This thriller, set in a steel city in the UK, treats fire almost as one of its characters. After the opening, in which we meet the main protagonist, a fireman, we are plunged into a world of burning, where the fire officer arrives at his next conflagration only to discover it’s his own home. He …
Continue reading Fires, by Tom Ward: #BookReview.
Inside Moves is a thriller with elements that occasionally lift it above the usual formulaic presentation of such books. Starting with a climatic event, the book moves back into the period prior to this to set the scene and explain how the climax came about. The general background to the story, its locations, mood and …
Continue reading Inside Moves, by Walter Danley: #BookReview.
Shadeward: Exoneration, by imaginative science fiction writer, Drew Wagar, is a continuation of the story begun in ‘Shadeward: Emanation’. If you haven’t read that book, I advise you to do so first, as it sets the scene and introduces the characters and the location whilst telling an engaging and compelling story. Continuing the saga, set …
Continue reading Shadeward: Exoneration, by Drew Wagar: #BookReview.
Set on an almost unrecognisable Earth in a distant future, this novel deals with the perils of unregulated capitalism as it is allowed run rampant through a society in which consumers are entirely secondary to profit (ring any bells?). Peopled by charismatic, strong, female characters and complex antagonists, the tale quickly engages the reader. Written …
Continue reading Sons of the Crystal Mind, by Andrew Wallace: #BookReview.
Storm of Attraction is a romantic thriller with an understandable bias in favour of female readers. After all, most romance readers are women. As a mature man, and the author of a romantic thriller, I’m able to enjoy the genre in a way a lot of men can’t imagine. Told very much from the woman’s …
Continue reading Storm of Attraction, by Lily Black: #BookReview.
Subtitled ‘180 Bizarre True Stories of How Dumb Humans Have Met Their Maker’, The Darwin Awards is not a book to read in one sitting, unless you wish to join award nominees by dying from laughing too loud and too long. There are some wonderful tales here; a few are apocryphal but most have been …
Continue reading The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt: #BookReview.
Joan Barbara Simon’s ‘Long Time Walk on Water’, is a phenomenon. There’s nothing ordinary, pedestrian, or conventional in this story of love, lust, prejudice, violence and parental brutality. An adherent of secular, as opposed to faith-based, philosophy, I’m already biased against the cruel, arbitrary, and unjust interpretation of so-called sacred myths that spread brutality and …
Continue reading Long Time Walk on Water, by Joan Barbara Simon: #BookReview.
This thriller is much more than that. Generally, thrillers are notorious for their concentration on story at the expense of character. In An American Cage, however, Galdi has broken that mould. He’s devised a tale that threads character throughout the story without adversely affecting pace and engagement. Written in present tense, and from an omniscient …
Continue reading An American Cage, by Ted Galdi: #BookReview.
I exercise a degree of caution when reviewing poetry, since I’m by no means a competent practitioner. Therefore my judgment is necessarily both subjective and lacking in personal experience. This is a pleasant read with a great deal of variety in the poems offered. There's rhyme and blank verse here. For me, the blank verse …
Continue reading Travelling Light, by Vickie Johnstone: #BookReview.
Genre can be the bane of the author’s life: most publishers insist on slotting fiction into predefined pigeonholes. But some books defy this process, either merging genres or crossing boundaries. Emanation is such a book. It is, essentially a science fiction book, but reads, certainly in the beginning, like a fantasy novel. It’s …
Continue reading Emanation: Shadeward Saga #1, by Drew Wagar: #BookReview.
[A review is a personal opinion. No reviewer can represent the view of anyone else. The best we can provide is an honest reaction to any given book.] This book is listed as ‘lesbian romance’. So, what attracted an agnostic, heterosexual man to delve into its pages? The description intrigued me to begin with. …
Continue reading The Purple Bowtie, by Lisabeth Reynolds: #BookReview.
This is a book I'd love everyone to read. Really. With its subtitle, ‘And How We Can Get There’, it offers hope for the future. Well written and, with forty pages of bibliography/research annotations, a book that has clearly been thoroughly researched. If you’ve reached that stage where you see a future for humanity in …
Continue reading Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman, Reviewed.
An offer and a request in one: Many of you have followed the progress of War Over Dust over the months it’s been under construction. I’m now looking for readers who’d be willing to post a review of War Over Dust in exchange for a free copy in ebook format (I can provide .mobi, .pdf, …
Continue reading Progress on the WIP: #SciFi in the Making.
This short piece of dark fantasy puts a different spin on a popular theme, and carries it through with some dark humour. It’s a compact story, told simply but with great effect. We know as much as we need to about the characters and watch as the tension slowly builds to the denouement, which contains …
Continue reading A Night Shift, by Joshua Scribner: #BookReview.
It’s dangerous to review a much-loved and respected classic; even more so for an author. So I face this review with some trepidation. The story is, of course, of its time; a period when readers had fewer distractions, were happy to read wordy stories, and were educated enough to understand the subtleties of language. I …
Continue reading The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe: #BookReview.
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Antidote to the Novel
Stuart Aken 