Category Archives: Book Reviews

Review: A study in silks by Emma Jane Holloway

silks

  • Random House Publishing Group – Del Rey Spectra
  • 24th September 2013
  • ISBN 9780345537188
  • $7.99
  • EditionMass Market Paperback

I recently had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof copy of this, the first title in Emma Jane Holloway’s trilogy ‘The Baskerville Affair’. The next part, ‘A study in darkness’ will be published later this month and the final part ‘A study in ashes’ will be published in December. I have already started reading the second book and have requested the third.

But what are these novels about?

As the title suggests, these are a riff on the Sherlock Holmes canon (for my friends in the fandom it’s an AU fanfic). Set in an alternative Steampunk Victorian England ruled by ‘Steam Barons’ who control the power supply and ruthlessly suppress competition using any and all means possible. Eveline Cooper, the orphaned daughter of Sherlock Holmes’s disgraced younger sister and the army captain she eloped with, is making her entrance into Society with her dearest friend Imogen Roth, daughter of Lord Bancroft, former Ambassador to Vienna.

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Review: Reforming the rogue by Donna Lea Simpson

 

rogue

  • Beyond the Page Publishing
  • 16th September 2013
  • ISBN 9781937349790
  • $0.99
  • Ebook

Linnet Pelham, genteel but impoverished, has lost her job as a schoolteacher and moved to London to live with her sister, former actress Jessica Landry. Jessica is sickly and engaged to her aristocratic lover Lord Cairngorm. But his Lordships’s brother Dominic Barton does not approve and is determined to prevent the disgraceful union which will damage the family name.

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Review: The Bookstore by Deborah Meylar

bookstoreBloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ)

 

Esme Garland is an English girl in New York. She is studying art history at Columbia University after gaining a first from Cambridge. After a shaky start she’s loving life in New York. She has made friends, met a wealthy boyfriend, Mitchell van Leuven, and more importantly found a great second hand book shop, The Owl. Unfortunately she gets pregnant and dumped before she can tell Mitchell. Desperate for work she gets a job at The Owl. Staff and regular customers help her through the trials and tribulations of the next year.

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Review: Comets! by David J Eicher

comets

 

In 1975, at the age of fourteen, David Eicher fell in love with the Universe. until then he had wanted to be a doctor, but became entranced by Comet West and has been fascinated by comets ever since. Consequently he gave up his medical aspirations and became the editor of Astronomy magazine and author of seventeen books about science and history instead. This volume was written in early 2013 in order to be available in time for the arrival at naked-eye visibility of Comet ISON later this month. Comet ISON is expected to be a ‘Great Comet’ – a particularly bright comet that will put on an impressive show for observers here on Earth.

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Criminally good books

I’ve just finished reading a couple of good books:

Silent Witnesses

Nigel McCrery

and

The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton

And Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press

Jeremy Clay

 

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Review: Timesplash by Graham Storrs

Originally: 2010 – Lyrical Press

Edition reviewed: 2013 – Momentum

 timesplash

In forty years a new underground craze will start – splash parties. Time travellers known as ‘bricks’ will be thrown back in time, ‘lobbed’, and their actions in the past will cause a ‘splash’ as their presence disrupts the timelines. The back wash from the ‘splash’ mixed with the new drug tempus causes a high. It’s marginally illegal; police forces concentrate on controlling the drugs and noise caused by the splash parties, after all the timeline can’t be changed because it fixes itself.

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Review: ’So that others may live: A Fethulleh Gulen Reader’ Edited by Erkan M Hurt

 

3rd July 2013

Blue Dome Press (The Light Inc.)

cover33324-medium

 

This is a compilation of the Turkish scholar Fethulleh Gulan’s essays. Gulan is an incredibly influential man and his ideas are the guiding light behind a movement for peace, education and social justice – the Gulan Movement.

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ARC Review: ‘Local Customs’ by Audrey Thomas

22 February 2014

Dundern

 cover35478-small

 

In 1838 the writer Letitia Landon married the governor of Cape Coast Castle, Captain George MacLean while the captain was on leave. It was a whirl-wind romance. They sailed for Cape Coast a few days later, arriving safely after five weeks. Eight weeks later Letty was dead. Initially her death was recorded as accidental – an overdose of prussic acid, but events surrounding her death caused a storm in London’s literary crowd, her husband was accused of neglect or cruelty, and there were rumours of suicide. The mystery remains – how did she die? Award winning writer Audrey Thomas first heard Leticia Landon’s story in 1964 while visiting Ghana. She visited Cape Coast Castle during the two years her husband taught at the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. Their guide told her about the famous English lady who wrote books and who’s death was surrounded by mystery. This is her answer to that mystery.

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Review: ‘Dead Ever After’ by Charlaine Harris

 

2013

Gollancz

 DSC_0003

The final adventure of Sookie Stackhouse begins the day after the penultimate novel ended: Sam the Shapeshifter lived and Eric the Vampire is not happy that Sookie used the fairy gift from her great-grandfather to bring Sam back and not to get him out of a sticky political situation. Everyone is upset. And then an old enemy comes back in to Sookie’s life, an instrument of unknown enemies. When she is murdered the police would quite like it if Sookie were the murderer. It all gets very stressful for Sookie as more enemies come out of the woodwork and Eric divorces her. Sam is distant and confusing, Bill a little too friendly.

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