The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Terror (The Crooked Medium 2)
True terror is a murderer you can’t stop.
London 1882. A carpenter is killed by a train – an eerie, brutal crime. Flamboyant medium Mrs Ashton and her sapphic partner Braddie seek justice for the widow.
A charismatic new medium takes London by storm. Dock-lass Maisie sees her frightening prophesy of vengeance. A noble family is devastated, but worse is to come.
Outgunned and bewildered, the three confront a deadly conspiracy. They risk losing everything.
Prize includes – Our Child of the Stars, Our Child of Two Worlds, The Crooked Medium’s Guide to Murder and the Crooked Medium’s Guide to Terror.
*Terms and Conditions –UK entries welcome. Please enter using the Gleam box below. The winner will be selected at random via Gleam from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then Rachel’s Random Resources reserves the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over. Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time Rachel’s Random Resources will delete the data. I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.
When the skeletons of a young woman and a baby are uncovered on a long-abandoned farm in Hvalfjörður, it is clear they were buried years apart. West Iceland CID begins to investigate the disturbing discovery, aware that someone has gone to great lengths to keep the past hidden.
In Akranes, Karitas, a young single mother seeking a new start, settles in with her four-year-old son and rents a basement flat from an eccentric landlord. A cautious sense of happiness returns when she meets the boy next door.
But when news breaks that a local girl has been murdered, Karitas must decide who she can trust, knowing that one wrong choice could place her and her child in danger. Detective Elma is drawn into the case, forced to navigate long-hidden family secrets to understand a killer’s motive, while struggling to hold together her increasingly troubled relationship with Sævar.
An outrageous blend of cosy crime and biting social satire for fans of Richard Osman, Mick Herron, and Marina Lewycka.
Janus Lodge isn’t your typical retirement community. Sylvia Abercrombie and her knitting-obsessed gang of octogenarians are feisty, foul- mouthed, and fiercely protective of their home. So when a shady developer plots to evict them and build a ‘gentlemen’s club’, they hatch an audacious plan to save their sanctuary – by starting a secret knitwear empire with a scandalous twist. As sales skyrocket, secrets unravel, and Sylvia’s ex-husband lurks in the shadows, the gang must pull off the ultimate heist to protect their beloved Lodge.
Hilarious and heartfelt, Knit One, Heist One is a riotous romp proving that age is no barrier to action.
A ship, a gun, and a nice teal robe to find one killer on a planet of criminals: will Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for? Qays Mendoza get the answers he is looking for?
On the edges of mankind’s domain there is a penal planet called Fresh Start where a sentence is at best exile to five generations, but more likely death in its harsh unforgiving wastes. It is to this planet the empire sends the worst of the worst and it is on this planet that Qays Mendoza searches for his old captain.
The galactic empire is falling, civilization contracts. Fresh Start is abandoned. Without oversight, the planet is wild, without guards; the Oubliette, the supermax prison on the supermax planet, lies open, and the Butcher of Raznak, a killer worse than the one Qays seeks, is on the loose. With the help of a street waif called Patience, Qays seeks answers. His soul is stained with guilt and his spirit broken by complicity. Religion did not have the answer; duty did not explain it. Birthright and station were not enough. His answers lie somewhere on Fresh Start.
When you are a prisoner of your secrets, the death of shame is the only path to liberty.
Annabel Banks was promised work as a maid with a prestigious Edinburgh family. But on her first day, she’s nowhere to be found. Concerned relatives contact Sarah Fisher to help. Sarah might know her way around the city – its light sides and dark – but soon she’ll discover the plight of dozens of girls ensnared in its many brothels: lured, abused and left ruined in the eyes of the world.
Meanwhile, a prominent society figure throws himself from the Scott Monument. Will Raven is asked to establish whether the death was suicide or if someone else was involved.
Drawing upon real historical events, The Death of Shame takes the Raven and Fisher series into a treacherous labyrinth of shame and the pitfalls of a culture obsessed with moral purity.
Pub. date 07 May 2026 Price £9.99 ISBN-13 9781788425940
Description
Chocks away! as our feline detectives investigate some sticky situations at the local chocolate factory in Catberry-on-the-Brink. Up at the Manor House, the family is at war as dark secrets are uncovered in The Tabby in Black chocolate selection box. Will Hettie and Tilly manage to reach the bottom layer before a murderer strikes? Did Horace Catberry really choke on a Mog Nob biscuit? And will the Goth Band Gums and Noses get to support The Travelling Whoopsies on their next tour? Join Hettie and Tilly as they unwrap the mysteries swirling around the Catberry family in this bitter-sweet assortment of truth and lies
Genre – crime & mystery > noir fiction ● ISBN hardback – 978-1-78758-972-8 ● ISBN ebook – 978-1-78758-973-5 ● Pricing [USD] $26.95 (HB) / $6.99 (EB) ● Pricing [GBP] £20 (HB) / £6.95 (EB) ● Releases March 17 2026 ● Published by Flame Tree Press ● Distributed by Hachette UK / Simon & Schuster US
SYNOPSIS
From the world of Raven Burns. The third book in the award-winning Killing series by Faye Snowden, following A Killing Fire and A Killing Rain. Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night.
As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.
ENTER THE FUNGALVERSE. Blade Runner, True Detective, and District 9 meld with the weird worlds of Jeff VanderMeer, Philip K. Dick, and China Miéville in Adrian M. Gibson’s award-winning fungalpunk noir debut, now with a foreword from acclaimed author Nicholas Eames and six pieces of original interior artwork.
Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty, and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.
As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division, and moral decay.
In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?
SPFBO X 2nd place. Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Winner of the FanFiAddict Award for Best Indie Debut, the Literary Titan Gold Book Award, and the Next Generation Indie Book Award.
My Review
I picked this book up at World Fantasy Convention 2025 in Brighton, from the Broken Binding table in the dealers room. I got a lovely signed and illustrated hardback edition. Usually I’m uncomfortable with mushrooms – I saw that episode of Hannibal where a killer was using bodies to grow mushrooms and one of the victims was alive and sprouting, and I’ve had an issue ever since. It’s weird, anything with parasites also upsets me, but I managed to read Alien Clay, so I can manage to read Mushroom Blues.
This novel was originally self-published in 2024 and did well in a variety of awards. The edition produced with The Broken Binding is a hardback, signed and illustrated. It’s published by Kinoko Book Co. which is hard to find anything about, so I’m assuming it’s the name the author has chosen for his self-publishing venture. Gibson is, according to his bio, “an award-winning Canadian SFF author, podcaster, illustrator, and tattoo artist. He is the creator of the SFF Addicts podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow authors M.J. Kuhn and Greta Kelly. The three host in-depth interviews with an array of science fiction and fantasy authors, as well as writing masterclasses.”
This is his debut novel. And it’s really quite enjoyable. We follow Hofmann, a detective sent from the homeland to work for the NKPD, and she’s struggling. In a world of men, she’s a divorced older woman in recovery from alcoholism – caused by the job, worsened by the death of her daughter in a car crash Hofmann caused. She hates mushrooms. Not just the people of Hoppon, but mushrooms in general – she can’t see them or eat them without feeling sick. And she’s stuck in a place where humans are a minority, and the majority are fungal people who live in fungal architecture. It’s her worst nightmare. She’s been fed a load of manure in the form of propaganda and holds all sorts of prejudices about the Hopponese.
Children are going missing. Hipponese and ‘half-breeds’ – mixed human and Hipponese children. An Elder finds the dismembered body of one of the children on a sacred island. The NKPD assign the job to Hofmann, and the force’s only Hopponese officer, Koji Nameko, since he was the one to first arrive and to speak to the elder who found the body.
They uncover the fates of the missing children and race to prevent a disaster that involves Nameko’s own family at a major midwinter festival.
As the pair investigate, Hofmann finds herself overcoming her prejudices and learning to appreciate the culture of the people her own are occupying. She even eats mushrooms and doesn’t vomit, at one point.
It’s obviously based, in part at least, on conditions in Japan between 1945 and 1970. After the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the yanks imposed a military occupation on Japan. Japan had been the aggressors, attacking China and Russia from the 1930s, before joining the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) and attacking Hawaii in 1940. There are still people alive who were children at the time and had relatives who fought with British, Commonwealth/Imperial forces in the Pacific, and who have inherited hate for Japanese people. Australian forces were expecting a Japanese invasion, British colonies around the Pacific were invaded and occupied. We’ve all heard about the horrors of Singapore and the POW camps that murdered thousands.
After the war, the USian Americans felt particularly aggrieved, as though they were the only ones to lose people in horrible ways, to be traumatised. And they took it out on the ordinary people of Japan during their occupation. Soldiers and civilian occupiers had been fed a diet of dehumanising propaganda for years and as a result treated everyone as though they were personally responsible for the actions of prison camp guards and commanders.
No one gets out of this looking good, by the way. There were massacres of people protesting for equal treatment in their own home, soldiers killed with impunity, the General in charge was a nutter. Japanese survivors of the hydrogen bombs were stigmatised because of fears of mutations and genetic damage and the institution of the Japanese Emperor got out of everything without a stain. Blame bad advisors, for the throne is divine and can do no wrong. Where have we heard that before?
Anyway, I recommend learning a little post-war Japanese history, after reading this novel, because the context adds depth.
Of course, this book is about an imaginary world, an imaginary war, and imaginary species, an imaginary occupation…
The mystery is well-paced throughout and the climactic race to stop the murder of children and incite a riot at a temple is exciting and balanced by the post action resolution. The description of the city is a blend of cyberpunk futurism and early 20th century detective noir, gritty and flashy, destruction and growth. The main characters develop as people and we learn about their back grounds as they move through the story. It was a quick read, although it’s not a short book, and I really couldn’t put it down.
Publisher Independently published Publication date 5 Aug. 2025 Language English Print length 284 pages ISBN-13 979-8284534489
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Murder has come to the city of Tronte…
Holtar didn’t become a necromancer for the prestige—he did it because talking to the dead is marginally easier than dealing with the living. Unfortunately, his latest case has given him a fresh problem: the corpses aren’t talking.
PUBLICATION DATE: 17th JULY 2025 HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £ 16. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
November, 1967, Iceland.
Fourteen-year-old Marsí has a secret penpal – a boy who lives on the other side of the country – but she has been writing to him in her older sister’s name. Now she is excited to meet him for the first time.
But when the date arrives, Marsí is prevented from going, and during the night her sister Stína goes missing – her bloodstained anorak later found at the place where Marsí and her penpal had agreed to meet.
November, 1977.
Stína’s disappearance remains unsolved. Then an unexpected letter arrives for Marsí It’s from her penpal, and he’s still out there…
Desperate for news of her missing sister, but terrified that he might coming after her next, Marsí returns to her hometown and embarks on an investigation of her own.
But Marsí has always had trouble distinguishing her vivid dreams from reality, and as insomnia threatens her sanity, it seems she can’t even trust her own memories.
