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The Devil and the Dark Water - Stuart Turton ****

After reading Stuart Turton's third and first novels (in that order), I had to fill in the middle one. I have to admit up front that its setting on a seventeenth century ship appealed to me far less than the other two, but going on Turton's ability to produce remarkable mystery novels, it seemed a no-brainer and it didn't disappoint. We rapidly follow the cast from the Dutch East India Company on board from Batavia (now Jakarta) on a journey to Amsterdam fraught with peril, both natural and apparently supernatural. The book is described as a historical locked room mystery - but that's just a smallish part of the plot, and the author emphasises this is fiction with a historical setting, not the kind of hist fic that aims to get every detail right. Central characters include a pairing seemingly based on the classic fantasy combo that began with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser - a huge mercenary and a diminutive magician, though here the smaller character is a detective, the un...

Human Remains - Jo Callaghan *****

In the third of her AIDE Lock/DCS Kat Frank novels, Jo Callaghan demonstrates again her ability to produce a page turner. Interwoven with a complex case involving the titular human remains are doubts about Frank's previous success putting away a serial killer, raised by a true crime podcast, and the presence of a stalker who seems intent on harming Frank. All the above would be enough to make a good novel in its own right, but the reason this series is so good is the involvement of the holographic AI detective Lock. His technical abilities are remarkable, yet even the professor who created him seems worried about the AI's insistence that he would be even more use if he had some form of physical body. The questions raised by his involvement, and the limitations his nature pose (when, for example, he ignores evidence because he wasn't explicitly asked to look out for it) add a huge amount to the depth of the book. The tension of the closing act is remarkable - once I started ...

Less can be more in a bookshop, revisited

REVISIT SERIES - An updated post from May 2015 I have a confession that will make most authors' lib people - you know, the ones who unfriend you on Facebook if you confess to buying anything from Amazon - quake in their sandals: I find many independent bookshops intimidating. I don't like their often dark, claustrophobia inducing interiors, and I don't like being talked to by staff unless I invite it. (Please note, Mary Portas, who regularly advises that good customer services involves welcoming customers and trying to help them. I don't want to be chatted to by a stranger. I'd rather help myself. If I want assistance I will ask for it. If your staff approach me, I will leave without making a purchase.) So it was with some nervousness that I entered the Mad Hatter Bookshop in the pretty (or to put it another way, Cotswold tourist trappy) location of Burford, surprisingly close to my no-one-could-call-it-tourist-trappy home of Swindon. But I'm glad I did. I wa...

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton *****

Although this book dates back to 2018, I came across it after reading and loving Stuart Turton's third novel from 2024, The Last Murder at the End of the World . Each is a convoluted murder mystery that works very differently to a conventional police procedural. I think The Last Murder is somewhat better for a couple of reasons - but that doesn't take away from the brilliance of this book. The trivial reason I slightly prefer the later novel is that it is just the right length - The Seven Deaths is a little too long. But more significantly, in The Last Murder , we the readers really don't know what's going on for much of the narrative and have to gradually piece things together. Here we quickly do understand the context - it's the central character who takes considerably longer to get his head around what's happening. The setting is a decaying country house, somewhere around the 1920s. The central character is tasked with solving a murder mystery, each day occ...

The Poor Cousin's Defence updated

Back in 2018 I wrote an article for the Royal Literary Fund called The Poor Cousin's Defence . In it, I pointed out the way that literary types have always treated science fiction as second-rate writing, so when they produced SF it had to be labelled as something else, denying that they had dirtied their hands with it in the first place. Infamously, Margaret Atwood, a serial offender. is said to have claimed in a BBC interview that science fiction was limited to ‘talking squids in outer space.’ I was revisiting the article to check something I'd mentioned about C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' observation from the 1950s when I noticed that something seemed to have changed. I had written: 'When has a science-fiction novel won a major literary prize? There’s no sign of SF on the Pulitzer or Booker lists.' Of course, the 2024 Booker Prize winner was Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Does this make my comment out of date? Not really. Harvey herself, true to form of such ...

The Grand Illusion - Syd Moore ****

It's easy to mistake this book for a historical fiction/fantasy crossover, but apart from one small element, it is straightforward fiction in a historical setting. The military had shown an interest in camouflage in the First World War, when some ships were given disruptive or 'dazzle' paintwork that made it hard to see where the ship began and ended or what its direction of travel was. But the whole business was supercharged from 1939. A rag-tag group of professionals including a zoologist, artists and a stage magician designed camouflage and fakery both to hide machinery and make fake airfields to distract bombers. Later guns and tanks would be disguised to look like trucks. Syd Moore sets her fictional team in this world, but faced with an even bigger challenge: trying to prevent the German invasion of Britain by playing on the occult leanings of Hitler's high ranking officers. The central character, Daphne Devine is stage assistant to the illusionist Jonty Trevalyan...

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