The Bookswarm Treasure Hunt
Sixty great prizes on offer, including an Amazon Kindle worth £111 and masses of great books, in the new Bookswarm Treasure Hunt!
Feed, by Mira Grant
Twenty years after the zombie-apocalypse put an end to life as humanity knew it, blogging has changed its face. Now purveyors of quality news, bloggers are qualified journalists who have to be in possession of extensive licensing to practice their craft in a meaningful way.
Shaun and Georgia Mason are adoptive siblings who have grown up part of the news, and their occupations as head Newsie and head Irwin of the After the End Times blogging consortium bears that out completely. Attached at the hip since their adoption by the ratings-hungry Masons, they work together, laugh together and live together, and this doesn’t change when they get to follow the campaign of presidential candidate Ryman.
Normandiefront, by Vince Milano & Bruce Conner
The D-Day offensive and the fighting that followed has always been a fascinating aspect of World War Two for the military historian. The books, films and TV series around the subject of Operation Overlord and the following weeks and months are almost countless. However there is still so much to learn from the allied invasion, as well as the personal accounts of the men that fought there, that historians are still able to offer something new to the study of the period. Milano and Conner achieve exactly this.
Normandiefront tells the story of D-Day to Saint Lô from the perspective of the German 352nd Division. The book is filled with direct quotations and accounts from Normandy veterans of the various units within the 352nd, complimented by those of the US servicemen that directly opposed them.
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Just Business, by Geraint Anderson
Cityboy is back, and this time he’s wading into the thriller genre. Cityboy is in fact one Geraint Anderson, a former City utilities analyst turned newspaper columnist, turned novelist. His first book, Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in The Square Mile sold 200,000 copies off the back of its merciless derision towards bankers and their nefarious deeds, and off the success of Anderson’s pseudonymous column in thelondonpaper.
Cityboy was largely semi-autobiographical, and Just Business reprises that approach from the outset. Steve Jones, also a utilities analyst, also a columnist for thelondonpaper, and also filled with revulsion for the City and its denizens, is keen to struggle on in the face of the soul-destroying horror of his job for long enough to take one last obscene bonus and flee the Square Mile forever. After an intense feeling of paranoia during a board meeting, a clandestine investigation by Jones into his boss’ emails unearths some disturbing but useful information. Planning on using this for blackmail, Jones instead is forced to flee with his long-term girlfriend when the plan goes awry and the boss shows up dead. Read more
Farmers Cross, by Bernard O’Donoghue
Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Ireland, but moved to England when he was 16; he was educated first at a Manchester grammar, then at Oxford where he is still a fellow. As such he is often classified as that recognisable character the Irish émigré, along with Beckett, Joyce, and now to some extent Paul Muldoon. As with these writers, the Irish rural world of his youth is returned to constantly. The collection’s title refers to an area in County Cork where O’Donoghue was born, characters recur, such as Jer Mac ‘the greatest breaker of horses’, and local details are added with a clear but unobtrusive touch. However, there are unnamed forces behind many of the poems, which means they run no risk of being simply pastoral: “We never discovered / exactly what gift it was that brought in its train / our father clutching his chest before he fell.” Read more
Face of the Devil, by N.J. Cooper
N. J. Cooper is the new moniker of Natasha Cooper, adopted for her Karen Taylor series, which kicked off in 2009 with the release of No Escape. Face of the Devil is the third in that series, and follows forensic psychologist Karen Taylor as she assists the Isle of Wight police in investigating the murder of a fifteen year-old girl, Suzie Gray.
Taylor is a dogged and gifted psychologist, who is more than prepared to exceed her remit as a civilian in order to ensure justice is done. In her personal life, she vacillates between her long-term partner Will, a talented but controlling brain surgeon, and her partner in this and other investigations, DCI Charlie Trench, a rugged and determined Geordie currently on a run of bad luck. Taylor is a likeable and vulnerable protagonist, beset by financial woes pertaining to her new property venture, her affections for two very different men, and of course, the task of bringing a murderer to justice. She operates in a similar manner to the myriad PIs in the genre, sometimes helping the police, sometimes hindering, and regularly clashing with them. For all these qualities however, it was rather ironically a little difficult for this reviewer to really get inside the psychologist’s head, to understand what motivates her. In fairness to Cooper, the bulk of the ground work on the character was done during No Escape, and her refusal to cover old ground on that score makes scant difference to the quality of the book overall. Read more
The Gallows Curse, by Karen Maitland
A novel steeped in treachery and sin? Count me in! Delightfully dark and undeniably spine-tingling, The Gallows Curse, Karen Maitland’s third historical novel, transports the reader back to 1210, a brutal time of political and religious upheaval, when a black force was sweeping across England.
While all of England is suffering on the grand scale under a papal Interdict [no church services, no baptisms, no last rites], the lack of Church protection is being felt particularly strongly by the poor and downtrodden amongst the citizenry. In the rural village of Grastmere, innocent and trusting servant girl Elena is dragged into a conspiracy to absolve the sins of the lord of the manor. Elena is left suffering from nightmares and, as the terrors of her sleep become increasingly severe, she seeks help from a cunning woman [the friendly neighbourhood wicked witch] who has been awaiting just such an opportunity to fulfil an ancient curse conjured at the gallows. Read more
Kim Newman
Kim Newman is an author, journalist, broadcaster, critic and bon viveur. His famous novel Anno Dracula, recently re-issued by Titan Books, is set in 1888, during Jack the Ripper’s killing spree—but a different 1888 to the one we know, in which Dracula became the ruler of England. In the novel, fictional characters—not only from Dracula, but also from other works of Victorian era fiction—appear alongside historical persons.
Bookgeeks’ Simon Parker asked him about his writing and his feelings about zombies, among other things…
The Legacy, by Katherine Webb
Erica and Beth Calcott spent every summer at Storton Manor, growing up under the watchful eye of their spiteful grandmother Meredith and playing with Dinny, the boy from the traveller’s camp. Now, in the wake of Meredith’s demise, they’ve come back to set the family’s affairs in order, and to face the hideous secret that’s haunted Beth to the brink of her own grave.
Caroline Massey is a woman in the late 19th century, following her heart and marrying the man of her dreams. But the West is a lot wilder than she’d counted on, and living on the prairie is a lot harder than expected. She can’t settle. She can’t conceive. And she can’t make her dream life work the way she thought it should. Read more
The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton
There are few writers of detective fiction more decorated than Steve Hamilton. His CV boasts a Shamus, a Gumshoe and an Edgar to name but a few, and the high praise which adorns the dust jacket for The Lock Artist reads like a who’s who of the thriller genre. This ensures that even those unfamiliar with Hamilton’s highly successful Alex McKnight series will be aware of the calibre of author they’re dealing with before a single page of The Lock Artist is turned.
The Lock Artist is Hamilton’s ninth book, and his second standalone piece. It follows a decade in the life of Mike, a traumatised but gifted young man rendered mute by an appalling tragedy in his youth. Pitied by wider society but scorned and taunted by his peers, Mike’s loneliness provides the perfect motivation for him to dedicate his free time to the study of locks, and more specifically, how to open them. This is, as he describes it, an “unforgivable gift,” and despite his innocent intentions, one that will lead him into untold trouble, from high school pranks gone awry and on to coercion into organised crime. Read more
The Field of Blood, by Denise Mina
Denise Mina’s The Field of Blood is part of the “Tartan Noir” tradition of hard-bitten Scottish mystery, full of grim despair, sharp humour, and complicated crime. Recently turned into a BBC miniseries, it is also an excellent introduction to Paddy Meehan: Mina’s young, clever, journalist-hopeful main character. Paddy is a Catholic girl surrounded by world-weary journalists, some of whom look down on her for her looks, some for her religion, and others just out of habit, but she is always fighting to find a place in the cynical world of the newspaper and understand her place in the wider city during the turmoil of the 80′s hunger strikes, marches, and religious tension. Read more
Powers of Darkness, by Robert Aickman
Continuing in the laudable task of reprinting all the short story collections by Robert Aickman, the people at Tartarus Press now provide us with a new, gorgeous hardcover edition of Powers of Darkness a book originally published in 1966.
For those not familiar with Aickman’s “strange stories” the collection is not perhaps the best introduction to the work of this unusual author, whose specialty was to pen dark, subtle, enigmatic fiction open to different interpretations by the reader. For any confirmed Aickman’s fan, however, the volume is a further step into the world of a beloved writer whose work is so fascinating that to miss even one of his stories would be an unforgivable mistake. Read more
Death in August, by Marco Vichi
The Italians are coming, and with them comes Death in August, the opening salvo of the Inspector Bordelli series from Marco Vichi. This is the first opportunity for non-Italian speakers to meet Bordelli, a Florentine WWII veteran with a penchant for fine food and the company of honourable thieves.
From this first meeting, Bordelli is a thoroughly likeable lead, apt to carry what promises to be a fine series. He adheres to perhaps the greatest convention of crime fiction, in that he is a maverick; within the opening pages bringing down the wrath of his superiors for his compassion towards those stealing to feed themselves. His warmth towards his fellow man is by no means limited to criminals, however. His subordinate, Piras, is the son of a war-buddy he remembers with great fondness, and he visits the same affection upon Piras Jr as he did to his father. He is also something of a gourmet, and indeed fine food, as one of the hallmarks of Italian crime fiction, is pervasive in Death in August. As with all the best meals, his are enjoyed in the company of friends, in Bordelli’s case an amiable pair of thieves, a wildly eccentric inventor and a curmudgeonly pathologist. There is a convivial atmosphere through much of the book, indeed as a crime writer Vichi manages to imbue Florence with more charm than Alan Whicker or Judith Chalmers could muster as professional holidaymakers. Read more
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Latest Competition
Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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