Stef Penney
Stef Penney was born and grew up in Edinburgh. After a degree in Philosophy and Theology from Bristol University she turned to film-making, studying Film and TV at Bournemouth College of Art. On graduation she was selected for the Carlton Television New Writers Scheme and has since written and directed two short films. The Tenderness of Wolves was her first novel, and was recently followed up by The Invisible Ones.
A Means of Escape, by Joanna Price
A Means of Escape is the debut novel from Glastonbury’s own Joanna Price, and indeed marks the maiden literary voyage of publisher Aston Bay Press. It also constitutes the opening salvo of a planned series featuring DS Kate Linton, and her boss, DI Rob Brown.
Price wastes no time, dropping a body in the reader’s lap within the first few pages. Said body is that of a young woman named Angel Kingsley, and the venue is Glastonbury Tor. Given the location, and the positioning of a series of flares in a full circle around the body, Linton and Brown suspect the crime has links to local new age movements. The investigation of Angel’s murder takes on an additional intensity when becomes apparent that her killer has kidnapped another local girl, Sam Jenkins. Read more
The Platinum Loop, by Austin Williams
The Platinum Loop is the sophomore effort from American writer Austin Williams. In his first outing, the acclaimed Crimson Orgy, Williams took a comic-horror look at the world of splatter movies, introducing us to two-bit film producer Gene Hoffman. Hoffman returns in The Platinum Loop, which looks at an entirely different type of film. This is a seamy and sordid twist on the holy grail tail. Not the ancient cup of a Galilean carpenter you understand, but the holy grail of adult movies; a brief, 8mm porn film starring none other than Marilyn Monroe.
The tale opens with garrulous but hapless hustler Floyd Manning being held aloft from a fourth floor balcony, suspected of trying to defraud a trio of sociopathic Texan oilmen. After Hoffman saves him from a certain beating and probable death, the two embark on a quest to get rich at the cost of Monroe’s honour, selling the illicit film to an eccentric and amoral collector down in Tijuana. Read more
Citizen Sailors: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, by Glyn Prysor
This first time author has done a valiant job in bringing together the letters, reminiscences and diaries of the men , and women, who served in the Royal Navy and the Wrens during World War Two. A complex task , carried out with great sensitivity he gives us a most readable account of the history of the War from its earliest rumblings in the 1930’s up until the post war years when many of those who had served during this time returned to their civilian lives.
Within almost 500 pages of the most evocative writing he carefully recounts all of the major events of the Second World War. There are chapters covering the Germans in Europe, the evacuation of Dunkirk, the first loss of a major warship – HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow, the war in Japan and the Far East and the D-Day and other landings.
Take a sneak peek at Simon Scarrow’s Praetorian
We’re delighted to be able to offer Bookgeeks readers a sneak preview of Simon Scarrow’s latest Macro and Cato adventure, Praetorian:
The city of Rome in AD 50 is a dangerous place. Treachery lurks on every corner, and a shadowy Republican movement, ‘the Liberators’, has spread its tentacles wide. It is feared that the heart of the latest plot lies in the ranks of the Praetorian Guard. Uncertain of whom he can trust, the Imperial Secretary Narcissus summons to Rome two courageous men guaranteed to be loyal to the grave: army veterans Prefect Cato and Centurion Macro.
Tasked with infiltrating the Guard, Cato and Macro face a daunting test to win the trust of their fellow soldiers. No sooner have they begun to unearth the details of the Liberators’ devious plan than disaster strikes: an old enemy who could identify them, with deadly consequences, makes an unexpected appearance. Now they face a race against time to save their own lives before they can unmask the mastermind behind the Liberators…
Praetorian is published on the 10th November. Look out for a review here on Bookgeeks soon.
Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier
Often compared with All Quiet on the Western Front, Gabriel Chevallier’s disturbing story of life in the trenches from a French perspective in the First World War is based on his own experiences. He was decorated for his bravery during his time in the war and this book, essentially an anti-war piece, explains how he coped with the horrific conditions soldiers on all sides faced.
Chevallier is an interesting character, perhaps slightly different from many who to write about their war experiences. He appeared to be a maverick; he didn’t like to comply, had little respect for his officers and seemed to join up to fight more out of interest than patriotism. Whether this is a feature of French soldiers, I don’t know given most books about the first and second world wars appear to be from an English or German perspective. Read more
The Girl Who Circumnaviated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne Valente
September lives in Nebraska with her mother during WWII. Her mother is a mechanic and her father is off fighting in Europe. September, similar to Pan of Pan’s Labyrinth, is eager to escape the realities of her worn-torn world, though unlike Pan, September’s realities include washing floral print tea cups and being nice to small dogs. When the Green Wind asks if she’d like to go to Fairyland with him on the back of his leopard, Leopard-of-Little-Breezes, she jumps at the chance, not thinking twice, or sparing a thought for her mother, or even bothering to wave goodbye because she, like most children, is Heartless.
September’s adventures are part of a long line of child-into-Fairyland stories: The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, Pan’s Labyrinth. The feel of the book is distinctly early twentieth century, with asides from the narrator to us, the dear reader. However, this book belongs completely to itself, it is imaginary and original, not predictable, except in self-aware ways.
Don’t Let Me Go, by Catherine Ryan Hyde
From the cover of this book and its hook lines, it looks very much like a Jodi Picoult novel. I anticipated an emotive story, perhaps a little sugary, but this was not the case. Although not a million miles apart from Picoult, Hyde definitely has her own style. The book although aimed at women contains very colourful and intriguing characters; half of these being men. It’s no-nonsense approach I think actually makes for a broader reading audience.
It recounts the life events of Grace a 10-year-old girl, whose mother is an addict and often unrousable. With the risk of the ‘county woman’ visiting and taking her into care, the sharp thinking, forthright Grace knows she needs to do something to prevent this and sets about making her plight known to some other tenants in her apartment block. Read more
The Killer is Dying, by James Sallis
James Sallis is no ordinary crime writer. Aside from crime writing, he has produced poetry collections, biographies, and books on musicology. It is perhaps no surprise then, that The Killer is Dying is no ordinary crime novel.
Elements of the plot are typical enough; a terminally ill contract killer works his final job, pursued by a dogged but despairing detective. This is no bog-standard binary conflict though; a third party, a young boy named Jimmie, is haunted by the contract killer’s dreams. The three never meet, but Sallis weaves the three threads into a lonely but beautiful tapestry. Read more
Snuff, by Terry Pratchett
Snuff is the 39th Discworld novel, and Sir Terry Pratchett’s 50th novel overall, a staggering achievement. This half-century seems a good moment to reflect on how far the Discworld has come since The Colour of Magic was published in 1983. From being a straight send-up of fantasy tropes (dragons, wizards, barbarian warriors, and so on), it has gradually evolved in to a beautifully realised alternative world in which all the institutions, customs and cultures of our own planet come in for some gentle (or sometimes not-so-gentle) ribbing. Not only that, but in selecting different institutions to pick on, Pratchett has now instituted a real sense of social and economic progress to the Discworld – fans now wait to see where he will turn his attention next (not for us a milieu changed only by war and magic as in so many fantasy worlds, the Discworld now has a postal system, a free press, a telegram system and football, none of which it had at the beginning).
The fact that Snuff makes no mention of the nature of the Discworld (in case you’ve somehow missed this – a giant disc carried through space on the backs of four massive elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant space turtle) is telling – because it’s simply not really relevant to this tale. Nor do we get any cameos by Death (normally he gets at least a walk-on), because this is possibly one of the most grounded Discworld books ever. That is of course partially a reflection of the grounded nature of Sam Vimes, central protagonist of Snuff and favoured character of many since his debut in Guards! Guards! (1989). Vimes novels often feel the most unfantastical of the Discworld canon, a reflection of Vimes’ humble origins and practical, copper’s worldview.
The Killing Way, by Anthony Hays
The Killing Way is an interesting prospect from the outset – a murder mystery based in Arthurian times. I confess that I approached it with trepidation in quite how this could be executed, with the period being one that has been portrayed in numerous historical fiction pieces in the past. The romantic version of Arthur’s court died a death with Cornwell’s interpretation, and has since been well and truly buried by Hume and others. So could an author successfully create a suitably dark version of the period in order to set a brutal murder within it?
Fortunately Hays succeeds in doing just that. The dark ages are well represented in their brutality and chaos, and the characterisations within the novel are suitably complex to allow for the mystery to unfold effectively. The main protagonist, Malgwyn, is well drawn and develops well throughout the novel. When the reader first encounters him he is a bitter, twisted drunk who has still not forgiven Arthur for saving his life when he wished to die in battle. As a result of that past encounter he is left with one arm and little in the way of a living. This allows for Hays to create a believable tension between Malgwyn and the other characters from the outset, one that varies by degrees as the novel and the murder investigation progresses.
The Demi-Monde: Winter, by Rod Rees
For his début novel, the first in a four-book story cycle, Rod Rees has taken on the well-used SF theme of virtual reality and the consequences when worlds collide. From cyberpunk novels to some particularly well-known episodes of Star Trek (which, with its holo-decks, could conjure up virtual realities for its characters at the push of a button), it’s a popular idea – so the execution of it, and the characterisation and storytelling, are the keys to success if originality is the goal. Fortunately, Rod Rees has demonstrated considerable prowess in all of these areas in Winter.
The Demi-Monde is a totally immersive virtual reality environment created to train US soldiers in asymmetric warfare – a simulation so realistic that players can forget they’re in a game at all, populated by millions of AI characters called Dupes. Everything about the simulation is designed to foment tension – limited access to natural resources, over-population, competing ideologies and the presence of a number of Singularities, characters modelled on the despots, tyrants and hard men of history, including Shaka Zulu, Henry VIII, Robespierre and Reynhard Heydrich. But (it won’t surprise you to learn), something’s gone very wrong in the Demi-Monde: the Dupes have realised that soldiers and other visitors walk among them and have started taking hostages – since to die in the game is to die in real life, the simulation can’t be turned off. Worse, somehow, the daughter of the US President has been drawn in to the game and captured. The stakes are very high indeed.
In Plain Sight, by CJ Box
When only the best crime fiction will do, I reach for a volume of CJ Box. Thankfully, Corvus have spent all of 2011 bringing Box’s substantial back catalogue to British shores, so there are plenty to choose from.
In Plain Sight is the sixth in the Joe Pickett series, bringing with it one of the darkest chapters in the ongoing saga of the beleaguered Wyoming game warden. In this outing, Pickett is tormented by an old enemy who will stop at nothing to wreak his revenge, targeting not just Joe but those close to him. All this occurs against the backdrop of a blood feud in Saddlestring. When eccentric ranch owner Opal Scarlett goes missing, her eldest offspring waste no time in drawing battle lines across the ranch. Their influence in local society is so entrenched that soon not just the ranch, but the entire community outside is riven by the Scarlett’s conflict. As the hostility escalates, Joe is forced to take drastic steps to protect himself and his family. Read more
The Association of Foreign Spouses by Marilyn Heward Mills
The immigrant story is a well-known one with Brick Lane and White Teeth recounting immigration to the UK, and innumerable stories of immigration to the US. With The Association of Foreign Spouses, Marilyn Heward Mills takes a different tack on the immigrant experience–white European women moving to turbulent Ghana for the love of their Ghanaian men. This is no story of white colonialism. Ghana of the 80′s is not Alexander McCall Smith’s comfortable Bostawana, full of Mma Ramotswe catching naughty people and red bush tea in every chapter. This is 198o’s Ghana, which has had three coups in eight years, shortages of everything, and no trains to run on the railroad tracks the British left behind them. The Western wives find themselves struggling against cultural norms that take affairs and out-of-wedlock children in their stride. They run out of tea and nice coffee is a luxury. The TV is censored, houses have to be walled and gated, the water and telephone lines are unreliable, and armed soldiers and bribes at checkpoints are the norm for a trip to the beach. Most of all, they struggle with every immigrant’s trouble, being different, being from somewhere else.
Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson has won international acclaim with his Mistborn trilogy and taken on the task of finishing Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series with a deft touch. Gollancz have now reissued his debut novel, a standalone fantasy titled Elantris.
Elantris was the centre of Arelon, a place of magic, healing, and incredible wealth, and a home to people transformed by the magic they wielded into shining silver demigods, magicians of the Shaod. But everything changes, and now Elantris stands shut and decaying, home only to the desperate who have become infected by what once gifted them with powers beyond understanding. Raoden, prince of Arelon, waits to inherit a throne that now sits in a new capital, Kae, and waits, as well, for the woman he is meant to marry, the princess Sarene.
All does not go as expected, and when Sarene arrives for her wedding she is told that Raoden has died. Soon, she is battling to ensure that the treaty uniting Teod and Arelon against the Fjordell holds true, and finding a nemesis in Hrathen, a high priest sent to convert the people of Arelon, fighting Sarene for the respect and love of the people in her new home.
Arelon seethes with secrets, and Sarene, for all of her experience at negotiation and statecraft, struggles to find allies and help in a country that has quickly become home. Her clash with Hrathen, and their struggle for the loyalties of the people of Arelon, is fraught with more danger than she realizes, and the decaying capital, the once gorgeous Elantris, begins to draw the eyes of those who seek power, and hides more secrets than even they realize. Read more
The Consummata, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
When Mickey Spillane began work on The Consummata, Charles Manson was an unknown Ohioan drifter, King Idris was still in power in Libya, and the surface of the moon was still untainted by human boot prints. The sequel to The Delta Factor, Spillane shelved it after much frustration at the cinematic development of its predecessor. And so, several decades later, Max Allan Collins did for The Consummata what he has done for so many of Spillane’s incomplete manuscripts, and presents the finished article to a hungry audience at the tail end of 2011.
Originally intended to be contemporary, but now something of a 1960s costume drama, The Consummata wastes no time, cutting (quite literally) to the chase in the opening line. The hero is Morgan the Raider, fleeing from the attentions of various law enforcement agencies, and finding assistance in the home of Pedro, a Cuban immigrant, exiled from his native land by the rise of Castro. This chance meeting sees Morgan tasked with tracking down a Cuban thief by the name of Jaimie Halaquez, an unsavoury sexual deviant who has liberated $75k of funds pooled by Cuban exiles to help fight Castro.
Death of Kings, by Bernard Cornwell
Uhtred’s back – after a detour in to a one-off novel for his last outing, doyen of British historical novelists Bernard Cornwell has returned to continue the saga of Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Born an English noble but raised by Vikings, he straddles the divide that runs across what is now England in a way few other men can. Uhtred has been a trusty right hand to King Alfred for many years, even though they are divided by religion and many of their social attitudes – but now Alfred is dying, and all of the kingdoms of England watch and wait to see what will happen after his passing.
When Uhtred is awarded a decent sized estate by the ailing monarch, he settles down – but he knows that the Vikings are waiting for their moment to strike, and that it will come after Alfred goes. Uhtred is older now, cannier though no less fearsome as a warrior – but his intuitions are ignored by Alfred’s successor, his son Edward, and the churchmen who are his principal advisers. Uhtred is sent in to a trap that only his long experience helps him avoid, and becomes the only member of Edward’s court expecting war with the Danes.
Hysteria: The Disturbing History, by Andrew Scull
Andrew Scull’s The Disturbing History of Hysteria carefully details the often complex nature of a malady that sparked an array of treatment, symptoms, and diagnoses and puzzled, alarmed, and fascinated the doctors, patients, and public that came across it. At the height of its popularity, it was known as the “English disease”, blamed on women’s sex lives, and used as an excuse for treatments that crossed the line from bizarre to barbaric. Scull has written a history that reads like a page-turner, about a disease that still hides many of its secrets from those who would understand it.
Woven into all of the investigating and treatment there was an element of theatre, and Scull sweeps the curtain away to reveal the secrets of performances from patient and doctor alike. From surgeons demonstrating to a room full of visitors to one of the most persuasive showmen of them all, Mesmer.
To accentuate the effects of the treatment, soft music was added (Mesmer taking a turn on a glass harp, which he apparently played rather well), and the good doctor dressed in a lavender-colored silk robe, and wandered among his ecstatic patients, brushing them with a long magnetized iron rod. Read more
Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is something of a literary chameleon – his oeuvre includes Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic with which he made his name, the sprawling historical trilogy of the Baroque Cycle, the massively popular geek thriller Cryptonomicon and most recently a book to put the ‘science’ back in to ‘science fiction’, the massive Anathem. The sheer size of this volume is all that Reamde has in common with its predecessor – because this is Stephenson back in contemporary techno-thriller territory – and once again he’s got an audience of geeks firmly in his sights.
It’s a brave thing to give a book a title that no-one can pronounce. In this case, ‘reamde’ is the name of a computer virus which is designed to entice people to click on it (‘reamde’ being a deliberate mis-spelling of ‘readme’), and which when activated encrypts all the user’s files and literally holds them to ransom. The interesting bit is that the computer users targeted are players of T’Rain, a next-generation MMORPG which will be deeply familiar to anyone who’s ever played World of Warcraft. Victims of the virus have to venture to a particular part of the game world in order to pay the ransom, which has all kinds of unintended consequences, both in the game and in the real world.
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
Damned, Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, re-imagines Judy Blume’s 1970 young adult classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for a new generation. The novel follows Madison Spencer, a thirteen year old girl on the verge of puberty, who finds herself in Hell following a drug overdose. As the publisher states ‘this is Hell as only Palahniuk could imagine it’; a waste land of toenail clippings, wasted sperm and all the other excesses of our time on Earth. Madison is like any other teenage girl; obsessed with boys, worried about being unpopular and overweight, she has a misplaced crush on her adoptive brother Goran, whom her celebrity parents have ‘rescued’ from a third world country. She is a quintessential Palahniuk character, self depreciating, morbid and self-aware; however misplaced her perceptions might be.
Madison quickly befriends a variety of misfits and they join her on a romp across the underworld. Having discovered that there has been a mistake and she shouldn’t really be in Hell at all Madison sets out to find the Devil himself. Akin to a high school movie, Damned follows Madison and her friends as they try to find Madison’s admission files and rescue her from being eternally damned. Madison is nothing if not adaptable. She quickly adjusts to her life in Hell, finding her feet in a call centre where she persuades people that Hell really isn’t so bad, and takes on Hitler and a variety of evil dictators to form her own tribe of followers.
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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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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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