Cahan du Nahare is known as the forester – a humble man who can nonetheless navigate the dangerous Deepforest like no-one else. But once he was more. Once he was a warrior. Udinny serves the goddess of the lost, a goddess of the small and helpless. When she ventures into the Deepforest to find a missing child, Cahan will be her guide. But in a land at war, in a forest full of monsters – Cahan will need to choose between his past life and the one he leads now – and his choice will have consequences for his entire world. I loved both The Wounded Kingdom and The Tide Child trilogies, so I was excited when Gods of the Wyrdwood dropped through my letterbox with a satisfyingly solid thump. R J Barker’s latest is released this week and I’m pleased to confirm it is everything I have come to expect from the author, and more.  It’s clear that Cahan du Nahare is a man haunted by the ghosts of his past. Every action he takes is an attempt to run further away from who he once was. Cahan wants to live peacefully, under the radar of the authorities, but…

Please note, Bad Actors is the eighth book in the Slough House series. It is likely what follows, if you haven’t read what has come before, will contain some mild spoilers. Consider yourselves duly warned.  In MI5 a scandal is brewing and there are bad actors everywhere. A key member of a Downing Street think-tank has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, one-time First Desk of MI5’s Regent’s Park, is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back to Regent’s Park HQ itself, with its chief, Diana Taverner, as prime suspect. Meanwhile her Russian counterpart has unexpectedly shown up in London but has slipped under MI5’s radar. Over at Slough House, the home for demoted and embittered spies, the slow horses are doing what they do best: adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation. In a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing is the norm, bad actors are bending the rules for their own gain. If the slow horses want to change the script, they’ll need to get their own act together before the final curtain. I don’t get as much time as I would like to enjoy on-going series when it comes…

Please note, To Die in June is book six in an ongoing series. It’s possible this review may contain minor spoilers for those of you who haven’t read books one to five. Consider yourselves duly warned.  A woman enters a Glasgow police station to report her son missing, but no record can be found of the boy. When Detective Harry McCoy, seconded from the cop shop across town, discovers the family is part of the cultish Church of Christ’s Suffering, he suspects there is more to Michael’s disappearance than meets the eye. Meanwhile reports arrive of a string of poisonings of down-and-outs across the city. The dead are men who few barely notice, let alone care about – but, as McCoy is painfully aware, among this desperate community is his own father. Even as McCoy searches for the missing boy, he must conceal from his colleagues the real reason for his presence – to investigate corruption in the station. Some folk pray for justice. Detective Harry McCoy hasn’t got time to wait. Working on the assumption that each Harry McCoy novel is going to contain a month of the year in the title, with To Die In June we have…

An immortal Knight of the Round Table faces his greatest challenge yet—saving the politically polarized, rapidly warming world from itself—in this slyly funny contemporary take on Arthurian legend. Legends don’t always live up to reality. Being reborn as an immortal defender of the realm gets awfully tiring over the years—or at least that’s what Sir Kay’s thinking as he claws his way up from beneath the earth yet again. Kay once rode alongside his brother, King Arthur, as a Knight of the Round Table. Since then, he has fought at Hastings and at Waterloo and in both World Wars. But now he finds himself in a strange new world where oceans have risen, the army’s been privatized, and half of Britain’s been sold to foreign powers. The dragon that’s running amok—that he can handle. The rest? He’s not so sure. Mariam’s spent her life fighting what’s wrong with her country. But she’s just one ordinary person, up against a hopelessly broken system. So when she meets Kay, she dares to hope that the world has finally found the savior it needs. Yet as the two travel through this bizarre and dangerous land, they discover that a magical plot of apocalyptic…

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant. She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise. Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret. Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die. It’s been a few months since we last indulged in some old-school…

In a lonely cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow begins the last book he will ever write. It is the story of his childhood summer companions and the killer that stalked the small New England town. Of the body they found, and the horror of that discovery echoing down the decades. And of Sky, Wilder’s one-time best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and turned it into a lurid bestselling novel, Looking Glass Sound. But as Wilder writes, the lines between memory and fiction blur. He fears he’s losing his grip on reality when he finds notes hidden around the cottage written in Sky’s signature green ink. Catriona Ward’s new novel, Looking Glass Sound, is an exploration of love, loss, and trauma viewed through the eyes of a man revisiting his formative years.  Even as an adult, the still lurking pent-up frustrations of teenage angst make Wilder Harlow the most unreliable of narrators. His entire life has been shaped by the events during the summers of his youth, and his perspective is skewed at best. It would be easy to pity Wilder, but by turns, he is both the hero and then the villain of the piece. The…

Glasgow, 1933 Murder is nothing new in the Depression-era city, especially to war veterans Inspector Jimmy Dreghorn and his partner ‘Bonnie’ Archie McDaid. But the dead man found in a narrowboat on the Forth and Clyde Canal, executed with a single shot to the back of the head, is no ordinary killing. Violence usually erupts in the heat of the moment – the razor-gangs that stalk the streets settle scores with knives and fists. Firearms suggest something more sinister, especially when the killer strikes again. Meanwhile, other forces are stirring within the city. A suspected IRA cell is at large, embedded within the criminal gangs and attracting the ruthless attention of Special Branch agents from London. With political and sectarian tensions rising, and the body count mounting, Dreghorn and McDaid pursue an investigation into the dark heart of humanity – where one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, and noble ideals are swept away by bloody vengeance. Back in March 2021 I read Robbie Morrison’s first novel, Edge of the Grave. It’s a rather fine historical crime fiction set in 1930s Glasgow*. I’ve been waiting impatiently for its sequel, Cast A Cold Eye, to reach the top of my review…

INFINITY IS ONLY THE BEGINNING. The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds – except that they’re really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they’ll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life. Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth’s environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she’s walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of. And she needs to choose a side before it kills her. Hadiz Tambuwal knows our days are numbered. We’ve ravaged the planet without a second thought. Resources have been pillaged to the point of ecological catastrophe. Hadiz’s view of humanity is probably best described as dispassionate. That said she does want to try and save us, even when it looks like we’ve passed the tipping point. How best to do this? Well, it just so happens that Hadiz has stumbled upon the secret to interdimensional travel. If our Earth has depleted its resources beyond…

Please note, The Sinister Booksellers of Bath is a direct sequel to The Left Handed Booksellers of London. With that in mind it is entirely possible, if you’ve not read book one in this series, what follows might contain the odd spoiler or two. Consider yourself duly warned! There is often trouble of a mythical sort in Bath. The booksellers who police the Old World keep a careful watch there, particularly on the entity who inhabits the ancient hot spring. Yet this time it is not from Sulis Minerva that trouble starts. It comes from the discovery of a sorcerous map, leading left-handed bookseller Merlin into great danger. A desperate rescue is attempted by his sister the right-handed bookseller Vivien and their friend, art student Susan Arkshaw, who is still struggling to deal with her own recently discovered magical heritage. The map takes the trio to a place separated from this world, maintained by deadly sorcery performed by an Ancient Sovereign and guarded by monstrous living statues of Purbeck marble. But this is only the beginning, as the booksellers investigate centuries of disappearances and deaths and try to unravel the secrets of the murderous Lady of Stone, a serial killer…

When Samantha Ashlyn is forced to return to her home town to write an article on a series of drownings, she initially resists, finding disturbing similarities to her childhood experiences. However, once she starts looking into the assignment, she finds that things are not what they seem. An ancient evil is rising again, aided by what appears to be a centuries-old conspiracy to keep it hidden. With the help of a disgraced police diver, Sam races to stop the nightmare before more lives are lost. Not realising that her investigation has put herself and those she loves in terrible danger. I’ve not read any horror at all so far this year so it’s high time I correct that particular oversight. The best way to remedy the situation? The latest novel from Graeme Reynolds, he of werewolf classic High Moor. His latest release, Dark and Lonely Water appears at first glance to be just a creature feature. Good news friends, it is a creature feature. It is most definitely that, but also so much more.   Right from page one, the novel has a deliciously downbeat quality that I really enjoyed. All the characters are just a little bit broken. The plot…

Please note The Tyranny of Faith is the second book in The Empire of the Wolf trilogy. If you haven’t read The Justice of Kings then what follows will likely contain minor spoilers. Consider yourselves duly warned! A Justice’s work is never done. The Battle of Galen’s Vale is over, but the war for the Empire’s future has just begun. Concerned by rumors that the Magistratum’s authority is waning, Sir Konrad Vonvalt returns to Sova to find the capital city gripped by intrigue and whispers of rebellion. In the Senate, patricians speak openly against the Emperor, while fanatics preach holy vengeance on the streets. Yet facing down these threats to the throne will have to wait, for the Emperor’s grandson has been kidnapped – and Vonvalt is charged with rescuing the missing prince. His quest will lead him – and his allies Helena, Bressinger and Sir Radomir – to the southern frontier, where they will once again face the puritanical fury of Bartholomew Claver and his templar knights – and a dark power far more terrifying than they could have imagined. The Justice of Kings was a first-rate fantasy thriller and one of my favourite novels from 2022. Its sequel…

The near future is a world in which scientists and their AI got it wrong. Rising temperatures have caused fires that burned landmasses, and the ash from these fires block out the sun. The resulting cold is extreme, like a nuclear winter, and was a mass extinction event for human beings the world over. Electricity grids, communications and services all failed. Societies collapsed. Humanity is reduced to small groups of survivors, scraping by however they can. Resources are scarce, and bands of survivors resort to violence to obtain enough food and fuel to survive. A man and his family group have survived the cruel winter by hiding in a house in Surrey, but when a roaming gang starts to ravage the area, they are forced to run. As they flee to safety, the cohesion and tolerance that had kept them going for so long starts to fracture… It’s time once again to dip my toes into the waters of apocalyptic fiction. Regular visitors to the site will know I am obsessive when it comes to extinction-level events. I’m drawn to novels that describe our end. I can’t help myself. I find that not only does apocalyptic fiction offer an endlessly…

You are not welcome here, godkiller Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god. Now, she makes a living killing gods, and enjoys it. That is until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, has somehow bound himself to a young noble, and they are both on the run from unknown assassins. Joined by a disillusioned knight on a secret quest, they must travel to the ruined city of Blenraden, where the last of the wild gods reside, to each beg a favour. Pursued by demons, and in the midst of burgeoning civil war, they will all face a reckoning – something is rotting at the heart of their world, and only they can be the ones to stop it. Some fantasy for you all this week, the first book in a new series from a new author. Godkiller by Hannah Kaner is a tale of secrets, lies and troubled souls. Due to a traumatic childhood event, and the hard years that have followed, Kissen has closed herself off from the outside world. She has crafted a brittle, abrasive exterior.  She has been let down so many times before and steadfastly refuses…