One Dark Night by Hannah Richell

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Simon & Schuster UK| 3 July 2025| 432 pages| e-book| Review copy| 5*

ELLIE
When the body of a young woman is discovered in the woods the morning after Halloween, arranged with ritualistic precision, teenager Ellie has more reason than most to be afraid …

RACHEL
 As both Ellie’s mum and the local school counsellor, Rachel, must grapple with the terror gripping the community, a tough job that’s made even harder when she realises her daughter is keeping secrets …

BEN
Police detective Ben Chase is desperate to solve the murder, but with his daughter Ellie struggling and the noose circling ever tighter, can he catch the killer before they strike again?

My thoughts:

I requested One Dark Night by Hannah Richell from NetGalley because I thought I’d like it when I read the blurb. And I was right! I haven’t read any of Richell’s books before but I’m certainly going to try some of her six earlier novels, all of them stand-alone stories. On her website she describes her work as suspenseful novels about families and friends tangled in secrets and lies. I’m drawn to buildings that creak with stories, to landscapes that shape the characters moving through them, and to the rich and often complex relationships between mothers, daughters and sisters.

One Dark Night is her sixth book, which she says is inspired by a real-life stretch of woodland and an old stone folly near where I currently live, supposedly one of the most haunted spots in England. Yes, it is very creepy.

I loved the spooky, tense atmosphere and as soon as I started reading it I knew I was going to enjoy this book. The settings are vividly described, the characters come across as real people, and the plot is amazing, multi- layered, with plenty of suspects for the murder and numerous twists and turns to throw me off the scent. For quite a while you don’t even know the name of the victim, who was found in the woods, called ‘Sally in the Wood’. It’s a police procedural centred on Ellie, a pupil at the private school, where her mother Rachel works as the school counsellor and her father, Ben, a detective sergeant who is on the investigation team. Ellie is struggling, having just started at the school and also because her parents are newly divorced.

In the Acknowledgements the author explains that the novel is loosely inspired by the place and stories of Sally in the Wood and the nearby stone folly, but the surroundings are drawn purely from her imagination. She had the idea for the novel after her daughter took part in a Girl Guides night hike to the stone folly above the spooky wood.

I found more information about the origins of the road, Sally in the Wood, on the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre. The road forms a curved section of the A363 road on the Somerset-Wiltshire border that cuts through dense woodland near Bath – a perfect place to set a murder mystery. There are a few explanations for the name – one being that a girl called Sally was murdered in the woods or imprisoned in nearby Brown’s Folly, or that she was an actual road accident victim. It has a reputation of being an eerie place, where ‘no birds sing’, so you never know…

I loved it, one of the best books I’ve read so far this year!

Top Five Tuesday: Books with a Direction in the Title

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. You can see the Top 5 Tuesday topics for the whole of 2025 here. 

Today the topic is Books with a Direction in the Title. I’ve chosen books with north, south, east, up and down in their titles:

  1. The King in the North by Max Adams – Oswald of Northumbria was the first great English monarch, yet today this legendary figure is all but forgotten. In this panoramic portrait of Dark Age Britain, archaeologist and biographer Max Adams returns the king in the North to his rightful place in history.
  2. South Riding by Winifred Holtby – portraying life in the 1930s, one of the main characters is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of Kiplington High School for Girls, a fiercely passionate and dedicated teacher.
  3. East of Eden by John Steinbeck – the story of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
  4. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel – the sequel to Wolf Hall. It’s 1535, Thomas Cromwell is Chief Minister to Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn is the king’s new wife. But she has failed to give the king an heir and Henry falls for plain Jane Seymour. Cromwell must find a solution that will satisfy Henry, safeguard the nation and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge unscathed from the bloody theatre of Anne’s final days.
  5. The Stars Look Down by A J Cronin – a family saga chronicling the lives of a number of interconnected families over a period of thirty years.The story starts in 1903 in a North Country mining town, Sleescale, as its inhabitants experienced social and political upheaval. It ends in 1933. It highlights the terrible conditions in the coal mines, the lack of workers’ rights and the need for change in the relationship between the coal miners and the mine owners.

Six in Six: The 2025 Edition

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Jo who used to blog The Book Jotter  is not running Six in Six again this year. The idea is to summarise the first six months of reading, sorting the books into six categories – you can choose from the ones Jo suggested or come up with your own. Or if you want to do a shorter version, then just post something about six books you have read in the first six months of 2025.

Although Jo is no longer blogging I think it’s a good way to look back over the last six months’ reading and so I thought I’d do it again this year.

As I’ve been reading less than usual this year (33 books in the first six months) I’ve had to use some of the books in more than one category. And as I’ve been reviewing less I haven’t written posts about all the books. The links take you to my posts on the books, and some are just short posts, not reviews. Books I haven’t reviewed are linked to Amazon.

Six Crime Fiction

  1. The Likeness by Tana French
  2. The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths
  3. Only Murders in the Abbey by Beth Cowan-Erskine
  4. Murder at Gull’s Nest by Jess Kidd
  5. The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey
  6. There’s a Reason For Everything by E R Punshon

Six books set in the past

  1. The Librarian by Salley Vickers – 1950s
  2. Precipice by Robert Harris (linked to Amazon)
  3. Resistance by Owen Sheers
  4. The House of Lost Whispers by Jenni Keer
  5. Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
  6. The House of Seymour by Joanna Hickson

Six Authors New to me

  1. There’s a Reason for Everything by E R Punshon
  2. Murder at Gull’s Nest by Jess Kidd
  3. Resistance by Owen Sheers
  4. My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis
  5. By Your Side by Ruth Jones
  6. Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd

Six Books I Read from My To Be Read List

  1. Signal Moon by Kate Quinn – a short story
  2. Keir Starmer: the Biography by Tom Baldwin
  3. Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn – nonfiction
  4. Wintering by Katherine May – nonfiction (linked to Amazon)
  5. Dead Man’s Time by Peter James
  6. Five Have a Wonderful Time by Enid Blyton

Six books I have read but not reviewed (all linked to Amazon)

  1. Ted: a Pawtography: My Adventures in Gone Fishing by Ted the Dog as told to Lisa Clark 
  2. The One that Got Away by Mike Gayle
  3. The Curious Case of the Village in the Moonlight by Steve Wiley
  4. The Boy With No Shoes: a Memoir by William Horwood
  5. The Neighbour’s Secret by Sharon Bolton
  6. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Six books recently added to my wish list (all linked to Amazon)

  1. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
  2. The Women of Arlington Hall by Jane Healey
  3. The Real Jane Austen by Paula Byrne
  4. God is an Englishman (The Swann family saga Book 1) by R F Delderfield
  5. A Cold Wind from Moscow by Rory Clements
  6. All That Matters by Chris Hoy – his autobigraphy

How is your reading going this year? Do let me know if you take part in Six in Six too.

Small Wars by Sadie Jones: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

Small Wars by Sadie Jones is historical fiction set mainly in Cyprus in the late 1950s where Major Hal Treherne and his wife Clara and their baby daughters are stationed during the ‘enosis’ (union with Greece) uprising. I’ve read about two thirds of it so far and it is good.

The book begins with a Prologue at Sandhurst in July 1946.

An English rain was falling onto the instruments of the band, onto their olive green uniforms and the uniforms of the cadets as they marched. The quiet rain lay in drops on the umbrellas of the families watching, on the men’s felt hats and the women’s gloved hands; it dampened the grey and green countryside around them and put beads of water onto everything.

The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) is where all officers in the British Army are trained to take on the responsibility of leading their soldiers. The main character is Hal Treherne and this opening chapter is about his passing out parade after he completed his basic training as an officer.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56 is in Part Two, which is set in Limassol, Cyprus ten years later in 1956 during the Emergency. Hal has been promoted to a major.

‘It was a sharp sudden valley and it wasn’t fanciful to consider it sinister, with the slithering hard stones and earth that went steeply downward. For most of the day it would be in shadow. Hal had seen the gradients on the map, but was still surprised by the extremity of the land and that anyone would choose to build a farm there, so deep.

Description from Amazon UK:

Hal Treherne is a soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other commitment in life is to his beloved wife, Clara, and when Hal is transferred to Cyprus she and their twin daughters join him. But the island is in the heat of the emergency; the British are defending the colony against Cypriots – schoolboys and armed guerillas alike – battling for union with Greece.

Clara shares Hal’s sense of duty and honour; she knows she must settle down, make the best of things, smile. But action changes Hal, and the atrocities he is drawn into take him not only further from Clara but himself, too; a betrayal that is only the first step down a dark path.

It was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. The Orange Prize for Fiction, now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annual award that recognizes the best novel written in English by a woman, regardless of nationality.

WWW Wednesday: 23 July 2025

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I am reading Small Wars by Sadie Jones, a book I’ve had for years ( I bought it in 2011!). It’s historical fiction set mainly in Cyprus in the late 1950s where Major Hal Treherne and his wife Clara and their baby daughters are stationed during the ‘enosis’ (union with Greece) uprising. It’s tense, gripping and I’m now about halfway into the book and thinking I’ll have to stop reading my other book to concentrate on finishing this one.

That other book I’m currently reading is a NetGalley review copy of The Death of Shame by Ambrose Parry. This is also historical fiction, set in 1854 in Edinburgh, a mix of fact and fiction incorporating the social scene, historical and medical facts. It’s the 5th book in the Raven and Fisher Mystery series. Dr Will Raven is no longer working with Dr Simpson but is setting up his own medical practice with the financial assistance of Sarah Fisher. They are investigating the disappearance of Sarah’s young niece, the suicide of Will’s father in law and the blackmailing of Dr Simpson.

The last book I read was Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. This is set in the dark underworld of Brighton, where a gang war is raging. Seventeen year old gang leader Pinkie Brown, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. What follows is truly terrible, horrifying and full of violence. And yet I felt compelled to read it, fearful about how it would end. I’ll be writing more about it in a later post.

What will I read next? It could be All That Matters by Sir Chris Hoy, his memoir.

In elite sport, the margin between victory and defeat is miniscule, and the pressure is immense. Chris has built a glittering sporting career on understanding these how to feel for them, how to cope with them, how to make them count.

Last year, he faced another life-changing moment. He found out that the ache in his shoulder was in fact a tumour, and that he had Stage 4 cancer.

He will be living with this disease for the rest of his life.

Spell the Month in Books July 2025

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!

The optional theme this month is “set in a fantasy world or fictional place”. I thought this would be difficult but I managed to find books I’ve read for all the letters in JULY for this theme except for Y!

J is for Just So Stories for Little Children written and illustrated by Rudyard Kipling

This book contains Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 collection of short stories, Just So Stories. They are stories he told his daughter, Effie (Josephine) as bedtime stories – fantastic accounts of how various features of animals came to be. Kipling explained: ‘in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. They had to be told just so; or Effie would wake up and put back the missing sentence.’

My favourite is The Cat That Walked by Himself about when the tame animals were all wild. The wildest of all was the Cat and this is Kipling’s explanation of how the cat came to use humans for its own comfort but remained independent, walking in the Wet Wild Woods, ‘waving his tail and walking by his wild lone.’ Kipling’s illustrations in this book are perfect.

It also includes: ‘How the Whale got His Throat’, ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’, ‘How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin’, ‘How the Leopard Got His Spots’, ‘The Elephant’s Child’, ‘The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo’, ‘The Beginning of the Armadillos’, ‘How the First Letter was Written’, and more. 

U is for The Uncertain Midnight by Edmund Cooper

The author wrote that he had written this book before the Space Age, before the development of lasers, before it was possible to give a man a new heart.

I like it because of that; it’s low on technology and high on philosophy. It’s not set in outer space, but firmly on Earth  – but Earth in the 22nd century, a world run by machines, androids, who have taken over the burdens of work and responsibility, a world where the humans are required to spend their lives in leisure pursuits, but are subject to ‘Analysis’ (brain-washing) if the androids think they are maladjusted .

John Markham emerges in 2113 after spending 146 years in suspended animation, frozen deep under ground after an atomic holocaust had devastated his world. In 2113 not all humans were happy to leave everything to the androids. Known as Runners these humans believed in ‘human dignity, freedom of action and the right to work’. Markham struggles to adapt and this raises the question of whether the androids could be said to be alive – leading to discussions about the definition of life, the difference between determinism and free will, and eventually leading to war between the androids and the Runners.

L is for The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other Stories by Susanna Clarke

As a child I read all the fairytale books I could find and The Ladies collection takes me back to the magical world of those stories. They are full of deep dark woods, paths leading to houses that seemingly move locations, ladies who are never what they appear to be, princesses, owls, and above all fairies, including the Raven King.

The stories are all captivating and strange and set up echoes in my mind of such fairytales, as Rumpelstiltskin (in On Lickerish Hill). My favourite stories are The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Mrs Mabb, and The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse. The Ladies explains why Jonathan Strange prevented his clergyman brother-in-law from an engagement with Cassandra Parbringer as Strange discovers that his magic is no match for Cassandra and her two friends, the three bewitching ladies of Grace Adieu.

The story I enjoyed the most was The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse. I have not read any of Neil Gaiman’s books, but I think I really should. The story of the Duke’s horse is set in Wall, a village in the world created by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, where there is an actual wall dividing our world and the world of Faerie, guarded by burly villagers with cudgels. The proud Duke, the Nation’s Hero, passes unchallenged by the intimidated villagers into Faerie, in pursuit of his horse. His fate is then seemingly set in stitches in a magnificent piece of embroidery in exquisite pictures. The Duke’s fate depends on whether he can alter the future shown in the embroidery. The ending has a satisfying twist.

Y is for Young Wizards Series: The First Three Books  by Diane Duane. I haven’t read these books. If you have please let me know what you think about them.

Nita is just looking for an escape from her bullies when she stumbles upon an odd book in thelibrary: “So You Want to Be a Wizard.” Nita at first thinks it s a joke. But once she reads the mysterious book, an alternate universe of Manhattan reveals itself to Nita and her friend Kit. The pair embark on a terrifying adventure where real life and magic intertwine and they find themselves entrenched in a battle between good and evil.

Join Nita and Kit on their magical adventures in the Young Wizards starter pack dive deep into the ocean of Deep Wizardry where whales are wizards and ancient rituals are performed by sharks and dolphins. From the sea to the sky, join the dynamic duo on their third and most frightening challenge yet: Nita s little sister, Dairine. Not only is she too smart for a ten-year-old, but she just became a wizard with almost limitless power. Kit and Nita end up chasing her across the galaxy before she gets into trouble so deep no one can rescue her.

For fans of magic with a thirst for adventure, dive right in with the Young Wizards starter pack, which contains three books: “So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, “and “High Wizardry. “”

The next link up will be on August 2, 2025 when the optional theme will be Written by your favorite author(s)