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How much do you trust your partner? How well do you really know them? The opening prologue of Dennis Lehane's new novel, Since We Fell , suggests that something has gone badly wrong in Rachel Childs' marriage, since she's just put a bullet into her husband. As we get into the story however and discover more about Rachel's troubled family background and the breakdown she suffers later, you have to wonder how much we can trust Rachel's state of mind. There's going to be two sides to this story, and for a while at least we are not going to be sure quite who to believe. It might once have been a relatively clear-cut matter who was the injured party and who was the lying cheating bastard in any marriage situation, the only suspense being how long it would take the victim to realise their mistake and whether they would get out of it alive, but Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl was a game changer. Mixing the unreliable narrator with a more complex view of psychological ex...

Polly Clark's Larchfield  is partly a fictionalised account of WH Auden's brief spell teaching in the small community of Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland when the poet was 24 years old. The two and a half years that Auden spent at Larchfield would appear to be a fairly minor and obscure period to base a novel upon, even if you are familiar with Auden's poem 'The Orators' that was written around this time. The author however gives the story some contemporary relevance and interest by contrasting and linking the story in alternate chapters with a modern day story of a young mother who has recently moved into the same area and also feels the pressures of being an outsider in a small community. This method of contrasting past with present is a familiar literary device and it does serve to draw out deeper underlying themes, but Polly Clark's beautifully written novel manages much more than this. Even on a superficial and literary level however, it's a tr...

It takes a little while to settle into the world that Sam Peters has created in his debut novel From Darkest Skies . It doesn’t feel like an original creation, and with its main character Keon Rause a law officer and its use of artificial creations with human-like characteristics, Blade Runner does seem to be the obvious reference that comes to mind, but there’s something of The Expanse there too. Once it finds its own feet however, it’s clear that From Darkest Skies has more to offer here and potentially in the future. Well, we’re already in the future here, in a time where an outside alien agency known only as the Masters has pushed mankind out to distant planets for reasons that no one really seems to understand. There are plenty of theories however and by the time we get to the end of From Darkest Skies there are new insights to consider. For the main part however, Sam Peters' debut novel is more of a SF conspiracy crime thriller that has a personal angle for its detective ...

** The are no spoilers in this review beyond the initial set-up and nature of the crime ** Were it not for the peculiarities of the crime and the clues, The Legacy would probably be quite a pedestrian read.  Yrsa Sigurdardóttir's over-written descriptions are at least thorough and you get a very clear idea of how the case is progressing with regular summaries of the situation and lines of enquiry that are being followed up. You also get a tremendous amount of detail about the thought processes of each of the individuals and investigators concerned, as well as their personal disappointments and failures, their unsatisfying jobs and family relationships. That's a common thread in The Legacy  and you could say it has some bearing on the case, so there appears to be a valid reason for such a focus. The one area that you aren't given quite as much detail - as you might expect at least initially - is in the motivation and identity of the killer of Elísa Bjarnadóttir.  here are...

I'm not entirely convinced by the hard-ass act of Brigid Quinn, the tough and experienced 60 year old ex-FBI agent of Becky Masterman's A Twist of the Knife . It does seem like a deliberate ploy to have an edgy character who is a bit morally ambiguous, keeping the reader conflicted about her bluntness but admiring how (she tells us) she gets things done. Sometimes she bends the rules, but "it's for the right reasons". Yeah. sure, isn't that what everyone thinks? I'll give you an example that is totally unrelated to the actual case here - so no spoilers - but which is told by Quinn in the first person narration so that you have an understanding of where she is coming from. Opening her mouth once too often without thinking, Brigid Quinn says something insensitive to a fellow detective who is agonising over a failed prosecution in a child abuse case. The detective subsequently commits suicide and Quinn feels really bad about it. To try to make up for it, she ...

If you haven't already read Blood & Beauty , the first part of Sarah Dunant's fictionalisation of the years of the Borgia papacy during the Italian Renaissance, it might initially be a little bit difficult to grasp the depth of characterisation that the author has established and carried through to In The Name of the Family. It's important to see them as real people rather than monsters or even just historical figures because Dunant does have a different perspective to share on this period, or at least attempts to cut through the rumour and the legend to try to find a more likely measure of truth behind the exaggeration and self-aggrandisement.  Even then, In the Name of the Family  is still nothing less than a wild account of the actions of a shocking and notorious family dynasty. Even if you have read Blood & Beauty , it was published five years ago, so the sequel has been a long time coming. making it difficult to pick up the thread again. The personalities devel...