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Cultural diversity and social integration might be something that we now see as desirable and beneficial, but in 1899 or thereabouts in the town of Motal, in Grodno County (western Belarus), an isolated town surrounded by black bogs and separated from the rest of the world by the Yaselda River, the small Jewish community tend to keep their business to themselves and distrust outsiders. And perhaps that’s for the best for all concerned. Certainly that’s what Colonel Piotr Novak, the chief of the Okhrana, the secret police of Grodno and Minsk, comes to realise when he makes the mistake of investigating and questioning the townsfolk about some fugitives from the town who have been causing havoc in the region. The cause of such consternation, murder and mayhem in the region comes from the unlikely source of runaway housewife Fanny Keismann. The small Jewish community of Motal have traditionally had a problem with errant husbands, judging by the number of imploring articles from abandoned w...

SPOILER ALERT - As this is the second book in a series there will evidently be spoilers below but only relating to events that take place in book one, The Honours . It's a bit of a surprise to find that The Ice House picks up the story started in The Honours by leaping to the near-present 73 years later.  That means that Delphine, the plucky young and irrepressible 13 year old heroine who discovered a portal in the Ice House of Alderberen Hall that transported alien creatures from another dimension into England in 1935, is now an old lady of 86. Which also means that many of the characters of the first book - the few from Alderberen Hall that survived an invasion from another world/dimension - would also be dead or, like Alice, suffering from dementia and confined to a care home.  But evidently, as the prologue hints, time has different properties in the different dimensions, some creatures - including Delphine's father - have been gifted with the Honours which means they ar...

As adventure stories go, Tim Clare has a few surprises in store in The Honours , surprises that are too good to give away in a review.  Suffice to say, the story starts out as one kind of book set in the 1930s, with a young girl gathering suspicions that there is a Bolshevik invasion of England being plotted by a group of suspiciously behaving individuals in an English country house, and then it suddenly blind-sides you into being something entirely different, opening the book up to another dimension entirely, so to speak. There is of course also the possibility that 13 year old Delphine Venner is imagining things and even showing signs of early madness. After all her father, an artist, has been exhibiting strange manic behaviour and has had to check himself into a health clinic in the country estate of Alderberen Hall, taking his wife and daughter with him.  There's no question that Delphine is an unusual girl. Expelled from boarding school for tying Eleanor Wethercroft up in...

First appearing in 1946 and only translated for the first time into English by Louise Heal Kawai, Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders is a classic locked room mystery, one indeed acknowledged as such by the narrator of the story, citing numerous references to other such classics of the mystery genre. The events that take place in The Honjin Murders are presented by the narrator, who has always wanted to write a locked room mystery of his own, as if they were a true story of an extraordinary true case that has fallen into his lap. The events take place in November 1937 in the village of Okamura at a marriage between Kenzo Ichiyanagi, the eldest son of a family of respected lineage and Katsuko Kubo, the humble daughter of a former tenant farmer turned self-made businessman. Both are found murdered on the night of their wedding in an annexe to the main house, a ‘honjin’, a superior inn used in former times by nobles travelling to the capital Edo. The annexe however has been locked from...

You have to wait until a good two thirds through the first volume of Memories from the Civil War to even begin to understand or pin down the situation of the world we are in. It helps that the opening sections aren’t short on action, character development and a certain amount of intrigue as to what has happened to the world and where the rest of the story might be going. The cover and interior artwork is good too, which can help matters, but it could take a similar length of time to get accustomed to it as well. What you can grasp however is that civilisation on Earth has been reduced to living in Enclaves, protected cities managed by corporations that only admit a select few. Outside these “islands of civilisation” the external zones are dangerous, populated by proles. Three generations have lived this way, and it seems that in more recent times, several enclaves have ‘fallen’, Tokyo most painfully fresh in the memory of everyone. One way of getting into an Enclave is through 10 year...

Robin Morgan-Bentley presents a different takes on the popular genre of a woman in peril from a dangerous possessive/obsessive man/stalker, bringing a slightly more ambiguous edge to the situation that develops in her debut thriller The Wreckage . The circumstances are unusual too, all starting when a successful dramatist Adam Selby makes an early morning suicide attempt on a motorway. Ben Anderson, a teacher driving down the motorway during a storm on his way to work, is the unfortunate man who hits Adam when he throws himself onto the road. Ben is obviously distraught, seemingly even more so than Adam’s wife Alice. Even though he is told that it wasn’t his fault he is weighed down by feelings of guilt, sleeping badly, barely keeping it together. Alice is a more temperamental no-nonsense figure, seeming constantly on edge, she has no time for this and more or less tells Ben so when he visits Adam in hospital. On life-support, suffering permanent brain damage, Adam has no possibility o...

We’ve reached July 1973 in Alan Parks’ gritty Glasgow detective crime series and things don’t seem to be getting any better for Harry McCoy. In fact it all seems very much business as usual for any reader familiar with the first two books ( Bloody January , February’s Son ), but if Bobby March Will Live Forever doesn’t progress much further in its look at the development and connection between crime and drugs, or how crime impacts differently on the wealthy and lower orders of society in the city, it very much holds ground in what is turning out to be a terrific series. Bobby March is or was a promising (fictional) local rock star who in once auditioned for the Rolling Stones. Like many others his career has been cut short by the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and when Harry McCoy is called in the morning after his last show in Glasgow, he’s not all that surprised to find March dead from a drug overdose in his hotel room. Most of the police and the city are more concerned about a missing chi...