@RandomTTours – Page 16 – Everything Is Better With Dragons

Blog Tour Calendar: The Crow Folk, by Mark Stay

Blog Tour Calendar: Last Star Standing, by Spaulding Taylor

Review: The Invitation, by Katie Webster

·        Publisher : The Conrad Press (31 July 2020)
·        Language: : English
·        Paperback : 272 pages
·        ISBN-10 : 1913567273
·        ISBN-13 : 978-1913567279

**Amazon:**
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invitation-Lucys-Crypt-Katie-Webster/dp/19135672731

BLURB

On the island kingdom of Meta Emery, a young queen, Abigail, wakes in the middle of the night to a terrifying realisation; hostile wizards from the rival kingdom of Archmond have finally done what they’ve been threatening to do: bring a girl, Lucy, into this world to destroy the queen and all she has worked for.

Hundreds of miles west, in Archmond itself, a great feast unfolds in the castle to celebrate Lucy’s arrival. Soleman, one of the wizards and a co-ruler of Archmond, has spread the news to his people that Lucy is the heroine an ancient prophecy predicted; he promises that the discord throughout their world will soon be over. But his fellow ruler Ronald remains dubious that this apparently meek and troubled girl could really overthrow Abigail, or whether she is ever likely to want to.

This highly imaginative and original novel is the first in an exciting new fantasy series, ‘Lucy’s Crypt’.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katie Webster is an Australian lawyer, born in Queensland’s Daintree Rainforest. She has worked in both criminal and international law. She has published academically, but this is her debut novel.

Blog Tour Calendar: Cerebral Palsy: A Story, by Ilana Estelle

Blog Tour Calendar: The Invitation, by Katie Webster

Review: A Cut Like Wound, by Anita Nair

PUB DATE: May 15, 2014
MARKET: Crime Fiction
BINDING: Paperback
PRICE: £8.99
ISBN: 978-1-908524- 362

Blurb

It’s the first day of Ramadan in heat-soaked Bangalore. A young man begins to dress: makeup, a sari, and expensive pearl earrings. Before the mirror he is transformed into Bhuvana. She is a hijra, a transgender woman seeking love in the bazaars of the city. What Bhuvana wants, she nearly gets: a passing man is attracted to this elusive young woman-but someone points out that Bhuvana is no woman. For that, the interloper’s throat is cut. A case for Inspector Borei Gowda, going to seed, and at odds with those around him including his wife, his colleagues, even the informers he must deal with. More corpses and Urmila, Gowda’s ex-flame, are added to this spicy concoction of a mystery novel.

Blog tour calendar: A Cut Like Wound, by Anita Nair

Review: Shades of Deception, by Jacqueline Jacques

Walthamstow, 1902: Archie and his police sergeant pal Frank Tyrell investigate the disappearance of teenager Lilian and the discovery of a corpse in the River Lea – Eleanor ‘Nell’ Redfern.

Did her father’s ambitious plans to marry her to a rail magnate cause her to run away to her watery doom? And what about Lilian Steggles, a star swimmer with her eye on the 1908 Olympics – what prompted her to disappear from home and where is she now?

Archie uses his artistic skills to identify Nell and thence to track down her story and that of the other victims of a dastardly scheme to exploit young girls for the benefit of lascivious older men.

Review: In Black and White, by Alexandra Wilson

Alexandra Wilson was a teenager when her dear family friend Ayo was stabbed on his way home from football. Ayo’s death changed Alexandra. His death compelled her to enter the legal profession to search for answers.
As a junior criminal and family law barrister she finds herself navigating a world and a set of rules designed by a privileged few. A world in which barristers sigh with relief at the retirement of a racist judge: ‘I’ve got a black kid today and he would have had no hope.’

In her debut book In Black and White, Alexandra beautifully re-creates the tense court room scenes, the heart-breaking meetings with teenage clients and the moments of frustration and triumph that make up a young barrister’s life.

Alexandra speaks with raw honesty about her experience as a mixed-race woman from a non-traditional background in a profession that is sorely lacking in diverse representation. A justice system in which a disproportionately large number of black and mixed-race people are charged, convicted and sent to prison.

She shows us how it feels to defend someone who hates the colour of your skin or someone you suspect is guilty, and the heart-breaking youth justice cases she has worked on. We see what it’s like for the teenagers coerced into county line drug deals and the damage that can be caused when we criminalise teenagers.

Her account of what she has witnessed as a young mixed-race barrister is in equal parts shocking, compelling, confounding and powerful. Alexandra’s story is unique in a profession still dominated by a section of society with little first-hand experience of the devastating impact of violent crime.

Endeavour • 13th August 2020
£16.99 • Hardback

Review: In SatNav We Trust, by Jack Barrow

In SatNav We Trust – a search for meaning through the Historic Counties of England is a journey through ideas of science and belief, all the while searching for meaning and a bed for the night. Or was that the other way around?

On May 1^st 2013 I set off from Oxford on the trip of a lifetime. It wasn’t a trip around the world or up the Himalayas, I set off to visit every one of England’s 39 historic counties. These are the counties that used to exist before all the boundary changes that chopped Yorkshire into bits, got rid of evocative sounding names such as Westmorland, and designated the big cities as metropolitan boroughs. I wanted to visit England as it used to be, although that’s not quite how it turned out.

In SatNav We Trust started out as a travelogue exploring all the usual suspects, spectacular landscapes, architectural or engineering wonders, historic towns with their cathedrals and castles. However, it soon developed into a journey through ideas and beliefs, an exploration of how the rational and the apparently irrational jostle for position in human experience. The book discusses our fundamental scientific understanding of the universe when, deep inside us, we might be as irrational as a box of frogs. This context, the exploration of England—the places stumbled across with no day to day plan, created the backdrop for these ideas.

ISBN: 978-1-5272-6030-6

Summary

The book takes the form of a journey through one English county a day. Rather than having a plan, other than a rough anticlockwise direction of travel, the trip was largely spontaneous. This unplanned nature is what drives the narrative, similar to the way a MacGuffin drives a story, and opens the possibility of stumbling across unintended experiences.

The journey is taken in a fifteen-year-old 4×4 referred to throughout as The Truck, along with a sat nav referred to as Kathy (actually the voice of Kathy Clugston from Radio 4). Rather than paying for hotels this was a camping trip to keep the costs down. The logistics of finding somewhere to camp each night provided further challenges. All of these inconveniences, and the unexpected solutions that followed, provided useful metaphors for concepts that arose in the philosophical exploration.

The result of this unplanned approach is that the story only covers the areas of the counties passed through. There are no descriptions of the obvious locations in each county because the journey simply didn’t pass that way. However, this means that there were unplanned encounters with places such as a village falling into the sea, the wonderfully mad Tees Transporter Bridge, or accidentally driving a speedboat with two drunk blokes without any consideration about how to get ashore.