Tag: science-fiction

Michael Waterhouse, The Ladder (The Conrad Press 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/122841167-the-ladder?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=7AS2TUpxkL&rank=1

Gary looks in his mirror in the morning and sees only blood. Drink, perhaps, but maybe more than that. Undertakers come to take away his wife Kim. He has already dealt with bereavement once when they lost their daughter Adrianna.
He settles on a remote Scottish island, living the life of a recluse and gives out a false name for himself, though the locals keep probing.
The story goes back and forth between the past and the present, between the husband and the wife. Gary and Kim are very different personalities. She is no-nonsense, energetic, dislikes ‘fuss’, loves colour. He is more contemplative, worries. They experience the conception, birth and death of Adrianna differently. As Kim declines, her suffering punctuated with ‘intervals of happiness’, they approach her sickness and her impending death from different angles.
He decides to build a memorial to her, somewhere he can see it every day. He buys a ladder and paints it in 46 different colours, in her honour, and begs for her forgiveness. But the monument elicits questions from the islanders which Gary would rather not deal with.
This is a sober account of grown-up, married love—a story about how a loving couple learn to cope with the unthinkable. Waterhouse writes beautifully about grief and the complex emotions that come with bereavement. Yet the story is not all tears.
The construction of the memorial and daily life in the Scottish village yank Gary out of his sadness. Shopkeeper Angus, fisherman Struan and a chance visitor from his old life challenge his imposed seclusion. The balance between the heart-rending understanding of Gary’s and Kim’s emotions and the plot around the ladder and the change it provokes in Gary is brilliant.
I received an ARC from the author.

Rob Jung, Judgment Day (Hawk Hill Literary 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127270858-judgment-day?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sfjas5A6L4&rank=6#

This Book 3 in The Chimera Chronicles Trilogy concludes the (fictional) story of The Reaper, a still-lost (real historical) painting by Joan Miro.
The story begins with a bang, with art forgery expert Ham witnessing as police arrest Senator-elect Magnolia Kanaranzi. In Magnolia, he has found his grandmother’s murderer and his estranged mother. Magnolia seems to truly believe she is innocent. At her extradition hearing, she locks eyes with the son she abandoned at four years old.
It seems her henchmen are turning on her. Now the Senate faces the legal conundrum of how to remove her from her seat. The same sort of legal shenanigans that may be soon faced in real life if Donald Trump is elected again.
But Magnolia is no loser, and her devious brain comes up with a fight-back plan of dirty tricks. Nothing is past her—blackmail, kidnapping, hiring hitmen, pinching people’s phones. The trick using the lottery ticket numbers is ingenious.
The characters’ personalities and their interactions are portrayed with lively dialogue and action-packed plot. The legal proceedings demonstrate a prodigious familiarity with the US courts system. Not being au fait with it myself, a lot of that went right over my head. Nevertheless, it fed well into the story of Magnolia’s power politics.
Another thing I admire about the Chimera Chronicles is the sympathetic villain—by this, I don’t mean we necessarily like Magnolia, but we understand her motivations. Under psychoanalysis, we finally learn the history behind her megalomaniacal behaviour, and it’s a good one. I couldn’t wait to read on. Magnolia is probably the best and most interesting villain I’ve ever read.
I have read Book 2 but not Book 1, but this one stands alone well, as long as you realise that you’re tuning in just at the exciting bit.
I received an ARC from the author.

Khurram Elahi, The Group (Khurram Elahi Publishing 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123265969-the-group?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Pgl2y1m4Fn&rank=1

Everyone thought IT consultant Jagat Singh ‘had it all’. That was until he met the Forex Group, their website cleverly designed to hook the would-be gambler. Now, Jag is paying the financial cost of his wrong decisions.
He’s reeled in by account manager Mark’s offer to ‘double’ his first £5,000 investment ‘for free’, and the perceived promise of easy profits plunges him into addiction.
His English wife Jenny and daughter Bunny are at first a welcome haven away from his troubles, but Jag hasn’t told them. There is a beautiful metaphor for an ethnic Indian well-assimilated to life in Britain—‘blending in like another dot on a William Turner landscape’.
Alarm bells only start to ring when Mark is hesitant about providing him with a monthly statement. By now, Jag has invested £60,000. Mark is even more hesitant about the prospect of ‘withdrawals’.
The first two chapters delve into the backstory of his online gambling (‘investment’) experience, where I would have preferred an Opening with more action or dialogue. The first line of Chapter 3 would have been a great Opener—‘He finally hit send.’
It’s difficult, I think, to write about a protagonist’s interaction with a computer—easier to accomplish, perhaps, in a film, where you can show a visual of the text on the screen.
Finally (Chapter 13), we begin to see some action—Jag enters a Zoom meeting with other scammed investors. His relationship with Jenny is suffering, especially after she opens one of his letters. Technology starts to take over, and the twisty ending is exciting.
Online forex trading really does sound like fun. But The Group warns us about the dangers imbedded in ‘the small print’—nobody reads it, right? Even computer-savvy people like IT consultants can find themselves hoodwinked. The lesson to us all is: do due diligence. If xyz sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Reading this book couldn’t have been better timed for me, as my bank just informed me of ‘fraudulent activity’ on my account.

Nick Mylne, Life in a Spin (The Conrad Press 2020)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56345624-life-in-a-spin?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Yfv6nsoYR6&rank=1

This little book contains humorous anecdotes from the author’s career as an international helicopter pilot with both commercial and military experience.
Beginning with a funny-but-it’s-true story of a misguided attempt to represent Sandhurst at boxing, Mylne tells a charming array of tales. The anecdotes are not so much ‘funny ha-ha’ as ‘human’. Good naturedness comes through on every page. He is as genial about his own cock-ups as he is about the sometime silliness of military bureaucracy.
Some of the stories convey how terrifying it must be to pilot a powerful air-borne vehicle in dangerous conditions or when infrastructure is inadequate, and Mylne describes a couple of horrifying near-death experiences.
From job assignments all over the world, readers are treated to amusing (yet always respectful and even loving) looks at foreign cultures, and we meet kings and sultans. One story contains the great line—‘what sparked my love of the Arab world—amazingly, was… a war’. Cultural faux pas result when he mispronounces words in Arabic. Mylne was flabbergasted at the size of his salary in a teaching posting to Saudi Arabia until he discovered that flight instructors were expected to arrange their own accommodation—baksheesh and all. Certain students, despite their dangerous lack of aptitude, he was not allowed to fail.
Each story is illustrated by a cute cartoon by Peter Loyd.
A must for fellow aviators, but even non-flyers will enjoy this.
I was given a copy by the author.

Aidan K. Morrissey, The Atenisti (The Conrad Press 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62025797-the-atenisti

Ricci, a member of a secret organisation, the Atenisti, finishes a job in London and, being followed, escapes to Italy. He is an assassin, trained by the late Giacomo. He seeks to avenge the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl and finds himself chasing a world-wide paedophile ring through Italy and Germany to India. His method is to get to them before the police do.
He knows them from the pornographic ‘snuff film’. Their paymaster collects gruesome trophies of the children. The rapist/murderers gouge out their eyes and send them to him, to be kept in a jar.
It’s action-packed, and there is excellent building of suspense; you really want to keep reading. The climactic final scene is nail-biting, with all the rapists getting what’s coming to them.
Sadly, I believe that world-wide paedophile rings do exist, whether they have vigilante assassins from secret organisations chasing them, and much needs to be done by law enforcement to shut down these crimes. Also sadly, the use of sexual violence as a political tool in ethnic terror and oppression of girls remains an international scandal in parts of India. The story cites a statistic, probably accurate, of 106 rapes in India per day, forty percent being minors.
Building a fictional tale around these real-life tragedies makes the story realistic and exciting, lending meaning and identifiability to the protagonist’s quest.
Some crime scenes are quite graphic.
Morrissey builds on his experience as a lawyer, time spent living and working in Italy, Germany and India, and his passion as an amateur Egyptologist.

Jane Buckley, Stones Corner: Turmoil (Orla Kelly Publishing 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56918213-turmoil?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_21

After Bloody Sunday, things are still volatile in Northern Ireland. The British forces in Derry, exhausted from lack of success, are zealous for payback. Private Robert Sallis is in his barracks, trying to understand the hatred with which he and his mates are daily bombarded.
19-year-old Caitlin McLaughlin is terrified by the sounds of invading helicopters. The Brits already have her brother Martin, who’s friendly with the Provos. Now they’ve come, causing as much destruction as possible, for her father Patrick.
A girl is wooed by the fervent Republican Kieran. Kieran convinces her to set up a honeytrap for soldiers.
Caitlin and her sister Tina try to carry on. Caitlin, her face black and blue from the soldiers’ blows, goes to work at the only remaining shirt factory. The boss’s nephew, James Henderson, catches her eye.
Her father has a heart attack in custody, and a neighbour rushes them to the A&E, through aggravating checkpoints and impossible traffic. There’s been a bombing, and the A&E is swamped. Her father is badly beaten, unresponsive, and not expected to last the night.
James, in his uncle’s opulent dining room, finishes his partridge dinner, surrounded by Protestant businessmen, politicians and policemen. The factories are threatening a strike against internment. At work, James needs a secretary, and her supervisor suggests Caitlin, warning him that she’s ‘a Papist’.
As he and Caitlin pursue a clandestine love affair, James plans a conference with both sides of the sectarian divide, hoping for a rescue strategy for the factory and peace for Derry.
All these characters interconnect in complex and heart-wrenching ways, finally climaxing at the fateful conference at the City Hotel. Stones Corner-Darkness, Part II of the series, deals with the fallout from this event.
The characters are rich, and the plot moves along at a good pace. The dramatisation is great and the dialogue believable.
My only niggle was that I found Robert’s naïveté a bit surprising. Surely British troops in Northern Ireland knew precisely what their historic role was. James seems a bit clueless, too. The characters at the extreme ends of the Republican/Orange spectrum—Kieran and Charles Jones—are a bit one-dimensional, but that’s alright, as all the other characters are well developed.
This novel is gorgeously written, with careful editing. We feel the terror of the raid on Derry—the down-draught of helicopter blades, the rattling of rooftiles, the salivating German Shepherds—the agonising grief at her father’s death.
I rate this 5 stars Plus.

Tony Bassett, Heir to Murder (The Book Folks 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203178090-heir-to-murder?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=5oKFBKsMaq&rank=1

A neighbourly dispute over loud music results in trouble. And murder. The noise-maker, Miles Kenworth, son of Lord Culverton, has had his skull mutilated by an axe. Residents had seen Jake Harris knocking down his door brandishing a bat.
The tales features detective DS Sunita Roy, whom we know from previous novels in the series.
Charles Laxton, Rupert Faulkner and Miles’ ex-girlfriend Ursula Grey enter the investigation. Stephanie has photos of someone in a compromising position in a hay barn, and her sister Bella tries to dissuade her from using them for blackmail. Laxton hasn’t told the truth. Logan Price has a motive. The list of suspects reaches seven. The murders multiply, and one two years earlier on the Costa del Sol may be linked, so DS Sunita Roy and Brett Dawson jet off to follow the lead. Sunita follows her instincts, and it pays off.
The investigation builds gradually, and we experience some setbacks, building suspense for the climax.
In Bassett’s detective novels, the plot builds right along with the police investigation. We see peeks inside the suspects’ private lives, as we are fed the detectives’ leads. This makes for good pacing and good suspense. I like how realistic the cops are. There’s a team of them, of mixed genders and ethnicities, as in real life, each with individual roles and talents, and their dialogue is natural with enough banter to make it fun. When the plot becomes complicated, there is always a helpful summing up—either a team meeting or Sunita mulling things over at bedtime.
A perfect detective thriller. I was given an ARC by the author.

Linda Coussement, Contrast (Elephas Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199799331-contrast?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZtMH0DeWED&rank=4

Ghost wakes up to a beautiful morning and looks around for someone with whom to converse. Rabbit, Cat and Frog are discussing some mysterious new object in the garden, a round, flat circle of concrete. Leora walks out, speaking to her friend Dana on the phone, and notices the object, too.
Her neighbour Xander notices that a strange circular patch of flowers has replaced his prized Japanese maple. The concrete and flower circles have a psychological effect on their viewers. There is something malevolent about the wall between the gardens.
Ghost—named during life Adam—goes back through his life in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation to figure out where he went wrong. Ghost and Leora discuss the meaning of life. Xander believes it’s all about ‘staying away from the heavy’.
Ghost’s memories of life have a hazy, dream-like quality. Nothing seems solid and real, provoking the reader to think deeply about the same existential questions. Perhaps the two gardens symbolise purgatory, where Leora and Xander, also, are stuck because they’re dead inside, and the wall represents their barriers to self-actualisation.
We get no sense of a Creator god. The dead and the living bump around, coming to some conclusions, but nothing earth-shattering.
We spend a few too many early chapters wondering at the strangeness of the world, and by the half-way mark, we still haven’t figured it out. As the reader is also trying to work it out, this leaves an uncomfortable feeling. While Ghost and Leora and Xander work out the rules to this world where ghosts can manifest and walls can be malevolent and circles of concrete and flowers can appear overnight and you can converse with disembodied voices, there could have been some impending consequence, some ticking timebomb necessitating that they solve the puzzle quickly. Or, there could have been a bit more action or relationship conflict to make it more interesting.
A world where already-dead ghosts help the still-living humans work out the answers to ‘life, the universe and everything’ is an interesting one. I liked how it was mostly Ghost asking the questions, not the living. Unsurprisingly (as they are bogus), mediums who purport to translate across the boundary have never been able to procure for us solid answers.

N. L. Holmes, Pilot Who Knows the Waters (WayBack Press 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61198050-pilot-who-knows-the-waters?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=FLio8ymDmz&rank=1

1335 BCE. The story is fictional but based on real events during a tremendously interesting period, the suppression of the Aten revolution of Akhenaten and the Zannanza Affair. The death of Prince Zannanza led to a period of conflict between the Hittites and Egyptians that culminated in the Battle of Kadesh.
Lord Hani is sent to Hattusha to the court of King Suppiluliuma to negotiate a Hittite bridegroom for the Queen of Egypt. The Hittites called this queen Dakhamunzu—basically ‘great king’s wife’ in Luwian—so we don’t know who the desperate queen was—Nefertiti, Meritaten or Ankhesenamen. Holmes has it as Meritaten, or Meryet-aten.
At the palace, the Egyptian ambassadors meet with chamberlain Hattusha-ziti, who is then sent by the Hittite King to check out the situation in Egypt before Prince Zannanza is offered. Intrigue, coups d’état and murder ensue.
This is Book 6 in the Lord Hani series, so the main characters have been established. Helpfully, the cast of characters and glossary comes at the beginning. There is adequate characterisation of the main players, the diplomatic team, and scene-setting is good in terms of descriptions of the palace, travel, etc.
I would have liked a fuller rendition of the negotiations with King Suppiluliuma. The discussions that led to this extraordinary betrothal must have been extraordinary. We should certainly have heard the letter of the queen: ‘…I would not wish to take one of my subjects as a husband. I am afraid.’
I like how Holmes uses the real Egyptian words for things. Interesting details about the Hittite culture are seen through Egyptian eyes—e.g. the diplomats are amazed that the Hittites have no gardens. The daily family lives of the Egyptians are well portrayed, and the family scenes allow for good pacing, contrasting the action of the political events. The dialogue is natural—difficult in historical fiction. The plot is interesting and throws up some fascinating twists.
A wonderful ancient-Egypt detective story.
I was given an ARC by the author.