Category: Blog Tour

#BlogTour #BookReview #Ad Sepulchre Street by Martin Edwards

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Sepulchre StreetWelcome to the opening day of the blog tour for Sepulchre Street by Martin Edwards, which is published tomorrow, 11th May 2023. My thanks to Kathryn at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the post by my tour buddy for today, The Puzzle Doctor.

Sepulchre StreetAbout the Book

‘This is my challenge for you,’ the woman in white said. ‘I want you to solve my murder.’

London, 1930s: Rachel Savernake has been invited to a private view of an art exhibition at a fashionable gallery. The artist, Damaris Gethin, known as ‘the Queen of Surrealism’, is debuting a show featuring live models pretending to be waxworks of famous killers. Before her welcoming speech, Damaris asks a haunting favour of the amateur sleuth: she wants Rachel to solve her murder. As Damaris takes to a stage set with a guillotine, the lights go out. There is a cry and the blade falls. Damaris has executed herself.

While Rachel questions why Damaris would take her own life – and just what she meant by ‘solve my murder’ – fellow party guest Jacob Flint is chasing a lead on a glamorous socialite with a sordid background. As their paths merge, this case of false identities, blackmail, and fedora-adorned doppelgängers, will descend upon a grand home on Sepulchre Street, where nothing – and no one – is quite what it seems.

Format: eARC (400 pages)             Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 11th May 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Find Sepulchre Street on Goodreads

Purchase links
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Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Sepulchre Street is the fourth in the author’s historical crime series featuring Rachel Savernake. It’s a series I only discovered when I read the previous book, Blackstone Fell.

Rachel Savernake is not so much a private detective as a personal detective pursuing investigations that spark her interest. As she herself admits, ‘It’s the thrill of the chase. I yearn for it like an addict craves the needle’ and her favourite pastime is ‘Asking  what if?’ But it’s not just any old crime that attracts her: her taste is for the ‘exotic’.

The author teases us by continuing to hold back information about Rachel’s past growing up on the remote island of Gaunt.  (Some readers may find this frustrating but I find it tantalising.) What we do know is that she is a very wealthy young woman. However, her early life remains shrouded in mystery. She zealously guards her privacy and is a formidable adversary.  Beware what she carries in that glittery evening bag! She’s incredibly well read, resourceful and imperturbable in even the most fraught situations, although, at times, her lack of fear appears to some to verge on recklessness. In fact, she’s just supremely confident she’ll be able to find a way out of any situation.

The members of Rachel’s household – Martha Trueman, Martha’s brother Clifford, and Clifford’s wife Hetty – are devoted to her. Although performing the role of servants – housekeeper, cook and chauffeur come bodyguard – it’s clear they’re the closest Rachel has to a family and may know more than they’re letting on about her past. Rachel is particularly good at utilising their various talents as part of her investigations whether that’s gathering gossip or carrying out a little subterfuge. Crime reporter, Jacob Flint, is once again involved in the story. It’s fairly obvious he has a huge crush on Rachel. He himself admits that from the moment of their first encounter she has fascinated him ‘to the point of obsession’.

The author describes Sepulchre Street as ‘as much a thriller as a detective story’ and the story certainly involves some dramatic scenes, often involving poor Jacob who seems to make a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s also a returning character who’s not your common or garden villain but performs the role of shady behind-the-scenes manipulator.

Rachel’s attempts to discover the reason behind the grisly death of Damaris Gethin, carried out by Damaris’s own hand, involve a number of other characters and plot lines which attract the spotlight for much of the book. Some of these plot lines incorporate quite contemporary themes. Of course, Rachel, who possesses observational and deductive skills to rival Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the answer to the mystery well before everyone else, including, I suspect, most readers. In fact her methodology – ‘I simply follow an idea until I find something that proves that I’m wrong’ – has a distinctly Holmesian flavour.

Sepulchre Street will appeal to fans of classic crime fiction (think Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers) and those who enjoy the challenge of unravelling an intricate plot. A neat touch is the addition of a ‘cluefinder’ at the end of the book (apparently all the fashion during the ‘Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars) in which the author identifies all the clues you very likely missed.

In three words: Intriguing, clever, entertaining

Try something similar: A Gift of Poison by Bella Ellis

Martin EdwardsAbout the Author

Martin Edwards has won the Edgar, Agatha, H. R. F. Keating, Macavity, Poirot and Dagger awards as well as being shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize.  He is President of the Detection Club, a former Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and consultant to the British Library’s bestselling crime classics series.

In 2020 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to crime fiction.

Connect with Martin
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#BlogTour #BookReview #Ad No Place To Hide by JS Monroe

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BLOG TOUR BANNER no place to hideWelcome to the final day of the blog tour for No Place To Hide by JS Monroe. My thanks to Sophie at Ransom PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Head of Zeus for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the review by my tour buddy for today, Bookstagrammer wendyreadsbooks.

No Place To HideAbout the Book

You can shut the doors.

Adam lives a picture-perfect life: happy marriage, two young children, and a flourishing career as a doctor. But Adam also lives with a secret. Hospital CCTV, strangers’ mobile phones, city traffic cameras – he is convinced that they are watching him, recording his every move. All because of something terrible that happened at a drunken party when he was a student.

You can close the blinds.

Only two other people knew what happened that night. Two people he’s long left behind. Until one of them, Clio – Adam’s great unrequited love – turns up on his doorstep, and reignites a sinister pact twenty-four years in the making…

But once it begins, there’ll be no place to hide.

Format: eARC (384 pages)              Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 13th April 2023 Genre: Thriller

Find No Place To Hide on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Hive | Amazon UK
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Inspired by Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus, No Place to Hide explores the consequences of a bargain entered into with a fellow student many years before which turns out to be akin to a pact with the Devil of Marlowe’s play. Okay, so Adam doesn’t quite get twenty four years of ‘absolute knowledge and infinite power’ in exchange for his soul but he does get a successful career as a consultant paediatrician, untarnished by any whiff of scandal associated with the tragic event that occurred at a party whilst he was a medical student. Until, that it is, the person he entered into the agreement with decides it’s time to claim his prize.

Alternating between Adam’s time at college in 1998 and the present day, we get a keen sense of his increasing paranoia as he begins to believe he is being secretly filmed, and not just by someone with a camera, but by all the surveillence technology we see (or perhaps don’t see) around us. It puts a strain on his marriage, especially when the intrusion comes a little too close to home, threatening the safety of his young family as well as his career.

Having commenced with a theatrical performance – Adam’s starring role in Doctor Faustus – it’s fitting that the book’s closing scenes are full of melodrama. I liked how the author keeps Adam, and through him the reader, constantly unsure about who to trust. For instance, is Clio, the object of Adam’s unconsummated student lust, a willing accessory or an innocent pawn in a devilish game? This is particularly cleverly done when it comes to Ji, Adam’s friend from university who has progressed from video game addict to technology supremo.

The book’s equivalent of Hell is the so-called ‘dark web’ which turns out to be a very dark place indeed, the stuff of nightmares in fact. Adam’s adversary is not perhaps Marlowe’s Devil, the incarnation of pure evil, but a manipulative, damaged individual with demons of his own, and a very particular motive for tormenting Adam.

No Place to Hide is a skilfully crafted, thought-provoking thriller that is also an unsettling insight into the extent to which technology, and surveillence technology in particular, has become part of our everyday lives and the capacity for its misuse. Maybe you haven’t noticed how many security cameras there are in your high street or local shopping centre? You probably will after reading this.

In three words: Compelling, intense, dark

J S MonroeAbout the Author

JS Monroe read English at Cambridge, worked as a foreign correspondent in Delhi, and was Weekend editor of the Daily Telegraph in London before becoming a full-time writer. His psychological thriller, Find Me, became a bestseller in 2017, and has since been translated into 14 languages. Writing under the name Jon Stock, he is also the author of five spy thrillers. He is currently the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford, and lives in Wiltshire wirh his wife, Hilary Stock, a fine art photographer. They have three children.

Connect with J. S. Monroe
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