Colin Garrow's Blog, page 5
February 23, 2025
‘The House of Light and Shadows’ by Lauren Westwood
Welcome to my spot on the blog tour for The House of Light and Shadows, via Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources. Blurb When Kate goes to look after her estranged sister’s children in their creepy old house, she takes a photo of what seems to be a ghost. Frightened yet intrigued, Kate undertakes to uncover…
February 19, 2025
‘Dead Lions’ by Mick Herron
My Review (5 stars out of 5) Slough House boss Jackson Lamb travels to Oxford to check what a dead body might be doing on a bus. When the corpse turns out to be former spy Dickie Bow, it sets Lamb wondering if the apparently assassinated spook left some sort of message, something that might…
February 17, 2025
‘The Woven Lie’ by Liz Harris
Welcome to my stop on the Blog Tour for The Woven Lie, via Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources Blurb When Violet Hammond sees an advertisement for a manager to run a museum in a village outside Bury St Edmunds, she jumps at the chance of a job that sounds both different and a challenge. For…
February 16, 2025
‘Killing Rommel’ by Steven Pressfield
My Review (5 stars out of 5) (Audiobook) In 1942, Hitler’s armies are sweeping across Europe. In North Africa, Rommel has beaten back the British Eighth Army and stands ready to overrun Egypt, Suez, and the oil fields of the Middle East. The British come up with a desperate plan to infiltrate enemy lines and…
February 1, 2025
‘Old Rage’ by Sheila Hancock
My Review (5 stars out of 5) (Audiobook) Actor and writer Sheila Hancock writes about her life from (and before) 2016, recalling incidents from her childhood, her long acting career and her marriage to actor John Thaw. But she also talks a lot of about politics, Covid, lockdown, racism and the difficulties of getting old.…
January 29, 2025
‘Chasing Her Shadow’ by Joy Mutter
My Review (5 stars out of 5) Actor Wilhelm Schreiber lives in London with his Italian wife and their sons. But the growing rivalry between siblings Wolfgang and Conrad, soon takes a dangerous turn. I’ve read most of this author’s books so am familiar with her penchant for those classic literary themes, murder and lust.…
January 19, 2025
‘Get Carter’ by Ted Lewis
My Review (5 stars out of 5) Back home for his brother’s funeral, Jack Carter wants to know what happened. Told that Frank was found dead and drunk in a car at the bottom of a cliff, mob-enforcer Jack knows his sibling was no great drinker. Instructed by his gangster bosses Gerald and Les to…
‘The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken’
My Review (5 stars out of 5) Most of us, at some point in our lives, either ourselves or one of our loved ones, will go through the experience of having to appear in a criminal courtroom. Written anonymously by a barrister, this book brings to light some of the cases where justice doesn’t work…
January 18, 2025
Giving up the Ghost – the Agony of an Unfinished Novel
Like many writers, I’m a big fan of Stephen King, and have taken on board most of his advice about storytelling, character development and the routine of writing. However, his suggestion that ‘Stopping a piece of writing just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea,’ doesn’t always work for me. Having…
December 29, 2024
‘Finders Keepers’ by Stephen King
My Review (5 stars out of 5) Obsessed with the books of author John Rothstein, Morris Bellamy breaks into the writer’s house with a view to stealing a stash of notebooks that could contain an as-yet unpublished novel. Years later, as Bellamy is coming to the end of a jail sentence, schoolboy Pete Saubers discovers…
