M. F. W. Curran – “The Secret War” (2007) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in January 2009 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 29/08/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

In books, stories of vampires and demons fighting men have been done over and over again and it’s tough for a new writer to find a different slant to put on events. The same can be said of war stories, particularly in film and TV versions, where the focus has switched away from the fighting itself and more towards the human aspect, with some having the war as a background character rather than a focus. What M. F. W. Curran has done with “The Secret War” is combine both to great effect.

The recently promoted Captain William Saxon and his closest friend Lieutenant Kieran Harte are survivors of the Battle of Waterloo. For both of them, the victory comes with a cost. William lost many men under his command and carries the guilt that he was no able to do more. Kieran has been injured and is recuperating in the Belgian town of Gembloux where he has found love and is considering leaving the army to stay behind when his colleagues return home.

Neither of them realise that there are worse battles to come, against an enemy not so easily defeated as the French were. They soon find this out, though, as a mysterious artefact stolen from the body of a dead French soldier proves to have the power to raise a daemon. This daemon ravages the town of Gembloux, killing soldiers and civilians alike, including Kieran’s lover. Reluctantly, they return home only to find there are others who are interested in the artefact. Death follows them until they meet a man called Engrin who leads them to Rome and introduces them to a secret part of the Catholic Church that is fighting a battle against these daemons and worse.

The story starts a little slowly, given that we don’t actually see any action from the Napoleonic War, although we do get some in flashback a little later on. Instead, we get an introduction to the relationship between the Kieran and William. But before things can get bogged down, they have their first meeting with a daemon and suddenly the story becomes all action and remains that way more or less throughout. It does slow a little when they return home, reflecting the far slower pace of life they lead when not on the front line, but even at this point the action I’d become accustomed to by this stage wasn’t far away.

The one danger that this approach can bring is that fighting the same kind of enemy over and over can get a little repetitive sometimes, such as happened in Karen Miller’s “Empress”. Curran, however, has mixed things up wonderfully. Whilst the main story is about the fight between the Church and the daemons and vampyres, there is enough variation within this to keep it interesting all the way through. As well as the background to help you get to know the characters, Curran introduces us to the Church’s army of monks and their training and the political intrigue going on within the Vatican which may cause the war to be lost. Add to this the changing scenery between France, Belgium, England and Italy and even a battle at sea and the mixture of places and circumstances really helps to keep things interesting.

However, the aspect I most enjoyed was the characters themselves. Curran’s writing isn’t especially visually descriptive, meaning you don’t often get a clear picture of characters or places themselves, but he is a great writer of personality. Even when all the monks are in their matching uniforms, you can easily tell them apart by the way they act and their motivation for doing what they do. The relationships between all the characters are vividly described and it’s almost impossible not to share the guilt that some of them feel for either past or present actions and the love they feel is tangible at times.

This is also a great help in ensuring you know which side you’re supposed to be on. As compared to the personalities of the men, the daemons are mindless killing machines and the vampyres, whilst human like in appearance, are cold and emotionless. There is never any sympathy for the forces of evil as Curran doesn’t allow the reader to generate any feeling for them whatsoever. It’s one of the clearest lines I’ve seen drawn between two sides of a war in a book in some time and it’s quite subtly done, without having to resort to descriptions of the acts of horror the least likeable side may commit to turn your sympathy against them.

When a writer takes on an old idea, there has to be something new involved to make it stand out, or it has to be very well written to make it worth reading. Here, Curran has achieved the latter with a good use of pace and a great use of the characters’ personalities. This is impressive for any writer, but considering this was his debut novel, this makes it even more worthy of note. It is a testament to both his skill as a writer and how much I enjoyed the story that, having a copy of the second part of the story immediately to hand, I did not hesitate for a moment before diving straight in at the end of this first part.

Jonathan Gash – “Bad Girl Magdalene” (2008) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in November 2008 and was also subsequently published on ciao.co.uk on 03/04/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

Over the years, there has been a lot in the news about the abuse suffered by children in the care of the church, particularly the Catholic Church. After years of such abuse, many parts of the church have since offered apologies and reparation. Something like this isn’t necessarily the kind of thing you would expect to see as the basis for a novel, but that is the background against which Jonathan Gash’s “Bad Girl Magdalene” is set.

Magda Finnan is a child of The Magdalenes, an orphanage run by nuns. Having reached the age at which she can leave, she has a job as a domestic at the St Cosmo Old People’s Home, also run by a group of nuns and a place of her own to live. Unfortunately, Magda is still haunted by dreams of an evening back at the Magdalenes, where her best friend Lucy was abused by a priest and ended the night by ending her life; an event which was covered up by the nuns.

One day, Magda sees Father Doran, the priest who she still holds responsible for Lucy’s demise. She vows that she will kill him, thinking that this may be the only way to ensure Lucy is at rest and no longer haunting Magda’s dreams night after night. The problem Madga has is that she can’t read or write and so has only the vaguest of ideas of how to go about something like this. She just knows that it needs to be done, but isn’t entirely sure how to get it done.

We follow Magda through a few days of her life, getting to see how her strict Catholic upbringing and the things she’s seen in the orphanage have affected her and how she lives her life now. We see how people take advantage of her, both and work an in her personal life and how the religious views she’s had imprinted on her have coloured her life. We also get to see how she works around being illiterate and innumerate to such an extent that no-one realises straight away that she can’t read or count.

What struck me most about the story, even more so than the slightly disturbing background, is what a wonderful character Magda Finnan is. She’s spent most of her life being ordered around and berated and punished for any number of things and she’s uneducated, which gives her a major inferiority complex. She’s a shy, retiring little thing, but she’s battled through everything life has thrown at her and she’s survived, possibly against the odds. This makes her more of a heroine than many other characters I’ve come across.

The way the book is written helps with this, as it’s told from Magda’s point of view in the very simple language she herself would use. When she’s under pressure, there are moments where it sometimes becomes a little disjointed, with the writing almost heading towards the stream of consciousness style, but retaining more composure than that style would allow. There were parts where Magda reminded me of Christopher Boone from Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”, although without the same level of fascination that novel provided.

Despite the delight that was Magda, this was still a slightly difficult novel to get into. The whole background is slightly unpleasant, even more so when you suddenly spot a mention of a mobile phone or something recent and realise that this is not a novel set a long time ago, but on events that have possibly occurred recently or may still be going on.

This does take a little away from the simple joy that is Magda’s life, for the reader at least, if not for her. This, combined with her almost childlike ways, made what she was trying to do seem a little more distasteful. Whilst the language is quite simple, the novel isn’t always an easy read because of this, although it does become rather compelling, as you can’t help but feel sympathy for Magda’s cause, as wrong as her aims may seem to the rest of us.

If you can put the slightly disturbing concept to the back of your mind as you read, this is a thoroughly rewarding novel, in which the context plays an important part. It’s a novel that pulls your emotions in different directions, such that I found I enjoyed it, but felt slightly guilty for having done so. It’s not the kind of thing I could read over and over, but it’s certainly different enough and well written enough to be worthy of one look.

Tim Harris – “Sport: Almost Everything You Ever Wanted to Know” (2007) Review. 3/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in August 2008 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 17/02/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

We all know one. Someone who can tell you who was the last player to score a hat trick for Accrington Stanley away to Grimsby on a Wednesday night in January. This was just a random example, by the way, so please don’t write in with the answer. The kind of person who is wonderful to have on your side at a Quiz Night, but who you don’t really want to be getting into conversation with if you can avoid it.

This is the main problem a book like this is going to have. It needs to impart information, but without being incredibly dull. After all, no one reads a dictionary for fun; or no one I know, at least. The introduction sets a light-hearted tone that promises well for the rest of the book and which continues for much of the text, which has quite a light tone to take the edge off the rather heavy material and has the odd humorous aside.

Over the chapters, Harris works through the various sections of sport. He begins on the field itself, talking about how the field of play has changed from the original Olympic arenas to modern day stadia. He the covers how the rules have adapted over the years and how the kit has changed some sports beyond all recognition.

Perhaps more topically, the use of drugs in sport gets a chapter of its own as does, a little more strangely and not entirely in keeping with the way he’s set out the rest of the book, the art of racing in all its forms. He ends with the effects of outside influences on the sporting world with chapters on political influences on sport and the media influences on it.

Harris certainly manages to achieve what I believe were his main aims. In terms of the “almost everything you need to know”, it can’t be argued that this book is anything but a complete success. The amount of information contained here is staggering and, whilst the main focus is on the more popular sports; football, cricket, both forms of rugby and horse racing, it’s difficult to think of a single sport, even dating back as far as chariot racing and the Ancient Greek Olympics, that doesn’t get a mention. The down side of this all-inclusive policy and the attempts to make the book appeal to the maximum number of people is that many sports don’t get much page space, with the virtual ignoring of my own particular sport of field hockey being a minor disappointment, even allowing for the fact that Harris warns of this in the introduction.

What wasn’t a disappointment was how readable the book was, especially considering the rather imposing size of it. Rather than filling the pages with huge lists and nothing other than facts and figures, Harris has gone for a very readable style. His writing style is quite informal and chatty, which makes it like having a conversation with one of those rather dull people I mentioned in the first paragraph. The main difference is that Harris writes with a dry humour that manifests itself most easily in the chapter and section headings, but also allows for the odd wry aside that gives this an edge over most reference style books.

This does make the book an easy read, but unfortunately the way it is set out makes it almost useless as a reference book. In the chapters with a much greater scope, such as the ones on the rules, the arenas and the kit, he attempts to break things up chronologically, but also by sport. This means that he takes chunks of time on one sport, then circles back round to the same period and focuses on another sport and so on. It does keep things flowing, but if something catches your attention and you want to refer back to it, finding it again is going to be next to impossible.

In the sections where there is less information, Harris’ style works a lot better. The drugs section is split by drug, rather than by sport, which wasn’t quite in keeping with everything else, but gave a good view of how widely used some drugs were. The media and politics chapters were much the same, both written strictly chronologically, without worrying about the sports. Apart from the fact that some information did seem to be repeated between the chapters, these would be the easiest ones to find anything from. The “speed sports” section was probably the best, as well as being a personal favourite sport of mine, the scope was quite narrow and so a chronological history worked beautifully. My one complaint with that section was that after the invention of the car, it focused almost exclusively on Formula One, with other forms of car racing barely getting a mention.

The one thing that could have made the book more use as a reference tool would have been with the inclusion of a decent index. Sadly, in this area they have also failed with much of the index being grouped by sport as opposed to the more traditional simply alphabetical version. This is more in keeping with the way the book is set out, but does reduce the effectiveness of the book as a reference source.

It’s a shame, as there is a lot of information here and Tim Harris has written well and accessibly. I did enjoy reading the book, even discovering to my surprise that it clarified a reference in an introduction to a Stephen King novel for me. However, the way the information is presented means it’s unlikely to have mass appeal; it won’t work as a reference volume and no one but the most diehard sports fan is going to pick up a book like this to read for pleasure.

J. P. Ledwon – “This Time Around” (2008) Review. 5/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in December 2008 and was subsequently also published on http://www.ciao.co.uk on 24/12/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014. Please note that the author paid for the original review, but this did not influence my opinion in any way.

For some reason, the male version of “chick-lit” never really took off. “Bloke-lit” hasn’t sold in the way the genre’s big sister has done. Maybe we men don’t like admitting we have emotions, or maybe we’re just too busy watching football in the pub to read a book. It’s a shame, as there are some decent authors working in the genre. Mike Gayle is perhaps the best known, but I’ve just discovered another who is a worthy addition to the genre.

Barry Brooks isn’t having a terribly good day. He thought he was, with a great new job on the horizon and having just completed the Three Peaks Challenge, but his girlfriend isn’t as excited at his achievement as he thought she would be. When he gets home, he discovers why; she’s packed up the entire contents of the home they shared and has left him, turning all his friends against him in the process. Worse is to come when his parents are killed in an accident and his new job turns out not to offer the bright future he anticipated.

Barry’s life becomes something of a rollercoaster ride. For everything good that happens to him, something bad is usually not too far behind. Unfortunately for Barry, the lows seem to be lower than the highs are high. He’s also getting some strange people coming into his life, some of them giving him cryptic messages and even going so far as claiming to be his long dead grandfather. Barry doesn’t know what’s happening to his life and nothing that happens seems to be helping him understand it any better.

Seen through Barry’s eyes, his life veers from the normal to the strange on an almost daily basis. One minute he seems to be settled and things are going well, but the next he’s mired in confusion trying to figure out the latest set of strange events to engulf him. With Barry being largely off balance, the reader is also left largely off balance as well. When the ending came, I realised I should have seen it coming, but I was so caught up in Barry’s confusion that, much like Barry himself, I didn’t spot it until it was way too late. It was a masterful piece of storytelling by Ledwon, leaving the answer in plain sight, but disguising it beautifully.

It’s very easy to get caught up in the story and the major part of the reason for this is that Barry could be any one of us. Most of us have jobs, many have partners, some will have gone through the pain of losing our parents and most through the pain of a relationship ending. In many ways, Ledwon is telling us our own life story and even if it’s not a life we’d be entirely happy living, it’s close enough to the real thing to be able to relate to.

Adding to this realism is that Barry’s life isn’t too extraordinary that it takes the edge off the story. Too many novels in the genre have characters with too much time on their hands; meeting friends for coffee or extended lunches and whose employers seemingly don’t care if they’re at work or not. Barry doesn’t have that luxury and so is at work when he should be and doesn’t have free time he shouldn’t have. Indeed, apart from the strange things that keep happening to him, his life gives the appearance of being quite dull and ordinary, which also helped to blind me to the reason behind events.

The pace of the story is deceptively high. It’s only really a snippet of real life and there’s not an awful lot going on compared to some stories, but Ledwon manages to make things pass a lot quicker than you would expect. The whole story seems like watching life with the fast forward button pressed; the story flashes by and scenes and circumstances change before you realise it. This meant that reading the book felt like the pages were turning on fast forward as well and it’s a masterful piece of pacing that only helps the book seem better.

If there is one negative aspect, it’s in Barry’s job. Initially it seems to fit in with the realism, but it does become one of the few unrealistic aspects of the story. With the rest of the story being so real, it does stand out and it stretches disbelief so far that I could almost hear it snap. It’s a rare poor moment in what is a wonderful story and fortunately it’s only a minor part, so it didn’t impact severely on my enjoyment of the book.

What Ledwon has done here is combined ordinary life with extraordinary circumstances and turned it into something wonderful. With Barry being so completely ordinary is virtually every way, this story really shouldn’t be as readable or as addictive as it is. Ledwon has given us a literary cake; the end product is tastier than any of the individual ingredients. The early pages give no real hint of what is to come and the reader is hooked before you realise it. It’s wonderfully done in virtually every way and I’m certainly going to be watching for Ledwon’s name with interest in future.

Stan Cattermole (K. P. Webster) – “Bete De Jour: The Intimate Adventures Of An Ugly Man” (2009) Review. 5/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in May 2009 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 29/10/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

‘’Something’s just come in that might appeal to you’’, said Sue from The Bookbag, having just taken delivery of ‘’Bête de Jour’’. Pleased to be thought of, I never mustered the courage to ask whether this thought was motivated by a previous liking for bloke lit, or by the book’s subtitle: ‘’The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man’’.

The major issue with bloke- and chick-lit is that, all too often, it’s about perfect people. The main characters are usually successful, have lots of friends and free time and money. They cook brilliantly, eat healthily, have gym memberships they actually use and tend to be young and physically attractive. I am none of these things and it’s depressing that there are no stories about people like me. Except that now there is and it proved to be even more depressing.

Stan Cattermole is, by his own admission, very ugly and horribly overweight. The weight issue is a little more recent, but he’s been ugly since the day he was born. This meant he was bullied horribly, both at school and by his parents and his self-confidence is virtually non-existent. Because of these things, his success with the opposite sex is negligible. As he approaches his 30s, he determines that things will change. Next year is going to be a good one and he’s going to do whatever he can to make it happen.

He does so by starting a blog and this book is collected writings from that blog. We get to follow most aspects of Stan’s life, from his attempts to get fit, to his reintegration into the world outside his lonely flat. We get to see how his past life has affected his outlook and everything he does to put that behind him, in his dealings with friends old and new, both platonic and sexual relationships and his feelings about everything that happens to him.

The first thing you notice is that Stan is a very funny guy. He has a wry sense of humour, which mostly gets turned on himself. His observations of people and situations are also frequently amusing and his speed dating experiences are hilarious. This does cause some problems, however, as some of Stan’s humour means you need to be able to read this book in the company of friends. Explaining to a stranger on a train that the reason you’ve just burst out laughing was a line like ‘’sprinkle a little cinnamon on your genitalia every day…’’ isn’t a good way of meeting people.

Stan is also an emotional character and takes a lot to heart. This makes the book an emotional read, as he often reacts to situations with his heart rather than his head. Being someone who does much the same thing, I found myself frequently understanding how he was feeling. Stan never holds back and whilst some of the things he’s done over the years do seem pretty disgusting, it is to his credit that he is as open as he is. I was enjoying the feelings of familiarity the book gave me until it occurred to me that seeing a lot of myself in a book by a self-proclaimed ugly man maybe isn’t something to be terribly happy about.

What this did provide, however, is a touch of reality that is often missing from books like this. Being able to empathise with a character in a book like this is something that happens rarely, at least to me. I also got a shock when Stan went to a school reunion in the same town I went to school with and I fleetingly trawled through memories of my own to work out if I actually knew him. Several things counted against it being the case, but it helped make this the most realistic bloke-lit book I’ve read.

Unfortunately, Stan does fall for a couple of the old clichés and that does let ‘’Bête de Jour’’ down a little. Admittedly, it’s a condensed version of a life, so it’s bound to skip out some of the more boring parts, but parts did get a little too sensational to seem real, which was a shame given how much I’d seen of myself in other parts. This is a regular failing of the genre, which frequently seem to spurn reality in favour of soap opera lives that people may want to read more about. This is often a pity, but it seemed even more so here, given how familiar much of it had sounded. It may be that Stan just happens to have had a remarkable year and a number of his friends did have quite a tough time, but there was so much going on that it took the edge off things slightly for me.

Ultimately, though, this is not why the book ended up depressing me. I suspect that the whole aim of the story is to be life-affirming; a kind of ‘’if I can do it, so can you’’ type feeling. But close to the end, Stan looks back over his efforts and it suddenly occurred to me at that point that this man is actually more successful with the opposite sex than I am. There is hope within these pages that this may not always be the case, but it’s still a profoundly upsetting thought.

Still, there are worse ways to get depressed than this and, in the end, this is a very entertaining book. I feel a little guilty for laughing at Stan, a guilt tempered only slightly by feeling that he’s laughing too. This is a warm-hearted, well-written, amusing read and well worth enjoying for yourself. It’s perhaps a little explicit during the cyber-sex scenes, but Stan doesn’t go into Belle de Jour levels of detail. As well as being a funny guy, in this respect Stan is something of a gentleman. Which is one more thing we have in common. Dammit!

James Patterson and Maxine Paetro – “The 6th Target (Women’s Murder Club 6)” (2007) Review. 1/5

This review was originally published on Goodreads on 14/08/2018

The first five novels in Patterson’s “Women’s Murder Club” series never seemed to settle down. The earliest ones suffered from poorly written female characters, as the male authors didn’t seem to understand how to write women. Then, when Maxine Paetro came aboard as the co-author in place of Andrew Gross, the focus started to be on court cases and so the pace dropped and the plots became overburdened, but there didn’t seem to be any real improvement in the other aspects of the writing. With “The 6th Target” now being the third novel between this pairing, hopefully things will be starting to become a little better.

A gunman goes berserk on a ferry, shooting five people, killing three of them and leaving Claire Washburn, a member of the Women’s Murder Club, seriously injured. It’s an open and shut case, as everyone knows who did it and he handed himself in to Lindsay Boxer, the only question being whether it was the act of a murderer or a criminally insane person. With this case quickly sewn up, Boxer is free to work on the case of a kidnapped girl and her nanny, one of whom appears to have been immediately murdered.

However, Lindsay needs to work these cases with everything around her changing, as her Chief has finally agreed to her request to step down from Lieutenant back to Inspector and has essential swapped her and her former partner’s roles. She has split up with her boyfriend, Joe, struggling to cope with a cross country relationship which survives only on odd weekends and her new partner, Conklin, seems to have feelings for her. Martha, Lindsay’s dog is away on holiday, Yuki is dealing with the court case arising from the shooting and Claire is in hospital.

As with the previous novel in the series, there is a lack of coherence here that makes things a little bit messy. Rather than the four women being a Club, they all seem to be doing their own thing here and the only lesson the authors appear to have taken on board from previous novels is that if you’re not going to use a character in any major way, it’s better to write her out of commission in the story itself rather than just ignore her for the duration of the novel. Admittedly, they handle Claire’s situations better this time than they did Yuki’s in the previous novel, but they still haven’t really got to the emotional depth of a group who supposedly have been mostly friends for five previous novels.

The plot generally here lacks coherence in the way Lindsay’s life does and has a similar amount going on. The major problem with this is that as a major character goes through an emotional rollercoaster, the authors haven’t done a good enough job either here or previously of building the character up enough that you have enough feeling about her to really care. Had the series been better written, this would have been a far more effective novel than it turned out to be, but that’s been largely true of the series thus far.

The other issue this causes is that it reduces the effectiveness of the pacing, which has long been a highlight of Patterson’s writing, not just in this series, but in all his writing. Whilst the short chapters and simple grammar are still present, the chapters tend to switch between plots and with there being so many of them, the reader has to deal with the change of focus each time, which slows the reading speed down as you have to adjust to the next plot and mentally catch up with where you were in that particular sub-plot before you can accelerate into the pace of the writing.

This has always been a weak series, right from the start, but after so many novels where it should really be well into its stride and improving, the reverse seems to be happening. There is little plot coherence, there is a horrible lack of consistency and the relationships haven’t built or developed as the series goes on. If these lessons haven’t been learned by now, I suspect they may never be.

Jeremy de Quidt – “The Toymaker” (2008) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in September 2008 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 08/02/2009 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

Looking back, it always seems like the books and TV shows available for younger people are so much better than what was available to me. Maybe some of them just seem that way to me and it’s not actually the case. But I do know that I never had anything quite like Jeremy de Quidt’s “The Toymaker” available to me back then because, believe me, I would have remembered.

There is a toymaker who, frustrated with toys that run down, is attempting to put a real heart into a doll, so that it would keep going constantly. Far away, there is a conjuror called Gustav, who hides in a travelling circus because he hides a secret that some people would happily kill him for. His grandson, Mathias, with no-one else to care for him, hides too, wondering what this secret may be.

One day, just after a mysterious stranger appears at the show, Gustav has a fatal accident. This stranger, Dr Leiter, verifies that Gustav is who he suspects, but after failing to find what he seeks, he buys Mathias from Lustmann in the hope that the secret may have been transferred across from Gustav to Mathias and he can find out what it is.

However, Leiter hadn’t counted on the greed of Lustmann’s wife, Anna Maria nor on the tenacity of Mathias and the servant girl Katta, who manage to evade his dwarf servant Valter and escape. The two children find their way into the hands of a man called Koenig who, intrigued by the secret and by the amount of money Leiter is willing to spend to find it, takes Mathias along to help him unravel the secret.

This is a beautifully dark story, very much in the Neil Gaiman mode, although missing some of his fantastical twists. Many of the characters are hiding secrets, which blurs the disctinction between good and evil and it’s only the innocence of Mathias that really gives much of a clue to which side we should be on. Even then, his companions do things that you wouldn’t associate with the traditional hero behaviour, which makes it a little tougher to sympathise with their aims and blurs the line between the supposed good and bad a little more.

However, this does give the characters far more realistic behaviour than in many books. Even Katta and Stefan, characters supposedly on the side of good, harbour thoughts of revenge which they even sometimes act upon, which isn’t often the case in a story such as this. As is usual in books and films though, it’s the bad characters who are the most fun and Marguerite, Leiter’s lie detector doll, whilst a very minor character, was a wonderful touch and despite never speaking a word, she had the best line in the book.

Whilst I enjoyed the dark, gothic feel of the story, I did find it a little slow paced. The journey to seek the secret seemed to be dragged out, with it taking longer to get to the required place than it did to work through the clues. However, when the clues did finally arrive, they were at least not easy to predict, so the ending came as a surprise to me. But after so long reaching the point where the ending of the book could come about, the actual ending itself was a little quick and a touch disappointing, although the basic idea was deliciously dark.

What does help keep the story moving along is the quality of the writing. Along with the great ideas, the book is aimed at a slightly younger audience, so it’s a simply written tale. Whilst the pacing itself may be slow, the language flows very well and this helps keep the pages turning, even when the story itself isn’t as exciting as it could be.

As a horror fan, I particularly enjoyed the darker nature of the book, although the pacing wasn’t always conducive to an easy read. It may be that younger readers, who this story is aimed at, may become a little bored, although more confident or teenage readers will be more inclined to battle through it. Those that do, especially those with a liking for darker tales, will be rewarded with an enjoyable story which is well worth working through.

Mark Billingham – “In The Dark” (2008) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in August 2008 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 20/11/2008 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

I’ve been a fan of Mark Billingham and his DI Tom Thorne character since his debut novel. Like many series do, though, I did feel that a couple of the more recent novels suggested that Billingham was running out of ideas of things to do with Thorne. So it was a minor relief that his latest novel “In the Dark” was to be a standalone one, even if early optimism was dulled by the rather clichéd tagline “…it’s where fear lives”, which didn’t seem quite in keeping with Billingham’s normal style.

Late one night, a driver sees a car travelling with no lights on. Being a good citizen, she flashes her own lights to warn them. Unfortunately for her, travelling in the car are some gang members putting one of their number through an initiation. The car turns around and coming alongside, the occupants shoot at her, causing her to swerve off the road and kill a man standing at a bus stop.

This sets off a chain of events. The victim was a police officer, which puts them on high alert, determined to find the person who killed one of their own. However, it seems that this may have been a dodgy copper with a link to some shady characters, who are also out for revenge and aren’t constrained by the same rules as the police. The victim’s partner, a police officer on maternity leave as she’s 8 months pregnant, is also keen to find out more, especially as it appears that her partner was keeping secrets from her.

This is typically Billingham, throwing the reader straight into the heart of the story and moving it on from there. From the first page, you know this is going to be a story about gangs in London, but it soon becomes apparent it will go deeper than that. As more and more information comes to light, the story becomes more rounded and you get to follow the main characters as they set about life and death matters.

For a while, the story read a lot like the film “Kidulthood”, seeming to be mostly about life with the gang and following them. But at a point where I was starting to think it was maybe getting a little dull and wondering how things would end, there’s a sneaky little twist that threw away any thoughts of how the story may end and pushed it off in an unexpected direction. This was at a point where I simply had to know what happened and I ended up turning down a good night’s sleep as I felt compelled to see how things ended. This is also typically Billingham, drawing the reader in and then totally hooking them.

Billingham’s strength is in the realism of his stories. He takes real life, weaves it with strands of fiction and comes up with a story that you could quite feasibly see on the news, or as part of a storyline in “The Bill”. The use of language with all the characters seems quite realistic and helps keep the groups distinct from each other. Billingham always keeps the pace high and the action flowing and there is very little here that feels wasted; everything is important later on, even the parts that you don’t realise are important until it’s nearly too late.

The major downfall here is in the characterisation. Whilst the groups of people who feature here; the police, the gangs and those involved in killing the gang, within these groups each individual member is not well drawn. Billingham doesn’t seem to work well in helping the reader visualise the characters, so they all seem quite faceless; or in the case of the pregnant woman, faceless with a large belly. This does make it quite difficult in knowing exactly where sympathies should lie as a reader, especially as there is no good and bad here, just different levels of bad.

Fortunately, the pace of the story and the high action level prevented me from worrying about this too much. There were a couple of points where I got characters mixed up with each other, but this didn’t happen all that often. There were also a couple of points where I had to check back for the exact role of some of the minor characters, as they were mostly sketched over and tended to blend into the background until they were needed to add to the story, a little like the chorus in a Shakespearean play. Again, this wasn’t a big enough distraction to ruin the story, but it was enough to unsettle the flow of reading, especially as the pace and intrigue was kept fairly high.

Ultimately, though, this is a gritty crime drama, certainly in keeping to Billingham’s normally high standards. Existing fans will chuckle at the realisation of who the DI they call “Spiky Bugger” is and newcomers to Billingham’s work will likely be impressed. It’s a little like the news; only in more depth and with a much greater entertainment level.

Richard Morgan – “The Steel Remains” (2008) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in August 2008 and was subsequently also published on ciao.co.uk on 15/11/2008 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

After a couple of attempts at science fiction, Richard Morgan has turned his hand to fantasy. His earlier works have been well thought of; frequently praised for bringing a touch of reality to the science fiction genre and his fantasy work promises to do the same.

Ringil Eskiath is a war hero, living in the small town of Gallow’s Gap; the scene of his greatest moment in a war between humans and a lizard race. His sword hangs in a tavern where he spends most of his time, except when called upon to rid the town of minor nuisances. Although he’s still killing things in return for money and favours, his role is now more pest control than protection. Until one day his mother appears and asks him to search for his missing cousin; a request which reluctantly takes him home and throws him into a situation far more serious than it first appears.

Archeth is one of the Kiraith, a race from another world who helped the humans in the last war. Archeth was left behind when her race returned home and she now acts as a reluctant advisor to Emperor Jhiral. She spends her life constantly at risk from the religious leaders who see her as an alien heretic and want her jailed or executed. When the port city of Khangset is virtually destroyed and she seeks to find out who or what might have caused it.

Egan is a nomadic shepherd, enjoying his retirement from fighting by taking advantage of the peace and quiet and the number of young women attracted to his position of clan master and his reputation as a dragon slayer. He has also been changed by his experiences in the war and has little time for his own religion, which sees him branded a heretic amongst his own people. This concerns his brothers, who are determined that he will not dishonour their family name any longer and mean to remove him as head of their clan in the most extreme way.

The story follows these three characters through their daily lives as they deal with the threats facing them and their livelihoods. Unusually for a story like this, we get to see their personal habits as well as follow the more exciting moments. So when Ringil is not dealing with threats to himself or someone else, we get to see him taking drugs and giving blow jobs to other men. We get a full description of Egan’s sex life and hear about the casual bigotry that Ringil and Archeth have to deal with on a daily basis.

It is this aspect I enjoyed most. It is rare in fantasy novels that you get characters who swear or have lives outside the story at hand. Their casual use of krinzanz, which sounds similar to marijuana, is unusual and having a homosexual lead character is even more so; especially that we get graphic descriptions of his sex life. This made them feel far more real and made it a lot easier for me to get involved in the story and their lives. It also made completely clear which side of any confrontation the reader was meant to fall on, as whilst the supposed heroes may have been flawed, they were well drawn whereas no-one else had nearly the same level of detail.

Morgan is a fantastically descriptive writer and this helps to visualise many of the situations the characters find themselves in. The main thing he does better than most authors is describe sound. Many writers are good at visual description, but when Morgan describes the sounds of battle; the ringing of metal against metal, the screams of men and horses, he does it better than anyone I can recall and it’s the closest thing I’ve ever come to reading in surround sound.

Morgan’s pacing of the actual scenes is wonderfully done as well. He uses short, choppy sentences during action scenes which makes those paragraphs pass quicker than other parts of the story, giving a feeling of the character’s heart beating faster with the exertion. This, combined with his special touch with sound, puts the reader into the heart of battle more effectively than many.

There are a couple of downsides, unfortunately. The characters have clearly been through a major war prior to the events of “The Steel Remains” and this is frequently referred to. This makes the book sometimes feel like the second part of a series and made me feel like I was missing out on something. The war seems to have been a major one and several times I found myself wondering more about previous events than current ones. I hope Morgan writes that story at some point, as it’s going to be all action and a wonderful read with his writing style.

The other issue I found was that the pacing of this story was a little uneven. For the reader to have enough feel for our supposed heroes there needed to be a lot of character building, but it felt as if there was a lot more of this than there was a conclusion. After all the talk of Ringil as a great general, when the time came for this to be put to the test, that part of things seemed largely glossed over. Indeed, the events that the story seemed to be leading up to were over much too soon and, being as well written as they were, left me feeling unfulfilled and wanting more; like a gourmet meal, it was delicious, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it, although there was a delightful little twist at the end, almost the equivalent of an after dinner mint.

One thing for sure, though, is that Richard Morgan is a name well worth looking out for. He adds a touch of reality to a genre where so much has been written that it’s difficult to find a new angle and this provides a breath of fresh air. If his science fiction is written the same way, it’s no surprise he is highly thought of in that genre and I predict that high praise will soon be coming his way in his new genre.

Brian Ruckley – “Bloodheir (Godless World 2)” (2008) Review. 4/5

This review was originally published at http://www.thebookbag.co.uk in April 2008 and was also subsequently published on ciao.co.uk on 03/11/2008 and on Goodreads on 31/12/2014

The Godless World is changing; the events of “Winterbirth” have left their scars and the Black Road is growing ever stronger. Many of the True Bloods are in mourning for their lost friends and relatives, but the battle isn’t even nearly over. Encouraged by previous successes, the Black Road are pushing for further gains and they are being assisted by the rogue na’kyrim, Aeglyss, who is growing in power since being left to die on the Breaking Stone by the White Owls.

This isn’t entirely welcomed, even amongst the Black Road, as many of them see Aeglyss as a half-breed and not a true follower of their creed. Whilst Aeglyss has the power to turn many of them to his way of thinking, others are not so deeply under his power and so there is discord. The same is true of the True Bloods, as whilst Aewult is the commander, as befits his position of the Bloodheir to the Thane of Thanes, the head of the most important of the True Blood families, his position seems to have gone to his head and he is not popular with many of the other Thanes.

Meanwhile, assisted by some of the na’kyrim friendly to their cause, Thane Orisian has taken some of his men in an attempt to capture K’rina, who is very important to Aeglyss, in an attempt to lessen his influence. At the same time, Aeglyss has come to the attention of the Anain, who are amongst the original beings created when the Gods were still in the world and are supposedly the most powerful beings in existence. It seems that there are to be two battles to be had; one physical battle between the two armies and a battle of power and influence between a powerful being and a powerful race.

There is an awful lot going on within the novel and it frequently proves difficult to keep everything separate. Many of the people on both sides are human and are descendents from the same ancestors many centuries ago, so there are a lot of similarities between the two sides and I was occasionally unsure of which side of the battle I was following at any given time. In addition, on either side, many of the family names were quite similar, particularly on the True Blood side and I got a little mixed up between some of the characters on that side as well, especially early on in the story.

Once I started to get a little more into things, however, this became less of an issue. As events progress, Ruckley spends more time following the major characters and switches between them a lot less, meaning you get to fully explore the personalities of each of them and they become a lot more distinct. From this point, I found it a lot easier to become involved in their struggles, as you could follow a personality, rather than a nameless and faceless army.

The beauty of Ruckley’s writing is in how well he draws his characters. Unlike in many such novels, there is no clear line between good and bad. There are heroes and villains on both sides and the fact that the leaders on both sides are despised by many in their own armies blurs this line further. No character is without their flaws and even the ones who seem about to be cast as the hero often fail to live up to your expectations.

This is the other aspect of “Bloodheir” I most enjoyed; you can never guess what might happen next. Just when you think you have come to know a character, the focus switches elsewhere and by the time you return to this character, events have caused them to act in a way you might not have expected. The good characters become more hard hearted and world weary and the impulsive and blood thirsty develop caution and restraint. Whilst this meant that there was no-one you could really cheer on, the psychology of Ruckley’s characters was spot on and this was by far the most realistic drawing of fantasy characters I remember reading in some time.

This, for me, was the saving grace of the novel, as I did find that the story was quite slow paced. As is common with the middle book in a trilogy, the main focus here did seem to be about moving characters into position for future events. Whilst there was a lot of jostling for position on both sides and there were a few battles later on in the story, I did find things a little slowly paced and tough to get involved in for much of the book. Had Ruckley’s characters not been as strong as they were, it would have been a real struggle for me to read, but he has managed to keep me interested all the way through and by the end, the intrigue in the plans that the Black Road in particular were hatching made me long to know what was next.

I have often decried books for having a great storyline, but not having believable characters. Ruckley has provided the opposite, with a slow paced story being acted out by characters that had all the flaws of the people you meet every day. Whilst this made for a slower paced and tougher read, in the end I find that I preferred Ruckley’s way of doing things and finding out whether or not you prefer it as well is no great risk. This is a story that seems to get better as it goes and, given how captivated I was by the end, events yet to come promise to be incredible.