Book Reviews

  • How They Were Found by Matt Bell

    It has been a long time since I have enjoyed a collection of short stories as much as I did How They Were Found. Matt Bell is a wonderful writer: his stories are varied in topic and style, but he never fails to find the voice of each of his characters, making them real, even…

  • Doors by Daniel Brako

    Successful psychiatrist David Druas has a thriving practice, an attractive secretary and caring friends. He also has Hans Werner, a patient who sees doors that aren’t there. In order to destroy his patient’s delusion, David performs the Invocation of The Doors ritual, just as his patient did. At first, he notices no change but after…

  • The Humans by Matt Haig

    You hear a lot of people talk about an author’s ‘voice’, discussing how it is one of the most important things to get right. In The Humans, Matt Haig’s writerly voice is so good, it’s only after finishing the book that you are aware of how well he nailed it. Professor Andrew Martin has solved the…

  • Carniepunk by Various

    I have always found carnivals and traveling fairs very sinister places; places where the ‘freaks’ and dispossessed gather together and, at least in my imagination, seduce the unaware into the underworld, never to be seen again. It seems I’m not alone in my madness as Carniepunk, an anthology of urban fantasy stories set in and…

  • Inferno by Dan Brown

    Dan Brown gets an awful lot of stick, doesn’t he? After The Lost Symbol, I was one of the grumblers, complaining that he couldn’t write for toffee and that he wasted no opportunity to show us how clever he was and how much research he did. I vowed never to read another Dan Brown book.…

  • Emerald City by Chris Nickson

    Mention Seattle to me and what comes to mind is Microsoft, Frasier and rain. But Seattle is also the setting for Emerald City, the new book by Chris Nickson. It’s 1988 and Laura Benton is a music journalist at The Rocket, a publication at which the author also worked in the 1980s. It’s a male-dominated…

  • Face To Face: Portraits of the Human Spirit by Alison Wright

    Alison Wright’s personal story is very moving. Her survival in an horrific bus crash and ensuing long recovery make for difficult – if interesting – reading. Her brush with death and subsequent appreciation of life clearly informs her work in this collection of portraiture from her travels. Each photograph has a story behind it, a…

  • Automatic Woman by Nathan L Yocum

    If you can imagine Sherlock Holmes written by Micky Spillane and set against a steampunk alternative Victorian London, you’d maybe begin to understand the fascinating universe in which Nathan L Yocum’s book, Automatic Woman, takes place. Jolly, a rotund detective from the Bow Street Firm, finds himself drawn into a very strange case when an…

  • At the Dying of the Year by Chris Nickson

    Richard Nottingham, constable of 1730s Leeds, has his most distressing case to date: the bodies of some young children have been found and according to the coroner, they had been abused before death. Nottingham and his officers are motivated to find the culprit so that no other child has to suffer what these youngsters did.…

  • The Night Rainbow by Claire King

    Telling a story, especially an adult story, from the point of view of a child is a very difficult thing to get right. Among authors who have been successful in achieving this are Emma Donoghue in Room, John Boyne in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and John Harding in Florence & Giles. With the…