Stone Cold Heart by Caz Frear

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Stone Cold Heart

2*

Stone Cold Heart is Caz Frear’s second novel and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t get on with it very well. However, I’m in the minority as there are lots of 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. My copy is a NetGalley copy that I’ve had far too long – I did start reading it when I first downloaded it but soon realised that it would be better if I read her debut novel, Sweet Little Lies first. These are police procedurals written in the first person present tense narrated by DC Cat Kinsella who is part of the Murder Investigation Team 4, and her personal life is a major part of both books.

Naomi Lockhart, a young Australian woman was murdered and at first it looked as though her flatmate had killed her. The night before she was murdered Naomi had been at a party held by her employer, Kirstie Connor and her husband, Marcus. Also at the party were Joseph Madden and his meek wife, Rachel, Marcus’ sister. Joseph is an emotionally abusive narcissist, who manages the local coffee shop and when suspicion then falls on him and he is arrested he claims that Rachel is setting him up. And so begins a most convoluted and tangled tale about Joseph and the rest of his family, filled with secrets and lies, most of which are complete red herrings.  

Alongside the murder mystery, the book follows the story of DC Cat Kinsella’s family and the mystery surrounding Maryanne Doyle that was told in Sweet Little Lies – you really do need to read that book first to understand what is going on in her family life in this book. Cat is a conflicted character to say the least and although other readers have found her a warm and likeable character I found her one of the most irritating fictional detectives in crime fiction. She is full of guilt and angst about her family, in particular about her father and her brother. She is keeping the identity of her boyfriend a secret from everybody – if you’ve read Sweet Little Lies you’ll know why, otherwise you’ll be as mystified as her family and police colleagues are.

I found the secrets surrounding Cat’s family the most interesting part of the book, more so than the investigation into Naomi’s murder. The Murder Investigation Team all get on well together, but their continuing team meetings in which they endlessly consider all the possible theories about the murder and what happened, although interesting at first soon became tedious – far too much hypothesising. The book just dragged on and on. And then there is the ending – except it’s just the murder mystery that ends as it looks as though there is still more to come about Cat Kinsella. If you like long detective stories, full of twists and turns, lots of red herrings and dubious and unreliable characters who withhold evidence you may like it more than I did.

Amazon UK link
Amazon US link

My thanks to the publishers, Zaffre, for a review copy via NetGalley.

Reading challenges: Mount TBR challenge and Calendar of Crime – the main action takes place in November.

Writing Wild by Kathryn Aalto

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Writing Wild

3.5*

‘An exciting, expert, and invaluable group portrait of seminal women writers enriching a genre crucial to our future.’ —Booklist

Blurb:

In Writing Wild, Kathryn Aalto celebrates 25 women, both historical and current, whose influential writing helps deepen our connection to and understanding of the natural world. These inspiring wordsmiths are scholars, spiritual seekers, conservationists, scientists, novelists, and explorers. They defy easy categorization, yet they all share a bold authenticity that makes their work both distinct and universal.

Part travel essay, literary biography, and cultural history, Writing Wild ventures into the landscapes and lives of extraordinary writers and encourages a new generation of women to pick up their pens, head outdoors, and start writing wild.

My thoughts:

Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See The Natural World is by Kathryn Aalto and illustrated by Gisela Goppel. Published by Timber Press it will be released in paperback on 1 April, with a Kindle edition to follow on 14 April 2020.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I do enjoy reading books about nature, so Writing Wild appealed to me. Kathryn Aalto’s reason for writing her book was to highlight what these 25 women writers have written, their historical significance and the barriers, biases and bullying they overcame to write. It covers two hundred years of women’s history through nature writing, including natural history, environmental philosophy, country life, scientific writing, garden arts, memoirs and meditations and does not aim to dismiss men’s contributions. Gisela Goppel’s portraits of each writer head each chapter. Aalto writes an introduction to each writer and includes excerpts of prose, poems and essays with added recommendations for further reading, plus a list of sources and an index.

Predominantly American and British, some of these women writers are familiar to me, such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Vita Sackville West, Nan Shepherd, Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard and Helen Macdonald. Others are new to me, but I would like to read several of their works, such as Andrea Wulf’s book The  Brother Gardeners in which  she explores how England became a nation of gardeners. Wulf, a design historian, writes horticultural and historical history through narrative nonfiction, borrowing techniques from fiction to make nonfiction come alive. Elena Passarello’s Animals Strike Curious Poses essay collection, which Aalto describes as written with  laugh-out-loud humour and depth of empathy, also particularly appeals to me.

One of the things I learned reading this book is the name ‘Cli-fi’. I hadn’t come across it before but of course, it is not a new genre. As Aalto points out it goes back at least to Jules Verne’s 1889 The Purchase of the North Pole. Contemporary examples including Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour. The writer she chooses to illustrate this genre is Saci Lloyd, an acclaimed writer of cli-fi, whose vivid and action packed books include The Carbon Diaries, about the effects of carbon reduction policies. They are gritty eco-thrillers featuring Laura Brown a 16 year old trying to manage life with a carbon deficit card.

Kathryn Aalto is a writer, designer, historian and lecturer. For the past twenty-five years, her focus has been on places where nature and culture intersect: teaching literature of nature and place, designing gardens, and writing about the natural world. Her work explores historic and horticultural themes with a contemporary twist. She is the author of The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood (2015) and Nature and Human Intervention (2011). Her website is kathrynaalto.com.

My thanks to Timber Press for a review copy via NetGalley.

Sweet Little Lies by Caz Frear

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

 

Sweet Little Lies

3*

Sweet Little Lies is one of my TBRs. When it was first published nearly three years ago I kept seeing rave reviews of Caz Frear’s debut novel and wondered whether I would like it. It begins very slowly and I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to bother finishing it. It was only at about the halfway mark that it picked up pace. What I didn’t like about it is that it’s written in the first person present tense and apart from that I didn’t like the style of writing – very wordy, with much that adds very little to the plot. Once it finally got going this is mainly a police procedural set in the present day in London with flashbacks to Ireland in 1998. Whilst I found the plot a  touch over complicated and relying too much on coincidence I think the characters are well defined, and the dialogue is convincing.

When DC Cat Kinsella was a child of eight, visiting family in Ireland, teenager Maryanne Doyle went missing and Cat suspected her father had something to do with Maryanne’s disappearance because of something she had seen. But she kept it to herself and that had affected her relationship with her father ever since. So she is a complex and conflicted character who has changed her name, from McBride, distancing herself from her family and in particular from her father, whom she both loves and hates.  Her secret means that when the body of a woman, who turns out to be Maryanne Doyle, has been found strangled, not far from the pub that Cat’s father runs in Islington she is in a quandary – should she tell her boss that she had known Maryanne in the past?  But she is desperate to know the truth – and that is what kept me turning the pages to the end of the book.

Amazon UK link
Amazon US link

Reading challenges: Mount TBR challenge and Calendar of Crime – the main action takes place in December.

Six Degrees of Separation: from Wolfe Island to Blue Lightning

Published on by Margaret31 Comments

It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

Wolfe Island

This month the chain begins with Lucy Treloar’s Wolfe Island. It is a book I have not read but one I think I’d like. It’s about Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay. She has resigned herself to annihilation… until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary.

I’m beginning my chain with a book by another Lucy – The Book of Lost and Found by Lucy Foley. It’s the story of Tom and Alice beginning in 1928 in Hertfordshire and moving backwards and forwards in time and place to 1986, from Paris, to London, Corsica and New York. It all revolves around Kate, whose mother, June, had recently died in a plane crash.

The Flight by M R Hall is also about a plane crash. When Flight 189 plunges into the Severn Estuary, Coroner Jenny Cooper finds herself handling the case of a lone sailor whose boat appears to have been sunk by the stricken plane, and drawn into the mysterious fate of a ten year-old girl, Amy Patterson, a passenger on 189, whose largely unmarked body is washed up alongside his.

There is also a coroner in A Rustle of Silk by Alyis Clare – set in 1603 when former ship’s surgeon Gabriel Taverner has settled in Devon near his family and he is trying to set up a new practice as a physician. But it is not easy to gain the locals’ trust and someone is leaving gruesome little gifts on his doorstep. The local coroner, Theophilus Davey asks him to examine a partially decomposed body found beside the river.

Another book with the word ‘silk’ in the title is The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, a Sherlock Holmes continuation novel. It’s narrated by Watson as he looks back on two of the most puzzling and sinister cases he and Holmes had to solve November 1890 – that of The Man in the Flat Cap and The House of Silk. The first involves an art dealer, Mr Carstairs who is being threatened by a member of the American Flat Cap Gang, whereas the second concerns the murder of Ross, a new member of the Baker Street Irregulars.

The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is my next link – the second book about the original Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson investigate the mystery Mary Morstan presents to them – it involves the murder of Bartholomew Sholto, the Agra treasure stolen during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and a secret pact between the four thieves – the ‘Four’ of the title, resulting in a chase down the River Thames in a super-fast steam launch.  I listened to an audiobook of the novel, narrated by Derek Jacobi.

My last link is another audiobook – Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves, the fourth in her Shetland books, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It completes the chain too by linking back to Wolfe Island because it is set on another island, Fair Isle where Perez returns to his family home with his fiancée Fran. A woman’s body is discovered at the Fair Isle’s bird observatory, with feathers threaded through her hair, but as a storm sets in, Far Isle is cut off leaving Perez with no support from the mainland. 

My chain is a circle beginning and ending with books set on islands. They move from Chesapeake Bay in the Mid-Atlantic region through mainland Britain to Shetland in the Northern Atlantic covering a variety of genres and time periods, including contemporary fiction, historical and crime fiction.

Next month (4 April 2020), we’ll begin with Anna Funder’s ‘classic on tyranny and resistance’ – Stasiland – the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2004.

My Friday Post: A Body in the Bath House by Lindsey Davis

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Book Beginnings Button

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, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

A body in the bath house

A Body in the Bath House by Lindsey Davis is one of my current library loans. It’s historical crime fiction, a Marcus Didius Falco novel, an ‘informer with a nose for trouble’.

 

But for Rhea Favonia, we might have lived there.

‘There’s a smell! There’s a horrible smell. I’m not going in there!’

I didn’t need to be an informer to know we were stuck. When a four-year-old girl reckons she has detected something nasty, you just give in and look for it.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56These are the rules:

  1. Grab a book, any book.
  2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
  3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
  4. Post it.
  5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

‘Imagine Britain as a rough triangle.’ Helena had a letter in her hand, so well studied she hardly referred to it. ‘We are going to the middle of the long south coast. Elsewhere there are high chalk cliffs, but this area has a gentle coastline with safe anchorages in inlets. There are some streams and marshland but also wooded places for hunting and enough good farming land to attract settlers. The tribes have come down from their hillforts peacefully here. Noviomagus Regnensis – the New Market of the Kingdom Tribes – is a small town on the modern model.’

Noviomagus Regnensis was the Roman town which is today called Chichester, in the modern English county of West Sussex.

Blurb

AD 75. As a passion for home improvement sweeps through the Roman Empire, Falco struggles to deal with a pair of terrible bath-house contractors who have been causing him misery for months. Far away in Britain, King Togidubnus of the Atrebates tribe is planning his own makeover. His huge new residence (known to us as Fishbourne Palace) will be spectacular – but the sensational refurbishment is beset by ‘accidents’. The frugal Emperor Vespasian is paying for all this; he wants someone to investigate.

Falco has a new baby, a new house, and he hates Britain. But his feud with Anacrites the Chief Spy has now reached a dangerous level, so with his own pressing reasons to leave Rome in a hurry, he accepts the task. A thousand miles from home, he starts restoring order to the chaotic building site and realises that someone with murderous intentions is now after him…

~~~

Fishbourne Roman Palace is in the village of Fishbourne, Chichester in West Sussex. The palace is the largest residential Roman building discovered in Britain, dated 75 AD, around thirty years after the Roman conquest of Britain.

Have you read this book? What did you think?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with One Word Titles

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday 2020

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is: Books With One Word Titles. I’m not a fan of quirky long word titles – I much prefer one word titles, brief and to the point. These are all books I’ve read – except for the last one:

Atonement by Ian McEwan, a book I love and have read twice and seen the film.  I am often disappointed seeing the film of a book as it rarely matches the book . In this case the film is mostly faithful to the book, with minor alterations, except for the ending. I prefer the book’s ending. It’s a love story and a war novel, and also a mystery and a reflection on society and writing and writers. I loved it.

Awakening by Sharon Bolton – If you don’t like snakes this book won’t help you get over your phobia! Clare Benning is a wildlife vet who’d rather be with animals than with people. When a man dies following a suspicious snake bite she investigates his death. As more, and more snakes surface it gets really scary.  I enjoyed it immensely.

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer, her debut novel about Arnold, a serial killer and a twelve year old boy, Stephen. Nineteen years earlier Billy, Stephen’s uncle then aged eleven had disappeared. It was assumed that he had been one of  Arnold’s victims but his body had never been found. Stephen is determined to find where Arnold had buried his body and writes to him in prison.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates – this is a tragic story, intense and shocking in parts, a work of fiction, not a biography of Marilyn Monroe. It follows Norma Jeane Baker’s life in chronological sections from The Child 1932 – 1938 to The Afterlife 1959 – 1962. It switches from one narrator to the next, and from third person to first person perspective throughout. It’s brutal, tender and both lyrical and fragmented. I think this is one of Joyce Carol Oates best books, although I have by no means read all her books.

Chocolat by Joanne Harris. I saw the film first then read the book. Vianne Rocher arrives in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, a place that is ‘no more than a blip on the fast road between Toulouse and Bordeaux’ on Shrove Tuesday. She takes over the old bakery and transforms it into La Celeste Praline Chocolaterie Artisanale – in other words the most enticing, the most delicious and sensuous Chocolaterie. It’s a fabulous book.

Dracula by Bram Stoker. I knew the story of Dracula from film and TV versions – with most notably Christopher Lee and later Louis Jourdan as Dracula, but the book surprised me – mainly by how much I enjoyed it. It is composed of letters, journal entries, newspaper articles and transcripts of phonograph diary entries, from several characters, so the story is told from several different viewpoints. And it’s a very sensual and melodramatic novel, full of religious references. There is the question of life after death, the existence of the soul, the triumph of good over evil, the nature of sexuality,  fear and superstition. Vampires are at the same time appealing and repulsive.

Ferney by James Long. This book is a love story, balancing historical fact and imagination, a sort of time-slip novel. When Gally and her husband Mike buy a derelict cottage in Somerset they meet Ferney, an old man of 80 who knows the history of the cottage.  A bond grows between Gally and Ferney but Mike is a historian and he finds it hard to believe Ferney’s stories of the past and insists on having proof.

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo, a dark, gritty and violent tale that had me completely enthralled and I loved it. It’s retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and I think it sticks well to Shakespeare’s version (which itself wasn’t original!) – it has the same themes and plot lines. The setting is rather vague – it is somewhere in the 1970s in a fictional Scotland in a lawless town full of drug addicts, where there is a titanic struggle for control between the police force, corrupt politicians, motorbike gangs and  drug dealers.

Tombland by C J Sansom – I could have chosen any of Sansom’s Shardlake books as they all have one word titles. Tombland is the 7th in the series, set mainly in Norwich in 1549, two years after Henry VIII’s death and England is sliding into chaos as rebellion spreads in protest against the landowners’ enclosures of the common land. It’s a murder mystery too. I loved the attention to detail and the descriptive writing which placed me precisely at the scenes.

Ulysses by James Joyce – I have started this book and given up several times. I’d love to say I’ve finished it, but I haven’t. It deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as “Bloomsday”. The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Loosely modelled on the wanderings of Homer’s Ulysses as he travelled homewards to Ithaca, Joyce’s novel follows the interwoven paths of Stephen, estranged from his father and Leopold, grieving for his dead infant son. Ulysses was made into a film, of the same title in 1967, starring Milo O’Shea as Bloom and in 2003, another version, Bloom was released starring Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball. I haven’t seen either of them – maybe I’d get on better with the book if I did watch one of them.