Book review – Page 28 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Review: The Reacher Guy, by Heather Martin

The Reacher Guy:

The Authorised Biography of Lee Child

Heather Martin

Constable – 29^th September 2020 hardback £20.00 – also available as an eBook/audio

The definitive, authorised biography of

Lee Child

“Riveting . . . archival diligence . . . [Martin] is a skilled and audacious interlocutor, too, but her subject is just as adept as interviewee . . . starkly affecting” – Irish Times

The Reacher Guy is a life of bestselling superstar Lee Child, a portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. It tells the story of how the boy from Birmingham reinvented himself to become the strongest brand in publishing, selling over one hundred million books in more than forty different languages across the globe.

Heather Martin interviews friends, teachers, colleagues and neighbours, including agents and editors. Based primarily on her conversations with the author over a period of years, together with readings of his books and research in his literary archive, this authorised biography reveals the man behind the myth, tracing his origins back through the generations to Northern Ireland and County Durham, and following the trajectory of his extraordinary career via New York and Hollywood until the climactic moment when, in 2020, having written a continuous series of twenty-four books, he finally floats free of his fictional creation.

Lee Child comments: “I met Heather Martin some years ago, and we started talking about why people love telling and hearing stories. To get more depth and detail we started talking about why I do. Eventually I said, ‘If you want to really get to the bottom of it, you’re going to have to write my biography.’ So she did. It was a fun and illuminating process. I had forgotten a lot, and it was fascinating to be reminded. Now it all makes sense.”

“Vivid and entertaining . . . a must-buy for any aspiring novelist, thanks in particular to its terrific insight into how Child’s first book was written, rewritten, edited, sold and published.” – The Telegraph

“You’ll emerge from the first 300-odd pages knowing more about [Child’s] formative years that you do about your own.” – The Times

TBR Pile Review: Civilisations, by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor

54345837. sy475 — Hardcover, 352 pages
Published April 15th 2021 by Harvill Secker
(first published August 14th 2019)
Original Title: Civilizations
ISBN: 1787302296 (ISBN13: 9781787302297)
Edition Language: English
Literary Awards: Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française (2019)

c.1000AD: Erik the Red’s daughter heads south from Greenland.
1492: Columbus does not discover America.
1531: the Incas invade Europe.

Freydis is the leader of a band of Viking warriors who get as far as Panama. Nobody knows what became of them…
Five hundred years later, Christopher Columbus is sailing for the Americas, dreaming of gold and conquest. Even when captured by Incas, his faith in his superiority and his mission is unshaken.

Thirty years after that, Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, arrives in Europe. What does he find? The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation, capitalism, the miracle of the printing press, endless warmongering between the ruling monarchies, and constant threat from the Turks.

But most of all, downtrodden populations ready for revolution. Fortunately, he has a recent guidebook to acquiring power – Machiavelli’s The Prince. It turns out he is very good at it. So, the stage is set for a Europe ruled by Incas and, when the Aztecs arrive on the scene, for a great war that will change history forever.

Civilisations is a wildly entertaining counterfactual story about the modern world, colonisation, empire-building and the eternal human quest for domination. It is an electrifying novel by one of Europe’s most exciting writers.

Review: Sergeant Salinger, by Jerome Charyn

21 Oct 2021 | 9780857304711 | Format: Paperback Original | £9.99

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

2021 marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of The Catcher in the Rye.

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war – from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to
civilian life, he lived like a ‘spook,’ with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Review: Death In The Woods, by Jo Allen

Death in the Woods

A series of copycat suicides, prompted by a mysterious online blogger, causes DCI Jude
Satterthwaite more problems than usual, intensifying his concerns about his troublesome
younger brother, Mikey. Along with his partner, Ashleigh O’Halloran, and a local
psychiatrist, Vanessa Wood, Jude struggles to find the identity of the malicious troll
gaslighting young people to their deaths.
The investigation stirs grievances both old and new. What is the connection with the
hippies camped near the Long Meg stone circle? Could these suicides have any
connection with a decades old cold case? And, for Jude, the most crucial question of all.
Is it personal — and could Mikey be the final target?

Purchase Links

Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09BG9BY1N

Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BG9BY1N

Review: Adventure Dayze, by Wayne Mullane

**Buy Links**
**Amazon**
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adventure-Dayze-Overcoming-limitations-Irelands

Blurb

Hiking is the gateway to adventure.

Being in the Great Outdoors is great for the mind, body, and soul. And the even better news? It needn’t involve much more than putting on a pair of trainers and heading out your front door.

In Adventure Dayze, author Wayne Mullane recounts his hiking experiences in Britain and Ireland with his friends, including overcoming limitations walking at altitude and having a dodgy sense of direction!

This book aims to help you get started… or, if you’re a seasoned hiker, to encourage you to hike with renewed vigour. This story shares insights and discusses the benefits of hiking, including fitness, friendship, courage, mental health, and…err…the joy of eating.

Adventure Dayze will inspire you to overcome your limitations and get outdoors to enjoy all the unique beauty that is on offer. Even pandemic lockdowns won’t be able to suppress your exploration, as the author found out, there are many ways to bring the outdoors inside when there’s no other choice.

Author Bio
I live in Maidenhead, England. I’m a local council worker. My main hobbies are hiking, writing and playing board games. I also like spending time with family and friends. As well as writing about my hiking adventures, I write short stories and poems that appear on my website. I enjoy reading books on travel and fantasy novels.

Review: Bad Apples, by Will Dean

Published by POINT BLANK 7 October 2021
Hardback £14.99

A murder
A resident of small-town Visberg is found decapitated in the forest
A festival
An isolated hilltop community celebrates ’Pan Night’ after the apple harvest
A race against time
As Visberg closes ranks, there could not be a worse time for Tuva Moodyson to arrive as deputy editor of the local newspaper. Tuva senses the scoop of her career, unaware perhaps that she is the story…

Set in Sweden’s Halloween season, when the forests are full of elk
hunters and the town of Visberg is thick with the aroma of rotting fruit, BAD
APPLES is a thrilling introduction for readers new to the series, and for
die-hard #TeamTuva fans, a heart-stopping rollercoaster…

YouTube: Will Dean – Forest Author

Novella Review: The Wolf Skinned, by Jack Johnson

The Wolf Skinned (The Wolf Skinned Saga Book 1) by [Jack Johnson] — The Wolf Skinned is the first book in a series which chronicles the saga of Ulf The Wolf Skinned, a blood hungry Viking Berserker. Ulf is one of Odin’s sacred warriors known as a Ulfhednar; clothed in a wolf’s skin, he leaves a trail of death and pain wherever he goes. At the tender age of 17 he already has a fearsome reputation as his adopted father Eric Bloodaxe’s deadly hound of war. And by the end of the year 915 AD, every Saxon will know and fear the name, Ulf The Wolf Skinned. Link Here

My Review

I quite like historical fantasy, and historical fiction, especially stuff from the Anglo-Saxon period. It’s even better if some of the main characters were real, but unknown generally and going on an adventure. In this novella, Lady Ælfwynn of Mercia, daughter of Æthelflæd of Mercia and her husband Æthelred, has an adventure among the Vikings, and meets Ulf, a berserker.

Set in 915, five years after Æthelred’s death, when Edward of Wessex and Æthelflæd of Mercia continued to fight the Vikings as their father Alfred the Great, of Wessex, had done. In history, Æthelflæd died in 918, just before the Vikings of York were to kneel to her, and Ælfwynn took control of Mercia, but only for a few months. Before the end of the year she had been taken to Wessex by her uncle Edward and he took control of Mercia. His son became the first King of the English. No one knows what happened to Lady Ælfwynn. I personally think she was locked up in a nunnery so no one could object to her uncle’s theft of her throne. It wasn’t unheard of for a royal woman to become a nun, and it was unusual for a woman to rule alone.

Jack Johnson gives Lady Ælfwynn an adventure to rival the real adventures of her mother.

Lady Ælfwynn is doomed to marry a man of Northumbria that she doesn’t like, until the Vikings arrive to rescue the Berserker Ulf from captivity in Durham. Ulf and Ælfwynn run away from the fighting and head to York to join up with Ulf’s adopted father, Eric Bloodaxe. On their journey, they get to know each other and fall in love. In York, the Vikings are concerned about having Edward of Wessex’s niece in their halls as a ‘hostage’.

When the Lady of Mercia arrives with her brother and prospective son-in-law at the gates of York, it seems a battle is inevitable. Eric Bloodaxe tries to discuss terms with the Lady, but things don’t go well.

There is a battle. There is treachery. It’s very exciting.

And I want to know what happens next.

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Luckily I know the author, so I’ll get to read the next instalment before it’s published. I got to read this one in an earlier stage.

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I thought the descriptive writing was excellent and the little bits of magical reality add an enchanted element to the narrative. The Gods are certainly playing with people’s lives. It’s hinted at, subtly, that Odin is abroad in England.

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One-eye’d trouble-making git.

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I enjoyed the characterisation of Ælfwynn and Ulf, and the development of their relationship. Their relationship is loving and based on friendship and shared difficulties, before it becomes physical, which I liked.

The battles are very invigorating and exciting to read. They are written with a dreamlike reality. This is because the author sees them in his mind and writes what he sees.

If you like Bernard Cornwall’s Uhtred of Bebbenburg books or the TV series based on them, or the TV series Vikings, this novella is for you.

Review: Catch your Breath – The Secret Life of a Sleepless Anaesthetist, By Ed Patrick

I didn’t expect that being an anaesthetist in a pandemic would leave me outside my front door naked, or indeed that I’d be telling this story to readers. Nevertheless, I am excited to shed more light on this and the mysterious world of drugs and coffee.
– Ed Patrick
Catch your Breath is a gut punch of a memoir by a doctor – and comedian – whose job is to keep people alive after putting them to sleep. Ed Patrick is an anaesthetist. Strong drugs for his patients, strong coffee for him.
But it’s not just sleep-giving for this anaesthetist, as he navigates emergencies, patients not breathing for themselves and living with a terrifying sense of responsibility. It’s enough to leave anyone feeling numb especially in the midst of a pandemic.

Hilariously funny, moving and truly insightful, it follows Ed’s journey from bewildered medical student in Aberdeen to unflinching anaesthetist on the NHS frontline. A dose of insight into life on the hospital wards during the pandemic, while injecting hope that we will all get through this.

But don’t worry, there’s plenty of laughing gas to be had.

Review: SWOP The Satsuma-Sized Secret, by Lucy Noguera

**Age**: 7-9 years

**Themes**
Friendship
Adventure
Family
Deaf sibling
Sign Language
Acceptance

Blurb

What would you do if you found the world’s smallest dog?

When Ernie and his family leave the countryside to move to the city. Ernie feels like he’ll never settle into their new home.

Yet on his very first night, a surprising new friend introduces himself – Swop is a very tiny dog. A dog that just happens to be the size of a satsuma.

Ernie vows to keep Swop a secret, but Swop has other ideas and he’s determined to make Ernie’s first day at his new school a memorable one!

Review: What Lies Buried, by Kerry Daynes

Kerry Daynes, leading forensic psychologist, takes us into the murky world of psychological investigation to uncover what lies buried. Each of her clients is classed as a ‘mentally disordered criminal offender’ whose psychological problems have contributed to them breaking the law.

Whether she is dealing with a young murderer who says he has heard voices telling him to kill, a teacher who daubs children in red paint and threatens to abduct them, or an aspiring serial killer who faints at the sight of blood, Kerry’s quest is to delve beyond the classic question asked of forensic psychologists: ‘Are they mad or are they bad?’

In her new book, Kerry provides an unflinching, enlightening and provocative insight into the minds of her clients, shedding light
on the root causes of their behaviour.