Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review: The Great Darkness (Nighthawk 1) by Jim Kelly

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The Great Darkness CoverAbout the Book

1939, Cambridge: The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout – The Great Darkness – covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam.   The night is full of alarms but, in this Phoney War, the enemy never comes.

Daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force. Brooke investigates, calling on the expertise and inspiration of a faithful group of fellow ‘nighthawks’ across the city, all condemned, like him, to a life lived away from the light. Within hours The Great Darkness has claimed a second victim.

War, it seems, has many victims, but what links these crimes of the night?

Format: ebook, hardcover, paperback  (352 pp.)  Publisher: Allison and Busby

Published in paperback : 23rd August 2018                  Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Crime

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

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My Review

For Inspector Eden Brooke, the darkness is a relief.  His experiences at the hands of the enemy during World War One damaged his eyesight, leaving him extremely sensitive to light.  Of course, his role as a detective is to shed light on the darkness of crime.  This is just one of the many plays on the theme of darkness and light in the book.

Brooke makes an engaging and interesting leading character.  An insomniac, keen night swimmer and faithful husband, he’s intelligent, well-read, perceptive but also ruthless when he needs to be.   In fact, it is during one of his night-time swims that he detects the first signs that something is going on in the city that is not quite right.   Denials from officialdom that anything occurred cause him to suspect a cover-up, or worse.  Then the dead bodies start turning up….

Brooke has collected a team of fellow ‘nighthawks’, individuals whose job or inclination mean they inhabit the streets, buildings or even rooftops of Cambridge while most of the population are asleep.  They are his eyes and ears on the ground, as well as providing companionship and conversation in the wee small hours.  Luckily, he also has a trusty assistant, Edison, but despite his name it’s Brooke who has most of the ‘light bulb moments’ (there’s that darkness and light theme again).

The Great DarknessThe Great Darkness immerses the reader in the narrow streets of Cambridge with its colleges, historic public buildings and riverside paths.  There’s also a great sense of the period from the ever present fear of bomber raids, the air raid shelters and barrage balloons to the wartime food (hare casserole, anyone?) and the copious drinking of tea.  The short chapters keep the story moving along and the interest high.  As far as the central mystery is concerned, it was pretty late on in the book until I saw the light.  (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that.)  The solution, when it is revealed, raises issues of more contemporary relevance than you might expect.

I absolutely loved The Great Darkness.  The combination of atmospheric setting, period detail, absorbing mystery and interesting characters in The Great Darkness ticked all the boxes for me.  Those looking for a new historical crime mystery series to follow have found it here, I think.  It would also be perfect for those mourning the absence of TV’s Foyle’s War.   I shall be eagerly awaiting the next book in the series.

The Great Darkness SignedThank you to Allison and Busby for my (signed) review copy in return for my honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Taut, atmospheric, gripping

Try something similar…Nucleus by Rory Clements (click here to read my review)

Jim KellyAbout the Author

Jim Kelly was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective.  He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and was education correspondent for the Financial Times.   His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature.  He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

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Book Review: White Houses by Amy Bloom

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White HousesAbout the Book

In 1933, President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt took up residence in the White House. With them went the celebrated journalist Lorena Hickok – Hick to friends – a straight-talking reporter from South Dakota, whose passionate relationship with the idealistic, patrician First Lady would shape the rest of their lives.

Told by the indomitable Hick, White Houses is the story of Eleanor and Hick’s hidden love, and of Hick’s unlikely journey from her dirt-poor childhood to the centre of privilege and power. Filled with fascinating back-room politics, the secrets and scandals of the era, and exploring the potency of enduring love, it is an imaginative tour-de-force from a writer of extraordinary and exuberant talent.

Format: ebook, hardcover (240 pp.) Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 1st Feb 2018 (ebook), 24th Apr 2018 (hardcover) Genre: Historical Fiction

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

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My Review

Opening in 1945, shortly after the death of President Franklin D Roosevelt, Lorena Hickok, known as ‘Hick’, recalls her first meetings with Eleanor, the development of their relationship and her move into the White House.  What follows is a series of flashbacks to the years they shared together.

One such flashback is to a train trip during which they share their most intimate secrets and childhood memories.  Eleanor’s stories take only a few minutes of reading time.  Hick’s take much longer.  Indeed the story sharing scene seems to act as a pretext for a long section depicting the traumatic events Hick endured as a child, her escape from an abusive home, her time spent with some delightfully eccentric circus folk and her eventual move to a career in journalism.  At the same time, it charts the awakening of Hick’s sexuality and her growing realisation that marriage was never going to be a route she would take, that ‘Women were not interruptions, for me.’

Now don’t get me wrong, I loved the way Hick’s early life was written about but I wasn’t expecting it would form such a focus of the book.  Throughout the book, I felt I was getting to know Hick a whole lot better than I was getting to know Eleanor, who always remained somewhat elusive as a character even during flashbacks to scenes in the White House.  At times, Hick’s adoration for Eleanor serves to make that undoubtedly great lady appear a little like a saint on a pedestal.  ‘I loved being the brave and battered little dinghy.  She loved being the lighthouse.’

I really liked the narrative voice the author created for Hick with its sharp dialogue, witty wisecracks and waspish putdowns.  ‘I’d met Wallis Simpson.  Twice.  She wasn’t pretty.  She was a skinny rough-houser from a shitbox Southern town but she had done a phenomenal job of remaking herself, vanquishing good looking rivals, and turning a genial, not stupid, sort of spineless royal into her love-slave.’   

What I also admired was the convincing, heartfelt and sincere depiction of the love between two women.   There were lovely little intimate moments that revealed the women’s affection for each other.

‘She smiled when she saw me coming and I did the same.  When we had breakfast together, I sometimes took a sausage off her plate.’ 

‘And when I was the object of her love, when her eyes lit up across the room, when she touched her fingertips to the pulse at the base of her throat, to mark the spot for me, to mark herself, I thought that there was no sacrifice I wouldn’t make.’

As a story about the relationship between two women at a time when such relationships had to remain largely secret, White Houses scores highly and there was a great deal that I enjoyed about the book.  The true nature of Eleanor and Lorena’s relationship has been disputed by historians over the years and the author freely admits that White Houses is a ‘work of fiction, from beginning to end.’

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of NetGalley and publishers, Granta Books, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Tender, intimate, moving

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Amy BloomAbout the Author

Amy Bloom is the author of Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; and Normal. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Bloom teaches creative writing at Yale University.

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