Review: From Crime Scenes to Cruise Ships, by Dr Rhona Morrison

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NEW FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF I DON’T TALK TO DEAD BODIES What if your biggest challenge became your greatest adventure?

One day, Dr Rhona Morrison was a respected forensic psychiatrist planning for retirement. The next, on her birthday, she became a widow, stepping into an uncertain and unplanned future alone. But as Rhona soon discovered, an ending can also be a beginning – if you grasp the opportunities life presents.

In this warm, witty, and inspiring memoir, Rhona shares how she navigated the twists and turns of her loss and subsequent reinvention, transforming her grief into opportunity. From launching an art business and writing her first book, I Don’t Talk to Dead Bodies, to becoming a cruise ship lecturer and embarking on global adventures, she tackled each step with an open heart. Along the way, she discovered unexpected joys, new passions, and a renewed sense of purpose.

From Crime Scenes to Cruise Ships is an uplifting story of resilience, reinvention and embracing the unknown. Whether you’re facing loss, retirement, or a major life shift, Rhona’s journey is a reminder that even when life feels uncertain, you still have the power to shape your future. It may not look like you once imagined, but it can still be rich with meaning, adventure and possibility.

Your story isn’t over; the next chapter is waiting. So, let’s turn the page and step into what comes next – together.

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Review: The Cat Bride, by Charlotte Tierney

PUBLICATION DATE: 7 APRIL 2025 | SALT PUBLISHING | £10.99 | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

The heatwave of 1995.

Sixteen years since an infamous tiger-lynx hybrid escaped a small moorland zoo and killed a man.

Sixteen years since the animal was euthanised.

Sixteen years for the zoo to fall into disrepair.

Lowdy’s Mumma grew up in the zoo and when Lowdy falls ill, they’re forced to move to the old zoo for her to recover, still inhabited by her dying grandmother. As soon as they arrive, rumours surface of a big cat stalking the moors again.

Vengeful locals blame the three women for an apex predator on the loose and invade the estate, searching for proof.

Mumma insists all the cats are dead. Grandma whispers that the ‘tynx’ needs to be fed. Lowdy, still recovering from her own mysterious illness, has no idea what to believe. Can she even trust herself when she wakes up covered in ticks with no recollection of the night before?

As Lowdy searches for the truth – the truth of her childhood, what it means
to be a woman, and the truth about the cats – she realizes something catlike runs in the blood, something she cannot ignore.

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Review: A Rebel’s History of Mars, by Nadia Afifi

Format
304 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication
July 15, 2025 by Flame Tree Press

ISBN
9781787589452 

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer member’s striking new book of time travel and biological science fiction is a thrilling ride.

Kezza, an aerialist in the Martian circus, can never return to Earth – but she can assassinate the man she blames for her grim life on the red planet. Her murderous plans take an unexpected turn, however, when she uncovers a sinister secret.

A thousand years into the future, Azad lives a safe but controlled life on the beautiful desert planet of Nabatea. His world is upended when he joins a crew of space-traveling historians seeking to learn the true reason that their ancestors left Mars

Separated by time and space, Kezza and Azad’s stories collide in the Martian desert.

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Review: Named, by Camilla Balshaw

Bedford Square Publishers
05 June 2025
£18.99
978-1-8350-1071-6
Hardback

The book
Our names are a shadow we carry around with us. They are part of who we are. Our names are a marker of our self-identity and our sense of self. Our names have the power to shock. They have the power to heal, and they have the power to trigger conversations around race, class, social mobility and belonging. But what is a name? What do our names tell us about ourselves? And why do they matter?

Named is a fascinating exploration of names, global naming conventions and identity politics woven into a moving, personal narrative about the finding of family and self. At the intersection of memoir and social and cultural history it is a truly fascinating book about the seemingly ordinary and every day.

The author’s own narrative about her estrangement from her Nigerian father, the grapples with her Jamaican mother and her journey towards identity is woven through the chapters making it an engaging and intimate investigation of what makes us who we are.

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Review: The Hatter’s Daughter, by W.A. Simpson

FICTION / Fantasy / Epic
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-78758-911-7
Pages: 272 pp
Series: Tales from the Riven Isles

FLAME TREE PRESS

The Hatter’s Daughter is the third book set in W.A. Simpson’s Riven Isles
universe.

There is more to the Vine than mortals and immortals know. It reaches its
branches and tendrils into realms beyond the Riven Isles. On the night Faith
was born, her mother perished, but not before sending Faith to safety, in
Underneath. Discovered by The Mad Hatter, he takes Faith home to raise as
his own. When the Rot invades, Faith determines to fight. She won’t do it
alone. Her childhood friend, Prince Rowan accompanies her. Faith must
return to her birthplace to find a Legendary Heroine. But Overland is
dangerous, and the minions of the Rot are in pursuit. If she doesn’t succeed, the minions of the Rot will destroy everything they know.

Tales from the Riven Isles is a dark fantasy series set in a world outside of our own, where the characters of myth and fairy-tales exist, and their legends live on. Featuring the novels: ‘Tinderbox’, ‘Tarotmancer’, and ‘The Hatter’s Daughter’.

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Review: Victim, by Jorn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger

PUBLICATION DATE: 7th NOVEMBER 2024
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £ 9. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS


Description

Two years ago, Alexander Blix was the lead investigator in a missing person’s case where a young mother, Elisabeth Eie, had been kidnapped. The case came to a standstill when Blix’s own daughter was killed and he was arrested for avenging her. Blix is a now free man again, but Elisabeth’s kidnapper has found him, leaving evidence of her murder in Blix’s mailbox.

The police are unwilling to accept Blix’s help. Even if he was acquitted of his crime, his career in law enforcement is over. But Elisabeth’s murderer continues to pursue him, leading Blix to his new victims, while making it clear that he knows details from Blix’s private life that the former investigator has never shared with anyone…

Meanwhile, Emma Ramm has been contacted by a teenage girl, Carmen, whose stepfather has been arrested on suspicion of killing a childhood friend. But there is no body. Nor are there any other suspects…

Blix and Ramm can rely only on each other. And when Blix’s fingerprints are found on a child’s drawing at a crime scene, the present comes uncomfortably close to the past. A past where a victim has found their very own form of therapy. And it is clear that someone is watching…

Shocking, relentless and unbearably tense, Victim marks the return of the international bestselling, blockbuster Blix & Ramm series from two of Norway’s finest crime writers.

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