Veronika Jordan's Blog, page 37

The Croaking Raven by Guy Hale Cover Reveal

DC Toby Marlowe has just landed his dream posting but the quiet streets of Shakespeare’s Stratford are about to suffer a reign of terror.

A name from the past has returned, intent on revenge. A series of murders go unsolved but Toby realises that the killer seems to be following the plot of Hamlet.

Can Toby and his boss, DS Fred Williams, find the killer before all the actors at the RSC are dead?

The Croaking Raven doth bellow for revenge.

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Island in the Sun by Monica Carly

An absorbing account of a young English girl experiencing the joys and facing the
challenges of her unique pathway through adolescence, against the backdrop of an
island people intent on breaking away from their mother country and taking up an
independent role in the world.

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Many thanks to @ZooloosBT for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

Monica Carly was born in Peterborough in 1936 and spent her early years living through the Second World War with all its dramas and privations. At the age of 12 she moved with her family to Kingston, Jamaica, the next 6 years being rich in a wide variety of sights, tastes and experiences, including surviving a devastating hurricane.

Back in England she gained a B.A. Honours degree at Bristol University and taught English and French at secondary level before raising her family. She has always loved writing and has experimented in many genres such as short stories, children’s stories and poetry. More recently she has written two novels, and at the age of 87 has produced a memoir of her life in Jamaica.

Book Links
Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198389047-island-in-the-sun
Buy Links – https://mybook.to/islandsun-zbt

What We Did In The Storm by Tina Baker

Everyone brings their secrets to the island…

On the beautiful and windswept island of Tresco, two worlds live side by side. The wealthy visitors come by helicopter to stay at their lavish time-share properties. The estate staff travel by boat, and work all hours to keep them happy, to keep the money flowing in. But while the blue skies and savage waves make the island seem a wild paradise, under the surface the inhabitants are concealing more than they dare reveal. The truths about their marriages, their love affairs, and what they do in the darkness while their neighbours are sleeping.

As black clouds come rolling in and a storm hits the island, truths and rumours begin to tumble out, wreaking terrible damage. In the midst of the tempest, two women are attacked and one goes missing. The secrets of this fragile community can no longer be hidden if it hopes to survive. The islanders must finally reveal what they did in the storm, no matter the cost.

From the #1 bestselling author of Call Me Mummy comes a dark and luscious thriller, perfect for readers of Harriet Tyce, Amanda Jennings and Louise Candlish.

My Review

What We Did In The Storm is typical Tina style, full of dreadful, dysfunctional characters, but we can’t help loving them (well some of them) anyway. I always thought the Scilly Isles was a quiet, peaceful place until I read this book!

And there are a lot of characters – I still don’t know who Fiona is – but I soon got to know the rest. We have Hannah the sexy barmaid, who works for Alison and Bobby in the local (and only) pub on the island of Tresco. Fifty-plus Beatrice who is a bit like Margot from The Good Life (if Margot was permanently bladdered to use Ted’s expression), her son Kit who falls in love with Hannah, but obviously Bea doesn’t think she’s good enough and Charlotte, who is Beatrice’s Instagram-obsessed, posy, pouty goddaughter and is after Kit. Beatrice approves. Of course she does.

Then we have Sam and his wife Christie, who is convinced that Sam was having it away with Hannah, Thor (real name Alec) who’s a total weirdo, his gossipy cousin nurse Kelly from St Mary’s (or is she his aunt?), husband and wife John and Mary-Ann (another weird lot) and a host of other more minor characters. Are you keeping up?

Oh and I mustn’t forget Primrose, Beatrice’s dog: ‘….some sort of chihuahua, crossed with a gremlin and possibly a feather duster…..how she (Beatrice) adores the dog. She always wanted a daughter.’

There are basically two timelines – before the storm and after the storm. The story opens with Ted the boatman seeing two women on the cliffs, who look like they are dancing or bladdered, but when he looks again, there is only one up there. So who went missing and what happened to her?

To read this with my online book club, and Tina accompanying us, was the perfect way to basically digest the story in ten ‘staves’. If I had the whole book I would have devoured it in one go. It’s clever, hilarious at times, dark and so well written – I can’t wait for the next one.

Many thanks to The Pigeonhole, the author and my fellow Pigeons for making this such an enjoyable read. 

About the Author

Tina Baker, the daughter of a window cleaner and fairground traveller, worked as a journalist and broadcaster for thirty years and is probably best known as a television critic for the BBC and GMTV. After so many hours watching soaps gave her a widescreen bum, she got off it and won Celebrity Fit Club. She now avoids writing-induced DVT by working as a Fitness Instructor.

Call Me Mummy was Tina’s first novel, inspired by her own unsuccessful attempts to become a mother. Despite the grief of that, she’s not stolen a child – so far. But she does rescue cats, whether they want to be rescued or not. What We Did In The Storm is her fourth novel.

Team Olaf To The Rescue by Rachel Flower and Uncle Julian – Pets As Therapy

This is a ‘tail’ by Olaf, the fox red Labrador therapy dog, who visits schools and hospitals in Gloucestershire.

This story (written in rhyme), describes Olaf’s classroom adventures, particularly when Christmas celebrations are at risk due to a kitchen breakdown.

Happily, Olaf and his band of merry canine friends manage to save the day and give the children a party they will never forget. The book includes activities and uses Makaton sign language symbols to make it accessible to a wide range of readers.

Target audience – children and dog lovers of any age. Olaf gives all book proceeds to the Pets As Therapy charity.

My Thoughts

Last Saturday I went with my son to take my two youngest granddaughters out for the day. While travelling on the train from Hayes to Beckenham, we started reading Team Olaf To the Rescue. As Clara is only five and Rosa is two, I had to read it aloud to them. Clara managed a few words using the pictures and Makaton symbols – words like dog, Christmas, school, play, sausages etc. She is learning phonics at school which also helped her to sound out some of the words.

We continued over lunch in Wimpy (yes there is one in Beckenham – Cheltenham branch is long gone) – and now we had a table, we could do some of the fun activities like the word search, join the dots, matching words to pictures and the ‘find your route puzzle’. No, I couldn’t do the latter either without referring to the answers. We still have to colour in the pictures – another great activity for my next visit.

Team Olaf To the Rescue is a lovely, big, shiny-covered book that children will adore. Lots of pictures, a sweet story and plenty of puzzles and colouring in. The dogs are so cute – my favourite is Elfin Meelo – probably because he’s a terrier – I’m guessing it’s a ‘he’. Clara loved Cosmic Cooper best. I think it’s the name.

Highly recommended as an educational book for children, but also one that draws attention to a very important charity.

About Pets As Therapy

PAT is a national charity that enhances the health and wellbeing of thousands of people in communities across the UK. They strive to ensure that everyone, no matter their circumstances, has access to the companionship of an animal.

Volunteers and their temperament-assessed pets visit establishments such as care homes, hospitals, hospices, schools and prisons, and bring smiles to many faces. People of all ages get the chance to chat to someone and stroke a friendly cat or dog.

Buy Links
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£8.99

Broken Shadows by Sorrel Pitts

‘Looking back, Dad just didn’t act like a man who had killed his son. Every time I come back to it, I remember his face that day we came home and Mum had asked where Callum was, and there was nothing there but true concern, you know, at that moment…’

In 1994, eleven-year-old Callum was abducted from his Wiltshire village. His body was found six months later by his older brother, Tom, near a Neolithic henge called the Shadowing Stones.

It was the first in a series of events that would destroy Tom’s family; the boys’ father was a suspect but never charged, and their mother committed suicide a year later. Convinced his father was responsible for his brother’s death, Tom fled to Australia to start a new life. 

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Now, almost three decades later, Tom learns that his father is dying of cancer. Knowing this may be his last chance to uncover the truth, Tom returns to England. But when childhood acquaintance, Anna, forms a bond with Tom, old feelings are stirred. As he’s reluctantly drawn closer to both Anna and his father, Tom is confronted with a series of shocking twists and revelations that will change his life forever.

Powerful, gripping and deeply moving, Broken Shadows showcases the talent of novelist Sorrel Pitts. Sir Michael Parkinson described her debut novel The River Woman as ‘a fascinating story written by a very promising writer.’ With Broken Shadows, she has fulfilled that promise. In the vein of Donna Tart and Helen Dunmore, her novel is a story of love and betrayal that will haunt the reader long after turning the final page.

My Review

This turned out to be very different from what I expected. The ending was a total revelation. How it started and how it finished was almost like two different books.

We begin with Tom returning to England for the first time since he was 17. Following the horrific murder of his 11-year-old brother Callum, and the suicide of his mother shortly afterwards, he flees to Australia, where he marries Stella and has four children. He also runs a successful business.

He felt at the time that he had to leave because he believed that his father Jim may have killed Callum. So when he gets a call that his father is dying of cancer, he knows he must come home and sort things out. But confronted with a frail, dying old man, he is no longer sure about his suspicions. He is determined to discover what really happened.

In the meantime, he meets Anna, an old childhood acquaintance, and they rekindle their friendship. His relationship with Stella is in flux and Anna’s relationship with her partner Kerem in Istanbul where she has lived and worked for the past six years, is also in trouble. She returned to England to have a hysterectomy and Kerem wants children.

At two points in the book, we visit the Neolithic henge called the Shadowing Stones. It was near here that fourteen-year-old Tom discovered his brother’s body. It is described in horrific detail.

There are also other threads that eventually come together. There is Anna’s sister Isabel and her family, Jim’s time in Ireland and why he left and never went back, and of course the main premise of the book – who killed Callum?

It’s a marvellous book with themes I wasn’t expecting. The last few chapters were totally engrossing, emotional and sad. Highly recommended if you are looking for an intelligent read that questions assumptions.

Many thanks to Grace Pilkington Publicity @GracePublicity for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

Sorrel Pitts grew up in the ancient English landscape of Wiltshire, which is a strong presence in her writing. She worked as a magazine editor before moving overseas to teach English in Turkey and Spain. On her return to the UK she became Commissioning Editor for Macmillan Publishers and Editorial Manager for Oxford University Press. She is now living back in Wiltshire and is a freelance editor and writer.

Sorrel’s debut novel The River Woman was published in September 2011 by Indigo Dreams
Press.

Published by Bloodhound Books
EBOOK AND PAPERBACK
Published 6 February 2024
ISBN: (paperback) 978-1-916978-25-6
(e-book) 978-1-504093-59-0
Extent: 360 pages

The Au Pair by Jane Renshaw

The Davidsons seem like a normal family. But they do have one little secret…

American student Alice Snyder was excited to be spending the summer in Scotland, working as an au pair for the Davidson family at their remote lodge. But one month after she arrived, Alice disappeared without trace.

Now the new au pair, Melanie, has arrived – and soon notices that the Davidsons are a bit odd. There’s the strange comings and goings at night, the creepy paying guests, and sinister uncle Gray who makes her flesh crawl.

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And then there’s the worrying scratch marks on the floor of the au pair’s bedroom.

Did Alice try to barricade herself in?
What could she have been so afraid of?
Are the Davidsons somehow linked to her disappearance?
And is Melanie herself now in danger?

As she desperately tries to find out what happened to Alice, Melanie begins to understand that this old house harbours a truly horrifying secret. Alice was its last victim, but she might be its next…

My Review

What a suspenseful read! Poor Alice. So innocent and trusting and the two youngest girls in her charge, Tess and Isabel, adore her. Not so much 16-year-old Christina, but then she’s a teenager and doesn’t need a nanny, especially one only two years older than her.

Alice lives with her mum and dad in the US, but runs away to take up a post as an au pair in a remote Scottish manor house – Scallon Lodge. It’s in a state of disrepair, but that’s because the Davidsons’ business went bust and they can’t afford to do it up. As well as Ken and Caro, there’s Ken’s dodgy brother Gray and the three girls. Alice initially thinks they are all cool and wonderful, even Gray, and the younger girls are a delight.

Then Alice disappears, her clothes found by the sea, and the police believe she got into trouble while swimming and drowned. But Alice could barely swim and would NEVER have gone into the water by herself. I swim 3-4 times a week and I would never swim alone in the rough seas. Or anywhere remote by myself.

Almost immediately after Alice’s disappearance, a new au pair arrives. Melanie AKA ‘Donna’ is a lot older than Alice, and shall we just say, she’s streetwise. She wasn’t exactly an angel in her youth, but she’s turned her life around. She’s never worked as an au pair though, but hopefully she’ll get away with it, because she’s determined to find out what happened to Alice. And she’s not fooled by Ken or Caro of even creepy Gray. He won’t pull the wool over her eyes like he did Alice. And then there’s the so-called ‘paying guests’. What are they really up to?

What happened to Alice and were the Davidsons involved? And is Melanie/Donna herself now in danger? She can take care of herself, but how far would these people be prepared to go to hide their dirty little secrets?

The Au Pair is full of twists and surprises – the biggest is revealed fairly early on – and would make a fantastic holiday read. Just one word of advice. If you plan to take up a post as an au pair, make sure you check out the references for your employers. But then if Alice had done so, this book wouldn’t have been any fun.

Many thanks to @ZooloosBT for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the Author

As a child, Jane spent a lot of time in elaborate Lego worlds populated by tiny plastic animals and people. Crime levels were high, especially after the Dragon brothers set themselves up as vets and started murdering the animals in their ‘care’. (They got away with it by propping the victims up with Plasticine and pretending they were still alive…) As an adult, she is still playing in imaginary worlds and putting her characters through hell – but now she can call it ‘writing’ and convince herself that she is doing something sensible. In real life, she has a PhD in genetics and copy-edits
scientific and medical journals.

Jane’s links
Website: https://www.janerenshaw.co.uk/
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/janerenshawauthor/
Twitter : https://twitter.com/JaneRenshaw10

Book Links
Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204842288-the-au-pair
Buy Link – https://mybook.to/theaupair-zbt

17 Alma Road by Ian Gouge Publication Day

A house filled with history and secrets is more than mere bricks and mortar; not only a mirror on the past, it can also be a window to the future.

“masterful..soul-searching. I would have liked to live next door to Owen and Maddie; I feel we would have been friends” – Siobhan Gifford

“a dextrously woven story of how the complexities of any given life remain with us, and remain too within the bricks and mortar that bore witness” – Jonty Pennington-Twist

”a beautifully crafted story” – Janet Burl

Publication Day: 17th February 
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: Coverstory Books

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Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose.

The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it.

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But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant.

DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career. But Ava is not the sort of person who will step back and let someone else take charge when children like her are dying. She uses all her unusual skills and deep local knowledge to try to track down the serial killer in her community.

My Review

Omg! Omg! Omg! What a stunning debut novel! I loved this so much.

We have two perfect protagonists – 13-year-old Ava who has an unusual hobby, and investigating police officer DI Seth Delahaye. Ava goes out in the middle of the night, to look at the roadkill she keeps in her forest ‘lab’ to work out the rate at which they decompose and why. A future star of Silent Witness maybe? One night though, she finds more than she bargained for.

Delahaye is involved in the search for missing teenager Mickey Grant. He’s going to need help from the community – he only recently arrived from the Met – and Ava has the local knowledge and her unusual skills. But no-one will believe a child when she delivers her inside information, so she puts on an adult voice to call the police. Because she knows where the body is.

Her best friend is John – a bit older than her, and goes to a different school. They have a ‘War Room’ at his granddad’s house where they draw maps and plans and look at evidence. Because Mickey is only the first to be taken and they believe they can help.

Eva knows far more than her peers – which is one of the reasons she is bullied at school – including stuff about child killers, cannibals and lycanthropes. She knows that werewolves don’t actually exist, but there have been killers in the past who really believed that they turned into wolves at the full moon. It’s called ‘clinical lycanthropy’. Delahaye respects Ava’s knowledge and is prepared to investigate this phenomena, but then he has seen the bite marks on the bodies.

As well as Ava, we ‘meet’ the rest of her family – sisters Veronica and Rita, their awful mum Colleen, mum’s dodgy boyfriend Trevor (let me know if he does anything bad, Delahaye tells Ava), the kids at school and a host of others including Delahaye’s colleagues.

This is one of my favourite books of the year so far, and I am wondering if it’s going to be the first in a series.

Many thanks to @Tr4cyF3nt0n for inviting me to be part of the #CompulsiveReaders #blogtour 

About the Author

Marie Tierney lives in The Fens with her husband, son and two cats.

Artificial Wisdom by Thomas R. Weaver

SALVATION HAS A PRICE.

An enthralling murder mystery with a vividly realised future world, forcing readers to grapple hard hitting questions about the climate crisis, our relationship with Artificial Intelligence and the price we would be willing to pay, as a species, to be saved. Perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Neal Stephenson, Philip K Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson and RR Haywood.

It’s 2050, a decade after a heatwave that killed four hundred million across the Persian Gulf, including journalist Marcus Tully’s wife. Now he must uncover the truth: was the disaster natural? Or is the weather now a weapon of genocide?

A whistleblower pulls Tully into a murder investigation at the centre of an election battle for a global dictator, with a mandate to prevent a climate apocalypse. A former US President campaigns against the first AI politician of the position, but someone is trying to sway the outcome.

Tully must convince the world to face the truth and make hard choices about the future of the species. But will humanity ultimately choose salvation over freedom, whatever the cost?

Genre: Crime | Thriller | Mystery
Pages: 386
Publisher: Chainmaker Press

My Review

I’m a huge fan of crime fiction and mysteries, but I don’t usually read techno thrillers. However, this one revolves around the climate crisis and what might happen if we don’t tackle it now. And that is something I am very interested in.

I don’t know anything about AI though and I found some of the concepts like ‘egospace’ and NR (Neuro Reality) a bit beyond me. Someone I was chatting to in our readalong tried to explain that it’s like a TV series I’d never heard of and a bit like those virtual reality headsets. Well, I’m still none the wiser, but I think I get the egospace. It’s your own personal space, like the desktop on your computer before you go into the apps.

My egospace would take me back to my childhood. I would be at Bristol Zoo with my brother and my late father. We went every year. Amongst my fondest memories. Occasionally it would change and I would be with my husband walking our beloved Jack Russell, Pancake, who crossed the rainbow bridge in September 2021 aged almost 17.

But back to the plot. Basically, it’s 2050 and a heatwave has killed four hundred million people across the Persian Gulf. Journalist Marcus Tully believes that it wasn’t inevitable – it was ‘pushed’ there from the US – and he has a vested interest in uncovering the truth. His wife Zainab died, carrying their unborn child. Were scientists and politicians using the weather as a weapon of mass destruction?

By now, the world will be governed by a single dictatorship, with just one leader. But who will it be? There are two candidates left from the original twenty – the former US president Lawrence G. Lockwood and Soloman, a highly sophisticated ‘artilect’, the first AI politician in the world. Which one would you trust? Imagine Lockwood was Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, but your only other choice is basically a machine, a robot to you and me, however cleverly put together.

I’d love to say this is total fiction, but it could really happen if we don’t address the climate crisis now. Instead of nations and religions fighting against each other, we all need to work together. But do we need a single dictator in charge of our salvation, or is that too high a price to pay? I’m not sure any price is too high if the alternative is the end of our species. Or is it?

For fans of technology, there’s a lot to get excited about, but whether they happen or not, they are just a distraction. The real crux of the story is the climate crisis. Followed by Artificial Intelligence (because it does have a good side), and the loss of our freedoms (will they be taken away if we keep making bad decisions). This book will certainly make you think.

Many thanks to @lovebookstours for inviting me to be part of the readalong.

About the Author

“I write stories about tomorrow to help make sense of today. My debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, launches in the UK in October 2023. Aside from writing, I’m a tech entrepreneur. My last startup was acquired by Just Eat Takeaway; my new one is still in stealth but backed by a major Silicon Valley tech accelerator.”

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Scorpion by Phil Gilvin Cover Reveal

War is coming, a war that could mean the end of the republic.

But how can you do anything about it when you’re a captive, slaving in the guts of a brutal patrol ship.

Genre: Sci-fi / YA / Dystopian

Clara Perdue isn’t sure why she took Jack Pike’s place at the slave market. She isn’t sure why she saved another girl and volunteered for the Scorpion, a Coastforce ship that plies the Channel, murdering refugees and raiding the villages along the coast. But when she meets Xavi, another slave, she feels emotions she’s never felt before.

Meanwhile, Jack Pike has taken Clara’s parents to safety, and as he tries to track her down he finds an unexpected ally. But how can they find Clara?

Can Clara escape somehow? And, even if she can, how can she stop the war?

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