Category: Reading Challenges

Blog Tour/Book Review: Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire by M. R. C. Kasasian

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Betty Church blog tour

I’m a great fan of M.R.C. Kasasian’s Gower Street Detective series having been introduced to it through an invitation from Clare at Head of Zeus to join the tour for the fifth in the series, Dark Dawn Over Steep House.  Since then I’ve been acquiring the earlier books in the series so I can read the complete set at some point.  You can imagine my excitement, therefore, when Clare contacted me to let me know about the author’s new series, The Betty Church Mysteries, and to invite me to host today’s stop on the blog tour for the first book in the series, Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire.

You can read my review below.  Do also check out the review of my tour buddy, Linda at Books of All Kinds.

Betty Church and the Suffolk VampireAbout the Book

September 1939. A new day dawns in Sackwater, not that this sleepy backwater is taking much notice…

Inspector Betty Church – one of the few female officers on the force – has arrived from London to fill a vacancy at Sackwater police station. But Betty isn’t new here. This is the place she grew up. The place she thought she’d left behind for good.

Time ticks slowly in Sackwater, and crime is of a decidedly lighter shade. Having solved the case of the missing buttons, Betty’s called to the train station to investigate a missing bench. But though there’s no bench, there is a body. A smartly dressed man, murdered in broad daylight, with two distinctive puncture wounds in his throat.

While the locals gossip about the Suffolk Vampire, Betty Church readies herself to hunt a dangerous killer.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (432 pp.)    Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 12th July 2018                        Genre: Historical Mystery

Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire on Goodreads

My Review

Well, I don’t know about any of her police colleagues, but it didn’t take me long to have complete confidence that Inspector Betty Church could solve the mystery – or anything else she put her mind to, come to that.   After all her godmother is the redoubtable March Middleton (from the author’s The Gower Street Detective series) who learned a thing or two about detection from guardian and mentor, Sidney Grice.    And Betty’s had to overcome the loss of her arm in an accident, making her a sort of female equivalent of J K Rowling’s Cormoran Strike.

It’s no coincidence that Sackwater rhymes with ‘backwater’.  As Betty observes, ‘Nothing much had changed but nothing ever did in the slow death that passed for life in Sackwater’. With its main street of small shops and tea rooms it put me in mind of Walmington-on-Sea, the fictional seaside town in the BBC TV series Dad’s Army. Betty needs all her wits about her because the rest of the police officers at Sackwater Central are not so much Dad’s Army as Keystones Cops.    By turn, hopeless, cowardly, incompetent and intellectually challenged, the best of them is probably WPC Dodo Chivers.  And that’s not saying much because she is a bit dotty and, I’m afraid to this reader, slightly irritating. However, that didn’t stop some of Dodo’s ditsy comments making me laugh out loud.  “I had an aunt who was deaf… It made it very difficult for her to hear.”   

Betty is independent-minded, courageous and resourceful and has a nice line in putdowns and one-liners.    She’s a woman determined to succeed in what is, for the time being, a man’s world.  In fact, she’s confident she can succeed where her male counterparts will fail.  “When policemen tremble, we stand firm”, she confidently states.   Betty’s certainly going to need to stand firm because pretty soon the bodies start to pile up, in increasingly gruesome fashion, and rumours start to fly around Sackwater.  As that illustrious organ, the East Anglian Chronicle, reports ‘Suffolk Gripped in Vampire Terror’.  ‘And I had thought we only had the Nazis to worry about’, observes Betty ruefully.

I’ll confess I did find myself wishing that Betty could find herself at least one capable sidekick to help in her investigations.  The nearest she gets to anyone genuinely helpful  is the editor of the local newspaper, Tobias Gregson, with his ‘cobalt blue eyes’ and ‘winning smile’.  Hmm, romance in the air possibly?

The book has all of the trademark humour that fans of the author’s previous series have grown to love.  At one point, Betty recalls, ‘I used to go out with a musician – a pianist – until it became obvious I wasn’t the only piece in his repertoire’.  I did rather miss the random allusions to Sherlock Holmes stories from The Gower Street Detective series but, for the observant reader, there is consolation in the form of a reference to Ian Fleming’s most famous creation and the precursor of a scene from a well-known film starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.  And probably a few more that I missed…

Although nearly five hundred pages, the book‘s short chapters help to create an impression of pace.  The author has some fun with the chapter titles.  I particularly liked ‘The Mangled Sheep Murder‘, which I fancied was a play on the title of the first book in The Gower Street Detective series, The Mangle Street Murders.

Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire is a lively, fun and spirited read with a great protagonist and enlivened by the author’s zesty humour.  I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Head of Zeus, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Light-hearted, engaging, mystery

Try something similar…The Mangle Street Murders by M.R. C. Kasasian

M R C KasasianAbout the Author

M. R. C Kasasian was raised in Lancashire. He has had careers as varied as a factory hand, wine waiter, veterinary assistant, fairground worker and dentist.

He lives with his wife, in Suffolk in the summer and in Malta in the winter.

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Blog Tour/Book Review: The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise

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FINAL Emperor of Shoes B T Poster (1)

I’m delighted to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Emperor of Shoes by Spencer Wise alongside my tour buddy, Emma’s Bookish Corner.  My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and for introducing me to a book I might otherwise not have read.  You can read my review below.

The Emperor of ShoesAbout the Book

Alex Cohen, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Bostonian, is living in southern China, where his father runs their family-owned shoe factory. Alex reluctantly assumes the helm of the company, but as he explores the plant’s vast floors and assembly lines, he comes to a grim realization: employees are exploited, regulatory systems are corrupt and Alex’s own father is engaging in bribes to protect the bottom line.

When Alex meets a seamstress named Ivy, his sympathies begin to shift. She is an embedded organizer of a pro-democratic Chinese party, secretly sowing dissonance among her fellow labourers. Will Alex remain loyal to his father and his heritage? Or will the sparks of revolution ignite?

Praise for The Emperor of Shoes

‘Spencer Wise’s The Emperor of Shoes is one of the most complex, nuanced, character-rich first novels I have ever read. It is utterly original in portraying a twenty-first century Jewish diaspora, with one foot in homeland America and one foot in Asia creating consumer products, and, for Wise s protagonist, with an accompanying empathy for China s grassroots aspirations. Wise comes to us fully-flighted as a master stylist and a compelling storyteller’ – Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner

‘Fresh and innovative, Spencer Wise’s The Emperor of Shoes is the latest addition to the tradition of young-man fiction that starts with Bellow and Roth… I’ve taught for more than forty years; this is the best first novel I’ve ever read’ – David Kirby, National Book Award Nominee

‘What a haunting and intelligent debut novel. The confident and assured prose evokes easily the beauty of the complex relationships, the ugliness of the situation in the shoe factory, and the difficulty Alex faces when deciding between following his heart and his head. Just stunning’ – Louise Beech, author of How to Be Brave, The Mountain in My Shoe and Maria in the Moon

Format: Hardcover, ebook (320 pp.)    Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 26th July 2018                        Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Pre-order/Purchase Links*
Publisher | Amazon.co.uk ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Emperor of Shoes on Goodreads

My Review

In his praise for The Emperor of Shoes, Robert Olen Butler describes the book as ‘character-rich’ and I can’t disagree.  That doesn’t mean, however, that the characters are necessarily easy to like.

I found myself constantly shifting my view of Alex’s father, Fedor, accorded the accolade the ‘Emperor of Shoes’ (as he proudly reminds people).  One minute I felt he was merely an ambitious father trying his best to preserve the family business for his son in the face of changing market forces; the next minute, I was feeling reluctant sympathy for a pathetic, hypochondriac desperate for his son’s attention; the next minute, I was repelled by a monstrous figure up to his eyes in corruption with little or no regard for the lives of his workers.

Similarly, I started out condemning Alex for his naivety about working conditions in the factory.  How could he not have known what was going on?  Was he stupid, deliberately turning a blind eye because he couldn’t face up to the truth, or fearful of challenging his father?  However, the author skilfully takes the reader inside the mind of Alex, sharing his struggles with the difficult moral choices he faces and slowly gaining this reader’s sympathy.

Inspired by Ivy, the Chinese woman and activist with whom he forms a relationship, Alex begins to imagine making a difference to the lives of the workers in his factory.  But he faces opposition from the local state institutions built on bribes (euphemistically referred to as ‘gifts’) and corruption, personified by the malign and creepy Gang, described as ‘a Brooklyn mob boss in Mao jacket and togs’ who can make people ‘disappear with a nod of the head.’   A business proposition from Alex’s old friend, Bernie, offers the possibility of a third way but will mean taking a strikingly different path from the way his father has run the business up until now.    Does Alex have what it takes to face down ‘The Emperor of Shoes’ and start a quiet revolution?  And, if he does, will it take a greater sacrifice than he can bear?

The Emperor of Shoes made me think – and I always like that in a book.  For example, it made me question if, with a clear conscience, I could ever buy shoes made in China again without assuring myself of the working conditions in the factory.   ‘The elevator opened onto a room the size of an airplane hanger, and the dank warm air from the heat setter boxes slipped over my face like a pillow.  A boy with a Mohawk scowled at me: a stump for a right arm, severed at the elbow by the steel embossing plate on the leather grain press.  A girl, eyes jaundiced, punch-drunk, the first flush of benzene poisoning from cement glue vapors, scratched at her arm.  Everywhere, people and machines.’    A far cry from the conditions in Alex’s upmarket hotel.

The book also explores in an interesting way questions of identity.   An American by birth, Alex is nevertheless keenly aware of his Jewish and Russian heritage.  At one point, he is asked by Zhang, leader of the activist movement: “Russian, Jewish, American.  How can you be all?  Or do you pick one?”

There is real energy in the writing, along with acute observation and dark humour – for example, when Alex returns to his luxurious, air-conditioned hotel suite after a day at the factory (while the workers return to their dormitories subject to a curfew).  ‘There was a silver tray on my desk with a bottle of wine, a long stem rose in a champagne flute, a box of Godiva chocolates.  Even the gifts were a kind of mockery: here, enjoy a long sensual evening by yourself. These came courtesy of the hotel, once a week, for Ambassador level guests.  You reached Ambassador when you’d spent a good three quarters of your life on the road sleeping in their hotels.  It got passed down too, an inheritance you didn’t earn.  Death by luxury.’    

The Emperor of Shoes is an impressive debut – compelling, thought-provoking and spirited.  I, for one, can’t wait to read what the author creates next.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, No Exit Press, and Random Things Tours in return for an honest and unbiased review.  The Emperor of Shoes is the eighth of my 20 Books of Summer.

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Spencer WiseAbout the Author

Spencer Wise was born in Boston in 1977.  He holds a BA from Tufts University, an MA in fiction from The University of Texas, where he was a James Michener Fellow, and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University.  Wise is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he is at work on his second novel, Holderness.

Connect with Spencer

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