Book review – Page 36 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Review: The Mayfair Mafia, by Dick Kirby

It is a little known fact that one immigrant Italian family ran London’s thriving vice trade unchecked from the mid-1930s for some twenty years.
The five Messina brothers imported prostitutes from the Continent on an industrial scale, acquiring the women British citizenship by phoney marriages. Demanding 80% of earnings, the Messina became fabulously wealthy, purchasing expensive properties, cars and influence.
As this revealing and absorbing account describes, the brothers ruled with a ruthless combination of charm, blackmail and all too credible threats of disfigurement and death.
It took a sensational Sunday newspaper exposé to get the authorities to act. A series of dramatic arrests and trials followed and one by one the brothers were imprisoned and deported for crimes including immoral earnings, attempted bribery and firearms offences.
Such was their fortune that numerous potential beneficiaries came forward, most recently in 2012.
The author, a much published former Metropolitan police officer, has researched the remarkable criminal careers of the five Messina’s and the result is a riveting and shocking read.

Review: Feasible Planet, by Ken Kroes

Blurb

Are you concerned about the state of our planet and hope that governments and corporations will find a sustainable way for us to live? If you do not think about it too hard, that may work, but will it? Left on their own, with drivers of popularity and profits, I am not too convinced that it will.

This leads to the key question. Are we doing enough? I believe that the answer to this question is no and that our best hope is for each of us to vote smart, lobby hard, stay informed, and to act. This book primarily focuses on the last part, the actions that each of us can take.

While environmental aspects are key areas of concern, sustainability goes beyond controlling our consumption and pollution. There are key social, political, and economic areas that need to be addressed as well, and there are several steps that individuals can take to help in all of these areas.

For those of you who feel we could do more, this book is for you and is loaded with actionable activities, the reasons for doing them, and explores why we are not doing them already.

Review: Sister, by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Oslo Detectives are back in another slice of gripping, dark Nordic Noir, and their new colleague has more at stake than she’s prepared to reveal…

Pub date: 30 April 2020
ISBN 13: 978-1-913193-02-7
EPUB: 978-1-913193-03-4
Price: £8.99

Oslo detective Frølich searches for the mysterious sister of a young female
asylum seeker, but when people start to die, everything points to an old
case and a series of events that someone will do anything to hide…

Suspended from duty, Detective Frølich is working as a private investigator,
when his girlfriend’s colleague asks for his help with a female asylum
seeker, who the authorities are about to deport. She claims to have a sister
in Norway, and fears that returning to her home country will mean instant
death.

Frølich quickly discovers the whereabouts of the young woman’s sister, but
things become increasingly complex when she denies having a sibling, and
Frølich is threatened off the case by the police. As the body count rises, it becomes clear that the answers lie in an old investigation, and the
mysterious sister, who is now on the run…

A dark, chilling and up-to-the-minute Nordic Noir thriller, Sister is also a
tense and well-plotted murder mystery with a moving tragedy at its heart,
cementing Kjell Ola Dahl as one of the greatest crime writers of our generation.

Review: Two Lives, by A Yi

Fiction: Crime & mystery fiction
Product format: Paperback
Price: £9.95; $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-78758-277-4

Seven stories, seven whispers into the ears of life: A Yi’s unexpected twists of crime burst from the everyday, with glimpses of romance distorted by the weaknesses of human motive. A Yi employs his forensic skills to offer a series of portraits of modern life, both uniquely Chinese, and universal in their themes.

FLAME TREE PRESS is the new fiction imprint of Flame Tree Publishing.
Launched recently in 2018 the list brings together brilliant new authors and
the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices.

Review: Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, by Mick Finlay

49688528. sx318 sy475 — Paperback, 400 pages
Expected publication: April 2nd 2020 by HQ
ISBN:0008324522 (ISBN13: 9780008324520)

South London, 1896.

William Arrowood, Victorian London’s less salubrious private detective, is paid a visit by Captain Moon, the owner of a pleasure steamer moored on the Thames. He complains that someone has been damaging his boat, putting his business in jeopardy.

Arrowood and his trusty sidekick Barnett suspect professional jealousy, but when a string of skulls is retrieved from the river, it seems like even fouler play is afoot.

It’s up to Arrowood and his trusty sidekick Barnett to solve the case, before any more corpses end up in the watery depths . . .

Review: Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith

Pub. Date: 19 March 2020
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-0-85730-390-5
Binding: Paperback

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.
When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts, when twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past struggles to untangle the secrets in the midst of the town trauma.

This is a landscape of fear and ghosts, of regret and violence. It is a landscape transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding terrible secrets deeper still. Blackwood is the evil in the woods, the wickedness that lurks in all of us

Pen & Sword Review: Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, by Daniele Cybulskie

Imprint: Pen & Sword History
ISBN: 9781526733450
Published: 30th September 2019

Price:£12.00 was ~~£14.99~~

Have you ever found yourself watching a show or reading a novel and wondering what life was really like in the Middle Ages? What did people actually eat? Were they really filthy? And did they ever get to marry for love?

In Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, you’ll find fast and fun answer to all your secret questions, from eating and drinking to sex and love. Find out whether people bathed, what they did when they got sick, and what actually happened to people accused of crimes. Learn about medieval table manners, tournaments, and toothpaste, and find out if people really did poop in the moat.

Review: Acid Test, by Christopher Kimball Bigelow

Growing up Mormon during America’s early-1980s satanic panic, Bigelow escapes the religion’s bland conformity by playing Dungeons & Dragons. After graduating from high school in 1984, he dives into sex, drugs, and the counterculture via Salt Lake City’s punk and new-wave scenes, as echoed from London, New York, and especially Los Angeles.

As Bigelow explores the underground, he rejects myths of supernatural good vs. evil, living instead by the D&D concept of chaotic neutrality. During LSD trips, however, he starts sensing an unseen dimension. Then Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic novel The Stand gets him reconsidering good vs. evil. After an alarming otherworldly attack, can Bigelow find spiritual protection in Mormonism’s processed, regimented, corporate culture?

Published January 14th 2020 by Zarahemla Books

ISBN:0999347233 (ISBN13: 9780999347232)

Review: ‘Bella’, by R.M. Francis

Blurb
A spectre has haunted Netherton for generations.
Everyone has a theory, no one has an answer.
The woods that frame the housing estate uncover a series of heinous acts, drawing onlookers in to a space of clandestine, queer sexuality: a liminal space of abject and uncanny experience.
A question echoes in the odd borderlands of being, of fear-fascination, attraction-repulsion, of sex and death…
Who put Bella down the Wych-Elm?