The Watchers by A.M. Shine

 

A novel set in Ireland, the protagonist Mina is an aspiring artist who's struggling for money, and accepts a job from a friend in the pub to deliver a parrot to a buyer. She drives into a remote part of Galway where her car mysteriously breaks down on the outskirts of a wood. She walks along the road which leads through the woods and this is the worst mistake she could make. Because at nightfall, with screams chasing her, she’s beckoned into a building by an older woman who then slams the door shut Inside, she finds her rescuer, Madeline, and two others, Daniel and Ciara. But now the real nightmare begins, because watching them through the window are monsters, who will kill them if they leave.

The Watchers is a fantastic horror novel, which delves into ancient Irish myths. I’ve been reading a lot of horror recently, and this is one of the best I’ve come across this year. Hugely enjoyable and well worth a read.

Vine Street by Dominic Nolan

 

I’m a fan of Dominic Nolan’s first two novels, contemporary crime thrillers, Past Life and After Dark. Vine Street is a departure from Nolan’s previous books because it is a historical crime thriller, set in London in the 1930s. I’ve always loved London’s Soho and used to enjoy night outs there in the 1990s, and its reputation and history is rich and storied.

Vine Street is set in a world of organised crime set around prostitution, prostitutes, and corrupt police. With the war on the horizon in the first half of the novel, and then the war itself and postwar, there are also fascists in the guise of the Blackshirts and spies. And in the centre of it all, is a serial killer, whose murder spree crosses decades and whose killings aren’t recognised as such except by DS Leon Geats, a member of the porn squad,  DS Mark Cassar of the flying squad, and WPC Willamina 'Billie' Massey.

This is a sprawling book, 600+ pages, and is an incredibly impressive feat. It’s a great story and the characters are well drawn and interesting. The serial murders are gruesome, the victim’s fates horrific to contemplate. The story is compelling and I highly recommend this novel.

 

Bad Apples by Will Dean

 

The 4th in the Tuva Moodyson series, and Tuva is back in Gavrick, but her beat now extends to a town up the road, the hill town of Visberg. In fact, the story opens with Tuva visiting the town and after hearing a cry for help in the woods, discovering a headless corpse.

Will Dean’s strength is in his conjuring of eccentric characters. In the previous three novels he’s filled Gavrik and the surrounding woods with such people, and now he populates Visberg with more. And his best creation of all returns in this novel: the wood carving sisters, complete with their gruesome trolls.

Visberg is a town of secrets, not least its sinister festival of Pan Night, where the townsfolk all get together to engage in cult-like behaviours. And then there’s the no-questions asked storage facility. Indeed, while the plot of the novel is compelling, it’s this characterisation and environment which places Dean’s books a cut above the rest. There’s plenty here for future novels too, and I imagine Visberg will return to fill the pages of a good few Tuva Moodyson books yet.

4 out of 5 stars 

Bloody Foreigners by Neil Humphreys

 

Inspector Stanley Low is a Singaporean Detective in London to give a lecture at the London School of Economics. When a Singaporean man is stabbed to death, he’s asked to consult. Graffiti for the xenophobic group Make England Great Again was daubed above the body, which complicates things. Low is something of a loose canon, and so he needs to be kept in check by DI Ramilla Mistry, who also so happens to be his ex-lover.

Bloody Foreigners is apparently part of a series, though most of the books don’t appear to have been published in the UK, at least not be a publisher who markets them properly. I had seen the author’s work before but not read any of his novels, so this was my first introduction to his writing. Despite being part of a series, the book can be read as a standalone, as I did.

This is an enjoyable read, it has clear social commentary on the state and decline of the UK, without layering it on too thick. It’s one-part police procedural, one-part action thriller. There are parts of the narrative which stretch credulity a little, but nothing too extreme to spoil the enjoyment of the narrative. Low is an enjoyable misanthropic character, who despite his obvious flaws, is committed to justice and doing the right thing. the other characters are also well drawn out and I particularly liked the villains of the piece, especially a character who has more than a passing resemblance to Nigel farage.

This is a really enjoyable read and I’d recommend it.

4 out of 5 stars 

The Dying Squad by Adam Simcox

 

Detective Inspector Joe Lazarus stands in a ditch outside a deserted Lincolnshire farmhouse. It’s being used by a gang of countylines drug dealers to store drugs. It's a gang he’s been working hard to bring down and he’s conducting a solo surveillance of the house. But then a teenage girl walks up to his hideout and asks what he’s doing. She seems to know about the operation and so he assumes she’s undercover police or an informant. She accompanies him into the house and there he finds a couple of dead drug dealers and his own dead body. Because Lazarus has himself been murdered and is now a spirit.

So start’s his quest to solve his own murder. The girl, Daisy May, takes him to a bleak purgatory and The Duchess, the woman in charge of this halfway house of the afterlife, tells him if he wants to move on from there and to a better place (or perhaps worse) he needs to return to earth and find out who killed him and why. But there are complications. The air on earth is toxic and rots his memories, and if he doesn’t solve the crime quickly, he will lose his mind completely and be condemned to walk the earth, a mindless ghost.

The Dying Squad is the author’s debut and is a supernatural crime thriller. The book has two strands running through it - Joe’s attempt to solve his murder, which is the crime thriller bit, and the supernatural strand which brings in heaven and hell, and a sinister beast, the Xylophone Man, who snatches souls to carry down to eternal damnation. 

This is a well-plotted novel, and the characters are compelling. Daisy May in particular is an interesting character. It also has a surprising twist, and I thought I knew who was behind Joe’s murder until near the end when the surprise was sprung. The narrative resolved itself well and is left open for a sequel, though it equally could remain as a self-contained story if the author wanted to write something else.

An impressive debut by a novelist to watch. 

The Rule by David Jackson

 

When we first meet Daniel we think he’s a child. He acts like a child and speaks like a child and his inner monologue is that of a child. But we soon learn he is in fact about to turn 23 and is looking forward to his birthday. 

But Daniel also has a rule which his parents insist he must follow, and The Rule is not to touch anyone. We soon discover why: Daniel is uncannily strong and can cause harm without meaning to. 

Daniel lives with his mum and dad in a block of flats and one day they encounter a man in the lift, a drug dealer, and things go awry.

I won’t divulge spoilers but needless to say, Daniel’s strength now leads the family into great peril. Because the drug dealer’s associates want to know what has happened to him, as do the police, and it isn’t long before they’re all closing in

The Rule is the second novel by David Jackson that I’ve read, after his excellent novel The Resident. This isn’t a sequel, but it’s similar in that it takes a surprising premise and runs with it. Like The Resident, The Rule is well worth a read.

The Colours of Death by Patricia Marques

This is an intriguing novel set in an alternate universe Lisbon where a small percentage of the population have psychic powers and are treated with mistrust by the rest. When a man inside a train carriage is lifted by invisible forces and slammed against the carriage walls until he’s dead, psychically gifted Inspector Isabel Reis is put on the case. 

This is a good and original sci-fi which touches on various issues, not least the prejudice minorities face. The gifted community are treated with suspicion by most, and hatred by more than a few, especially after an event in the past where a powerfully gifted girl caused a disaster. In this way their treatment is reminiscent of how Muslims are treated today: a tiny minority commit atrocities and yet the majority suffer intolerance because of it. The victim is linked to the head of a powerful anti-gifted party and this too has strong similarities to the anti-immigrant nationalist parties we have today. 

There’s a slight oddity to the narrative in that we never learn the wider context - how the gifted came into existence (it’s a relatively new phenomenon) and whether they exist anywhere else in the world. Indeed, the wider world outside of Portugal is never mentioned. That said, this doesn’t spoil the story at all, it just leaves the reader with some unanswered questions.

A great read this, and presumably there’ll be a sequel. If so there’s plenty of space for the author to flesh out the world she’s created.