Book Review: The Undoing of Violet Claybourne by Emily Critchley – a tense, coming-of-age, historical thriller

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

This novel was long-listed for a Historical Dagger Award, so I had high hopes for an intelligent mystery. The Undoing of Violet Claybourne is more psychological thriller than mystery and built a well-sustained creeping sense of dread, for this reader anyway.

Most of the novel takes place over the 1938 Christmas holidays when Gillian is invited by new school friend Violet to her family’s crumbling mansion, Thornleigh Hall. Gillian’s mother died when she was born, and her diplomat father in Egypt has remarried and now has a young son, leaving Gillian’s care to a penny-pinching aunt.

Gillian is delighted to be staying with a proper family, and one with good connections at that. Violet is a little childish to Gillian’s mind, still playing imaginary games, and with strange rituals – her “undoings” – which the modern reader will flag as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But Violet is also affectionate, exuberant and kind.

Violet’s parents aren’t quite what Gillian might have hoped for. Her father is war-damaged and vague, her mother a vain and snooty woman who doesn’t believe in education for girls, but Gillian is soon swept away by Violet’s glamorous older sisters. Only Laura drinks too much and is unstable, while Emmeline, a student of psychology, is calculating and manipulative. Ignoring her school friend, Gillian attaches herself to the older girls with disastrous results.

There are secrets which slowly leak out during Gillian’s visit. Why is Emmeline so mean to Violet? What happened with the tutor who left in a hurry? There’s also a poacher who Flora’s father is oddly tolerant of and who lives on the estate. Then there’s the small boy Robin, also tolerated, the child of one of the maids. This family seems somewhat benighted, so when disasters happen, I wasn’t in the least surprised. Much of what goes wrong seems to come from their general sense of superiority, and the necessity of keeping up appearances.

When I think of the Christmas of 1938, what comes to mind is the sound of the dinner gong, the shine of the silverware, the rustle of Emmeline’s dress as she swept up the central staircase. Jazz music drifting through the drafty, shut-up rooms, scarlet-clad figures galloping across the snowy fields, and Violet sprawled star-shaped across her bed. “How good it is to be home, Gilly.”
    But these are nothing more than scrambled snapshots, a slideshow of disordered images on a fuzzy projector screen. If I am to remember, to truly remember, I must go back to the very beginning.

There’s a Boxing Day hunt, then a ball, as things go from bad to worse, and by the end of the Christmas break, I was relieved when Gillian’s story is rescued by the start of a new term and then the the war. Gillian throws in school for London and gets stuck into the war effort, a chance to forget about everything that happened at Thornleigh Hall. Her story is bookended by glimpses of Gillian in her seventies as the past comes back to her and she finds out what has happened to Violet and her family.

This a nicely paced story, the secrets revealed at just the right intervals, and the writing and characterisation both excellent. I was reminded a little of The Go-Between by L P Hartley as well as Nancy Mitford’s novels, with this book’s exploration of a dying way of life and how secrets can tear a family apart. The audiobook edition was excellent too, read by Nathalie Buscombe. All in all, it’s a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Hemlock and Silver by T. Kingfisher – a riveting retelling of the Snow White fairytale

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Book challenges are a great way to step out of your reading comfort zone and discover fabulous new books you’d never normally think of reading. And this was how I discovered Hemlock and Silver, a book recommended by a couple of colleagues and which I might never have got around to except that it happened to fit not just one reading challenge but two: our local library’s Turn Up the Heat winter reading challenge (discover a new genre), and the 52 Book Club 2026 reading challenge (read a standalone fantasy novel).

I think it was the strong narrative voice which appealed to me from page one. We meet Anja, a healer specialising in poisons, scruffily attired and with a chime adder for company, when the King arrives at her workshop asking for her help. He wants her to cure his daughter Snow, whose health has been in decline, with some kind of poison suspected. While Anja is thought of as a healer, she is at heart a scientist, observing, noting and experimenting, often with roosters, but also on herself.

Anja is the daughter of a well-to-do merchant, she’s a big woman, abrupt and sometimes tactless as her more marriageable sisters often remind her. But she has the respect of those who need her help. Her new task will take her away from her home of Four Saints, to a desert enclave where the Princess is sequestered, accompanied by two of the King’s guard, chatty and cheery Aaron and the strong but taciturn Javier.

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.
The poison was a distillate of chime-adder venom, which burned my sinuses when I took it off my wrist the way some people take snuff. The king was a tired man of medium height, with sandy hair and deep grooves worn into the sides of his face. I hadn’t recognized him at first when he stepped through the door of the stillroom. Well, why would I? The king was someone that I had seen far off, at the head of a long table or perched on a throne. Without context, he was simply a well-dressed man who had come in without even knocking.

As everything she knows about poisons throws up no obvious solution, Anja is forced to watch and wait and hope for a solution. Spying the Princess eat an apple that has not been brought from the palace kitchen’s, Anja is mysteriously drawn into a strange world involving mirrors, a talking cat and a sense of evil. There is indeed dark magic afoot, but T Kingfisher maintains a light touch with her storytelling, with humour and a touch of romance never far away.

She also does a brilliant job of creating a believable magical world that relates well to the original story. As such it was the perfect fantasy read for me, as we have that ‘stranger in a strange land’ feel, with Anja’s observant and scientifically aware character. She’s aided not only by a snarky cat who is only sometimes helpful, but by the practical and determined Javier. It’s a clever reinvention of a fairytale favourite, complete with poisoned apples, but missing the dwarfs.

I particularly enjoyed the audiobook narration of Hemlock and Silver, which was read by Jennifer Pickens who does the voices so well, I would seek out other books she reads on that basis alone. Hemlock and Silver is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Wreck by Catherine Newman – a funny and relatable novel about the trials of modern life

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So I never got around to reading Sandwich, Catherine Newman’s earlier novel about Rocky, a woman going through menopause and what happens when her family are on holiday together at Cape Cod. It was on my to-read list for ages, but you can’t read everything, and I somehow didn’t read Sandwich. Now, I’m seriously tempted.

In Wreck, Rocky is back and it’s another summer. She and her husband have a busy household, with Willa, her PhD student daughter, living back home, as well as her ninety-two-year-old dad in the cabin in the garden. Rocky and Willa both suffer from anxiety and a few things happen which bring this to the fore. A train accident when a young man is killed, someone they know vaguely who went to the same school as Rocky’s son Jamie, has her caught up in the social media storm that erupts. And then there’s the rash.

Rocky’s skin condition seems to defy medical explanation and she goes through a ton of tests. Time passes, and it’s Halloween, then Thanksgiving and Christmas and these issues threaten to unbalance Rocky’s world. This might sound a bit grim, but it never is because Rocky is such good company and Newman is such a witty writer. The way she and Willa bounce off each other, her father’s random comments about modern life, memories and non-sequiturs, her good-humoured and sometimes goofy husband, all add to the fun.

An email dings in, and I click over to it. It’s a new message from the patient portal EarlyGateway, which shows up in my inbox as ppearlygateway. Pearly Gateway! Like it’s a missive from the afterlife I’ll be arriving at ASAP. You have new test results, the message says. I hover my finger over the link, sigh, click back over to the Internet. I don’t even want to know just yet. It’s Schrödinger’s rash: Until I look at the results, I simultaneously do and do not have skin cancer. I’ll just loiter around scrollingly for a bit.

At first I wasn’t really sure where this slice of life book was going. Is it about the rash? Is it about the accident? And yet it’s all so entertaining. Can we really laugh about this stuff? The medical stuff is brilliant though – the calm indifference of the patient portal and its raft of lengthy latinate terms, the backwards and forwards between clinic and specialist appointments, the scans and blood tests. The endless wait for results, for a diagnosis. We can see why Rocky gets anxious. On top of everything, Rocky and her dad in particular, miss their mother who has died a year or so ago.

Somewhere in the middle the threads come together and the book suddenly has a lot more substance. Rocky is so vividly written you can’t help wondering if there’s something of the author in her. Both thoughtful and humorous, Wreck is by the end, a life-affirming read, fairly short – a short book is nice every so often – and very relatable. Wreck is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Bone Lands by Pip Fioretti – first in an Outback Noir series and a cracking good story

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Pip Fioretti writes a kind of genre blending crime novel with Bone Lands, which combines everything that we love about Outback Noir – the big skies and harsh, dry landscapes, the Aussie battlers who live there – with a hardboiled policeman and puts it all in the historical setting of 1911. And as a character, mounted trooper Senior Constable Gus Hawkins has a lot going for him. He’s complex in that he’s well-educated and sounds it, with several tours in the Boer War behind him which have left him with both mental and physical scars. He’s smart and resourceful, but that old PTSD means he drinks too much and gets into fights.

But then, everyone here seems to get into fights, well, just about. It’s a hardscrabble existence out in the back-blocks of New South Wales. Hawkins’ little town of Calpa is a ‘blink and you miss it’ kind of place, with a pub, a post-office, the police station and not a lot else. It’s a one-man station, with tasks often concerned with managing unrest – there’s not a lot to do in Calpa but drink your wages away – local admin like gun permits and the like. But riding home from monitoring behaviour at a dance honouring the King’s coronation, Hawkins comes across a serious crime – three young members of the same family brutally murdered.

The Kirkbride family are well-off landowners, running a huge sheep station, and not well liked in this haves and have-nots kind of place. With the endless work required to make money from wool, they have a huge labour force of hardened men of the land. Life is cheap and violence comes easy. But when the violence is against their own, the grim landowner and patriarch Robert Kirkbride is oddly reluctant to have Hawkins nosing around too much, preferring to believe in the ‘robbery gone wrong’ theory. It doesn’t help that Gus has had a romantic connection with the remaining daughter, Flora.

It was a six-hour ride upriver to Bourke. In summer it was a bastard of a ride, one I preferred to do at night if I had a choice. The thing to do was carry a tin of Josephson’s Australian Ointment. Buckskin breeches were made so you didn’t chafe, but six or more hours in the saddle on a hot day and everything chafed, from balls to brain. The glare was blinding but our official hat was a jaunty pillbox affair, which would be just the thing for a Parisian gendarme but was ridiculous out here. I shoved it in a saddlebag and wore a cabbage-tree hat like every other man in the bush.
The sun was on its way across a vast blue sky, a westerly wind blowing. I noticed a shape ahead in the distance, moving slowly. Dancer stopped at the sight of it. He didn’t like things that moved, nor did he like things that didn’t move. So there we were, his ears pricked forward, completely still, every muscle tensed and ready to flee.
‘How’d you get into the police force, mate?’ I said, stroking his neck. ‘Bribed someone, eh?’

But Gus is determined to find out what happened. These were his friends and he wants to bring some closure for Flora, too, who has become unhinged by the deaths of her siblings. It doesn’t help when two detectives arrive from Sydney with their own way of doing things, but none of the nous for dealing with the locality or shifty farm labourers. If conflict is the linch pin of a good story, then this one has it in spades. You can’t help but feel for Gus, even if he is, quite often, his own worst enemy.

Other characters are interesting too, particularly in relation to Gus. His initial dislike of Trooper Lonergan, a somewhat wet behind the ears type, sent from Bourke to manage the station while Gus looks after the detectives, mellows into friendship. Other characters are lightly drawn but the author captures their essentials in a way that makes them immediate. The few female characters – this really is a man’s world – have to manage as best they can, and we can’t help but sympathise over how they’re treated. The plot steams along towards some surprising revelations to make for a very satisfying mystery.

Bone Lands is atmospheric and absorbing, with sentences that are nicely honed and laced with wit, making Gus Hawkins good company. It’s a great start to a series – there’s already a second book (Skull River) with another due out next year, which is good news. Bone Lands is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan – a sweeping and emotional historical read

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

Patrick Ryan’s novel, Buckeye, haunted me for days after I finished it. The story takes us to the small town of Bonhomie, Ohio, starting off during World War II. We follow the lives of two couples, Becky and Cal Jenkins, and Margaret and Felix Salt, through the events of the war, and on to the lives of their children. Events of the twentieth century, wars certainly, but social changes too disturb their lives, but nothing compares to how they deal with events themselves.

All four of them have something that makes them different. Cal has one leg shorter than the other. This exempts him from military service, so he drifts into marriage with Becky, who has a gift. She can communicate with the dead. Astonishingly beautiful Margaret hides the secret of being abandoned as a baby at an orphanage, while Felix, who is gay, tries to lead a conventional life with her. The war shakes them all up, well and truely.

The story begins on the day victory is declared in Europe (VE Day), 1945, with a young Cal working in his father-in-law’s hardware store. He’s interrupted by the arrival of Margaret who has to know what all the commotion is all about and asks if Cal has a radio. They listen to the news together and exchange an unexpected kiss. From there we dip back into the past to discover Cal’s story and Margaret’s, each of which is tragic in its own way.

When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.

Cal’s father Everett lives out of town, traumatised by a previous war as well as the loss of two children and his wife to illness, becoming irascible and a hoarder. I really enjoyed the character of Everett, particularly the way he writes angry letters to whichever president is in office at the time. His war service has made him fiercely against war and this theme recurs during the book as more wars upend people’s lives.

Margaret is an interesting character in that she never reveals anything about her upbringing, determined to appear ordinary – if only she knew what that looked like. And it’s hard to quietly figure that out when everyone, particularly men, see nothing but her stunning good looks. So she has secrets from Felix, who likewise hopes for a normal family life. If only the war hadn’t got in the way, he might have kept up the pretence.

Cal keeps on trying to make the best of things, dealing with a demanding father-in-law, as well as his own difficult father, who never shows him any affection. He struggles to understand his wife’s talent which puts her in demand for readings with people who have lost loved ones, some from WWI, and more when the next war rolls along. The complications of children put the characters through even more, with more secrets, but also possibilities.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Like many who lived through the twentieth century, the characters of Buckeye have had their lives overturned by world events. There’s trauma and the tragic losses incurred by war. The prosperous post-war period that imagined a bright future for people but with that a restrictive social order. The changing times with the Civil Rights movement, while gay rights and feminism also get a look in.

It all adds up to a gripping read and an emotional one, certainly enhanced by characters you sympathise with. And then there’s the fine writing. I shall certainly be looking out for more by this author. Buckeye is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Six Little Words by Sally Page – finding your family where you least expect it

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this novel as much as I did. Six Little Words is a second chances story following Kate, a cancer survivor whose three daughters have all left home. She loves her house in a coastal Norfolk town and the little café that’s her local. But her life is missing something, possibly family. It’s at Luigi’s café that she strikes up a friendship with Pia, Danish and effortlessly stylish, and also here that a card appears on the community noticeboard. It simply says, ‘To be or not to be’. It turns out to be a call out for anyone wanting to join an amateur art group.

At one time, before she got a “sensible” job doing accounts, Kate had been a painter, and now thinks she’d like to try oils. Somehow she convinces Pia to go to the first meeting with her. The group has been jump-started by Tay, the girl who works at the café, something for Bardy, who’s a kind of foster father, to get him out of his rut. Bardy’s sons now live in New Zealand, his ex-wife is heading there too, and he’s feeling a bit sorry for himself. A former English teacher (Mr Shakespeare), he soon gets into organising the group and the story follows what happens when you throw a bunch of strangers together and add some art.

She was a golden yellow.
That luminous tone that sits between the glistening hue of honey and a wheatfield caught in the slanting rays of an August evening. He saw it as soon as he met her. He wonders sometimes if he glimpsed it, turned to the glow, even before she walked into his classroom: dull-red exercise books held in the crook of her arm, spines nestled against her hip.
She had introduced herself – Miss Anderson … Hana – a new teacher, like him. She laughed at his name. Most did. Then left for her own classroom, his life changed forever.

We also meet elderly couple Linda, a forthright former nurse, and her husband Leonard who won’t wear his hearing aids. Lou (Luigi) is Bardy’s best friend and he turns up, perhaps dragged along by Tay. And there’s Bardy himself, who has a gift in that he sees people as colours. He writes little colour themed poems, but keeps all this a secret, pretending he wants to write stories. Others have secrets, but nobody has anything like the secret that Kate’s hiding. Not that she means to hide it, it’s just that events sweep everyone along before she has a chance to mention it.

And of course everyone’s got a problem, big or small, and over the course of the story, they come to the surface. Characters rally round, and what begins as an art group becomes something more. There’s plenty of humour in the way the characters bounce off each other, misunderstand things and eventually sort things out. There’s romance too, which keeps the plot simmering along. And then there’s the Bard. Lovers of Shakespeare will enjoy the quotations that begin each chapter.

I particularly liked the way Sally Page conjures up the Norfolk setting, with the marshes and wading birds – Leonard’s a keen bird-watcher so you learn a bit about that too. It all adds up to a lovely story, a gentle but thought-provoking read. I enjoyed the novel as an audiobook, and the reading was excellent, performed by Christine Rendel. Six Little Words is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: Tata by Valérie Perrin – an evocative story with a complex web of family secrets

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Valérie Perrin is well-known for her bestseller, Fresh Water for Flowers, a book that’s been on my to-read list for a little while. So when Tata popped up on Netgalley, I grabbed the chance to read it. And I’m so glad I did. Tata (which means Auntie) is such an engrossing story, bringing us into the world of Agnès Dugain, a film director who has been unable to work since her actor husband left her. A phone call out of the blue from a small town in Burgundy informs her that her beloved Aunt Colette has died. Which would be sad news, indeed, except Agnès believes her aunt was buried in the Gueugnon cemetery three years ago.

It soon transpires that Colette lived quietly in a secluded house for the last three years, carrying a secret. Agnès leaves Paris to view the body and to discover anything she can about her aunt’s final years to solve the mystery of who is buried in her aunt’s place. The story flips back to the 1950s and the farm where Colette grew up with her little brother, Jean. There’s not much parental love, and the children are expected to work, rather than further their education. But, in spite of this, Jean is discovered to be a musical prodigy.

Colette will do anything to protect Jean, but fortunately there’s help from Blaise, both her friend and the landowner’s son from the chateau, where there’s a magnificent piano. We learn of her apprenticeship to a cobbler in the town, and where Colette finds a niche and some happiness. Meanwhile, Agnès receives from Colette’s good friend and co-conspirator a suitcase full of cassette tapes and so listens to her aunt’s story in her own words.

There are numerous plot threads, and more secrets are slowly revealed. We’re taken to Gueugnon in the 1960s, and its football team, back further to events of the war and its legacy. You read about Agnès’s own career and how she met her famous actor husband. As she looks into the past, Agnès is forced out of the slump that has taken over her since her divorce and reconnects with old friends and makes new ones. She starts to think about a new story.

Throughout are numerous cultural references, including the movies that have inspired Agnès, the music of her father, the popular fashions and songs that evolved over time. I loved coming across film titles of movies I’d also loved, such as La Double Vie de Véronique, The Piano, and Un Coeur en Hiver, which I remember from a film festival. There are scenes in cafés, although Agnès doesn’t often have any appetite, but others eat and we’re treated to that as well. But at heart it’s a story about what we will do to protect the people we love, about friendship and the ties that make us a family. It’s heartbreaking – there are cruel characters as well as terrible historical events – but it’s also hopeful, charmingy written and full of wit.

Tata seemed to me a quintessentially French novel, and while I knew nothing of this particular small town, it was easy to imagine the stone houses, the narrow streets, the little shops and cafés. And the style of storytelling seems very French as well. I loved it. I could happily have started back at page one and read it all again. Tata is due for publication on 23 June, and I read it thanks to Netgalley and Europa Editions. It’s a five-star read from me.

Book Review: My Friends by Fredrik Backman – a coming-of-age story and a meditation on life, art and love

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’ve not often read a book that took such a philosophical look at the human condition, in particular the emotional cost of loving other people and of loving ourselves. About being able to say yes to life, when all around you is pain. This sounds kind of heavy, but in Backman’s hands it never is. Not really.

My Friends begins with a famous work of art and a young girl soon to turn eighteen, who has run away from her foster home with cans of spray paint in her backpack. Lousia has had a hard start to life, and when things go wrong at an exhibition of a painting loved by all the world, she runs down a back alley, where she meets, of all people, the artist. That’s all he has by way of a name, the artist, and when Louisa meets him he’s very ill.

Before long Louisa is on a train, running from her life, and latching on to Ted, the artist’s childhood friend. They’re also lugging along with them, the painting, yes, that one. The artist had got Ted to sell everything he had to buy it back and then unexpectedly bequeathed it to Louisa, a girl with nothing and whom he’d only just met.

Yes, it’s a crazy kind of premise, but soon, shy awkward Ted is heading home on a train, reluctantly with Louisa, who never stops talking, except to listen to his story of how the painting came to be. It’s the story of a summer when four friends are turning fifteen, how their odd friendship came about, and how things are all set to change before school starts again.

“I’m not an artist, I’m -“
The janitor interrupted him so sharply that his ladder wobbled:
“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet … but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until its’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”
The boy hesitated for a long time before saying:
“I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things. There’s something wrong with my brain.”
“That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied.

First Ted tells Louisa about the artist, that weird kid who tends to get bullied, until Joar steps in and fights back on his behalf. Joar is loud, brash and tells terrible jokes. It’s Joar who crashes into Ted on his bike and who brings him along to the pier – where the friends hang out. Then there’s Ali, the only girl, who is fierce and loud, and a match for Joar. The four build a tight friendship that sees them through the difficulties of their home life, each of which is heartbreaking in its own way.

The story is teased out in chapters interspersed between Ted and Louisa’s lengthy train journey, which is interrupted by all kinds of hiccups. Louisa is difficult to put up with, and yet Ted can see why the artist took a shine to her. She draws too, endlessly sketching away, though doubtful of her talent. You get a lot about the need to believe in yourself and the power of art to transform lives.

At times I did find this book lacking in pace – the kids are always getting into trouble and there are endless anecdotes about that. And that train journey seems to take forever. But it all comes together well and the there are enough surprises to keep you interested. I’m glad I read My Friends. It’s original, inventive and thoughtful and leaves the reader thinking about it long after the last page – a four-star read from me

Book Review: The Sea Sisters by Louise Douglas – mystery, tragedy and suspense in a stunning setting

~ Judith ~ 3 Comments

Now here’s the perfect book if you’re feeling nostalgic for summer seaside holidays. The Sea Sisters, takes you to coastal Brittany, and the charming seaside town of Morranez. Here Mila Shepherd is one third of the Toussaints Detective Agency, for the most part helping to find missing persons. But Mila has her own private tragedy. She failed to answer a call from her step-sister Sophie the day Sophie died, drowned in a storm with husband Charlie in a boating accident.

Mila has given up her life in England to be a parent to Ani their teenage daughter and to atone for the guilt she feels. Discovering a note left in Sophie’s kitchen brings back questions about what Sophie and Charlie were doing taking their their boat out in a storm. But before she can dwell on that, she’s soon busy with a new case: the arrival of an English woman, Nicole Stevenson, who believes she is not who her family think she is.

Convinced that she is really Evie Albert, who went missing as a two year old during the annual Morvarc’h music festival, Nicole wants help to prove it. She and her sisters have discovered in their late father’s safe a folder of newspaper clippings about Evie’s disappearance and a photo of Evie’s mother Adeline who looks astonishingly like Nicole.

As the festival approaches for another year, and Ani makes plans with her friends, Mila is reminded of her summers spent with Sophie and the people she used to hang out with during her teens. Among them is her colleague Carter Jackson, who brings to the agency his expertise in dealing with police, and who zooms around the countryside on his Harley.

Soon the mystery of what happened to Evie is all-consuming. Nicole is frail, suffering from an auto-immune disease, so discovering the truth is time critical. We learn of Adeline’s transient lifestyle as a tarot card reader and her connection to the Holywell Commune, a cult-like group living in an old convent on the edge of town and who are distrustful of strangers. It’s going to take some ingenuity to discover if anyone there still remembers little Evie, as the commune is run by the domineering figure of Augustin Golliard.

The story takes some twists and turns as questions surface involving smuggling and petty crime. The two mysteries at times overlap and both Carter and Mila take risks which nicely builds suspense, with enough surprises to keep you interested right to the end. As I turned the last page, however, I was almost sad to be leaving Morranez as Douglas makes it feel like you are on holiday in a French seaside town in the height of summer.

I devoured this light, easy read which blended mystery, atmosphere and nostalgia and even a touch of romance in a well-plotted story. I’ll be keen to read the earlier books in Douglas’s Brittany series. The Sea Sisters, due to be published on 1 June, it’s a four-star read from me. My thanks to Netgalley and Boldwood Books for a reading copy in return for my review.

Book Review: Love Lane by Patrick Gale – part two in the Harry Cane story

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Patrick Gale has long been a favourite author of mine, so of course I’d read A Place Called Winter when it came out in 2015. I’m pretty sure it was one of my top reads for that year. Its story was inspired by the life of the author’s own great-grandfather, a man who had left his wife and young daughter to become a farmer in the Canadian prairies. The novel, set in the early part of the 20th century, describes a secret love, the effects of the Great War and following flu epidemic on its characters, as well as the difficulties of building a life out of nothing. It’s both fascinating and moving and like all Patrick Gale’s novels, beautifully written

In Love Lane, Gale picks up Harry Cane’s story when he sells his farm and makes a visit to his long lost family in England. A kind of mythology has grown up around Harry, known as Cowboy Grandpa, his grandchildren imagining an ageing Gary Cooper. And it isn’t surprising as no one has seen him for most of half a century. His daughter Betty has been brought up by a grandmother and a bunch of formidable aunts – her mother having died when she was twelve. As a young woman engaged to Terry, she feels the urge to write to Harry out of the blue. Terry has asked about Harry and getting married seems the right time to get in touch.

So begins a correspondence that doesn’t result in a visit from either side until Harry sells his farm and, wheat prices being down, has to accept a low offer. He turns up at the Liverpool docks, a shabby elderly man with few teeth and wearing a string tie. At first Betty doesn’t know what to do with him, Terry has a stressful job as a prison governor, but she determines to look after her father. Her flighty daughter Whistle takes a shine to him and so does the dog. There’s also something about Harry which makes women want to talk to him about their problems.

Harry had never gone so long without fresh air, walking the turbulent corridors, from the acid stink of his little, wood-veneered cabin to the bottomless, empty talk of the dining room to the echoing whoops of the bar and – now that he knew the way – down the service staircase to the cosy snug on the deck below. He was having, or listening in on, conversations that left him as dizzy as an inexperienced climber on a mountainside. It gave him the curious sense that – in transit from a young world to an older one – he had stumbled onto yet another, that was altogether older and wiser than either. By the time they had passed Ireland and were nosing into the mouth of the Mersey on a dazzling April morning, he was left with the slightly panicky feeling of someone worrying they’d bought a ticket to quite the wrong place.

The story flips between the points of view of Harry and Betty, as well as Terry, whose prison is one where executions are still performed, something which is hugely stressful. Harry goes on to stay with Pip, their elder daughter, so we get her narration as well. She’s married to Mike, also in the prison service and a man with secrets. Harry is, as ever, perceptive and inspires confidences.

The author does a terrific job of capturing post-war England, still with rationing, and even though both Mike and Terry have important jobs, there’s not a lot to spare. Women of their class didn’t work after marriage, and we get a lot of societal expectations in the 1950s on wives and young mothers in a patriarchal system. It was also a difficult time to be gay, with men outed for homosexual acts given stints in Terry’s prison, among them the tailor he brings Harry to for a new suit and shirts.

But best of all are the characters. Gale has done plenty of research on the one hand, but has had a wealth of letters and diaries, as well, no doubt, as his own memories of old family stories to sift through to inspire the novel. You get to know the characters and really empathise with them, which is something I always like about any of Gale’s books, he’s such a perceptive writer, perhaps having something of his own great-grandfather’s gift.

You can read Love Lane as a stand-alone novel, but I would really also recommend starting with A Place Called Winter, which I recall as a beautifully intense and emotional read. Love Lane is a welcome return to Harry’s story, and a four-and-a-half star read from me.