Category: Blog Tour

Blog Tour/Review: Illusion by Stephanie Elmas

whatcathyreadnext2 Comments

Illusion blog tour banner

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Illusion by Stephanie Elmas. I really enjoyed this accomplished historical mystery and you can read my review of Illusion below.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Illusion 2About the Book

London, 1873. Returning home from his travels with a stowaway named Kayan, Walter Balanchine is noted for the charms, potions and locket hanging from his neck. Finding his friend Tom Winter’s mother unwell, he gives her a potion he learned to brew in the Far East. Lucid and free from pain, the old woman remembers something about Walter’s mother. Walter is intrigued, for he has never known his family or even his own name – he christened himself upon leaving the workhouse.

Word soon spreads of his healing and magical abilities and he becomes a sought after party performer. During one of Walter’s parties, Tom is approached by Tamara Huntington, who reveals she is being forced to marry a man she does not love. Will he and Walter come to her rescue? With secrets beginning to emerge, Walter finds his mother may be a lot closer to home than he realised…

Format: ebook (285 pp.)                     Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 21st May 2017                   Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Illusion on Goodreads

 

My Review

‘Walter Balanchine was still the most unusual looking individual that most people had ever seen.’

The author has created a wonderful character in Walter Balanchine. He’s like a young Sherlock Holmes with his acute powers of observation, mastery of disguise and gift for turning up at exactly the right moment – but with a touch of the exotic East thrown in.  He’s a magician as well but is it ‘real’ magic or merely clever illusion? As he says himself: “Magic? There’s no such thing. Not in the literal sense anyway. Only illusion, my friend.”  Walter certainly knows how to stage tricks that we know are just sleight of hand or intricately worked out illusions. But some of the other things he’s able to do? Well, the novel cleverly leaves it to the reader to decide if his powers extend to the supernatural.

I also loved the other main characters – Tom, Tamara and the saintly Sally – and the author has created a formidable “boo hiss” villain in Cecil Hearst. The novel’s plot and style expertly capture the spirit of a Victorian mystery making this reader think of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White with a touch of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight. As well as the central plot concerning Tom and Walter’s attempts to rescue Tamara, there are other mysteries to be unravelled, including the truth about Walter’s parentage.

The author certainly captures the atmosphere of Victorian London.

‘They made their way to Limehouse, a quarter with streets so narrow that the houses seemed almost to touch in the middle. It was snowing now. A confetti of snowflakes filtered through between the narrow gaps in the gables above and floated, innocent and feathery, into the grime beneath their feet….Soon they fell upon Narrow Street, where chandlers sold their wares and the smell of spices and chops and old barnacled ropes filled the air.’  

And there’s a suitably Gothic feel when the action moves to Cecil’s country seat. Definitely a touch of The Fall of the House of Usher there!

I really enjoyed Illusion with its engaging mix of atmospheric period setting, intricate mystery and sprinkling of magic.  I would love to read more from this author in the future.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Endeavour Press, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

In three words: Atmospheric, mystery, lively

Try something similar…The Thirteenth Gate by Kat Ross (click here to read my review)

Stephanie Elmas 2About the Author

Stephanie Elmas was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Czech mother but spent most of her childhood in Bristol. She studied English at university in London. Having worked as a head hunter, she taught English in Japan before returning to university to complete an MA in Victorian fiction. It was here that she developed her interest in the dark dangerous world of Victorian sensation writing. After the success of her first novel, The Room Beyond, Elmas has returned to write the tale of the early life of East End mystic and illusionist Walter Balanchine. When she is not writing, Elmas teaches secondary school English and juggles a chaotic household in Surrey.

Connect with Stephanie

Website ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads

 

Connect with Endeavour Press

Website ǀ Facebook ǀ Twitter ǀ Instagram

Illusion blog tour schedule

Blog Tour: District VIII by Adam LeBor

whatcathyreadnext

District VIII Tour Banner

I’m delighted to host today’s stop on the blog tour for District VIII, by Adam LeBor and to bring you a fascinating article by Adam about the inspiration for the book, the first volume in his ‘Budapest noir’ crime series.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

DISTRICT VIIIAbout the Book

Life’s tough for a Gypsy cop in Budapest. The cops don’t trust you because you’re a Gypsy. Your fellow Gypsies, even your own family, shun you because you’re a cop.

The dead, however, don’t care.

Balthazar Kovacs of the Budapest murder squad is in the middle of his first cup of coffee when a mysterious text message arrives. There were three words: ’26, Republic Square’, and a photograph. The photo shows a man in his early thirties, lying on his back with his eyes open, half-covered by bricks and dust. The address, the former Communist Party headquarters, was once the most feared building in the country. But when Kovacs arrives at Republic Square, the body has gone and his only lead is the word of a Gypsy kid who saw the corpse bundled into an unmarked van…

Kovacs’ investigation will take him deep into Budapest’s shadows, an underworld visitors never get to see: the gritty back-alleys of District VIII; the people smuggling networks around Keleti Station; the endemic corruption of a country still haunted by the ghosts of history. And when the leads point to the involvement of his brother Gaspar, the city’s most powerful pimp, Kovacs will be forced to choose between the law and family loyalty.

Format: eBook (305pp.), Hardcover (400pp.)   Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2nd November 2017                           Genre: Thriller, Crime

Pre-order/Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find District VIII on Goodreads

 

Guest Post: ‘The roots of District VIII’ by Adam LeBor

I started writing District VIII, the first volume of my Budapest noir crime series featuring Balthazar Kovacs, a Gypsy detective, a couple of years ago. But the book’s roots go much deeper. I have reported on Hungary and its neighbours since 1990 when Communism collapsed across central and Eastern Europe. I have always been fascinated by the Roma and the near parallel society in which many live, alongside wider society but not fully part of it. Centuries of prejudice and exclusion have forged fierce bonds of blood and family that united them against a frequently hostile outside world.

Hungary and its neighbours are now part of the European Union and theoretically committed to providing equal rights and opportunities for all their citizens. But from the Baltics to the Balkans, many Roma families live in extreme poverty, in settlements on the outskirts of towns and villages with no proper water or electricity or sewage systems. Roma children are often wrongly classified as being mentally handicapped and so are deprived of a proper education. I reported on a wall in a town in the Czech Republic that served no purpose other than to divide Roma people from their neighbours. I travelled to a remote area in eastern Slovakia and interviewed young Roma women who told their heart-rending stories of being sterilised against their will. I reported on the horrific series of murders in Hungary in 2008 and 2009, while six Roma people, including a five year old child, were killed in a series of highly organised and planned racist attacks. I learnt Roma history and how, during the Second World War, the Roma too suffered a Holocaust which they call the ‘Poraymus’ or ‘Devouring’. In the camps parents refused to be separated from their children. They fought so hard to stay together that the Nazis allowed them their own section at Auschwitz, called the ‘Zigeuner Lager’, or Gypsy camp. The Gypsy camp existed for seventeen months until 1944 when its residents were gassed.

Nowadays there is good news as well. A new generation of young Roma people is passing through the education system, finding its voice as activists and politicians or simply as professionals – including the police. The Balthazar Kovacs series was also inspired in part by a reception I attended some years ago at the British embassy in Budapest, in honour of the Hungarian Roma Police Union. There I met several Roma police officers who told me their personal stories. It’s not easy being a Gypsy police officer. Friends and relatives – especially those who live on the margins of legality – are suspicious of the authorities. Other police officers can be wary of their Roma colleagues.

District VIII opens in the summer of 2015 when Hungary was the epicentre of the refugee crisis. District VIII is the area of Budapest with the city’s largest Gypsy quarter. A Syrian refugee is murdered at Keleti station and his body disappears. As Balthazar investigates, and discovers that his brother Gaspar is somehow connected to the killing, he is soon pulled between two worlds: his duty as a police officer and his loyalty to his family. Those bonds of family and of blood, Balthazar realises, may have to be broken. Unless he can find a way out.

2017.05.25. Adam LeBor portraitAbout the Author

Adam LeBor is a veteran foreign correspondent who has covered Hungary and Eastern Europe since 1990. He is the author of thirteen books, including Hitler’s Secret Bankers, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and City of Oranges. He writes for the Economist, Financial Times and Monocle. He divides his time between Budapest and London.

Connect with Adam

Website ǀ Facebook ǀ Twitter ǀ Goodreads

 

District VIII Tour Banner