Blog Tour Calendar: Ash Mountain, by Helen Fitzgerald
Tag Archives: Orenda Books
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: Mexico Street, by Simone Buchholz, translated by Rachel Ward
Hamburg state prosecutor Chastity Riley investigates a series
of arson attacks on cars across the city, which leads her to a
startling and life-threatening discovery involving criminal gangs
and a very illicit love story…
Night after night, cars are set alight across the German city
of Hamburg, with no obvious pattern, no explanation and no
suspect.
Until, one night, on Mexico Street, a ghetto of high-rise blocks in
the north of the city, a Fiat is torched. Only this car isn’t empty.
The body of Nouri Saroukhan – prodigal son of the Bremen clan –
is soon discovered, and the case becomes a homicide.
Public prosecutor Chastity Riley is handed the investigation,
which takes her deep into a criminal underground that snakes
beneath the whole of Germany. And as details of Nouri’s
background, including an illicit relationship with the mysterious
Aliza, emerge, it becomes clear that these are not random
attacks, and there are more on the cards…
Review: Containment, by Vanda Symon
ISBN: 978-1-913193-19-5
EPUB: 978-1-913193-20-1
Price: £8.99
Dunedin’s favourite young police officer Sam Shephard is drawn into a
perplexing investigation when a series of shipping containers wash up on
a sleepy New Zealand beach, and a spate of unexplained deaths
ensues…
Chaos reigns in the sleepy village of Aramoana on the New Zealand
coast, when a series of shipping containers wash up on the beach and
looting begins.
Detective Constable Sam Shephard experiences the desperation of the
scavengers first-hand, and ends up in an ambulance, nursing her wounds
and puzzling over an assault that left her assailant for dead.
What appears to be a clear-cut case of a cargo ship running aground
soon takes a more sinister turn when a skull is found in the sand, and the
body of a diver is pulled from the sea … a diver who didn’t die of
drowning…
As first officer at the scene, Sam is handed the case, much to the
displeasure of her superiors, and she must put together an increasingly
confusing series of clues to get to the bottom of a mystery that may still
have more victims…
Blog Tour Calendar: Containment, by Vanda Symon
Blog Tour Calendar: Mexico Street, by Simone Buchholz
Review: Beast, by Matt Wesolowski
Continuing the unique, explosive Six Stories series, based around
six podcasts comes a compulsive, taut and terrifying thriller, and
a bleak and distressing look at modern society’s desperation for
attention. Beast will unveil a darkness from which you may never
return…
In the wake of the ‘Beast from the East ’ cold snap that ravaged
the UK in 2018, a grisly discovery was made in a ruin on the
Northumbrian coast. Twenty-four-year-old vlogger, Elizabeth Barton, had been barricaded inside what locals refer to as ‘The Vampire Tower’, where she was later found frozen to death. Three young men, part of an alleged cult, were convicted of this terrible crime, which they described as a ‘prank gone wrong’.
However, in the small town of Ergarth, questions have been raised
about the nature of Elizabeth Barton’s death and whether the
three convicted youths were even responsible. Elusive online journalist Scott King speaks to six witnesses people who knew both the victim and the three killers – to peer beneath the surface of the case.
He uncovers whispers of a shocking online craze that held the young of Ergarth in its thrall and drove them to escalate a series of pranks in the name of internet fame. He hears of an abattoir on the edge of town, which held more than simple slaughter behind its walls, and the tragic and chilling legend of the Ergarth Vampire…
PUBLICATION DATE: 6 FEBRUARY 2020 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £8.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Continue reading “Review: Beast, by Matt Wesolowski”Review: Death Deserved, by Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger, translated by Anne Bruce
never shows at the launch of her controversial autobiography,
Always Number One. When celebrity blogger Emma Ramm visits
Nordstrøm’s home later that day, she finds the door unlocked and
signs of a struggle inside. A bib with the number ‘one’ has been
pinned to the TV.
Police officer Alexander Blix is appointed to head up the missingpersons
investigation, but he still bears the emotional scars of
a hostage situation nineteen years earlier, when he killed the
father of a five-year-old girl. Traces of Nordstrøm soon show up at
different locations, but the appearance of the clues appear to be
carefully calculated … evidence of a bigger picture that he’s just
not seeing…
Blix and Ramm soon join forces, determined to find and stop
a merciless killer with a flair for the dramatic, and thirst for
attention.
Trouble is, he’s just got his first taste of it…
PUBLICATION DATE: 6 FEBRUARY 2020 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £8.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Review: Keeper, by Johanna Gustawsson, translated by Maxim Jakubowski
London 2015: actress Julianne Bell is abducted in a case similar to the terrible Tower Hamlets murders of some ten years earlier, and harking back to the Ripper killings of a century before.
Falkenberg, Sweden, 2015: a woman’s body is found mutilated in a forest, her wounds identical to those of the Tower Hamlets victims.
Profiler Emily Roy and true-crime writer Alexis Castells again find themselves drawn into an intriguing case, with personal links that turn their world upside down.
Published April 28th 2018 by Orenda Books (first published March 15th 2017)
Original Title: Mör
ISBN:1912374056
ISBN13: 9781912374052
Edition Language: English
URL : http://orendabooks.co.uk/book/keeper/
Series
Emily Roy & Alexis Castells #2
My Review
So, today I’m reviewing the second Emily Roy & Alexis Castells novel, and introducing Alienor, who I adored when I read Blood Song.
This book is as twisted as the first novel, Block 46, and just as tightly plotted. We learn more about Emily and Alexis, their backgrounds and neuroses. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 were tenuously linked to the investigation as the background for the abusive family history of the murderers. The modern murders are confusing until you get to the revelations later on. The betrayal at the end was an unexpected twist but made the whole book make sense.
As with books 1 and 3, Gustawsson alternates between the investigation and the personal history of the murderers. I like the insight I got into the background to the crimes but was frustrated that I didn’t put the clues together. I’m not very good at that, clearly.
Another fantastic book from Gustawsson and Orenda.
Review: Block 46, by Johanna Gustawsson, translated Maxim Jakobowski
Paperback, 300 pages
Published October 1st 2017 by Orenda Books (first published February 5th 2017)
ISBN:1910633704
ISBN13: 9781910633700
Series
Emily Roy & Alexis Castells #1
My Review
Last year I reviewed Blood Song, the third book in the Emily Roy & Alexis Castells series. It was so good that I ordered the first two and I’ve just read them so I’m reviewing both, but in separate posts. Today it is book 1, Block 46. Tomorrow I will review Keeper.
This was a rather fantastic novel, linking events in Buchenwald Concentration Camp (where the author’s grandfather had been a prisoner for being a French Communist?/Resistance member) and murders in modern Falkenburg, Sweden and London, UK.
The main characters are introduced, although it is clear they have a past relationship and complex personal histories. Their backgrounds and personalities are slowly revealed. Emily Roy could be an unsympathetic character but for the pieces of vulnerability Gustawsson reveals in the narrative. I wasn’t sure about Alexis Castells, she seemed very self-involved, although that changed as I read, again her past was revealed in little bites that made her more understandable. They are both very complex, slightly damaged characters.
The plot was sufficiently twisted that I didn’t see the truth coming, even though the clues were there, looking back. I enjoyed the way the life of the criminals and the investigation intertwined throughout the novel, shifting between perspectives and giving clues to the reader while still hiding the truth. It didn’t feel contrived that a writer and a profiler would know each other or become involved in the investigation (even if I personally have reservations about the scientific validity of profiling) or that they would both end up in Sweden.
It was fascinating to learn about the Buchenwald Camp via fiction, I didn’t know that the prisoners and International Resistance had cached weapons and fought the SS as the Allied Forces got closer to them. I wonder how many SS officers escaped by pretending to be prisoners? *shudder*
Not having read the original novel, because my French is not great and Swedish non-existent, I can’t comment on the translation’s fidelity, but Karen Sullivan, who runs Orenda Books, wouldn’t allow a dodgy translation so I’m going to run with it being accurate.
I highly recommend this book, and the series actually, Also, the publisher, who is an absolute delight.
