps Devi rapt for hours and helps her learn more than she ever has before. Her father decides they need to move, into a better area of the slum with the luxury of two rooms and its own toilet. It was more solid and didn’t let the rain in. However, the monthly payment was crippling financially and soon there was nothing left, they couldn’t ‘freeboot’ the electricity so television was strictly rationed and they were back living hand to mouth. Devi is the best storyteller, drawing you into their lives and then destroying you when disaster befalls them. I felt she was a very lonely person, aside from her early alliance with ‘German Sheffered’ dog Sheru. Each time she trusts someone, her parents, the police, authority figures, they all let her down. She has never known what it is to have someone absolutely in your corner.

The author captures the noise and colour of New Delhi so perfectly it’s almost a sensory overload as you read. The combination of this and the terrible ordeals that Devi faces are overwhelming sometimes and definitely left me feeling privileged in life. Devi’s narration keeps us constantly alert because that’s how she lives her life, constantly in the moment and ever alert to what’s going on around her. Her intelligence and experience mean she can sense when something’s wrong, such as noticing some girls in her dormitory at Muskan juvenile facility are more moody and unpredictable than normal. These young women are utterly powerless, so not only are they preyed upon by bullies and evil men but the system is so corrupt there is never any justice. No one is listening. I realised with surprise that the conversations she has on this one night with her kidnapper are perhaps the most intimate she has ever had. She gets to bare her soul and disclose secrets she has never told anyone. To be this vulnerable and knowing a terrible fate might await you at the end is both cathartic and terrifying.

The pacing is perfect as at the end of each story the phone call is made and the offer increases. She knows who must be on the end of the line and understands their capacity for revenge, she’s wanted it for herself enough times. It’s such a compelling read that I read this in a day, feeling like I’d visited Punjab, Goa, Kerala and finally Mumbai with Devi. The feel of each place is captured beautifully and the contrasts of her rollercoaster life kept me glued to the page. We know how red in tooth and claw the world is but what I found most hard to comprehend is how people could blind themselves from the suffering going on around them. It’s as if the British immigrants and millionaires living in Sector 1 of the city see those in the slums as ants, something they simply tread on as they get on with their vastly superior lives. We see the contrast when Devi lives with a woman who is a banker and wants to use Devi as her muse. On her daughter’s birthday there’s an orgy of gift giving with designer scarves, sunglasses, bracelets and a laptop are unwrapped, with her main present being a vintage Cartier watch. By contrast on Devi’s birthday there’s no party, just a cake and one present – a brand new Sony Handycam. Devi is overwhelmed and when the banker tells her to film the slums she does. She films people she knew, other kids dancing and play fighting, imitating famous people and having fun. Her benefactors are unsatisfied, they don’t want kids enjoying themselves they want to see the dirt and degradation, the alcohol, the drugs and the domestic violence. They want slum porn and she certainly delivers it, raw and unedited, but she knows that no film can truly capture what it’s like to live there.

There’s so much energy in this novel. It leaps off the page and its biggest achievement is its mix of addictive suspense and emotional insight. I came away from it feeling a little bit battered by the force of the story and it might take a few days to fully sink in. I liked Devi as a child, but as time and experience move her forward she becomes more morally questionable, complex and deeply conflicting. Although even if I didn’t always like her I could understand why she makes the choices she does and how she’s come to each terrible conclusion, every time wondering if this present adventure will be her last. It’s easy to forget when you’re deeply embedded in one of her stories that this is where it’s brought her, tied to a chair and listening as each person bids on her life. If you like to kept in suspense and to experience an extraordinary life lived in destitute and dangerous circumstances this is definitely for you.

Out 13th August from Head of Zeus

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Mermaid’s Cry by Kate Rhodes 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’ve been catching up on Kate Rhodes’s series of Ben Kitto novels and I’ve jumped a couple to read this for the blog tour, now I have to go back and read frantically to work out how he and Noah have ended up in Penzance. However that didn’t ruin the novel for me because it’s jam packed full of atmospheric settings, Cornish folklore and a cast of characters that left me suspecting absolutely everyone! Ben is living in Penzance, taking a break from his home island of Bryhir in the Scilly Isles after the events of the previous novel. He’s taking a break from police work and instead has found a job at a joiner and cabinetmakers, using the skills he learned building boats with his Uncle. It’s settled and therapeutic work as Ben slowly creates beautiful pieces of furniture and starts to deal with his grief and loss. Noah is a little confused to be away from everything he knows, but he’s enrolled at a kindergarten near Ben’s work so life has some routine and peace. He is starting to be brought into the community too, with an arts festival on the horizon he’s bound to be pulled into the planning, even just as a steward he’s happy to do his bit. Then life takes a sinister turn as he’s on the beach and sees a young mother with a baby in a pram. One moment of distraction and a black figure jumps out of the shadows and racing towards the pram it grabs the baby and throws it into the sea. Ben and Shadow are running before they’ve even thought and he dives into the sea to rescue the baby. He’s now a local hero, but the disturbing and traumatic event plays on his mind. How could someone do such a thing and will they do it again? 

The author weaves her story around the local myth of the Zennor Mermaid, a figured carved into one of the pews in Zennor church. A beautiful woman called Morveren was said to attend the local church from time to time and listen to the choir. She had a wonderful singing voice and many suitors were interested in her, but she came to listen to Matthew Trewella who had the best singing voice. One day after church he decided to follow her and was never seen again. Years later a captain dropped anchor near the beach and was surprised to hear melodious singing. When he looked out he saw a mermaid sitting on the rocks nearby and she asked if he would raise his anchor as it was blocking the entrance to her house, where she lived with her husband Matthew. There are many mermaid figures in Cornwall and the upcoming festival will be based around music and singing in Penzance and then a sky-watching from the remote location of Zennor’s beach. However, the myth takes a more sinister turn when mermaid emblems and notes are sent to people with small children, warning that the mermaid is watching for those who don’t deserve them. The police are immediately involved and new DCI Carnforth approaches Ben for his take on the original crime, could this person strike again? In sinister short sections we are taken into the mind of this person who themself as a mercy killer, where parents are neglectful or harming their children, the attacker will offer them to the Zennor mermaid who waits under the sea to claim them. Ben isn’t keen on becoming involved but Carnforth is keen to have his input and suggests he works more like a consultant than actually making a return to the force. For those lucky readers who know Ben and his dog Shadow, it’s impossible to imagine him sitting back and not taking part. Both of them seem to have an innate instinct when something is wrong and when Ben finds a mermaid talisman in his own garden he knows that he must find this person before anyone else faces the devastation of losing their child. 

 It was strange to get used to Ben in a new environment because he’s always seemed so at home in the wildness of Bryhir. Penzance is a huge difference being on the mainland and being a town, although Shadow seems to get used to the geography of his new home very quickly. I enjoyed the way the author presents Cornwall, giving it a split atmosphere between the town itself and the wilder places beyond, echoed in the two sites of the festival. She also gives us a realistic view of Penzance beyond the tourist trail, as both picturesque and a working fishing port. There are hints at the port’s arty history too with the Tate being a few miles away in St Ives and the attached village of Newlyn associated with Barbara Hepworth and many other artists. There’s a mix of tourism or seasonal visitors, then the long term residents trying to survive, especially during the quieter months when seasonal work isn’t as available and every empty property is listed on Air BnB rather than let to locals who need a home. Young people are priced out of the market and have no hope of owning a home of their own where they were born. Social housing is just as poor and overcrowded as it is anywhere else and perhaps has more demand, in fact the mother of the first victim is living on an estate that miles away from our usual depictions of Cornwall and a big contrast to Ben’s usual working area. The town’s foodbank is busy showing that residents are struggling with the cost of living, but on the other hand Ben’s chosen nursery for Noah has the rather middle-class sign of being run on Steiner principles. There are definitely haves and have nots here and Ben is definitely pulled into the lives of people who’ve had very difficult upbringings in circumstances of poverty, neglect and abuse. However, recovery and rebuilding are also big themes here with Ben playing a huge part in helping those in difficult circumstances while struggling to handle his own grief. 

It’s sad to meet Ben at such a crossroads in his life and I was pleased to see how our regular characters rallied around him, very carefully while letting him think they’re close by for other reasons. He thinks his Uncle is visiting Penzance because he has a secret woman and when his best friend Zoe appears he thinks she’s just there to headline the festival. Yet they are around at a crucial time for Ben and Noah and possibly know our hero more than he realises. I was hoping he’d start to see the benefit of grieving alongside his friends and fellow islanders, rather than removing himself from the situation. His relationship with Zoe is as close as always and her support means the world. She’s also bringing music back into his and Noah’s lives, something that his nursery teacher seems very keen for Noah to pursue. She approaches Ben to tell him that Noah is very talented for his age, a skill that is probably from his mother Nina. She’s very intense and insists that not to nurture Noah’s skill would be tantamount to neglect. The author drops little clues like this one throughout the book until I had about six suspects in mind! The tension as the festival approaches is nail-biting as Ben works with the police to make plans for security so that parents can attend with their children safely. Ben is a natural investigator with an innate skill for trouble that’s almost prophetic. He knows when there’s a pattern in a criminal’s behaviour, his brain detects a clue but can’t quite get there yet. There are some uniformed officers in the local station who begrudge Ben working with them and are resistant to the changes their new female chief wants to make. I started to wonder whether our attacker could be closer than they realise, especially when the DCI also has a warning from the mermaid about leaving her child with a nanny. Crimes against children are so emotive and that’s very clear here as the inner voice of the attacker becomes even more disturbing with a strange circular logic that hard to understand – ‘I see unworthy mothers and fathers everywhere I look, they don’t deserve any more chances […] they think the world is safe and that chaos doesn’t exist. None of them understand the price their children could pay, laughing distracted or staring at their phones. Negligence is a sickness”. 

By the time the festival arrives everyone has done all they can to keep families safe, with a security perimeter at the park that can’t be broken, of course that assumes the attacker isn’t one of the stewards. I was still suspecting the nursery nurse, the festival organiser, a police officer, a young man who is abused by his older brother and even the DCI’s nanny. The author has created short, urgent chapters here. They ramp up the tension as we flip between Ben’s inner world and the attacker’s, following them and their newest victim to the dark, wildness of the festival’s other site at Zennor. We can sense the mystical feeling of Cornwall and how it’s become warped in this person’s mind. It’s pitch black and rough terrain, plus with miles and miles of coastline can they be sure to find the right place in time. I defy anyone to put the book down at this point and I devoured it in one sitting. Ben still knows he’s missing a part of the puzzle and we have to trust that his intuition will click in before it’s too late. This is a great thriller and taking Ben out of his natural habitat does bring a different feel to the series, though I hope he does eventually return to island because he belongs there. We can see in the aftermath that he needs his found family and just like Zoe he will always return to the island and each other. 

Meet the Author

Kate Rhodes is an acclaimed crime novelist and an award-winning poet, selected for Val McDermid’s New Blood panel at Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival for her debut, Crossbones Yard. She has been nominated twice for the prestigious. CWA Dagger in the Library award, and is one of the founders of the Killer Women writing group. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, the writer and film-maker Dave Pescod, and visited the Scilly Isles every year as a child, which gave her the idea for the critically acclaimed Isles of Scilly Mysteries series.

Posted in Netgalley

The Dog Sitter by Eva Leska Natiello

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When a woman whose life has gone sideways takes a 30-day dog-sitting job in New York City, despite not being a dog person, she’s pulled into Manhattan’s chaotic social orbit. This delightfully offbeat story is a heartfelt journey of messy midlife reinvention, filled with sharp humor, quirky characters, and one very judgmental dog.

Recently divorced, newly evicted, and suddenly strapped, Colleen Fitzroy is out of options. She reluctantly agrees to work for former boss, Massimo Locatelli—editor of Savor Magazine—dog sitting his precious Aldo while he’s out of town. At least no one will bother her.

That’s until an endless parade of New Yorkers arrives unannounced, pulling Colleen into their knotty orbit. As she juggles strangers, a high maintenance dog, and her unraveling plans, Massimo takes note of her grit. He offers her a role in an ambitious new venture inside Manhattan’s rarefied restaurant scene—which triggers a shameful secret.

Colleen must confront the life she’s been living—and decide if she has the courage to seize the life that’s long overdue.

My counselling work is all about hope and recovery so as soon as I saw this book on NetGalley I knew it would be for me. We follow Colleen who’s something of a character as she has a total break from her disastrous life to think about what to do next. All she must do is spend one month in her previous boss’s incredible apartment to dog sit his canine companion Aldo. This is complicated by the fact that Massimo once fired her from the magazine he edits. There’s no one else and he must fly to Italy in a hurry to help his cousin and Colleen is the only option. However, Colleen has never had a dog before so this is going to be a steep learning curve. She’s also not that keen on being woken in the middle of the night, having unexpected visitors who let themselves into the apartment with no warning, or spending long FaceTime calls with Massimo so he can spend time with Aldo. She also doesn’t have a lot of time for privileged rich people. She honestly made me laugh and struck me as someone who has been through a lot in her life and has zero fucks left to give. If this were a film I could imagine either Meg Ryan or Renee Zellwegger playing this part to perfection. She has all of her belongings, meagre as they are, with and nowhere to go when Massimo returns. She’s insightful about the position she’s in. She was married to a firefighter who survived 9/11 but contracted terminal lung cancer from the dust at Ground Zero. Having lost the man she loves and struggling with the sense of loss she throws herself into a relationship with a man she describes as a ‘party partner’ – great fun for one night but disastrous in the long term. She thought she’d left grief behind but it came back and hit her twice has hard. This is a definite crossroads, but does she know how to move forward both physically and emotionally?

The change is gradual as she learns to look after the beautiful Aldo and cope with the various visitors to Massimo’s flat. She’s woken in the middle of the night by someone entering the flat and a lot of shouting from the street below. It’s Massimo’s daughter and a boyfriend who won’t take no for an answer. Without missing a beat Colleen opens the window and lets fly with some well chosen warnings. In no uncertain terms he knows to give the apartment a wide berth. Other visitors include a woman called Gloria who appears to be a cleaner, but a very stylish and well-dressed one. There’s also the caretaker of the building, a group of gourmets who hold a supper club despite Massi not being there and various others. At times these interruptions are a little jarring, especially when we’re first trying to get to know Colleen. However, all play their part and slowly Colleen starts to see that Massi’s life might not be as picture perfect as it seems. The gourmets let slip that he may have lost his job at Savor magazine, gossiping about their absent host in a horrible way. Slowly we can see Colleen opening up to people again as she enjoys chatting with Massi’s daughter and when she sees a photo of the supper club she barely recognises herself because she looks engaged and as if she’s truly in the moment. Aldo slowly begins to bond with Colleen as only dogs can, showing he’s now depending on her for comfort. Even Massi starts to make longer phone calls where he’s actually confiding in this women he’d pretty much written off. We can see their similarities in upbringing, with poverty and scarcity of food being the source of their pleasure in food now. In fact food is very sentimental to Colleen who remembers her garden with her husband very fondly, in fact her prize possession is a carrot plan grown directly from the seeds he collected on their vegetable patch. She also does a regular stint at the food bank, making sure children don’t grow up in food poverty and hates what she calls ‘food peacocking’ something that Massi and Savor Magazine do daily. Even though Massi grew up in a poor environment he certainly doesn’t now. When he asks if Colleen has found Aldo’s dog food in the fridge she realises she’s been heating it in the microwave and eating it herself it is so delicious. 

The settings are interesting and contrast beautifully. Massi’s apartment is both aspirational and sentimental with his kitchen table covered with the carved names of people who’ve eaten there. He keeps back copies of his magazine in pristine condition, clearly very proud of his position. By contrast the home that Colleen has just left is in a New Jersey suburb, ‘neat and smells like ocean mist and sea salt in the way cheap candles do.’ This is typical of the self-deprecating way Colleen talks about her life, she’s never had the luxury that Massi and his friends take for granted. Manhattan is frenetically busy when compared to the serenity and elegance of Massi’s hotel in Italy. We can even see the difference in the pace of life with city people like little ants, busily scurrying around. Colleen’s back in that pace but struggles to cope with the busy in and out of the apartment and it does interrupt the flow a little. The plot then wanders into different territory as Massi decides to start a business importing truffles for Manhattan restaurants and asks Colleen to be his courier and saleswoman, visiting contacts in their kitchens and selling directly. This was a plot development I really didn’t expect and I suspected there was more to this venture than met the eye. 

This book could have been a simply madcap makeover story, but it does tap into deeper themes such as childhood, loss and how we process trauma. I wasn’t sure where the truffle business was going to go but it felt like a great metaphor for humans – even the most dirty and unpromising truffles are treated like gold and Colleen could be seen like that, a treasure underneath those layers of defensiveness and snarky wit. She also learns that people are not what they seem and even those who live very different lives can teach each other something. Rather than do all the cliched things such as yoga and celebrating her ‘me’ period, Colleen actually learns things she didn’t expect like not taking people at face value and of course she learns the joy that a dog like Aldo can bring into your life. The absolute gem of the story though is Colleen herself, a rather chaotic, irritable and closed off person who slowly blossoms. 

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Sugartown by Caragh Maxwell 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What do you do when you’ve ruined your life? You go home to your mother, if you’re lucky enough still to have one. Saoirse Maher wouldn’t recommend it. 

Leaving home wasn’t supposed to be temporary. When she moved to London, Saoirse was leaving Ireland behind for good, and with it her messy, broken family. But it turns out that starting again isn’t as easy as she imagined, and when her five-year relationship goes south, Saoirse finds herself out of options. And so here she is, trudging back to her mother Máire’s house up a side road on the outskirts of Irish civilisation. 

Except the world she comes back to is nothing like the one she left behind. Her mother has a new family, and everyone else seems to be moving on. But between the drinking, drugs, and an entirely healthy, not-problematic-at-all-thanks relationship with Charlie, there’s plenty to distract her.

Don’t look too closely, and everything’s fine. Saoirse is just fine. 

This was one of those books where the narrative voice captures you straight away and you know you’ll follow wherever she takes you. Saoirse is in her early twenties, newly returned to a small town in the Irish midlands when her big life in London doesn’t go as planned. Now back under the roof of her mother, her second husband JJ and their three perfect daughters, all Saoirse can see is the difference between the mother her little sisters have and the mother she had at the same age. Back then Máire was young and struggling, with a husband who’d rather drink his wages than bring them home to his wife and child. In fact Saoirse can remember being in her mother’s car, driving from pub to pub to look for him. There was so much drama between her parents she might as well have been invisible. When she contrasts this with Lily, Grace and Emilia’s life she can see the difference but she can’t understand it; are they just more lovable than her? She notices the way her mother Máire dotes on them, puts their hair into identical plaits but stops short of identical clothes, reads to them at night and makes sure they’re cared for and these small expressions of love hit Saoirse like poison darts. Her sisters even get to call her Mammy, something that Máire was very clear about:

“I was christened Máire Lynch. Not Mammy. That is not my name. I won’t speak to you if you don’t use my name.”

Sometimes she wonders if the impression she has of their relationship is distorted but then she remembers Granny Lynch, the person who cared for her most asking her aunt to give her some leeway; ‘leave her be, you’ve met her mother.’ Granny’s is the only place she had stability and felt loved for herself, just for existing. Even now, at the age of 24, Saoirse feels her mum’s bite as she bullies her out of bed in the morning, insists she does an interview for the local hardware store and is insistent that JJ shouldn’t have to keep her. Saoirse just wanted a few days grace to gather her thoughts and adjust, but now she’s everything she didn’t want to be, living back with her mother in a small Irish town and doing a job that has no meaning and pays enough money to get by week to week. Then, with her friend Doireann she spends it on alcohol and drugs to forget the tedium and disappointment of life for a few hours. She isn’t even allowed to express her disappointments because Máire is right there, ready to tell her what it was like to be her age with a baby and an alcoholic husband. The author uses wit and humour, even within the darker themes and here Saoirse talks about the ‘overarching theme of the Annual Irish Suffering Olympics’. If you complained about a broken toe, someone else had lost their foot in a mowing accident, so you should ‘get over yourself’. This was such a familiar moment of Irish family humour that it made me smile. 

It’s easy to forget Máire’s struggles because Saoirse’s voice is so compelling. It’s no wonder her mother enjoys the routine and stability of her relationship with JJ after the turbulence of marriage to Saoirse’s father. When Saoirse hits rock bottom her dad is briefly there for her, but it’s the first time. Although we concentrate on the mother/ daughter relationship, he has been completely absent in her life. He’s one of those Irishmen who are great at stories and for the craic down at the pub, but they don’t see the state he’s in at home and the way he chooses drink over his family again and again. He seems stable enough at the moment, living with his second wife and making bodhrains in his garden workshop, but he will always let her down. I was concerned that Saoirse would end up living her mum’s life, young, pregnant and with a partner who can’t be trusted. I felt so maternal towards Saoirse throughout and I could see that her lack of parental support left her craving love and acceptance. It’s like a huge hole that can never be filled. Unfortunately it also leaves her open to damaging relationships and when she meets Charlie, through Doireann and her on again off again boyfriend Connor, she falls headlong into tumultuous and possessive feelings.

I was holding on to hope that she could get her life back on track, even when it hits rock bottom and she wakes up in hospital. In the end she turns to counselling and one of the first things they talk about is that emptiness Saoirse feels where the love and support of a parent should be. One line of dialogue in the book broke my heart more than anything and it’s when Máire is throwing all her anger and resentment at her daughter. Their fight turns physical when Saoirse reminds her that she forgot she had a fourth child. When she asks her mother what she’ll tell her little sisters Máire says ‘I’ll tell them to be anyone but you.’ It’s so harsh it stopped me short. Of course in order to heal we look for closure and Saoirse has tried drugs, alcohol, relationships and acting out to fill that hole at her centre. The counsellor asks her some searching questions. What if that closure never comes? What if she doesn’t have a relationship with her mother? Somehow she has to learn to feel that uncomfortable absence without trying to fill it with other things. I felt there was hope that she would build self esteem, because even in the throes of first love she finds Doireann’s relationship with Connor uncomfortable. When she tries to clarify whether they are together or not, Doireann says they’re not ‘together, together’ but it’s great because they both get their space and they’re not making claims on each other. Saoirse is confused and asks Doireann who else she’s seeing, but she’s only seeing Connor while he’s seeing other girls. 

“So you do all the things a couple does without the security of knowing you’re not going to get cheated on.”

Of course she could be cheated on whether in an official relationship or not, but the need to point out that only Connor benefits from their arrangement shows that Saoirse does have some expectations and standards. She knows she doesn’t want that kind of relationship. She wants boundaries, exclusivity and respect it’s just that her desperate need for love and acceptance means she settles for less. She also knows that her own capacity for love is immense, saying she would tear herself down to make sure Charlie grew because ‘it was just my way.’ Luckily at this point she moves in with Doireann and her family and sees a totally different way of parenting, a seemingly natural maternity in her mum Karen who struggled to become a parent and sees her daughter as something of a miracle. Saoirse notices that they have saved mementoes of every milestone in their daughter’s life and yet are still able to listen and support her plans to move away from home. When Karen’s had a hard shift at the hospital, Saoirse listens and makes her a cup of tea and Karen tells her she’s a ‘good girleen’ but the compliment is so alien to her she doesn’t know what to do with it. Being mothered makes her realise how complicated it is and opens up the guilt, anger, resentment and thoughts that she could ‘fuck up’ her own daughter. Yet she’s already thinking about how to stop repeating the pattern. 

This is a remarkable debut. Every single character felt completely real and the author has captured the awkward vulnerability of youth and a girl who has never had that parental safety net that allows her to experiment and work out who she is. The language is beautiful too from the viciousness of a resentful parent, to the delirium of drug addled parties and the tedium of the hardware store. She describes a silence between her and her mother as weighing on her like ‘wet wool’ and I could feel its heaviness. It all rings true and struck a chord with me about my own teenage years and not always being understood. Some of the descriptive passages are so layered they create tiny moments of stillness within the turbulence becoming passages to breathe in. I found myself responding to the book bodily, so immersed that when the author described a panic attack I realised I was holding my own breath. I felt sad, angry and deeply maternal towards Saoirse and with my counsellor head on I wanted to help. I wanted her to see that she wasn’t the sum of her parents and all the bad things that had happened, that even in the darkest moments there is a tiny spark of light. Any writer that can make a reader feel so much for her characters and their journey is special and I can’t wait to read what Caragh does next, but for now I know Saoirse will be staying with me for a while. 

Out now from OneWorld Publications

Caragh Maxwell is a writer living in Sligo town. She graduated from the Trinity College MPhil in Creative Writing in 2023, and her essays, poems and stories have been published in The Irish Times, The Cormorant and other publications. Her writing focuses on the self, memory, and womanhood. Sugartown is her debut novel, and was shortlisted for the 2025 A Post Irish Book Awards.

Posted in Netgalley

The Glass Key by Amanda Geard

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“They do say secrets are revealed one funeral at a time.”

I absolutely adored Amanda’s previous novel The Moon Gate, set at the outbreak of WW2 and straddling Australia, Ireland and the UK. This time she starts her story in Ireland, where Maggie has grown up hearing her mother tell her the bedtime story of The Glass Key. It’s a Nordic fairytale passed down by Maggie’s grandmother Anna Swan, who mysteriously left her home one stormy night years ago, never to return. Now Maggie’s grandfather has died and going through his things, Maggie is shocked to discover a faded wartime letter, asking him to take in a baby. In that moment she realises that Anna Swan was a woman of many secrets.

Only by travelling to Norway and discovering the story of four brave young women whose lives were forever changed by the occupation of their tiny islands, can Maggie uncover the shocking truth about her family – and finally unlock the mystery of the glass key…

There are many historical fiction novels looking at women’s lives during WW2, but I hadn’t read any set on Norway’s many islands, so it brought a different perspective and an atmospheric setting to the story. People becoming displaced and lost during WW2 is close to my heart as my late husband was Polish and both of his parents were displaced during the war: Hannah escaped Warsaw as a small child in the sewers and ended up alone at a Scottish school for refugee children. Whereas Alek was taken to Siberia by the Russians, but somehow escaped and ended up living in the Siberian forests before making his way to England through the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. These individual family stories have huge impact through the generations. Hannah’s dad believed his family to be dead and made his way to America where he remarried. Hannah then had a half-sister in Washington who she only discovered decades later. Amanda shows the chaos of war, not just on the battlefield but in ordinary everyday lives and it brings home how impossible it was to escape the war’s grasp. Through Maggie’s family and four extraordinary women in the Norwegian islands we can see how far the war reached, in fact it’s only for one afternoon on an uninhabited island that the women could let go and clear their minds. Around these archipelagoe there are tiny bays and secret places that are impossible to police, especially when up against local knowledge. It’s no surprise that the allies would use it as the perfect spot for secret assignations. Small boats can be missed in fog and poor weather conditions and although Germany annexed Norway, they haven’t reached these remote places yet. But there’s no doubt they’re coming. 

The narrative is a dual timeline split between wartime Norway and modern day Ireland. In Ireland Maggie has had to come home after her grandfather’s death because his home at Hellebore House may have to be sold. Her grandfather Atticus lived there with his Norwegian wife Anna. Anna spent many years in the garden, cultivating Norwegian plants and flowers. She left when Maggie’s mother Freja was young, with no explanation. Maggie’s first instinct, now Atticus is gone, is to try and save the house but as she goes through his things letters from Freja’s mother are hidden away, sketches of Norwegian flowers and a painting of the island of Einevar that she’s never noticed before. The key is a photograph of three young women and a man lying in the grass surrounded by wild flowers. On the back are four names: Liv, Nina, Astrid and Lief and the place, Lyosa. How might these people be connected to her great-grandmother Anna? As Maggie becomes more curious about her family’s past, she also has to face her own past in the shape of first love Jack who has moved back to the area. She doesn’t need to complication as she’s still healing from her divorce and the knowledge that she’s infertile. The Norway narrative is told chronologically as we meet sisters Nina and Liv, their friend Gudrun and a new teacher called Astrid who’s been sent from the mainland to work alongside the formidable school mistress Froken Henrikson. Nina and Liv soon make friends with Astrid after they’re introduced by Gudrun. All the women know the Germans are getting closer and when they find a British man injured in a small boat they assume he is carrying out some secret mission. His appearance sets up a love triangle between him and the fisherman Lief who absolutely adores Liv, but are those feelings reciprocated? Meanwhile, Astrid and Nina are becoming much closer too. When the Germans do arrive, it’s two brothers called Grimm and a man called Bruno Schmitte who is an artist. The tiny population of Einevar can’t predict how the islanders will respond to a German presence. There are those who will resist and place themselves in danger and others who will fall in line, causing a fracture between young people who’ve known each other all their lives. Their last uncomplicated day was spent on Lyosa when, for one afternoon, the friends lie in the sun and don’t think about the war. 

There are brilliantly layered and complex characters here, particularly the women. Astrid is brave, very sure of who she is and her feelings. She’s loyal to those she loves and to her country, becoming very close to the sisters, especially Nina. Liv is young and headstrong, placing herself and others in dangerous situations. Lief has adored her for his whole life and will do anything for her, but will that loyalty place him in harm’s way? Liv shelters and nurses an allied agent who drifts onto Einevar having been attacked by German fighters, until he’s fit for the voyage back, knowing that if found out she and Nina would likely end up in prison. I loved how independent the Norwegian women seemed to be, able to sail, weather the elements and forage for themselves. It’s not an easy life, even before the war starts and they are determined to resist the Germans in any way they can. Not everybody on the island thinks this way though, with some becoming close to the German brothers despite it being an affront to family and friends. I did wonder if I could be so brave as to fend for myself without basic utilities and forced to fish or forage for food. These women are so in touch with the land, with its incredible night sky with endless stars and curious Northern Lights. Maggie gets a taste of their lives when she arrives at the cabin in Lyosa to do her family research. It’s like walking back in history with no electricity or running water and gives her an experience of what previous generations had to face just to survive. I also admired the bravery of those who continued to resist despite knowing their capture would mean death or imprisonment and torture. 

Motherhood is also a huge theme in the novel, starting with the shock of great-grandmother Anna leaving Freja behind with her father when she was just a child. What caused her to flee and why did Atticus never try to find her? There are many different representations of motherhood, from women who leave their babies, to infertility and being a mother to someone else’s child. If Maggie and Jack were to become close again she has the prospect of being a stepmother while not being able to have her own children, something that echoes through the generations.  These women are linked by those experiences but also their talents, such as Freja’s Nordic fairy tales for children once told to her by her mother Anna. Maggie’s creativity also links back to a previous generation, with Liv’s drawings and a book of botanical sketches uncovered to Hellebore House. I loved how the author showed the war’s reach and how one tiny uninhabited island gave the young women a chance to let go of it for just one afternoon. Maggie is the conduit for all the drama of WW2 and these sections of the book are nail-biting in parts. Maggie’s present is more gentle and flows beautifully, resolving the secrets kept for three generations and in a way I didn’t expect. Amanda’s novels are real favourites of mine and this had everything – family secrets, hidden letters, forbidden relationships, espionage and some incredibly brave women who sacrifice everything for the people they love. This is a fascinating read should be on every historical fiction fan’s summer list. 

Out now from Headline Review

Meet the Author

Hi, I’m Amanda, and I absolutely cannot WAIT to share my latest novel with you.

THE GLASS KEY is a tale very close to my heart and inspired by the Norwegian Arctic island my husband and I bought when we were 29. Evie Woods said it’s ‘a captivating story that unlocks an emotional doorway to the past’, and well, I love that.

If you’re new to my work, you might like to start with THE MIDNIGHT HOUSE, inspired by a message I found scratched into the rafters of our Irish home, a two-hundred-year-old stone building perched on the edge of the Atlantic. The book was a Richard & Judy book club pick and translated into 8 languages. 

THE MOON GATE uncovers the secret behind a mysterious legacy – Towerhurst, an old house crumbling in a rainforest. It takes place across three locations: Tasmania (my home state), London (where we rented a houseboat for many years) and County Kerry, Ireland (where I now live). THE MOON GATE is my most sweeping and beloved book.

I’m also a geologist who explores the world’s remote places. I’ve worked on five continents, and spend months at a time out in the wilds. Writing novels provides a similar sense of discovery, though the conditions rather more comfortable!

You’ll find me on my website, Instagram (@amandageard) and Facebook (@amandageardauthor). I love chatting with readers, so please come on by.

Posted in Monthly Wrap Up

Best Reads June 2026

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’m writing this from a puddle of my own sweat and with a fan roaring in the background. Every animal has spread their body as far as possible across the wooden floor trying to keep cool. It’s been a stay at home month for sure as my neurological symptoms worsen when it’s hot, within a couple of days I had the texture of a wet noodle. So it’s been a month with lots of reading. I’m organised though, fans in both rooms I use a lot, ice cold water, lollies and ice chips, a neck fan and a handheld motorised fan that’s a god send. Nothing tells you that you’re middle aged more than a neck fan for Christmas. Especially when you’re pleased with it. I’ve been reading for the Squad POD Collective this month, then mainly NetGalley reads in between. There’s a huge range in these favourites as we go to Ireland, Liverpool, Norway, Italy and the US, from the aftermath of WW1 to the present day. There are family sagas, an incredible forbidden love story, a great start to a new crime series, the most talked about book on social media and finally a slice of whimsical joy from Matson Taylor. See you next month 📚

Look at that fantastic gothic cover! This is the dark and dangerous side to my favourite city as disgraced detective Mark Fletcher wakes up disoriented in the Castle Street Hotel. He’s horrified to find he’s in bed with a corpse, a man with a bullet hole in his head. How can he explain this when he has no memory of what happened last night? His finger prints and DNA will be everywhere, so will his disillusioned colleagues believe him if he calls it in? He can take his chances with his old team or he can run. This is the man who caught the Butcher of Bootle, only to watch his life rapidly fall apart nine months ago. Luca Veste takes us on a breathless chase through Liverpool while the crime team are playing catch up. We follow his old colleagues Kirkham and Abs as they investigate a body discovered in a garden in Kirby, making Brookside jokes along the way. Could these two deaths be linked? We’re also introduced to the Bonucci family, patriarch Salvatore and his second in command Gino and Frankie. Everyone knows the Bonucci family, they have legitimate business interests but underlying that is a criminal enterprise that’s seeped into every area of the city. They also blame Mark for the death of Salvatore’s youngest daughter Sofia, a huge lapse of judgement that went terribly wrong. Now Mark is trying to investigate who killed his bedfellow, Kirkham and Abs are 24 hours behind him, but could the Bonucci’s be closer? This is a nail-biting and action packed crime thriller that had me rooting for Mark from the moment he woke up. I loved the Scouse humour and the settings the author used as Mark jumps out of windows and even into the Mersey. The ending is such a shock and very clever indeed. I’m already waiting for the next book.

I’ve not written my full review on this but I can’t stop thinking about it and I’m dying to talk to other people for their opinion. We are introduced to Natalie, a trad wife influencer in the US with a hugely successful social media business and merchandising from their ranch Yesteryear. Natalie espouses the traditional life where the man is the head of the household and the woman looks after the home and their ever growing family. Her husband Caleb works the farm, while she runs the business with the help of two nannies and a producer. The monetisation paradox is clear to see, she’s making a living by preaching values that she doesn’t live by. Natalie wants her followers to embrace her trad view on family life, but has turned her ideology into a successful business run by a woman. Followers can watch her baking bread or collecting eggs from the chickens, but they don’t see her childcare or the producer who live on the isolated ranch with the family. Thanks to some clever remodelling of the house they also have all mod cons, but hidden from view with clever screening. Natalie tells women they should submit to their husbands, while agreeing privately that her own is an idiot. Without her this family would be lost. At university Natalie kept herself to herself, noting her roommate’s promiscuity and feminist viewpoint knowing she would become one of the ‘angry women’. Women who think they can have it all – the career, the marriage, the home, the children – end up doing it all and no wonder they’re angry. She still criticises the angry woman; seemingly never realising that’s exactly who she is and that her life is unsustainable. One morning she wakes up when it’s still dark, she can hear children having breakfast in the kitchen. Why hasn’t anyone put a light on? As she makes her way into the kitchen she realises that it’s very basic and her children are eating by candlelight. Except they’re not her children. The oldest girl is looking after them, but she doesn’t know her. Then she sees Caleb, but there’s nothing behind his eyes. They seem to living a real pioneer life, with everything done by hand, no hidden gadgets or shortcuts, no staff, no filming. Is this a nightmare? Has she been imprisoned here? Has she time travelled? You will ask all these questions alongside Natalie as the author takes you back and forth from the internet friendly lifestyle she created and the real thing. The author has managed to make an unlikeable character incredibly compelling, asks questions of this strange world where everyone has a real life and an Instagram ready life, and challenges ideals that current US politicians are advocating for women. The minute you finish this book you will want to find someone else who’s finished it so you can talk.

It was lovely to spend some time this month in one of Faith Hogan’s warm and welcoming worlds, this time on an isolated Irish island called Pin Hill. In this small community, sisters Blythe and Rae grew up with their grandparents at the family hotel in Hope Square after the death of their parents. Blythe’s ambition in life was to train in hospitality at university and follow her grandad into the family’s hotel business. Rae on the other hand was more of ‘go with the flow’ girl, spending her time with friends rather than learning the family trade. Yet, when we meet the grown up sisters, life hasn’t turned out as planned. Blythe lives in her own guest house at Still Water House with handyman husband Kip and daughter Siggy. Rae’s husband Marcus has died and she’s living alone in the Hope Street Hotel, where she’s run the family business with her husband for many years. What happened to place these sisters at odds with their expectations, especially Blythe who lived and breathed the hotel. As always Faith has created some great characters here in the rather strident and opinionated Blythe and her quieter, less confident sister. Blythe’s actually a bit much in parts and I found her very hard to like. We’re taken back and forth to the women’s teenage years where the explanations lie and uncover the secrets and events that set them on the wrong paths. While in the present day, Rae is struggling to maintain the hotel alone and has discovered financial problems her husband covered up. Unfortunately they aren’t the only secrets about her marriage. She has the help and support of niece Siggy and refugee Danial who’s just moved to the island with his grandmother. Blythe is suspicious of both of them and becomes obsessed with Rae’s potential plans for the hotel, setting herself on a path to disaster. This was a lovely, warm novel with great moments of humour in between the sister’s broken relationship. This is the perfect summer holiday read.

First of all I have to mention that gorgeous Art Nouveau cover on this novel, matching perfectly with the time period which is post WW1. This is one of my favourite periods for historical novels because I’m fascinated with the pace of societal change that ranged across class, gender and sexuality. It’s also a period where mental health issues and disability became much more prominent. Many men came home from the war with amputations and facial disfigurements, changing their lives forever. Of course many men didn’t return and every family was touched by loss either on the battlefield or in the waves of Spanish Flu that broke out after Armistice Day. Into this period of seismic change, Rue Baldry has written a beautiful story of forbidden love that touches the heart. Our two narrators are Albert and Edgar, who are both at a boarding school but for different reasons, despite being close in age. Albert was demobbed and needed a job, so is working at the school as a gardener. He has been through so much, yet is only 19 years old. Edgar is 18, a schoolboy from the middle classes who has just missed active service and longs to train as a doctor despite his dad’s wishes. When they meet there’s an instant affinity between them and we’re drawn into their fledgling love. This is a book that’s so evocative of the era whether it’s the old-fashioned British private school or in hell of the trenches. I thought the exploration of a class divide between the two men was very well done too and represented the societal changes in post-WW1 England. It’s impossible not to be drawn in by this love story, especially poignant considering these men were paved the way for the more permissive society we have today. There is no better representation of love is love,

In Ireland, Maggie has grown up hearing her mother tell her the bedtime story of The Glass Key. It’s a Nordic fairytale passed down by Maggie’s grandmother Anna Swan, who mysteriously left her home one stormy night years ago, never to return. Now Maggie’s grandfather has died and going through his things, Maggie is shocked to discover a faded wartime letter, asking him to take in a baby. In that moment she realises that Anna Swan was a woman of many secrets.

Only by travelling to Norway and discovering the story of four brave young women whose lives were forever changed by the occupation of their tiny islands, can Maggie uncover the shocking truth about her family – and finally unlock the mystery of the glass key…

I’ve still to write my review for this one, but I enjoyed it immensely particularly the WW2 timeline in the Norwegian islands that I knew nothing about. People displaced and lost during WW2 is close to my heart as my late husband was Polish and both of his parents were displaced during the war. I loved how the author showed how far the war reached and how it was only on one tiny uninhabited island that the young women could let go of it for just one afternoon. Amanda’s novels are real favourites of mine and this had everything – family secrets, hidden letters, forbidden relationships, espionage and some incredibly brave women. This should be on every historical fiction fan’s summer list.

Last, but definitely not least we come to Matson Taylor, not only a great writer but an all round good egg. His knowledge of art. architecture, and ancient Rome gives us a fabulous summer setting for this standalone novel about found family in the eternal city. A wobble on a new Vespa has Clemmie and Monty literally bumping into each other on a bridge flanked with angels as the novel opens. Monty’s injuries aren’t too severe but mean he can’t work on the renovation job he has in Rome. Now without a roof over his head and needing to recover from concussion (at least he hopes that’s why he can hear Octavian the cat talking to him) Clemmie and her friend Floss offer their palazzo. In their very unique home he finds the rest, relaxation and the care he has needed for a long time. You’ll fall in love with Monty who really is one of life’s innocents or what me and my mum call ‘new people’ who are on their first incarnation in the world. What he does have are secrets and a private grief that he’s never shared. Matson brings him together with the caring aspiring writer Clemmie and her friend, the flamboyant retired actress Floss. Add to these eccentrics a pair of food smuggling nuns, a man who lives in a converted ice cream van and a little twinkle of magic too. I never want Matson to stop writing because where else would I find scenes of nuns going to a gay disco? Set in the 1970s where the height of fashion is Floss’s new avocado en-suite, dazzling Rome is brought beautifully to life and as always there are deep emotions at its core. This is a wonderful comfort read for the summer, especially for those of us who are staycationing.

Here’s next months tbr, if I don’t get distracted of course!

Posted in Personal Purchase

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’d seen so many extremely varied viewpoints on this book that I couldn’t resist dipping in and it was definitely worth the hype it’s received. I read it voraciously over two days, so excited and so confused towards the end I realised I’d read it too fast. I had to go back and force myself to read it slowly. Read either way, this really is a delicious story that has hit at exactly the right time in history. With the US administration rolling back women’s rights and rumours about the implementation of Project 25 it feels like we’re watching Gilead formed in real life. One of the most controversial online figures in this huge political move to the far right is that of the ‘trad wife’, a woman who lives her life focused solely on the home, children and obeying her husband who is always head of the household. This might come from a religious conviction or a political one, but social media is awash with trad wife influencers like Hannah Neelham who shows life at the family farm and cooking from scratch or Estee Williams who proudly declares a return to 1950s values where motherhood and domesticity are the priority. To me this feels like the logical extension of the late 1990s dating book ‘The Rules’, much lauded by Charlotte in Sex and the City. Single women were advised to keep their distance and mystery on the dating scene – with men naturally being pursuers they are more responsive to women who play hard to get. It also advocated withholding sexual contact and focusing on the man’s wants and needs. It stands to reason that any eventual marriage would also involve the man’s needs coming first and feminists are concerned that the current trad wife trend appears like a pop culture phenomenon, but is born of patriarchal policies that will set back women’s autonomy and authority by decades. Of course the obvious paradox here is the influencer’s monetisation of the trad wife lifestyle, promoting the concept of the man as sole breadwinner while simultaneously operating successful and lucrative online content creation businesses, often with merchandising and multiple staff. These women are highly driven and ambitious and this is where our main character Natalie is situated; right at the centre of the monetisation paradox. 

The story is told through Natalie in a compelling inner monologue that had me absolutely gripped, despite disliking her quite intensely. The author takes us back to her college days, where she keeps herself separate from her roommate and other students often with a condescending and superior attitude. She firmly believes she has the answer to why feminism isn’t working, labelling her roommate the archetypal ‘angry woman’ who thinks they can have it all but will only end up exhausted and dissatisfied. She marries Caleb and is pregnant before graduation, not finishing her degree. She’s married into a political dynasty, with Cal’s father hoping to start a presidential campaign soon. Obviously they are republicans and Natalie’s father in law does point out that Caleb could be perfect for politics, being an ‘idiot’ who has no direction and is easily controlled. It’s Natalie who gets the idea to run a ranch, scouting for suitable properties and approaching her father-in-law for funding. He agrees to give them the five million they need, but Nat must keep her end of the bargain and keep producing beautiful grandbabies. She sets out to sell the great American Dream on social media, giving her ranch the tongue in cheek name ‘Yesteryear’. Despite having no farming experience, the plans for are to keep livestock, grow vegetables and become self-sufficient. She sets out to represent their lifestyle as pioneers, deliberately choosing her decor accordingly and instructing builders to hide all their modern appliances behind doors and false walls. She starts out posting nostalgic pictures, but then expands to videos where she and the children cook from scratch or make items for the house. Before long she has a business on her hands and now she isn’t just hiding the appliances, but two nannies and a producer, not to mention the merchandising. What could possibly go wrong?

This is a book with some huge reveals, you won’t always know what’s going on and you won’t be able to put it down – I was even reading while cooking the tea. I was so involved that when Natalie wakes up one morning to find her home isn’t as she knows it I was completely discombobulated – we ended up with gluey spaghetti that night! There’s no electricity and she finds children in her kitchen eating breakfast by candlelight, but they’re not her children. Caleb looks like her husband but there’s nothing behind his eyes. She’s now living pioneer life for real and when she opens the cupboards to look for her appliances, there aren’t any. There’s no help either. Her eldest daughter Mary cares for her with something close to a resigned exasperation, making sure that even if Natalie is only sitting, she can still do laundry and churn butter. Imagine a more realistic version of Little House on the Prairie where you can never escape to a power shower or flushing toilet. Natalie asks herself what’s going on: is this a punishment for something she’s done, has she lost her mind or is this some sort of sick reality TV situation? Is God punishing her. She’s now a trad wife for real, but she definitely isn’t happy, nor is she making any money.

This book is so well written, incredibly ambitious and captures the zeitgeist. I didn’t like Natalie but found her inner voice almost hypnotic. She’s deliberately hiding her intelligence and business brain on screen, but makes the comment that her eldest daughter takes after her because she holds “her intelligence like a knife behind her back.”However, once she becomes a traditional wife for real Caleb is the head of the household and she realises that whatever their home situation men can opt out of chores and childcare with no explanation, whereas she’s being forced out of bed while unwell. I was intrigued about where her belief system comes from, expecting generational religious beliefs and trauma but her mother and sister, while religious, have compassion and the ability to accept changes to their world view. They have understanding and compassion, something that Natalie seems to lack and it is utterly damning when her mother asks her why it’s so hard for her to be kind. I was so angry about the hypocrisy, pushing her ‘lifestyle’ to an online audience of women while keeping, not only her modern applicances, but the help hidden. She must know she’s making women feel inadequate, taking their money and lying to them. Once you become a tool of the patriarchy you’re an enemy of your fellow women, even though she gives them lip service by repeating the Christian Nationalist narrative that a trad wife is equal to her husband in the eyes of God – her work is different but of equal value. How can they be equal when only one of them has autonomy and the final say? In fact she openly fears aspects of the real pioneer life, especially giving birth. She is also aware of the paradox: 

‘To be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them.’ 

It’s only by pretending they have nothing, that she becomes rich. I think I kept reading because I was so desperate to see her carefully planned, fake world fall apart. At a time where feminists are debating whether they’d rather be alone with a man or a bear (and regularly choosing the bear) she pedals a dangerous rhetoric and any woman selling it is colluding with the patriarchy. On a day where I’ve seen yet another group of white British men on trial for raping a woman drugged by her husband, I’m not inclined to give any man that sort of power over me. This week a pregnant woman on holiday in Florida had an incomplete miscarriage and was still, days later, unable to get the procedure she needed to prevent infection. This is because she wasn’t in her home state and doctors in Florida were unsure on the legal position of performing a D and C operation thanks to ‘pro-life’ policies. Another woman who’d been informed that her baby was too malformed to survive outside the womb, was bombarded with hate on Instagram for choosing to end her pregnancy early. Female influencers can’t post on social media without facing a barrage of abuse from trolls. Thanks to all this, men like Andrew Tate and Christian Nationalist men in positions of huge power, I have a permanent level of inner rage. There should be a special level of hell for women who take up this cause and use their religious beliefs to make life harder for their fellow women. I let go a bit of that rage while reading this because it helped me remember that what we see online is like any other representation of real life – heavily edited and stretching the truth, if not an outright lie. Not only is this book addictive and inventive, but through Natalie, the author blows apart the whole hypocritical and dangerous industry as well as the Christian Nationalist ideology that espouses trad wives and I absolutely loved that. 

Out Now from Fourth Estate.

Meet The Author

Caro Claire Burke received her Master’s in Fine Arts from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the co-host of Diabolical Lies, a politics and culture podcast. YESTERYEAR is her first novel.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

Liar Liar by Luca Veste

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Even good people do bad things…

Once hailed as Liverpool’s finest detective, Mark Fletcher brought a serial killer to justice and earned the city’s admiration. But when he’s accused of working with Liverpool’s most notorious crime family, his legacy is shattered – and so is his life.

Now disgraced and spiralling, Fletcher wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of the last 24 hours… and a dead body beside him.

The evidence says he did it. His instincts say otherwise.

Hunted by the force he once served, Fletcher must uncover the truth – not just to clear his name, but to survive. Because someone wants him silenced, and they’ll stop at nothing to finish what they started…

Wow! What an opener to a new series from Luca Veste, set in his hometown of Liverpool which just happens to be my mum’s hometown too. I’ve spent time in Liverpool since I was a little girl, visiting family in Rainhill, going to mass at the the cathedral and visiting art exhibitions as a teenager when the Tate opened up on the Albert Dock. It was the first trip my husband and I took with his daughters visiting the museums and going vintage shopping on Bold Street. They loved it so much that my eldest stepdaughter and her boyfriend have been living there for the last three years for university and are making the city their home. Mostly I love the people and their attitude on life, their resilience, their determination to fight injustice and the way they stick together. It’s a great city with so much diversity, both in its residents and its buildings something the author really captures in this novel. He uses different areas of the city for different moods, showing that there’s a reason Liverpool is often used as a film set for shows like Peaky Blinders, This City Is Ours and The Responder, capturing the grandeur of the Georgian quarter, the more run down areas and where industrial buildings from it’s heyday as a port city have been revamped for new projects. It’s no surprise it’s often used in feature films to represent New York, because Liverpool’s energy made NYC feel strangely familiar when I first visited. It also has a darker, criminal underbelly that the author delves into here.

The incredible cover for the book features the iconic Liver Birds, one looking towards the city and the other looking out over the Mersey. They bring a gothic feel to the cover and this is definitely a very dark tale, highlighting the criminal underworld that visitors don’t get to see. While the Liver Birds and grand riverfront buildings have grandeur they never lose their sense of humour, the Cunard Building’s distinctive brickwork mean its known as the Streaky Bacon building, the grand grey stone buildings in the administrative district have pride coloured pigeons on the eaves reminding us it’s also the gay quarter and there are also Superlambananas – yes they are exactly what they sound like. Even the huge Queen Victoria statue at the end of Castle Street has its own name – Victoria’s Knob – because her sceptre looks very phallic from a certain angle. It’s Castle Street where the book opens as suspended police detective, Mark Fletcher, wakes up in a hotel room bed with a dead man. From that point we follow Mark’s every decision as he tries to save his career, but also his life. He has two choices: to call it in and hope he has enough goodwill left that his colleagues will listen or to leave the hotel and try to investigate. Who wants him implicated in a murder? Do they want to give him a taste of his own medicine and see him jailed or are they playing a game that ends with his death? In between the action packed present day, we’re taken back to nine months ago when Mark was riding high, the detective responsible for catching the Butcher of Bootle. What could possibly have happened to start the fall from grace he’s had in such a short time? The answer to that question lies with one woman, Sofia Bonnuci and her gangster family. The minute he tried to help by hiding Sofia from her violent boyfriend everything changed. Today, from the moment Mark wakes up, the plot is action packed as he jumps out of windows and into the Mersey, dodges suspects and bullets at breathless speed. We tear across Liverpool from the very grand Castle Street to the docks, Rainhill and into the Wirral. I loved the dialogue too, full of Scouse humour with references to ‘the bizzies’ and Brookside as Mark’s old colleagues Kirkham and Abs investigate a body found buried in someone’s back garden in Kirby- their boss asking whether anyone called Sinbad lived there. They find out that the landlord of the houses is an agent who works for the Bonucci family. Could these events be linked in some way or is it just a coincidence? 

Mark really does grab you as a central character and I was on his side immediately. We’re privy to all his thoughts and deductions, as well as his changing emotions as the day progresses. This is a deliberate choice by the author who wants us to bond with the central character in this new series. I trusted him too because he feels like a good man who’s made some poor choices, possibly due to being one of life’s ‘rescuers’. He can’t resist helping, even if it has meant stretching the rules a little. Stepping outside the rules only works when nothing goes wrong, but when it does the situation runs away from him and here he is living alone, drinking a little too much and potentially losing the job he loves. It’s a case of poor judgement, something that plays into his decisions now, involving other people in what could be a doomed situation. His colleagues Kirkham and Abs will soon start investigating the body in the hotel. Would they even believe Mark if he did contact them? The discussions between them show the impact of Mark’s previous actions on his team, with Abs pointing out that they were close and now nobody even talks about him. It’s hard to know what to think, especially when they see CCTV from the hotel. Did Mark made one mistake that went drastically wrong or has he been completely rogue all along? We are let into their world of the Bonucci family too, where legitimate business interests across the city seem to be a cover for more illegal activities. This family are like a liquid that’s seeped into every area of Liverpool and the author cleverly sets them up for future novels with a potential interest in a new Italian restaurant that sounds very like a favourite of mine in Bold Street. A power struggle seems to be emerging, with Salvatore Bonucci now becoming older, his seconds in command Gino and Frankie, are jostling for position and both have very different approaches to business. 

The tension is absolutely nail-biting as Mark ends up cornered but escapes again and again. However, constantly looking over your shoulder is wearing and Mark is getting colder, dirtier and more tired all the time. There’s also his mental state, as his conscience is battered again and again will he simply run out of self-belief? Every time he escapes, his choices narrow. A show down is coming, but will it be with his old colleagues or will the Bonucci family find him first? The ending of this book, when it comes, was so unexpected my jaw dropped. The forbidding setting of Toxteth Reservoir is a brilliant choice, with derelict buildings full of dark, damp labyrinth of endless corridors and hiding places. It brings us full circle back to the gothic Liver Birds:

‘Their wings weren’t spread in triumph, but half open as if caught in the moment before deciding whether to strike”. 

They’re a metaphor for the whole book, constantly on edge and potentially dangerous, leaving the reader trailing behind unsure what’s going to happen next. It’s clear Luca Veste values his readers by giving his previous Liverpool Detectives a cameo, with Murphy as Kirkham and Abs’s boss and Rossi helping her parents set up their (very familiar) new restaurant. He’s setting them firmly into the future of this series, something fans will love. This has definitely whet my appetite for more from this team, thanks to the author’s love for his city and his ability to surprise the hell out of his readers.

Out now from Harper Collins

 

Meet the Author

Luca Veste is a writer of Italian and Liverpudlian heritage, married with two young daughters, and one of nine children. He studied psychology and criminology at university in Liverpool. He is the author of the Murphy and Rossi series, which includes DEAD GONE, THE DYING PLACE, BLOODSTREAM, and THEN SHE WAS GONE.

Part psychological thriller, part police procedural, his books follow the detective pairing of DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi. The novels are set in Liverpool, bringing the city to life in a dark and terrifying manner…with just a splash of Scouse humour. Liar Liar is the first in a new crime series set in Liverpool.