To The Last Page

The novels of Robert Irwin are indeed wonderful things and it’s good to see that they haven’t ceased yet. All stories must eventually come to an end however, and not all of them end as we might like, but there will always be new stories and many more wonders to discover as we go through life. That in essence is what Wonders Will Never Cease is all about, but with it being a Robert Irwin novel and with the story here set in the War of the Roses period of English history, there are many other philosophical and esoteric matters to consider in a rich work that is itself filled with magic and wonder. A historian specialising in Oriental studies, Irwin made his literary mark with the labyrinthine horror fantasy The Arabian Nightmare in 1983, but each of his successive novels have continued in one way or another to explore the idea of life transformed. Sometimes it’s through mental illness ( The Limits of Vision ), in the world of the surrealists ( Exquisite Corpse ), through mind-altering ...

York, 1799. Fletcher Rigge has been hired to carry out an investigation by the son of a gentleman who has recently been murdered. Matthew Harvey was a portrait artist specialising in ‘shades’ - silhouetted portraits of his sitters. His son, Captain Harvey has reason to suspect that the murder may be among one of the six last portraits he made during Race Week. The suspicion is confirmed by the fact that the names of the sitters have been torn from the ledger, so all Fletcher Rigge has to go on to find the six clients is the shadowed profiles that exist of them in copies that the artist has kept. That’s an interesting basis for a murder-mystery enquiry, but there are a few other peculiarities about Andrew Martin’s Soot . First of all, Fletcher Rigge is no 18th century private investigator, but rather a bookseller and writer who currently resides in debtor’s prison. Captain Harvey (with his wonderfully eccentric and dissolute companion-servants) has however heard of the bookseller’s keen...

Welcome to Rotherweird. Or perhaps not, since outsiders aren’t encouraged to stay in this unusual little English town which would rather keep its secrets to itself, and even from itself, since delving into ‘old’ history is forbidden there. Rotherweird is hidden in a valley shrouded in mists, a kind of Steampunk fantasy Hogwarts meets Gormenghast, where over the course of centuries cut off from the rest of the world, they have developed their own curious ways and inventions. But that world is now suddenly under threat. And - wouldn’t you know it? - it looks like it’s outsiders who are to blame. Although it’s perhaps not the fault of Jonah Oblong who has recently been employed as a history teacher there - he has a name at least that fits in well with the other eccentric characters of Rotherweird. He’s teaching modern history of course, none of this ‘old’ stuff, which might be part of the reason why the previous incumbent of the post, Flask, has disappeared in somewhat mysterious circumst...

The book’s title is from a story by Hans Christian Andersen, but the reality of being the Marsh King’s Daughter is anything but a fairy-tale for Helena Eriksson. As a child, Helena lived the first 12 years of her life in a remote cabin in Upper Peninsula of Michigan, unaware that her mother is actually a prisoner, kidnapped when she was a 14 year old child by Jacob Holbrook, the man she knows only as her father. Twelve years in captivity in the wilderness - not even knowing that it was captivity - has been hard, but not as hard as adjusting to a normal life with other people and with the press interest when Helena and her mother finally manage to escape from the clutches of the man who would become known as the Marsh King. There’s a whole other story in there about growing up in the wilderness, completely isolated from normal society and having to learn to adapt to the culture shock of a whole other unfamiliar and unsettling way of life. There’s also more uncomfortable questions that s...

Michael Robotham's latest suspense thriller is not one you should even think about reading if you are an expectant mother. Stick to the mummy blogs for more practical and sanitised concerns about having and bringing up a baby, but if you happen to be in the right frame of mind and have a few hours to spare (having been forewarned that you are going to find this one difficult to put down once you've started it) you're not going to find a better plotted, more convincingly characterised or a more terrifyingly thrilling read than The Secrets She Keeps . Personally, I normally tend to think that it's far too easy for a thriller writer to rely on stirring up the fears and emotions that come with crimes that involve babies being kidnapped or placed in danger. That doesn't mean however that a good thriller can't be written around that theme, particularly when the author is willing to actually explore how deeply those sentiments sit in a woman's make-up, and even con...