Tag: Psychological

Posted in Personal Purchase

How to be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Not getting enough sleep, doomscrolling on your phone, and feeling acid anxiety every time you watch the news? You’re not alone. One morning, Caitlin Moran lay in bed and realised: she had finally reached Peak Despair. The point where, in books and movies, the heroine decides to move to a remote farmhouse, walk an ancient, 600-mile pathway, or adopt a baby hare. The moment where someone goes on a quest to find … hope.

But this – this is not that kind of book. Caitlin tried – but it turns out remote Welsh farmhouses are really expensive. No-one with a job can walk 600 miles. And it’s incredibly hard to get access to baby hares in Crouch End.

And so, Caitlin decides instead to go on a domestic quest. To see if you can stay in the same house, in the same neighbourhood, but feel better about the frantic modern world by trying to make better days. Leaving social media, eschewing 24/7 news for local newspapers, sitting on buses without headphones, and listening to what people are really saying. Picking litter, donating blood, rewilding a garden, and the hardest thing of all – learning to fall back in love with the world again.

I would imagine that I’m not the only one who has lost sleep over the state of the world at the moment, or turned off the news for fear of launching a brick at the screen. Back in the 1980s my grandad would converse with the television, usually with hastily put together child friendly swear words – ‘suffering night’ was a favourite. I used to think it must be hard to find a level of rage that made you swear and argue with a tv screen but then I turned fifty and the floodgates opened! Now rarely a day goes by where I’m not exclaiming ‘What the fuck?’ Or telling someone to fuck the fuck off. At least my grandad only had Thatcher to rail against, I have Musk, Farage, Trump, Bannon, Hegseth, Zuckerberg, Fox, Robinson, Truss, Jenrick, Anderson, Yusuf, Tate… etc. Our county has a Reform council and mayor. The list feels endless so it’s no surprise that I have a daily conversation with tv, radio and every one of the social media sites, particularly X (stupid name) which is an absolute cess pit of hatred and bile. I worry about the future all the time and tonight I’m writing this after a very trying day as I’m still wide awake at 4am. Food prices are rising, so is fuel and the level of hate towards people with disabilities and anyone else marked out as different has started to affect me. I can’t always get my prescribed drugs since Brexit. I can’t afford to go out as much and some experiences like theatre and gigs are becoming unaffordable. The government are telling us to prepare for disruption so I’m stockpiling candles, loo roll, tinned and long life food as if we’re on a war footing. I can’t get to my own GP. My personal details have been hacked to such an extent that I had three different bank cards this year and I don’t know if my money is safe. It feels like we’re in the second episode of the brilliant series Years and Years where the banks crash and AI has taken most of our jobs. It feels like everything is in flux and if you haven’t noticed it’s because you’re on beta-blockers or you’re not paying attention. 

Into this maelstrom of disaster and anxiety comes the wise counsel of Caitlin Moran, a writer I’ve followed since her years at NME. I loved her book How to be a Woman and her novel about her time as a music journalist. She’s honest, warm, funny but wise too, characteristics that are in abundance in this new guide to all of the above. Set in clear individual chapters, she gives us a roadmap out of the sleepless nights and pointless arguing with fascists on social media. It’s a brisk walk through middle aged life starting with a crisis over the state of the world. She decides that the only way to be happy is to create her very own Eden in the Welsh hills – a dilapidated farmhouse with several acres for hens, wildflower meadows and a buffer against the world. It’s months before the realisation comes that the house needs raising to the ground then rebuilding, they don’t have the necessary skills or enough money to pay someone else. After a period of mourning, Moran reevaluates and decides she will have to create a happier life where she is, near a tube station and with a world’s supply of Red Bull cans sticking out of her hedge. In fact her first task is to stop saying ‘someone should do something about this’ and just get on and do it. She starts by tidying her garden, the hedge and the path outside, but her endeavours reach the local park where people just dump their unwanted crap next to the recycling bins, instead of in them. Slowly she notices other people tidying their front yard and the pavement outside, the road starts to look smarter and the rubbish gathers more slowly. 

The chapters that most resonated with me were those on the ‘uni-cause’ and social media. Don’t be an activist she tells us, relating a story about an acquaintance who has fallen down the rabbit hole of X and become gripped by the ‘uni-cause’ – performative outrage or emotion over one issue. We all know someone this has happened to and it is no different to radicalisation. She cites how this person has become obsessed with the plight of the Palestinians, a good cause to raise awareness about until it becomes all they do online. They start to share their cause with friends, especially those with a lot of followers asking them to retweet their posts. If they don’t, he then follows it up with entreaties to ‘not look away’ and berates those who haven’t supported his viewpoint, concluding that if they’re not on his side they’re an enemy. As people like this are drawn further in, their relationships start to suffer, family gatherings become bad tempered, they stop talking to people with an opposing viewpoint and see everything in binary rather than the multitude of grey shades in between. Why are we actively making ourselves miserable? Especially when we know that these algorithms work to narrow down our interests – so if we argue on a post about immigration, you’re suddenly inundated with the latest news from Reform, right wing commentators and more outrage. It’s like stoking the fire. Moran gives sensible advice on the input – limit the time you spend online, retrain your algorithm by watching nothing but cats, don’t read the news or reactions to it and instead read the papers at the weekend. If someone you know is depressed or incensed by a specific cause she gives them a limited time to speak then tells them to find a charity, a petition, a march or someone to write to about the issue. In this way you get involved and become part of the solution rather than wallowing morbidly in the slurry of other people’s opinions. I’m trying to apply this with my own family and it does help. Moran often finds that an issue that seemed disastrous on Monday has gone away by the weekend anyway, or at the very least a few world leaders are promising a summit about it. 

Another great tip is having an awareness of how animals act at different times of the year and even each day. Her cockapoo gets up in the morning, goes into the garden and stretches. She sniffs her territory and welcomes the day, instead of languishing in bed or hunched over a screen, taking in an avalanche of bad news and faux outrage. It sounds obvious but just being present in whatever you’re doing is key with this. You can walk the dog on the same path every day, not taking anything in and listening to a podcast or you can take the ear pods out and listen to what’s around you, letting the dog dictate the direction and varying what you see. Walking the dog regularly is something I really struggle with due to my mobility issues but when I can be out in the fresh air I always have a better day. I’m also a big believer in keeping your ears free to hear what’s happening around you and I always carry a notebook so I can jot down snippets of other people’s conversation. It makes us more connected to the world and means we’re doing one thing at once, a more mindful way of living. Also varying what you do according to the season is sensible – if you feel more relaxed and the need to hibernate in winter, then do it, it’s what animals do. It made me think of something I say about holidays. We work hard to afford our holidays but often feel quite blue and stressed as we go back into normal life. I tell clients to think about what they do on holiday that creates the relaxed, happy feelings. Obviously we can’t give up work, family commitments and all of normal life but what made the difference: less screen time? More time outdoors? Quality time with our partner? Having lie-ins? Then try to incorporate a bit of that in everyday life. Me and my husband spent two weeks in Scotland but when we returned he was soon stressed so we talked about what helped his stress levels and it was more time outdoors, having time to fish and spending less time on his cause (anti-fascism) especially online. We realised we need more quiet time, so we’re spending more time with no tv, radio or music. Both of us are calmer.

There’s nothing ground breaking here from a counsellor’s perspective, but it is sensible, effective advice to stave off apathy and try to bring some hope back into life. This is delivered with Moran’s usual honesty, forthrightness and wit. It made me think of a very low point in my life, when I moved into a little barn conversion on my own. I’d not lived alone for very long so it was a real opportunity to get to know myself again, and find what I needed at this point in my life. I went to New York and Venice, spent more time with friends, I picked up my counselling training and became qualified. I went to gigs and started writing again. I helped out at the meditation garden in the village. One of the key things that made me feel ready to face the day was a few lines of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that I had on the chimney breast in my bedroom: 

“Hope is the thing with feathers, 

That perches in the soul, 

And sings the tune without the words 

And never stops at all.” 

It was just one small moment of uplift as the day started that made everything else possible. If you’re having a mid-life moment of ‘let’s emigrate’ or ‘shall we move to the seaside and open a zoo?’ maybe go get your hormone levels checked and chat to a counsellor before buying an expensive money pit and uprooting your whole family. Then make tiny little changes to how you spend each day. I promise it will lead to bigger ones and the despair, although we can’t banish at altogether, will definitely improve. 

Meet the Author

Caitlin Moran is the eldest of eight children, home educated on a council estate in Woverhampton. She published her first novel at 16 and became a columnist at The Times at 18. She has won Columnist of the Year seven times and has also been named Interviewer and Critic of the Year. Her million-selling groundbreaking feminist memoir How to be a Woman was voted one of the Sunday Times ‘Most Important Books of the Twenty-First Century’. 

Caitlin’s other books have also been bestsellers and How to Build a Girlwas made into a film with Beanie Feldstein and Emma Thompson. Her Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves, co-written with her sister Caroline Moran, won a Rose d’Or for Best Sitcom. Her Who’s Who entry lists her interests as ‘cava, eyeliner, hair embiggening, and The Struggle’.

She lives in North London with her husband and two children, and, after following all her own advice, she really is hopeful now.

Posted in Wordpress Prompts

The Most Recent Books That Kept Me Awake

Posted on by thelotusreaders

What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?

In the aftermath of Halloween it seems strangely fitting to be thinking about what scares me and I have to admit to having the most vivid imagination and can easily scare myself without much input from books or films. However, I can never really anticipate what’s going to scare me in a book, with the exception of Pennywise the clown of course. He scares everyone right? So aside from It, I read a steady diet of Dean Koontz, Stephen King and James Herbert in my teens but always found myself more spooked by old fashioned ghosts or more realistic fears. So here are the three most recent writers I’ve been kept awake by and the books that creeped me out.

The Watchers and Stay in the Light by A.M.Shine

I chose A.M.Shine’s first novel, The Watchers on Netgalley and was blown away by how creepy it was. A woman is sent on an errand by her antique dealer friend and ends up getting lost in rural Ireland. When her car breaks down she knows she will have to walk to civilisation and the best way seems to be through a forest track. It’s still light and she figures she has enough time to get to the other side before sunset. Once in the forest Mina realises her mistake, it seems bigger than from outside and she’s concerned that the light might start to fade before she can get to the other side. She feels unnerved, although she can’t say why, then she hears a scream that isn’t human, but isn’t like any animal she’s ever heard either. As the shadows gather she is beginning to panic, when suddenly she sees a woman beckoning her and urging her to hurry. She’s standing by a concrete bunker and although that seems odd, Mina decides it’s better than staying out here to be found by whatever made that terrible noise. As they hurry inside and the door slams behind them, the screams grow in intensity and volume, almost as if they were right on her heels. As her eyes adjust to the light she finds herself in a room with a bright overhead light. One wall is made entirely of glass, but Mina can’t see beyond it and into the forest because it is now pitch dark. Yet she has the creeping sensation of being watched through the glass, almost like she is the parrot in a glass cage. A younger man and woman are huddled together in one space, so there are now four people in this room, captive and watched by many eyes. Their keepers are the Watchers, dreadful creatures that live in burrows by day, but come out at night to hunt and to watch these captive humans. If caught out after dark, the door will be locked, and you will be the Watcher’s unlucky prey. Who are these creatures and why do they keep watching? 

I was absolutely entranced by this incredibly disturbing tale and loved the way the author created this unbelievable world inside the everyday. In the opening section Mina’s world is relatively normal, she goes about her day like any one of us. She has an irritatingly perfect sister, she gets lonely, she sometimes drinks too much wine. We can identify with these imperfections and relate to her. So when this ordinary woman, finds herself caught up in the extraordinary, we believe it because we already believe in her. Yet, the author carefully leave tiny details, that instinctively alert us that something is wrong. The remoteness of the place, the way her phone suddenly stops working, the single strange cry she hears – as if something is on lookout, alerting others to her presence. All of these are universal literary signifiers for ‘something’s not quite right here’. The author never describes the Watchers visually, again there are signs they leave behind and other sensory clues: the burrows in the ground, claw marks around the window, the revolting smell, their cries. Just as Mina is standing in the light, unable to see them lurking in the dark, so are we. Even when you think we’re going to ‘see’ them, we never fully do. The clues set our imagination on overdrive, we build the monsters in our heads which makes them so much scarier as they feed into our personal fears and phobias. The dynamics of the characters in this book are unsettling too and it has an incredible ending that blew my mind! I have the sequel Stay in the Light on my bookshelves because I know I want to read it. I just have to be in the right frame of mind.

Nightwatching and Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra

I was sent Tracy Sierra’s first book Night Watching totally out of the blue. I opened the parcel and then the first opportunity I got I flicked to the front page. I didn’t stop reading. I sat down where I was and disappeared into an opening section that is every woman’s worst nightmare; waking up to an intruder in the house. It begins with a nonsense rhyme:

Yesterday upon the stair I met a man who wasn’t there, 

He wasn’t there again today, oh how I wish he’d go away. 

Antagonish by Hugo Mearns

My grandad used to read me this exact rhyme and strange supernatural stories. I used to ask ‘but is he there or not?’ This is the very question this whole book revolves around from the very first line – ‘there is someone in the house’. Our unnamed narrator becomes alert in the night as a strange noise nudges her awake. I was told by a book reviewer who I respect enormously that this was brilliant and she was absolutely right. Although I drove my husband crazy by waking him up to ask if he remembered locking the door. He hadn’t always and I knew I wouldn’t sleep until one of us had crept downstairs and checked. Preferably not me! Our narrator is at her secluded home with her two small children in a blizzard. The sound she hears is a familiar one, a tread on the stairs to her room, but it’s unusually heavy and slow. She has a split second to make the decision – does she hide, try to run or stay and fight. Will all three of them get out alive and if they do will anyone believe her? 

The first thing that hit me about this book was the unique voice this mother has. We see everything through her eyes and experience everything her body goes through – mainly fear. There’s the heart-stopping tension of that first night, the immediate threat rendering everything else unimportant. Yet there are other fears lurking underneath – will the police believe her, will it stir up questions about her husband’s absence, what will her father-in-law make of what has happened? She is waiting for people to doubt her and the reader doubts her too. Always on the lookout for unreliable narrators, I did wonder whether I should trust what she was experiencing. It’s just so incredibly odd. This tall intruder seems to have two voices: a raspy harsh voice when he’s angry then more of a soft, weedling voice. A voice you might use for children as he asks them to ‘come out little pigs, little pigs are more delicious’. As he does this right next door to their hiding place, it’s even more terrifying. Her little girl whispers to her its the ‘Corner Man’ from her nightmares, he sits in the corner of her bedroom at night and whispers to her. My heart was in my throat at this point! Was he real or something supernatural? Could he possibly be real if this is true? My husband was relieved when I finished this one, but the habit of locking the door is ingrained on both of us.

I approached her second novel with trepidation, would it be as good as the first? Well I can set your mind at rest. This novel is incredible and it’s on my end of year favourites list. This is a ‘stayed in bed almost all day to keep reading it’ type of incredible. The plot is simple enough. A young boy named Zach is taken by his father on a ‘boy’s trip’ to the wilderness with people he hopes will invest in his business. As they settle into their cabin and make it ready for guests it’s clear that Zach is an innocent boy, easily ordered around by his dad who’s angry that his secretary Ginny hasn’t been up to prepare the cabin as she promised. As they settle in for their first night, Zach is convinced something is lurking around especially when he has the visit the outside toilet alone and in the dark. The noises and shadows are like nothing he’s heard before. Could a monster be up here with them in the mountains? Possibly. But monsters aren’t always what we expect. 

This author is fast becoming a master of complex and painful family dynamics with an edge of horror. This monster in the snow brought back memories of the first time I read The Shining and there are parallels in the isolated mountain setting, a potential pressure cooker of people forced together and the young, innocent boy at the centre of the tale. Zach knows this place very well, having come up here regularly with his mum and sister and this was one of my first questions. Where are the women in this story? We know Zach came up here with groups of women and their kids, but his mum, sister and even the expected Ginny are nowhere. In a small vignette at the beginning we see a previous trip and Zach’s mum explaining how to check the snow for the likelihood of an avalanche. She impresses upon him the importance of turning back, even if the risk is small it’s not worth taking. It’s clear very early on that Bram, his father, doesn’t have the same attitude to risk. He’s the sort of guy who thinks men take risks and would rather show bravado to his guests than follow the advice of his wife through Zach or the guide that comes with the cabin. 

Zach is such a beautiful narrator and he’s written with such care, everything he thinks or tells us maintains that innocent, slightly anxious voice. I desperately wanted to protect him and get him out of this situation. As adults we wear masks – the one we wear for our job for example or the ‘telephone voice’ many of us use without really intending to. Children don’t and that creates a tension, especially in an environment where the whole purpose is to impress and sell yourself. Bram makes it clear that these men expect a winner and he has to act like one. This idea of wearing different masks is beautifully depicted as Zach takes us back to an evening at home where his mother had returned home late and a little drunk. He listened in silence to their argument and cursed his mother because she knows the rules. Why does she set out to make him angry? Zach describes his father’s other side as his ‘underself.’

“For Christmas two years ago, someone had given his sister a stuffed octopus that could be flicked inside out. Flip one way, pink, fuzzy and smiling. Flip the other way, green, slick and glowering […] switching outerself to underself.”

He has that horrible realisation we all have at some point in our childhood, that other people might dislike your parent or think they’re an idiot. As they set out and he watches his interactions with the other men he realises they can see through Bram. The guide sees he knows nothing and Bram’s need to own the best of everything means his mountain gear is flashy, it looks too new. The only other kid on the trip is Russ and he makes it clear that he knows exactly what type of man Bram is because his dad is exactly the same: 

“My dad, yours? They’re selfish. They nearly got us killed. And for what? Steve said you and me shouldn’t have skied it and they ignored him, because god forbid they don’t get to do exactly what they want.” 

How scary must it be as a child to learn that your parent is willing to take huge risks with your life for money? Even worse, Zach finds something that makes him wonder; if his dad has an underself does everyone else? The environment brings its own dangers with further snowfall and too many risks taken. Survival becomes a question between which is safest – taking the chance with the environment or staying indoors which is undoubtedly warmer and locks out whatever it is that Zach saw the night he ventured to the outside toilet. There’s always a tipping point and the pressure the author builds is almost unbearable. My heart was in my throat during those final chapters because I felt so protective of this incredible little boy. Tracy Sierra is able to evoke that heart thumping fear we feel as children, sometimes when we’re doing nothing more dangerous than lying in bed in the dark. With Zach she explores the difference between a manageable fear that’s no more than a calculated risk with the right understanding and techniques, a fear that simply comes from encountering something we’ve never seen before and the fear we can’t face because it’s too terrible. There are far scarier things than the monsters we imagine in the dark.

Changeling by Matt Wesolowski

I read this with no idea of the subject matter, except that it would be framed as a mystery being revisited by a podcast called Six Stories, where Scott King interviews six people connected to a cold case. It’s not that he expects or aims to solve the case, although that’s a possibility, it’s about hearing different voices, perhaps ones that haven’t been heard or have something to add to their original evidence. I had no idea of the geographical location in the book nor could I have predicted reading it when I did. The case begins on Christmas Eve 1988 when Sorrel Marsden is travelling along the Wentshire Forest Pass, a road between Chester and Wrexham in North Wales. He hears a knocking sound in the car and decides to pull over in a lay-by to investigate. As he gets out he glances back to check on his son Alfie who is fast asleep in his booster seat in the back. Sorrel checks under the bonnet of the car, but not seeing anything obvious he decides to continue his journey. However, as he drops the bonnet he notices the rear passenger door is open and Alfie’s booster seat is empty. He looks for his son on the edges of the forest, but with no clue where Alfie has gone he goes to the phone box and calls the police. 

I read this while we holidayed on the welsh borders, with the River Wye running through the garden of the cottage. We were travelling back from Chester Zoo when I started to read The Changeling and I’d passed navigation duties to my stepdaughter so I could put my feet up in the back. So I read Sorrel Marsden’s account of his son’s disappearance just as we drove from Chester into Wales! Wesolowski is skilled at creating a setting that slowly unnerves the reader and I felt this strongly as I read about the history of the forest and the interview King does with a contractor working on the construction of a holiday park. He worked in the forest when Alfie disappeared and tried to help search for the boy. Yet the floodlights and vehicles wouldn’t work – the very embodiment of a ghost in the machine. They were sleeping onsite when the knocking started, insistent and gaining in volume despite having no visible source. What I found most chilling were the voices, whispery and urgent little voices that were indecipherable but angry in tone and with a terrifying intensity. Sorrel Marsden has made a point of walking the pass every year on the anniversary of Alfie’s disappearance. He never claims to hear or see anything on his treks, but they do serve a purpose. They set him up as the victim, the hero of the piece, especially then compared with Alfie’s mother Sonia who has never taken part in the search or been interviewed about her son. Until now.

Sonia does consent to meeting King and talks for the first time about that awful Christmas. She doesn’t deny drinking, but claims that Sorrel is an unusual man, with an ability to draw people to him that goes beyond his looks or personality. She recalls being belittled and controlled. Yes she struggled as a very young and isolated mum, but no help came. Despite claiming she was a bad mother, Sorrel left her alone with Alfie and rarely visited. Other women contacted Scott King to tell their own story of encounters with Sorrel. Like a mini ‘Me Too’ movement these women come together to talk about coercive control, psychological abuse, strange knocking sounds keeping them awake and leaving them unnerved. I had my suspicions about Sorrel Marsden. The women refer to an unusual feeling they’d experienced, as if he had them in an enchantment. It made me think of the word ‘glamour’ in the way it’s applied to witches – folk tales tell of a witch’s ability to ‘glamour’ people, to only show those sides of themselves they wish to be seen. It’s also known as love-bombing. Sorrel is a master manipulator and serial abuser able to charm and convince women to trust him. He then slowly isolates them, breaks down their confidence, gaslights them and convinces them they are worthless.

Sorrel took them camping once in the same forest where Alfie disappeared. From then on Sonia would hear strange voices and knocking when no one was there. However the section that genuinely lifted up the hairs on the back my neck seemed a bit tenuous at first. King interviews a man whose mother has recently died. She was a teacher in the 1980’s, gathering research on pupils who had behavioural issues. Her son found the research in the attic and was intrigued by her notes on Child A, because Child A was Alfie Marsden. She recorded his behaviour on several occasions and the more she saw, the more scared she was. Alfie would turn his back on other pupils and deliberately ignore group activities. Alone with him, she heard muttering and although he wasn’t moving, she could hear a strange knocking. There were times where she was scared to look him in the face, he was unnaturally still as if he was listening somewhere or to something else. Did Alfie just have behavioural issues or was there something more sinister at play? There are a couple of utterly brilliant twists towards the end, neither of which I’d expected and one made me rethink everything I’d read up to that point, in a Sixth Sense way. I wanted to go back and reread with that knowledge, to see how I’d missed it. This was a brilliant and disturbing novel, a clever mix of psychological and supernatural elements that’s very addictive and will stay with you long after the book is finished. I was obsessed with noises in the night at our holiday cottage and felt watched in the open plan glass extension, especially at night. I had to read something fun and light afterwards but it definitely stayed with me.

You can listen to Matt Wesolowski’s real life encounter with the supernatural on this episode of the Uncanny podcast where he talks about a student house and a goth poltergeist.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002mmt2

Posted in Random Things Tours

 The Life and Death of Lucy Westenra by Bee Casey 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

“In this moment, I pray for time to stop. If I could just stay here, listening to her breathing I would never ask for anything else. In her arms, I’d happily spend forever … but she always lets go.” 

When Lucy Westenra met the mysterious vampire, Count Dracula, the world believed she died. But that is the story of men, not the truth. 

Lucy was desperate to escape her life, her betrothal to Lord Holmwood, her forbidden love for Mina and ran away into the night willingly. Her death though, is being threatened by a rogue band of vampire hunters made of Van Helsing, her ex suitors … and her beloved Mina. 

She will have to risk everything to finally rest in peace; including the love of her life. In this sapphic reimagining of a classic gothic tale, Lucy rewrites her own story as a master of her own fate, her own desire and her own death.

I have always had a bee in my bonnet about Lucy Westenra. I didn’t read Dracula until university in my late twenties but prior to that was spellbound by 1990s it girl/actress Sadie Frost and her depiction of this sexy and sassy Victorian woman with three suitors and a thirst for blood. I felt like she got a raw deal. Especially when Jonathon Harker was seduced by three brides of Dracula, but still got the girl, once he’d rescued her from the Count’s clutches of course. When I read the book in both my first and second years of uni I became more aware of the psychosexual elements in the novel and even did a presentation on Sex and Death in Dracula where I talked about the homoerotic elements of Lucy’s suitors, the tainted blood as a metaphor for disease and how Lucy is trapped by her class, her gender and her sexuality. As a mature student it seemed unexpected and I earned the respect of some neo-goths that day. This is the book I’ve been waiting for and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I felt like it righted a wrong and gave life to a character I enjoyed but who had been written as a walking warning, both to her friend Mina and Victorian readers. 

Bee Casey’s Lucy is a delight. She’s beautiful and vivacious, but also intelligent and radical, not afraid of questioning the status quo. Even when it might shock. She mentions that Mina brought her a new piece of clothing called culottes that she felt more free wearing than her usual skirts. She also thinks about the whispering she’s heard of women who seemingly live together, like a married couple. One of them sometimes wears masculine dress like a suit. But these are whispers and she’s never heard of this in Whitby, making the joke that even the Queen can’t imagine such relationships exist. However Lucy knows better and realises people are only viewing sexual pleasure through a male viewpoint and even her own mother has warned her it’s largely disappointing for the woman. She has known the sexual pleasure between two women and she knows she’s in love with her friend Mina. Why can’t they live their lives together, instead of becoming married to the men in their lives? Mina though sees their relationship as girlish experimentation, but something that can’t exist out in the open. When they encounter a strange ship that runs aground in the Whitby harbour, Lucy is mesmerised by it. What follows is like a sickness and those around her are desperately worried for her sanity and her life. 

The author has followed the story of Dracula, but writes from Lucy’s perspective with letters bringing other events into the story, such as Jonathon Harker’s visit to the Carpathian Mountains. This keeps everything focused on our heroine. Her nocturnal wanderings and nightmares are viewed as possible hysteria because rest is advised to start with. What they don’t know is that Lucy encountered an unusual woman called Mercy near the abbey and is seduced. Mercy relates the life of a vampire and describes her two ‘sisters’ and the Count as a family. She describes the eternal life of the undead, the freedoms and pleasures of living outside society and it’s easy to see why this would be attractive to Lucy who often bemoans having to choose one person to spend her life with and the expectation that it will be a man and marriage. 

“Why I cannot just keep them all. Why do we have to deal with the trappings and expectations of modern marriage. Why must I choose one partner when the world is so large, when people are so complex […] Why must possibility be sacrificed in the name of propriety”. 

She likens herself to the mythical examples of Penelope and Persephone. Penelope weaving and waiting for Odysseus to return, keeps delaying suitors in a strategy they don’t even recognise, something Lucy calls a ‘quiet rebellion’. When considering a life and death like Mercy’s she thinks of Persephone living half her life in society and half in Hades. Can there be such a compromise for her? It’s telling to me that Quincey is the only one of her suitors who reads the female authors she suggests and he’s also the first to offer up his blood when Van Helsing insists on a transfusion. He was also the first to propose. He seemed like the better choice to me but as she points out she has a choice but no freedom – “an illusion of free will”. She’s also intelligent enough to realise that the others proposed because Quincey did, more enthralled in the competition with each other than marriage to the real her. She considers whether she’s scared of dying to become undead and ponders that even her name would be erased if she married her choice – Holmwood. Even her gravestone would have his name and she would only be remembered as the wife of Holmwood and not her own self. Of course at first she has no idea what Van Helsing has in store for her interred body. This is a brutal scene in Dracula as all three of her suitors drive a stake through her heart and cut off her head. It feels like a punishment for resisting them and with the phallic stake it also has a corrective element too, driving home that this is what men do to women. But as the men talk, thinking her unconscious, she overhears. This would be a second death. How can she avoid such a brutal fate? 

This novel is filled with a tension that comes from us knowing the source material and Lucy’s fate, where as readers we should be glad she has been restored to eternal life by her suitors desecrating her body. I was desperate for there to be a different ending here. The joyous moments happen when she and Mina are together and Lucy truly does light up when she’s around. I was absolutely desperate for a happy ending! This book clearly comes from a love of the Gothic classic, but a frustration with Lucy’s lack of agency and voice throughout. This novel elevates her character beyond the moral warning she becomes in Bram Stoker’s hands. It repositions her as a radical thinker, passionate lover and a critic of the male dominated society she’s brought up in. Exactly where Lucy should be. I’ll leave the final words on men to her. 

They ‘have always revealed themselves to be a disappointment, to have some ulterior motive, to enjoy the chase of me, then upon realising my excitement and whimsy is not just an act of seduction attempt to put out the fires of my passion and sedate me to becoming an acceptable bride”. 

Out now on Kindle and paperback

Meet the Author

Bee Casey is a writer, book reviewer, copy editor but above all – a book lover. They describe themselves as genre-fluid, because they write whatever inspires them; whether it’s horror, poetry, fantasy or romance. They wrote their first ‘novel’ when they were eight years old, the exciting tales of Desmond the Bear (written in beautiful purple crayon and unfortunately lost to time). They have released two novellas, What If and Constellations, and a poetry collection, Healing in Reverse, available now from most online retailers and select indie stores. Their next release is set for early 2027. When not writing, they are also a Random Things Tours reviewer too!

Posted in Personal Purchase

The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Mrs Danowski – known as Danni – is the housekeeper of a grand mansion on the wild coast of Cornwall. When glamorous young writer Daphne du Maurier visits Manderville Hall to research her new novel, she and Danni are drawn into a clandestine and intoxicating affair.

For Danni, it is an all-consuming love; for Daphne a submission to long-suppressed desires. But their fragile secret is vulnerable to prying eyes and destined for heartbreak. When Daphne’s novel launches to triumphant success, Danni is distraught to find herself transformed into a malign and jealous character on the page. She seeks respite from the hurt by telling her own story: The Housekeeper.

I remember my mum first showing me the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film adaptation of Rebecca, the novel by Daphne du Maurier and I have loved it ever since. Of course as an adolescent girl I thought this was a romance and missed most of the complex psychology between the characters and their insignificance next to the overwhelming presence of Max de Winter’s dead wife Rebecca. She’s in the diary in the morning room, on the stationery, the bed linen and in the sheer and fragile nightgown still laid out on her bed in the wing overlooking her beloved sea. So significant is her ghost that Max’s new and unprepared young bride doesn’t even have a name. One thing that always stayed with me though was the pale and haunting face of the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. Beautifully played by Judith Anderson in her severe black dress, she seemingly floats quietly through the house always catching out his new bride who is inept and deeply self-conscious. She doesn’t have the upbringing or self-assurance to assert her own opinions and ideas for how they live at Manderley, simply acquiescing to the status quo and Mrs Danvers lead. We never know whether she means harm or is simply devoted to her dead mistress, a relationship that as I got older took on a different meaning – the display of the sheer nightgown, the way Rebecca told Danni of her sexual exploits and how she talks about touching Rebecca’s hair all have a sapphic undertone I didn’t see when I was young. It remains one of my favourite books and films to this day, so knowing there was a novel inspired by Rebecca was really exciting and this book didn’t disappoint.

Judith Butler and Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca 1940

Rose Tremain takes everything we know from Rebecca and gives the novel an origin story. At Lord Grenville- Whithers’s house, set on the Cornish coast, we meet Mrs Danowski, the housekeeper of Manderville. Danni, as she is known, worked for Grenville’s wife who recently died. She’s protective of her employer who was so shocked by his wife’s untimely death he suffered a small stroke. Along with the other servants Danni runs a tight ship and still keeps her mistress’s things in her part of the house. Her quiet and regimented world is blown apart when the novelist Daphne du Maurier visits the house. She falls in love with its position on the cliffs near Fowey, where she lives at Ferryside. She tells Lord Grenville that she is struggling to write in their family home always interrupted by the children and the servants. She asks if she can use the small boating shed in the cove for a writing place. He agrees that she can come and go as she pleases and orders Dani to make sure the place is ready for Daphne’s visits. It’s soon clear that there is more to Daphne’s request than meets the eye. An intoxicating pull of desire exists between the two women and as Daphne confides, there are times when the boy inside her needs to come out. As they embark on this passionate and dangerous affair change is in the air. The possibility of war looms and closer to home Grenville- Whithers is thinking about the future and where to bestow Manderville if he should die. He’s considering his niece Adelaide, a loud and careless girl who has no experience running a big house. The servants are feeling restless and start looking at other options for their future. Suddenly the place Danni felt safe and stable is in flux and she’s living life on a dangerous edge again.

The confrontation at the ball

I loved how the author incorporated Rebecca into the novel, so that her whole story becomes the reason for its creation. Mrs Danvers becomes the repository of Daphne’s passion and ‘perverted’ nature. She makes Danni into this evil and obsessive woman to excuse her own behaviour. Then there’s Rebecca and the second Mrs de Winter who function as two sides to Daphne’s character: the social butterfly with insatiable passions and the inept and inexperienced mistress of the house.

“What I see in this character is Daphne’s horror of her own nature.’

As well as using the boat house in the cove for her novel, Daphne incorporates the ball thrown by Grenville- Whithers at Manderville as the scene of the young wife’s disastrous choice of costume, encouraged by the housekeeper to drive a wedge between them. This is the unforgettable night where Mrs Danvers takes the young wife into Rebecca’s bedroom and shows her Rebecca’s alluring sheer nightgown and how she would confide her sexual exploits. It’s where I first realised the depths of her obsession with her mistress, she’s almost living vicariously through Rebecca and getting an erotic thrill from her sexual conquests. Rose Tremain uses the ball as a catalyst for change too. It’s the moment where Manderville’s future is decided and where a decision is made about Daphne and Danni’s relationship. Danni has to look at herself in the mirror at times to see whether the woman she sees in the glass is who she expects or if she’s become the woman immortalised in Daphne’s new book. She replays parts of her upbringing in Poland in her mind, the terrible rise of hate against Jewish families like hers and being ostracised at school. Even though the memories are painful she uses them to reaffirm who she is, Mrs Danowski born in Kalinskiego Street now housekeeper of Manderville Hall with the attention to detail and quiet deference the position requires. Overriding the memories of Daphne and her naked in the boathouse giving in to their desires.

“The more she is made guilty by these feelings, the more terrible she must make me in her story.”

I enjoyed the two subplots about two younger servants called Roly and Florence and around Dani’s dressmaking. Roly wants to get ahead and dreams of opening a tobacco and sweet shop. Danni supports the young couple and is willing to help them set up, but is horrified when Roly goes to extreme lengths to secure what he wants. She feels an affinity with a young woman called Emerald, brought along to Danni by her mother because they are finding it impossible to buy a wedding dress that suits her. Danni gets the sense that Emerald isn’t looking forward to her wedding, but sets to work creating a dress that’s simple but cut beautifully to suit her fuller figure. When Danni gets the chance to talk to Emerald alone, she confides in her about the real love of her life. Danni’s thwarted feelings for Daphne drive her to help Emerald live the life she wants, on her own terms.

The pace of the novel is perfect, slow and languorous at first with moments of intense and hurried desire. My heart raced at times, terrified they would be found out. There was a constantly ticking clock in my mind, waiting for the moment everything would change. The author’s representation of Daphne du Maurier feels genuine, even to someone who has read a lot about her background and life at Menabilly – her very own Manderley near Fowey. It’s easy to see aspects of Rebecca and the second Mrs de Winter in her character and behaviour, but also Daphne herself. It was interesting to imagine Danni beyond the Hitchcock film’s representation of Mrs Danvers. Instead of the austere and ghostly housekeeper we see a woman in moments of abandonment, with her hair down her back and nothing but a fur coat on, the object of Daphne’s desire. A desire she’s so ashamed of she makes her lover evil in print then burns her to death. I must mention the stunning cover of this book too, a wonderfully stylised Art Deco representation of the housekeeper, perhaps peering from her dead mistress’s window to the sea below. It’s stylish and immediately takes us to the East Wing of Manderley where the housekeeper is stood as a boat runs aground bringing disaster for Maxim de Winter. Most exciting is the news that Rose Tremain has also written a screenplay to turn the novel into a film. Now in post production this is a Richard Eyre film with Anthony Hopkins as Grenville and Outlander’s Catriona Balfe as Danni. I’m really looking forward to seeing this and I’ll be placing this book pride of place in my collection of books I inspired by Rebecca and Jane Eyre.

Out Now from Chatto and Windus

Posted in Random Things Tours

Fallowfield by Nicole Swengley

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Fallowfield Hall: once an avant garde art college, now abandoned and decaying. To journalist Rowan Woodhouse it is the fabled backdrop to her parents’ 1970s love story. But is there more to Fallowfield – and her family – to uncover?

Seeking solace after the loss of her artist-teacher father, Rowan accepts a research project to interview college alumni, hoping this may reveal more about him – and her enigmatic mother who died tragically young.

But Rowan soon discovers that Fallowfield had a darker side than hedonistic student life and idyllic picnics on its famous daffodil lawns. Jealousies, betrayals and rivalries emerge when she learns of the mysterious death of one young woman and the unsolved disappearance of another. As part and present become dangerously intertwined, how will the suspicions sparked by her investigations impact Rowan’s own troubled life?

I was immediately intrigued by this story that uncovers life at a progressive art school called Fallowfield, where journalist Rowan Woodhouse’s parents met in the 1970s. The opportunity to contact alumni from her parent’s years at the college has a personal benefit, to find out more about her parent’s relationship. However, she finds a surprising amount aren’t keen on talking about their student days, with some coming across as rude on her first phone call. Where people do engage with the project the author has cleverly created different perspectives of the same time, showing that while people might be in the same place they haven’t always had the same experience. This is usually because everything in life is experienced through our own filter, formed by our personality traits, learned behaviours, past experiences and general outlook Time also affects memories, causing events to be distorted, bundled together and confused. We each create a narrative of our past, but how do our friends and family see those same events? Previous student Patrick remembers his college days as living in a hazy bubble but recommends she talks to Maksym, a rival of her father’s who might remember it differently. Of course there’s also the possibility that people are lying, bringing a more sinister edge to the story and inspiring Rowan to dig further. Parts of the mystery are only revealed as Rowan uncovers them so we experience her emotions in the moment. It’s a slow- burn read and I enjoyed the chance to really understand the characters and Rowan’s complex emotions as she moves through people’s hazy memories and her father’s memorabilia and sketchbooks.

I thought the passage of time – can it really be over fifty years – played an interesting part, because the world has changed so much in that time. In the same way ideas about childhood developed during the Victorian period and into the 20th Century our views on teenagers and young people has changed. I feel like we’ve extended the protection and care we give to a child to this older age group. We’re more aware that they might need support with decisions and that they’re more open to exploitation. This comes from psychological research but also from the decision to extend school or training to the age of eighteen. Added to that is an extended time living at home for many young people thanks to the cost of living crisis and rising rents. The #MeToo movement has made us more aware of inappropriate relationships and power imbalances so behaviour that was perhaps frowned upon in the late 20th Century is an absolute ‘no no’ for today’s students and tutors. The criminalisation of coercive control and emotional abuse has finally made people realise that intimate partner abuse isn’t just physical and young people are vulnerable to manipulation and grooming. Rowan realises that her father’s romantic stories about how he met her mother Annie at Fallowfield could be viewed differently now. Nick had been a student at the college before returning as a lecturer and as Annie’s tutor he knew their relationship was against the college’s rules but they still continued to see each other. Now her father has died Rowan has been visiting his country cottage as an escape from her London home. She’s surprised to find newspaper articles in her father’s things about a student who went missing and a tutor’s girlfriend from around Fallowfield who was found dead during her parent’s time there. Could these articles contain the big secret behind the alumni’s reluctance to reminisce and what part do her parents play in the events of that time? 

I’m fascinated by artists and the art world and I learned a lot about a genre I’d never come across before. Rowan’s father painted within the Good Girl genre – an illustrative style often used for comics, book covers and erotic art. It’s glamorous women in tight or skimpy clothing and had been around for a few decades before Nick was a student. Rowan didn’t seem keen on her father’s style, branding it as trashy although she did listen as he showed her why his women were different from the more exploitative side of the style. I still wondered if there was a link between the representation of women in his art and his behaviour? It’s clear a toxic atmosphere was brewing at the college, an interesting contrast between the idyllic setting at Fallowfield which was a secluded country estate. Not many painters become household names and an atmosphere of determination and competition thrived between this group. It’s clear some will let nothing stand in the way of their success, creating dangerous situations. After the events in the articles and the summer ball Fallowfield was closed suddenly leaving students struggling to find other courses. The governing committee felt the scandal was too great for the college to continue in its current form. Alongside Rowan we’re starting to understand the rather permissive regime at Fallowfield, with drinking, drug-taking and free love. A woman called Zizi is part of the art college’s social scene but lived in a hippy community camping in a nearby field. Is she the one described in the newspapers as the girlfriend of a tutor? Could her father have been seeing this woman at the same time as her mother?

The most fascinating part of the story from a psychological perspective is how her parent’s ‘perfect’ love story seemingly prevented Rowan from forming loving and functional relationships as an adult. She sees Nick and Annie through a romantic lens, mainly due to Nick reinforcing the story throughout her life and after Annie’s death. All families have their own myths and this one was so strong she’s measured every relationship next to it and none have made the grade. She met current boyfriend Doug in a work capacity with Doug providing the photographs to her features on an assignment. It seems that he is often absent and while this is normal for someone who works freelance, when present in body he often isn’t in mind. Rowan seems a bit lost in terms of how he feels and where he sees their relationship going and is reluctant to invite him to her father’s cottage. She cooks him a dinner from scratch before leaving but he’s incredibly late and when she does get in touch he’s tired and wants to stay home, with no apology for wasting her time. I wondered if her feeling that she came second to her mother in her father’s affections had led to her repeating the pattern with emotionally unavailable partners. I found her a little bit childlike in her acceptance of her parent’s great love story. It’s something we often re-evaluate as we get older, especially when we start having our own relationships. As she starts to uncover student stories of drinking, drug-taking and multiple lovers she seems surprised and I wondered what sort of student experience she had because I would have expected it. It’s a jolt for her to realise Nick and Annie weren’t perfectly romantic and had their problems. I wondered whether her mother would have categorised their relationship differently had she lived longer? Rowan has to face that maybe she’d let people go who could have been a great partner. Being performatively romantic like Nick isn’t everyone’s style and verbal, public declarations of love often cover up a multitude of secrets. 

The anniversary celebration is to be held at Fallowfield’s original site, now a resort hotel owned by another alumni student. Everyone, apart from her father, will be present in the same place as the events of that final summer. The tension really kicked in at this point and I wondered if Rowan was placing herself in danger. Can this event be the catalyst to breaking through all the confusion and lies to finally see the truth? Through each of these characters we can see a stark contrast between the self- fulfilment of using your artistic talent and the dangerous and competitive scramble towards fame and success. Often incredibly talented people also have huge egos and narcissistic traits, a combination that could become deadly when their ego is bruised. I had so many questions at this point. I was intrigued by sculptor Maksym’s suggestion that he provided a service for Rowan’s father. I wanted to know whether it was true that Nick was seeing other women as well as Annie. Could being at the original college for an event like that final summer ball bring up new memories for the students? Rowan’s research had thrown up some disturbing truths in my mind and I was happy and satisfied by the ending. I wondered how the truth would impact Rowan’s life going forward. I was strongly reminded of the opening to L.P. Hartley’s The Go- Between – ‘the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. 

Out now from Breakthrough Books

Meet the Author

Nicole Swengley is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, the Telegraph, The Times, Wall Street Journal, London Evening Standard and many other publications. Her short stories have featured in women’s magazines, a crime anthology and themed anthologies from Breakthrough Books. A past student of Faber Academy, one of her stories was shortlisted in a national TV/magazine competition some years ago. Her debut novel, The Portrait Girl, was published in 2024. Fallowfield is her second, standalone, art-and-design inspired mystery.

Posted in Netgalley

A Knock At The Door by Louise Candlish 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

She’s finally back home … but is it really her?

When three-year-old Tippi Macklin goes missing on a weekend break with her parents, her face appears in newspapers around the world, sparking endless debate and conspiracy theories. Wealthy and glamorous Jed and Gabby never give up hope that ‘Little Tippi’ will be found.

Eighteen years later, a young woman arrives at their door claiming to be their lost girl. She has a new name, a new history and some startling evidence to support her claim. Can she really be Tippi – or is she an imposter?

A DNA test will prove her identity one way or the other, but when the results come back, it seems the mystery has only just begun…

I do LOVE a Louise Candlish novel, so much so that when I saw I’d been approved on Netgalley I spent my whole Saturday reading it. I’m never disappointed and this is such a fascinating subject and family. Narrated by Gabby Macklin’s sister Bel, this is about how such a huge tragedy affects a whole family, but also about the underlying tensions and dynamics between its members. If it wasn’t for Jed and Gabby losing their daughter eighteen years ago you would absolutely hate them. They’re one of those couples on Escape to the Country or Grand Designs who say ‘I’m a cheese maker, my wife is a freelance bid writer and we have 2.4 million to spend.” Those people who claim to want a country kitchen, but really mean Downton Abbey. It’s now eighteen years later and a young woman claims that, after her parents died in a car crash, she’s discovered things that make her think she’s their lost daughter Tippi. This isn’t the first time their hopes have been raised, but it’s by far the most exciting lead they’ve had in a long time. Gabby tells her sister she feels that Eden is her daughter but Bel isn’t so sure and starts to investigate. Told mainly through Bel there are also a few different narratives: feeds from the couple’s social media pages for Tippi, some creative writing pieces from Tippi’s perspective from someone clearly obsessed with the case and text messages between two people that are very hard to decipher and suggest illegal activities. 

The characters are fascinating with Bel and her sister Gabby at the story’s heart, but also a weird dynamic between Bel and her brother in law Jed. The two families are in very different positions financially. Jed runs a very successful training business and Gabby makes candles in at home studio. Their home is clearly interior designed with a sunken living room area and so much party space. Theirs is the house where the family get together and with such a disparity in their earnings, it’s clear that some resentment is felt by Bel. She’s supporting her family while husband Marc gets his business off the ground. They rent their home and are aware that if London prices go up much more they will have to move, probably to a worse area than now. Their home is lived in rather than designed and with Bel working full time as a trading standards officer she has a lot on her plate. Daughter Luna is coming up to her GCSEs and becomes more incommunicative by the day. Grace is away at university studying psychology and seems the most sensible and sorted out of all of them. Wherever Bel’s busy schedule allows she is quite determined to find out whether Eden really is her lost niece or has she realised her similarity to Tippi and noticed Gabby and Jed’s wealthy lifestyle? It’s hard to like Bel but there’s a lot to empathise with. Jed came across as a man who is used to setting the agenda and uses his money to control and manipulate. Gabby is almost like a shadow, physically present but quiet and passive. Losing her daughter has been a trauma she will never get over and Bel doesn’t want her sister to sleepwalk into a relationship with Eden without proof that she’s definitely who she says she is. But why is Bel so sure Eden isn’t Tippi?

I thought the author captured the endless speculation and media attention around a missing child, especially one as photogenic and appealing as Tippi clearly was. When a case captures the public attention it’s as if everyone wants to be involved. The furore surrounding Madeleine McCann’s disappearance has shown us that people on social media will comment, discuss and make wild accusations about the family. The excerpts from the Facebook page show that people want to be part of the story whether that’s pretending to know something, throwing a wild theory out there or just sending their love and prayers. Often there appears to be no thought for the family who have to wade through this just in case there is a clue. The creative writing pieces are particularly cruel and well written. Who would do such a thing? What’s their aim? Is there any truth in them? It plays on Gabby’s hope that one day she’ll find her. The guilt of the parents felt very real and I found it very hard to believe that Eden was preying on that hope, just wishing that Gabby’s need to find her daughter might overwhelm the need for the truth. In the midst of DNA tests, research and quizzing Eden, has Bel has taken her eye off the ball at home? Something that has bothered her for years keeps resurfacing, a frustration that her sister’s ongoing drama overshadows her and her daughters. Because of what happened, Gabby is the precious sister who they can’t upset. Every problem Bel’s family has pales in comparison to what the Macklins have gone through. As her mother says, she can’t complain about her daughters because at least she has them. 

There are so many secrets here and as always I was glued to the page as they were revealed. Each revelation was a surprise and explained a lot about the family dynamics. The twists were not just focused on the Macklins though, Bel’s family had a few surprises in store too. I thought this was an addictive read and captured perfectly how trauma like this ripples outwards into wider family and friends. Through Gabby we can see how the loss affects a mother, leaving her in limbo and something of a recluse in her own home, perhaps not wanting to miss any development and having her hopes raised and dashed continually. Bel tells the story very well, becoming obsessed with Eden perhaps at the expense of her own daughters. My thoughts about some characters were confirmed, but others surprised me completely. You will devour this novel like I did as it’s Louise Candlish at her very best. 

Out November 5th from Harper Collins

Meet the Author

Louise’s previous thrillers include OUR HOLIDAY, a Sunday Times bestseller, WHSmith Richard & Judy Book Club pick, and OUR HOUSE, now a major four-part drama starring Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton (watch the full series on ITVX in the UK and PBS/Amazon Prime in the US) and winner of the British Book Awards Book of the Year – Crime & Thriller.

She has celebrated her 20th anniversary as an author with the news of two prestigious awards for 90s-set thriller THE ONLY SUSPECT: the Capital Crime Fingerprint Award for Thriller of the Year and the Ned Kelly Award for Best International Crime Fiction. Filming has just wrapped in London for the ITV adaptation, with Kevin McKidd starring as Alex, a middle-aged man with a deadly secret to hide. More soon on that – and on the adaptation of THE HEIGHTS, starring Anna Friel.

She lives in South London with her husband, daughter and a fox-red Labrador called Bertie. Books, TV and long walks are her passions – and drinking wine in the sun with family and friends. Authors she loves include Tom Wolfe, Patricia Highsmith, Barbara Vine, Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh. Her favourite book is Madame Bovary.

Posted in Monthly Wrap Up

Best Reads September 2026

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I have genuinely struggled to read this month and I’m relieved to be at the end of it and taking a much needed break. My home is in chaos because one of the cats is seriously injured, so keeping him safe and indoors while allowing the others to roam normally is difficult. If I separate Max from Dolly he gets very vocal and upset, but if we let him free to see her we have to block off the cat flap. The girls have started to tap at the window when they went to come in, but why is it always when I have my lap tray on my knee? It’s like they can sense me writing or doing my embroidery and want to cause maximum disruption, my lap is then free for cat cuddles of course. Minka is very outdoorsy and has taken over catching vermin, something Max is famous for. Max really wants to be out but although he’s healing he’s not ready yet. The bones seem to be healing well but the muscles and ligaments need plenty of rest yet. He broke his hip joint and his pelvis in several places then in the sacral area his ligaments had become detached leaving the spine separated from the pelvis. He’s walking now and looking a lot more like his old self, just with a slightly twisted walk. My dad has been struggling with his health meanwhile mum is trying to look after him as best she can as well as spending time with grandma who died last week at the age of 93. I sat down on the last day of September to write reviews but I couldn’t think straight. My head felt like a huge ball of chaos and I get weird neurological symptoms when I’m tired or overloaded. I took Max for his anti-inflammatory injections and the vet stopped and fetched me a chair. Apparently I was rocking as if I was about to faint. I’d gone white and when I took my glasses off my pupils were moving back and forth making me feel dizzy. I’ve read way more books than the four above but haven’t typed up my reviews as I’ve found it easier to use a pen and my reading journal so there are lots more reviews and snippets of my own writing coming soon.

This historical murder mystery by the author of last year’s smash hit The Betrayal of Thomas True, A.J. West. You may have seen him on Insta travelling around book stores with his worldly belongings in a camper van. I’m not going to give you my review because it’s due on a blog tour this month, but I’ll give you a preview and some background. We’re drawn into the story of Thomas Lewin and his brother William who went to the Chittagong hills in India. Thomas was a tool of empire but as far as English dignitaries go he did make some effort to speak to local chiefs in their dialect and kept local customs. He also had a relationship with a local woman called Dari who was referred to as the ‘wife’ of the great Thangliana. Everest is his daughter, drawn into the murder of her Uncle William who was killed thirty years after their return from India while acting in the West End. Everest isn’t sure about the murder, or the man kept in Broadmoor for committing it, especially when her father kept telling her about a curse. A.J.West has taken the historical details and written a great murder mystery with gothic and mystical elements and a very forthright female investigator. I fell in love with the journal entries that cover this family’s adventurous lives and particularly one written from the perspective of William’s wife Isabel who I was captivated by. It’s also incredibly witty and packed with colourful characters. Look out for my full review coming soon.

One golden summer. One missing treasure. And a secret that binds two lives together. 

Every year, Alice’s father gives her a treasure. Then on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, her final gift vanishes – along with the fragile certainty of her world. Alice runs, towards New York City and away from the memories of that last summer at the orchard where she grew up. Across the Atlantic, Tom has always felt that something is missing from his life. When he finds a long-forgotten letter, it leads him away from Sevenstones – the house at the heart of his family for generations – and towards a truth no one has ever fully told. From post-war London to 1960s New York, Alice and Tom’s stories become entwined. But will the secrets of their past bring them together, or break them apart?

I always think that the good marker of a book is when you find yourself thinking about it days later and this book brought up so many feelings! While we start with Alice’s devastating story of her early years, it was Tom’s narrative where the book came alive for me, with his early life in Dumfries and Galloway only a stone’s throw from my favourite yearly holiday destination. The descriptions are so vivid, from the hand to mouth existence of Tom and his father, their total connection with the seasons and each other. To be torn from all of that and transported to post-war London by his mother’s family feels so unjust. As Tom deals with new expectations, the fractured feel of the city and its bomb sites, we start to sense a secret behind all of this, only hinted at and never made clear to Tom. A promise was made in wartime, one that couldn’t be broken and has it’s roots in a house called Sevenstones where a key was left under a stone at the door for anyone who needed an interlude from their wartime duties. It’s a secret that follows Tom throughout his years at school and eventually across the Atlantic. Each section of this book is so evocative of its time and place and it is such an incredible example of how trauma is passed down through families. It made me think about world events that have affected previous generations of my family and why they made the decisions they did for their children.

When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden. In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door. But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while trying to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.

Wow I love this series and at the sixth book in it just gets better and better. These cases are never tidy. There’s always something that doesn’t quite fit or can’t be explained. I imagine this is the norm in real life police work, but often detective fiction is way too cleanly tidied away. Here someone always knows more than they’re willing to say or are more involved than you imagined. Then there’s the burden of proof needed for a conviction. Then there’s how everyone in Akranes is interlinked and having grown up in a small rural town I can see how it’s easy to think we know everything about another person. The truth is that we rarely see the full picture, just our part of it coloured by our own experience. Even within families there are things people know but no one talks about, there are different versions of the family history, things we’re open about and things we bury. Even so, how far would we go to protect those we love, especially our children? Throughout this series the people of Akranes are like a wider family, burying each other’s crimes and collectively forgetting the truth. The impact of one generation’s choices affecting the next. This is the scariest truth about monsters, they don’t look like storybook monsters, they can come out in daylight and ‘on the surface they’re just like ordinary people.’ This is a dark psychological thriller, full of atmosphere and a detective who always digs deep into her cases, even when it makes her personal life uncomfortable.

London, 1911. Coronation fever. Suffragette unrest. A city crackling with tension.

When a policeman is found brutally murdered on the streets of Kensington, blame falls on the three women seen fleeing the scene. Their sole witness? Stephen Pike: ex-borstal boy, under-butler extraordinaire and assistant to the most unconventional detective in London, Miss Decima Stockingham. Sharp-tongued, fearless and bored of behaving herself, she’s the only one able to see that this case is not what it seems.

Aided by an invisible network of maids – their eyes and ears in every house in London – this unlikely duo must catch the killer before time runs out. But in a city dazzled by ceremony and divided by change, you never know what might be lurking in the shadows…

It’s impossible for me to start this review without declaring my undying devotion to Miss Decima Stockingham who intelligent, entitled, sweary and short-tempered. On meeting her long-suffering servant Stephen Pike, other servants from the apartments that line Kensington Gore commiserate that at least he isn’t indentured to the mad old cow in 89C. He doesn’t correct them because largely their only impression of this woman is her morning bellow for her egg and her propensity to fling books out of the window until it arrives: 

“I was under the impression that boiling an egg was a quick job, but apparently you’re rearing the chicken by hand and fetching the water from fucking Spain.” 

Underneath this exterior is a sharp-witted woman who doesn’t mind appearing contrary and rude if it gets her the results she needs or the information she’s seeking. This character is begging for a TV series and Olivia Coleman. Her foil is Stephen Pike, driven to distraction by her demands and her willingness to place him in dangerous situations. He’s equally comic, mainly physically, in one scene he’s lured to a union meeting at the pub which soon descends into an evening of rounds, a drunken football match, injury and a hefty hangover. He may seem ordinary to the untrained eye but Miss Decima can see a sharp intelligence, observational skill and an ability to put a pattern together that makes them a formidable team. We meet them just before the coronation of George V and Queen Mary is just around the corner. The suffragettes are ramping up their civil disobedience and taking direct action to gain the vote. The author uses this backdrop for the labyrinthine murder mystery our mismatched pair are investigating. I loved the mix of comedy, suspense and action in this second book in the series and I’m now dying to read the first.

Below is my October tbr stack.

Posted in Random Things Tours

 The Last Tenant by Eva Bjorg Aegisdottir

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Trust can be deadly…

When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden.

In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door. But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while trying to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar. Dark, atmospheric and rich with psychological suspense, The Last Tenant confirms Eva Björg Ægisdóttir as one of Iceland’s finest crime writers, as a meticulous investigation and a series of unsettling discoveries draw a close-knit community towards a reckoning no one can escape…

Wow! I love this series and at the sixth book in it just gets better and better. Elma’s case is a difficult and historic one as remains of a woman are found on a remote farm next to the long-buried bones of an infant. Elma will have to wait to find out whether the two are linked and how they’ve died, in the meantime she will have to trawl through missing person reports to find a likely candidate for the woman. She finds one in a young woman named Solrun, a medical student who had been dating a local boy when she went missing and both her car and clothes were found on a beach. Now Elma must delve into her past and reopen the scars for those she knew and loved because Solrun did not walk into the sea and drown. The baby’s DNA matches hair found buried with Solrun, but she hadn’t been pregnant and the baby’s remains predate hers by some years. Confused, Elma becomes engrossed in the case that is bound to cause a stir in her home town of Akranes as dark family secrets are uncovered. We see the case through Elma’s eyes but we’re also taken into the life of a young woman called Karitas who has recently moved into town with her young son Bessi. At first glance their basement flat is small but clean and her new landlord Baldvin seems odd but kind. There are also transcripts of a young man recording his troubled relationship with his father and the disappearance of his girlfriend on to his phone. Lyrical jornal entries from a young woman book end the novel. These different narratives are just one of the reasons I love this author’s writing. It reminds me of the Shetland novels by Anne Cleeves. In a remote small towns cases become complicated because everybody knows each other and their history family history. It brings home the emotional fallout of the crime committed and the toll it takes on the detectives like Elma who grew up here and have to picture their friends and neighbours as suspects. There are twists here you won’t see coming, but they’re not there for sensation but come about because people have secrets and tell lies. In the background runs the tension between retired police chief Otto and Elma, who blackmailed her on a previous case by claiming he knew a secret about Saever. 

Elma throws herself into this case, mainly working alone but with Saever close by or at home to test her theories. Otto’s claims from the last book haven’t been addressed between them and along with having a lively toddler it has definitely sewn a bit of distance into their relationship. Her concerns grow when she sees he is distracted and receiving emails or messages from a woman that he isn’t sharing with her. I love the equity of their relationship, always equally responsible for chores, cooking and childcare, with none of the angst or guilt we often read with fictional female police officers. She’s a great mum but when she’s at work her mind is on the case, endlessly scrolling what she knows so far like a fruit machine in her head until something suddenly matches. She’s so absorbed that she’s not always checking her own well-being, with her mum intervening here and there to let the couple have some time and fun. On a night of wine with friends she’s horrified to have blurted out something about the case and mentally kicks herself for being unprofessional but she has discovered something she didn’t have before – other people’s impressions of someone she’s considering.

I enjoyed the character of Baldvin, the landlord of the basement flat where Karitas and Bessi live. He’s just the sort of the elderly gentleman I’d make friends with and I’ve had some eccentric friends over the years! He comes across as harmless and lonely with monologues that drift off at tangents and become philosophical. With a typical child’s innocence Bessi forms a bond with him, mainly fuelled by biscuits and ice-cream. He’s kind to them both so Karitas is surprised when neighbour Kristofer suggests she should be careful, insinuating he was creepy around his previous girlfriend. He does mention something about Karitas’s last name, its meaning and something about three suns that seems odd. She couldn’t be so wrong about him surely? She does sometimes come home and feel that someone has been in the flat and perhaps senses the whiff of his aftershave. When Elma asks around she finds that many people find him an odd character, almost like a child himself with a strange little giggle. A story about him did the rounds some years ago, that when working at the leisure centre he touched a young girl inappropriately, but one of her friends insists it wasn’t true. It shows that ‘apparently the truth doesn’t matter’ she says, something that seems more true today than ever before. 

These cases are never tidy. There’s always something that doesn’t quite fit or can’t be explained. I imagine this is the norm in real life police work, but often detective fiction is way too cleanly tidied away. Here someone always knows more than they’re willing to say or are more involved than you imagined. Then there’s the burden of proof needed for a conviction. Elma knows Solrun was chasing down a clue before she disappeared, because one of her friends mentioned she’d asked for help about symptoms and medication. It wasn’t a personal enquiry but Elma can’t see where it might fit in her death, even when everything else is explained. Then there’s how everyone in Akranes is interlinked and having grown up in a small rural town I can see how it’s easy to think we know everything about another person. The truth is that we rarely see the full picture, just our part of it coloured by our own experience. Even within families there are things people know but no one talks about, there are different versions of the family history, things we’re open about and things we bury. Even so, how far would we go to protect those we love, especially our children? Throughout this series the people of Akranes are like a wider family, burying each other’s crimes and collectively forgetting the truth. The impact of one generation’s choices affecting the next. This the genius and the darkness at the heart of this series. The scariest truth about monsters is they don’t look like they do in storybooks; they can come out in daylight and ‘on the surface they’re just like ordinary people.’ 

Out Now from Orenda Books

Meet the Author

Born in Akranes, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir studied for an MSc in Globalisation in Norway before returning to Iceland and deciding to write a novel. Her debut, The Creak on the Stairs, was published in 2018, becoming a bestsellerin Iceland and going on to win the Blackbird Award and the Storytel Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. It was published in English by Orenda Books in 2020, and became a number-one bestseller in ebook, shortlisting for Capital Crime’s Amazon Publishing Awards in two categories, and winning the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger. Girls Who Lie, Night Shadows, You Can’t See Me and Boys Who Hurt soon followed suit, shortlisting for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger, the Capital Crime Awards, and the Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel. You Can’t See Me won the Storytel Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year in Iceland in 2023. In 2024, Eva won Iceland’s prestigious Crime Fiction Award, the Blood Drop, for Home before Dark and was shortlisted for the coveted Glass Key. The Forbidden Iceland series, due to hit streaming servicesin Autumn 2026 via GlassRiver, has established Eva as one of Iceland’s bestselling and most distinguished crime writers, and her books are published in twenty-nine languages with more than a million copies sold.

Posted in Squad Pod Collective

The Bestseller by Jenny Knightsby 

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Therapist Helena Salve knows that client confidentiality is the number one unbreakable rule of her job. But the constant stories of coercive control and threat she hears from her client Belle about her dangerous husband have been wearing her down. One night over too many glasses of wine, she tells her best friend Tala everything that Belle has told her. The problem is, Tala is a down-on-her-luck novelist who is looking for an idea for her new thriller.

Months later, Tala is excitedly telling Helena that her publisher is saying this is going to be her biggest book ever. The story is Belle’s story. Not only is Helena’s job on the line, but if Belle’s husband is as dangerous as she says, her life is too…

Why would Tala do this to Helena? She knows what’s at stake.

Your friends are meant to protect you… aren’t they?

This is a great premise for a thriller and having been a therapist I’m always fascinated by books based on the therapeutic relationship. I think there’s a general fascination about what therapist’s personal lives actually look like. Do they have it all sorted? The answer is invariably no and in this novel there’s so much projection happening between Helena and her client Belle. Confidentiality is the bedrock of any therapeutic relationship, but that can get tricky when the therapist knows the client needs either specialist help or practical help. Helena is there to listen and guide Belle towards her own answers, but the constant disclosure of coercive control is uncomfortable to sit in. The urge to do rather than sit back and listen becomes difficult for Helena and it’s this discomfort that leads to her talking about it with best friend Tala. She asks Belle to bring her husband Julius to the sessions as she’s normally a couple’s counsellor, but that wouldn’t work either because he might take the opportunity to abuse his wife verbally and emotionally in the session. It is impossible to counsel a narcissist.This is an issue for supervision, where Helena should disclose that she’s finding Belle’s passivity and indecision on leaving her husband Julius very difficult. The fact that she doesn’t, tells me she wants to show her supervisor Martha that she’s doing this ‘right’. Helena is a perfectionist and perhaps she seeks approval from her supervisor rather than being totally honest. There’s something about Helena that’s very responsible, aware of her ethical framework and unwilling to break out of it. However, sometimes this demeanour doesn’t seem real.

I found Helena an odd central character because we have access to her inner life but I still felt she was almost ‘missing’ in the story. She feels very flat compared to other characters and it was as if she’d fallen permanently into her counselling role, treating everyone with empathy rather than displaying honest human reactions to events. However, as those events start to spiral out of control, that serene outer surface does start to crack. The author uses flashbacks to give us a picture of how all the characters meet while they’re at university, but also to show us incidents that would have me dumping her boyfriend Dylan, but Helena accepts and forgives. One scene is a dinner with Martha her tutor, but Dylan is late. When he does arrive he’s very drunk and relieves himself on the rug! This would have been an unforgivable red flag for me. Helena seems to have the measured outlook a lot of counsellors have, the ability to think on something for a while and not act on her first emotions. There’s no doubt she’s furious and betrayed when she realises best friend Tala has written a book based on her current client Belle. Inside she’s screaming ‘how could you do this to me?’ She’s terrified of her career and reputation being finished by this breach of confidentiality but she doesn’t show it. She waits and mulls it over, never displaying the emotions underneath. This either shows an ability to rationalise obstacles and work out a response that’s fully thought through, or she’s completely out of touch with her own emotions and unable to express them as soon as they arise. It made me think of the famous book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ where the author explains how trauma is not just a psychological event, it’s a physiological one too. The trauma is felt bodily and stays within the nervous system, causing physical reactions if not addressed through holistic therapy such as a combination of EMDR, yoga, meditation and neurofeedback. The body stores the trauma as muscle tension, hypervigilance and a rapid heart rate continuing to experience them long after the trauma has passed. I felt like Helena was storing her emotions bodily, without truly feeling and expressing them, that is until events start to spiral out of control.

Tala is Helena’s opposite in every way. She’s impulsive, creative and a torrent of emotion at all stages of her life. There’s clearly been an event that’s affected her permanently and it’s only through flashbacks that we see what this is. It makes sense of her neediness when it comes to relationships and when she thinks she’s found one after years of being single, she isn’t going to give it up easily. I couldn’t believe the audacity of taking Helena’s private impressions and worries for her client and turning them into a sensational thriller. It seems out of character for Tala who has been a steadfast friend for many years. Maybe she didn’t expect the book to take off the way it does and now it’s being advertised on the Tube and on the side of buses she can’t take it back. Risky behaviour isn’t new to Tala, we see in flashbacks that she experimented at university with drink and drugs. There’s an element of mothering in Helena’s relationship with her friend, replacing a missing element in her life? Helena and Dylan are that stable couple Tala runs to when things go wrong, but what about when things go right? As Helena reacts to the new book I wondered how much she was threatened by Tala’s success? If Tala gets her act together and does really well with the book, she might stop being the person who depends on Helena. No longer the person to be pitied and sighed over. When she brings a new boyfriend into the mix it’s as if all the problems in Tala’s life are being resolved at once and she is well aware of this change in their dynamic. 

I loved the way the author wrote about coercive control and as a survivor of this type of relationship it matters when people get it right. One of the worst elements for me was that other people can’t always see it, it’s subtle and hard to pin down when someone is exerting their will over you. It’s rarely straightforward because it exists within the dynamic of your relationship, so one seemingly innocuous word could bring you sharply back into line and leave you dreading the real ‘fallout’ later when you’re alone. The worst thing about this type of relationship is that you start to police yourself, trained into acting the way that pleases the abuser. They might seem to champion you to others, but in truth are jealous of what you’ve achieved and once the reflected glory has worn off they might try sabotage. After leaving my relationship I felt an enormous amount of relief but then self-doubt would creep in as if I’d internalised the abuser’s voice. It’s disorienting because the person you were in love with isn’t real, but just a mask they wear to hide their true self. All of this can be seen in Belle’s relationship with Julius and I think my own experience helped me understand why Helena wants to help this woman, even though she’s struggling to stay within the boundaries of their therapy. It’s very hard to sit back and not give advice in these situations or offer help beyond the counselling room. It was interesting to see how the professional distance became impossible when Martha ended up in hospital and Helena was without supervision. 

It seems that the lives of these three friends and their paths into adulthood hinged on a single night. I thought the author managed these flashbacks well, placing them absolutely perfectly for maximum effect. It seems everyone has secrets but they are slowly revealed creating a very addictive read with short, pacy chapters that make you want to read just one more – I desperately wanted to know where Martha’s cat had gone! The tension is almost unbearable as I worried about Helena overstepping with her client, or the client finding out what’s in Tala’s book and somehow passing that on to Julius. Would Helena be safe? As her well-ordered life starts to fall apart Helena starts to lose her belongings, forget her schedule and have terrible nightmares. She has no access to Martha and her relationship with Tala is broken. I wondered if she was heading for a breakdown. You may see the twist coming, but that doesn’t detract from the story. Eyes are opened, secrets past and present are revealed and I devoured the last few chapters late at night, unable to wait till the morning to find out what happened. This was an excellent thriller, full of psychological drama and really nailed the experience of being a counsellor with a problematic client. I also loved the ‘meta’ structure of reading a book about a book and just like Tala’s new novel this one should be a bestseller. 

Out now from Mountain Leopard Press

Meet the Author

Jenny Knightsby is a hospital doctor based in West London. The Bestseller was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2024 and is Knightsby’s debut novel.

Posted in Personal Purchase

Under the Blazing Sun by Jenny Lund Madsen

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Hannah is miserable. Her love life is in ruins, her contract demands a sequel to her bestselling crime debut – and she’s out of ideas. After a mortifying TV interview, her agent ships her off to a sun-drenched Sicilian villa with a simple order: finish the book. No distractions. No excuses.

But inspiration doesn’t strike – murder does. When a night out ends in murder, Hannah finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation … again. The police want her out of the way, and the only person who seems to believe her is a young but charming Italian police officer. That is, until she doesn’t.

Soon Hannah is chasing suspects, fleeing crime scenes, and doing whatever it takes to avoid becoming the next victim. She came to write a crime novel. Now she’s trapped inside one. Dark, sly and deliciously atmospheric, Under the Blazing Sun is the second novel in the award-winning series featuring accidental sleuth and disgruntled literary author Hannah, whose pursuit of plot twists keeps turning dangerously real.

I loved the author’s first book in this series and I devoured this one in a day. Hannah is once again fretting over writing her latest book, disgusted that copies of the romance novel she poured her heart into is being ignored, while the crime novel she wrote in one month for a bet is a bestseller. Hannah is a brilliantly flawed character full of writer’s neurosis, hating that she is forced to write what will sell rather than the books she aspires to write. Again she’s on a deadline and as a last resort her editor Bastian finds her a quiet villa in Sicily with its own swimming pool. No distractions and plenty of time to unwind and write the novel she’s had an advance to produce. I love this character because she says and does the things I want to, but my inhibitions keep it inside. She has no such restrictions, happily saying what she thinks when she thinks it. Her disgust with the crime genre and Jorn Jensen in particular is so funny. I wonder if she has ever had a thought or need she didn’t express? She’s also totally unregulated and this is what lands her in trouble every time. She decides to walk to the village without thought about the heat, how far it is and which direction she takes. So when it comes to going back to the villa she has no idea which hill to take and ends up exhausted and on the verge of sunstroke on her way back. This is where she is found by Hans and Greta who take her to their incredible house to clean up and drink something. This turns into dinner, wine and a night spent in their house. It’s when she wakes up in a strange place that she and the housekeeper Lucette find a dead body. Greta has been murdered and Hans is nowhere to be found. Has he been kidnapped or could he be the murderer? Hannah seems to have an inability to weigh up a decision before taking action. There’s so much going on in her head that it’s very hard for her to remain in the present. I’m always wishing she’d slow down a minute and breathe, but the only times she seems to do this are in the water. 

This hot Italian island couldn’t be further from Hannah’s Scandinavian home and is a great backdrop for a murder. Hannah is a fish out of water here and she notes the contrast between the cold and snow of her last case and the relentless heat and dryness of Sicily. The area throws up different obstacles too. There’s the rather sexist and misogynistic Sicilian police, aside from their one female recruit Carlotta. Hannah has to consider the local community and possible objections to people like Greta who are making money by bringing even more tourists into the area. There’s the possibility of corruption too with links between the Mafia, business and local government. We see the contrast of what the area is like for holiday makers and wealthy incomers, as opposed to the young people in the area who are struggling to find work and homes without moving away. The young police detective Carlotta wants to be the difference in the police force, banding together with Hannah on a couple of occasions and proving to be quite the distraction. Hannah is still in love with Margret and is dangling on an open ended waiting game. They’re not in a relationship until Margret can extricate herself from her marriage and make the best decisions for her children. Hannah isn’t always patient with this and doesn’t seem to realise that if Margret was in her life permanently so are her children. When she imagines them together I’m not sure the children feature in that picture. It was interesting to see her getting more than she bargained for and having the cheek to ask Margret’s police officer husband for help! He voices what many readers might be thinking when he tells her she’s the most annoying person he’s ever met. 

The case is an absolute maze of connections and suspects and despite her aversion to crime as a genre, she’s just as caught up in the mystery of this murder as any reader would be. She’s utterly reckless, in a comical way and there’s a chase on a moped during the final chapters that is clumsy and hilarious to imagine. Sparks fly when Jorn Jensen appears, but she can’t deny he helps make things happen. His arrogance is brilliant and when he suggests they write a crime novel together I thought Hannah might hit him with something heavy. The creepy moment in the basement, including Jensen’s cardboard cut out made me laugh and worry about her safety at the same time. This is a dark humour that I love. Jorn’s statement that he has ‘enormous sex appeal’ and it’s that and not his wealth that attracts women shows what sort of brash and conceited character he is, but there’s no denying his bravery and quick thinking. They are quite the investigative team, despite her reticence about working with him. Hannah’s instincts are good. She won’t accept the police’s conclusion that Hans killed his wife, reasoning that he adored her and couldn’t have done it. Instead she follows the money, often blundering into compromising situations and dangerous people. If the conclusion teaches her anything it’s that people will murder for very unexpected reasons. This is a brilliant second instalment of Hannah’s adventures and I’m going to resolve to be a little more Hannah and say what I think here and there. 

Out now from Orenda Books