Everyone is not as they seem in this fantasy novel, replete with war, witchcraft and secrets. Christophor Morden lives by night. His day-brother, Alexsander, knows only the sun. They are two souls in a single body, in a world where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun. Night-brother or day-sister, one never sees the light, the other knows nothing of the night. Early one evening, Christophor is roused by a call to the city prison. A prisoner has torn his eyes out and cannot say why. Yet worse: in the sockets that once held his eyes, teeth are growing. The police suspect the supernatural, so Christophor, a member of the king’s special inspectorate, is charged with finding the witch responsible. Night-by-night, Christophor’s investigation leads him ever further from home, toward a backwards village on the far edge of the kingdom. But the closer he gets to the truth, the more his day-brother’s actions frustrate him. Who is Alexsander protecting? What does he not want Christophor to discover? And all the while, an ancient and apocalyptic ritual creeps closer to completion… It’s the premise that is going to capture your attention initially when it comes to Equinox by…

Rumours of the Drowned Woman are rife. She hunts down wanted men but never collects on the bounty. Some say she can’t be killed, not in the usual ways. The Drowned Woman is looking for one man in particular: he killed her husband and stole her daughter. Her family has been wronged. There will be a reckoning. I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’ve really enjoyed this series. I’ve been suffering from the terrible/wonderful situation where I long to read the last book, but know I’m going to be disappointed that this has to end. Everything does, however, have to come to an end, and so with a heavy heart it’s onwards to the final part in The Walkin’ trilogy. The story picks up some time after the conclusion of book two, Your Servants and Your People. It follows another member of the McDermott family, Ryan. He has grown up in relative isolation with his mother. After years living on their small farm, events force Ryan out into the wild world where he has to confront the legacy of his family’s past. I liked Ryan immediately. Existing in that turbulent time of his teenage years, he is hopelessly…

Your Servants and Your People is a direct sequel to Your Brother’s Blood. With that in mind it is entirely possible that this review may contain some minor spoilers if you haven’t read book one in the series. Warning done, onwards… Seven years after Thomas returned as a Walkin’, the McDermott family are looking for a new life and Thomas has set his heart on starting a farmstead near the remote outpost of Fort Wilson. But the teachings of J.S. Barkley are not so easily forsaken – there are those who would see the sinners dead, and they are slowly closing in. Your Brother’s Blood, David Towsey’s début novel, was something of a revelation. I’ve read a fair number of zombie novels in my time, and it’s always a pleasure to discover a book that so successfully injects new life into the undead hordes. Pulling together elements of the traditional western and mashing it together with zombie horror, Towsey has created a unique and engrossing novel. I’m a great believer that you can’t beat a bit of zombie action. Turns out things can be even more entertaining when the undead aren’t focussed on brain munching. I’ve been looking forward to…

Thomas is thirty-two. He comes from the small town of Barkley. He has a wife there, Sarah, and a child, Mary; good solid names from the Good Book. And he is on his way home from the war, where he has been serving as a conscripted soldier. Thomas is also dead – he is one of the Walkin’. And Barkley does not suffer the wicked to live. I often hear the cry “Oh no, not another zombie novel”. Now I’ll be the first to admit that there has been a glut of books over the last couple of years featuring everyone’s favourite un-dead shufflers, but if you take a look around The Eloquent Page you’ll notice a lot of them are actually pretty damn good. I’ve read everything from historical zombie fiction (The Viking Dead), to novels that are something more akin to a ghost story (Handling The Undead).  All the zombie fiction that I’ve read has one thing in common, each new story attempts to add its own fresh perspective. Your Brother’s Blood, the debut novel from David Towsey, attempts to do exactly that and manages to pull it off with aplomb. Turning the zombie mythology we’re all familiar…