The clever title for this ripper tale doesn’t make it clear who is the odd child out here; fifteen year old Noah Sadler, who has terminal cancer, or his mate Abdi Mahal, a Somali refugee in Britain and the one of the few non-white faces at his posh school. When Noah ends up in a […]
Latest Reviews
Silent Voices by Ann Cleeves
This comforting little winner is the fourth in Cleeves’ series featuring the formidable Vera Stanhope, whose sandals and terrible sense of dress hide a keen intelligence and understanding of humankind. The story is intriguing enough: Vera finds a social worker strangled in a steam room, but the story is less interesting that witnessing Vera cajole […]
The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan
Published in the U.S. under the title Charlotte and Emily (which begs the question-what about Anne?) this beautiful novel takes you inside the cold, damp but deeply imaginative life of the Bronte sisters. It’s a compelling read for Bronte fans, best undertaken just before a visit to the parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire where you can marvel […]
Z, a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler
Ah, what a novel. It brings Zelda alive, before and after her relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, through all the Gatsby-like days, their glorious happiness and their mad sadness, into her final days and what-a-waste end. She’s a fascinating person in her own right, so troubled but so alive, and she deserves to have a […]
Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber
Josie Buhrman’s father is murdered and her twin sister’s testimony is used to convict a teenage neighbour of the crime. Thirteen years later a true crime podcast, a la Serial and The Teacher’s Pet, questions whether the right person was convicted of the crime. This quite decent thriller explores the effect of the podcast from […]
Woman of the Dead by Bernard Aichner
”The first stage of grief is revenge” reads the header on this neat little thriller. Given that, the protagonist Blum is just the kind of wife her policeman husband needs when he is mown down by an unknown driver. Blum has serious form, having mercilessly dispatched her parents eight years earlier. Blum is tough and resourceful […]
The Life I left Behind by Colette McBeth
Pretty good, though a little hard to keep track of who’s who when the lives of two women are touched by same perpetrator. Eve is killed while investigating an earlier attack on Melody which left Melody in a coma and resulted in a wrongful conviction. Eve’s voice comes to us from beyond the grave and […]
How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister
A beautiful little incendiary of a book that lobs itself straight into the brain, and burns. Suspended high school teacher Anna Crawford’s life is never quite the same after she is falsely accused of involvement in a high school shooting. But then her life before wasn’t great either. The commentary that erupts unedited from her […]