My Week in Books – 26th February 2023

whatcathyreadnext

MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Monday – I made another trip Down the TBR Hole.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Thursday – I reflected on the recently announced longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023.

Friday – I published my review of Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough. 

Photo credit: The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

New arrivals

Since I’ve been on holiday for two weeks, please make yourselves comfortable as this may take some time…

Drums of WarThe Drums of War (Thomas Tallant #3) by Michael Ward (Sharpe Books)

London 1642. The King has fled London with the drums of war ringing in his ears. Across the country, lines are being drawn and armies raised.

Influential royalist Lady Carlisle switches sides and presses spice trader Thomas Tallant and his partner Elizabeth Seymour into Parliament’s service.

Soon Thomas faces double-dealing in his hunt for a lethal hoard of gunpowder hidden on the river, while Elizabeth engages in a race against time to locate a hidden sniper picking off Parliamentary officers at will in the city.

The capital also witnesses a vicious gang of jewel thieves take advantage of the city’s chaos to go on the rampage, smashing homes and shops, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. They hand pick their targets but refrain from selling any of their loot. There are more questions than answers.

When war finally erupts, Elizabeth is caught in the brutalising carnage of Edgehill while Thomas joins the Trained Bands in their defence of the city. As he mans the barricades at Brentford, in a desperate rearguard action to repel Prince Rupert’s surprise attack, he realises the future of London rests in the hands of him and a few hundred troopers.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth believes she has identified the jewel thief and goes underground to trace his hoard. But all is not as it seems.

Hokey PokeyHokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, spying on their surroundings in the gilt mirrors and perfectly polished tableware, while the hotel’s red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.

In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn’t see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she’s determined not to let her out of her sight.

But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur and Nora will find herself face to face with a past she thought she had long left behind…

Sepulchre StreetSepulchre Street (Rachel Savernake #4) by Martin Edwards (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

How can you solve a murder before it’s happened?

‘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.

No Place To HideNo Place To Hide by J. S. Monroe (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

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.

The Letter ReaderThe Letter Reader by Jan Casey (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

She read their secrets during the war. Now she cannot forget them…

1941. London. Keen to do her bit in the war, Connie Allinson joins the WRNS and is posted as a letter censor. Her task: to read and alter correspondence to ensure no sensitive information crosses enemy lines. At first, she is not sure she’s up to it, but is soon drawn in by the letters she reads, and their secrets…

1967. Doncaster. Bored of her domestic life, Connie desperately wants a job, but her controlling husband Arthur won’t hear of it. Looking for an escape, and plagued by memories of letters she read during the war, she makes a bid for freedom and starts secretly tracking down their authors. Will uncovering their past give Connie the key to her present? And will she be able to find them all before Arthur discovers what she is keeping from him?

The Spy Across the WaterThe Spy Across the Water by James Naughtie (ARC, Head of Zeus)

Will Flemyng, originally trained as a spy, is now British ambassador to Washington. Meanwhile, his older brother Mungo is recuperating from a heart attack in their beloved Scottish highland family home, and Abel, the youngest of the three, has died mysteriously in America. Abel’s unexplained death sets in motion an unstoppable chain of events, beginning with an unexpected glimpse of a face at his funeral.

Soon Will finds himself on a dangerous journey into his clandestine past, from conflict in Ireland to the long shadows of the Cold War. Will possesses a silky veneer, but he often doesn’t know who to trust, nor who trusts him. Now he finds himself alone once again as duty forces him to risk everything…

Why has the past come back to haunt him now?

Three Gifts Cover_FinalThree Gifts by Mark A. Ratcliffe (eARC, époque press)

If you could save the life of a loved one by trading in years of your own life, how many years would you give? How many lives could you save? Would you know when to stop?

Francis Broad has done just that and has negotiated the day of his death, now he must come to terms with the decisions he has made.

Three Gifts explores one man’s attempt to live a good life, his sense of responsibility, gratitude and what it means to love.

The House of DoorsThe House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steey wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay.

Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she sees him as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.

Run to the Western ShoreRun to the Western Shore by Tim Pears (eARC, Swift Press via NetGalley)

Set in Britain in AD 72, Run to the Western Shore tells the story of a young Roman slave, Quintus, and Olwen, daughter of the chief of a local tribe. Quintus, long exiled from his people, has travelled great odysseys in the retinue of a powerful man, and although a citizen of nowhere, is a man of reason, fluent in many languages. Olwen, imperious tribal royalty, is rooted in her native land – a volatile warrior, fiercely attached to the natural world.

Promised to a powerful Roman by her father as part of a peace treaty, Olwen flees during the night, taking Quintus with her. Hunted by an army, the two make their way across the country, living off the land, heading for the western shore…

Written in spare but evocative language, Run to the Western Shore is a tale of quest and struggle, but also an ode to the land and a love story about the reconciliation of opposites in times of need.

The Sinner's MarkThe Sinner’s Mark (Nicholas Shelby #6) by S. W. Perry (eARC, Corvus via NetGalley)

Treason, heresy and revolt in Queen Elizabeth’s England . . .

The year is 1600. With a dying queen on the throne, war raging on the high seas and famine on the rise, England is on the brink of chaos. And in London’s dark alleyways, a conspiracy is brewing. In the court’s desperate bid to silence it, an innocent man is found guilty – the father of Nicholas Shelby, physician and spy. As Nicholas races against time to save his father, he and his wife Bianca are drawn into the centre of a treacherous plot against the queen.

When one of Shakespeare’s boy actors goes missing, and Bianca discovers a disturbing painting that could be a clue, she embarks on her own investigation. Meanwhile, as Nicholas comes closer to unveiling the real conspirator, the men who wish to silence him are multiplying. When he stumbles on a plan to overthrow the state and replace it with a terrifying new order, he may be forced to make a decision between his country and his heart . . .

The RomanticThe Romantic by William Boyd (Viking) Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss.

Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is.

This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: The Paris Sister by Adrienne Chinn
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: Cut Adrift (Jen Shaw #2) by Camilla Bruce
  • Book Review: Ponti by Sharlene Teo
  • #6Degrees of Separation
  • Book Review: Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery

#BookReview Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough

whatcathyreadnext5 Comments

Butler to the WorldAbout the Book

How did Britain become the servant of the world’s most powerful and corrupt men?

In Butler to the World, Oliver Bullough reveals how, despite priding itself on values of fair play and the rule of law, the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters.

From the birth of tax havens in the 1950s, moving from the British Virgin Islands to Gibraltar and Mayfair, this is a damning portrait of global finance and politics in the UK today – and an incendiary reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Format: Paperback (304 pages)          Publisher: Profile Books
Publication date: 19th January 2023 Genre: Nonfiction

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My Review

Subtitled ‘How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals’, the author’s view of the UK’s approach over the decades can probably be summed up as ‘Take the money and look the other way’. Using the analogy of the way a butler solves problems for his master by fair means or foul regardless of the consequences for others – as P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves does for Bertie Wooster – the author presents a series of case studies showing how Britain has facilitated the use of tax havens, complex financial structures and tax loopholes to allow shady individuals to squirrel money away. In other words, how  Britain, including its overseas territories, has become a ‘butler to the world’ and how successive governments have been good on rhetoric but poor on action when it comes to tackling global financial corruption.

He identifies the start of this as the Suez Crisis in the 1950s which was, he argues, a sign of Britain’s waning influence in the world. Added to this was the loss of income following the independence of its former colonies.  As he observes, ‘The banker to the world transformed into a pauper; the global currency limping from one crisis to the next’.  It was necessary to replace the lost revenues and a small circle of people within the City of London’s financial instititions came up with ways to do it that took advantage of a regulatory regime which pretty much relied on ‘chaps doing the right thing’.  Except it turns out they didn’t. Instead they looked for any way they could to keep money from around the world flowing into their coffers and stop anyone else finding out about it, especially the taxman, their defence being ‘If we don’t do it, someone else will’. It’s the same instinct that still drives those on the political right to call for more deregulation not less.

The author is clearly an expert on his subject but I confess that some of the detail in a few of the case studies, especially those involving arcane financial products and obscure company structures, went rather over my head.  The chapters I found most absorbing were ‘Rock Solid’ which describes how Gibraltar became rich by establishing itself as the online gambling centre of the world and ‘Down the Tubes’ in which the author explains how a Ukranian tycoon with possible links to the world’s most notorious mobster managed to manoeuvre his way into the heart of the British establishment, including being sold one of London Underground’s ‘ghost stations’ by the Ministry of Defence.

In the chapter ‘Giving Evidence’, the author describes the UK’s woeful record on tackling money laundering, leaving him to conclude that what measures are in place are designed to give the impression of extreme activity while actually doing nothing.

The new paperback edition has an introduction written after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in which the author scathingly describes Britain’s then prime minister Boris Johnson as ‘a butler’s butler: a politician who had suppressed a report into Russian interference in UK politics; who had welcomed billionaires to London; whose government had established a special “VIP lane” for well-connected individuals to use when selling goods to the government during the pandemic; who had merrily befriended oligarchs; and who had, before becoming prime minister, earned a six-figure sum writing a column for a newspaper owned by tycoons who owned their own tax haven’. Ouch.  The author concludes change is unlikely to come from politicians or civil servants, which means it’s up to us. Reading a book like this is perhaps a good start.

Butler to the World is an impeccably researched, no holds barred exposé of the way Britain has become, in the author’s words, a global enabler of skulduggery. It left me feeling simultaneously informed and appalled but unfortunately not entirely surprised.

In three words: Authoritative, polemical, insightful

Oliver BulloughAbout the Author

Oliver Bullough is the author of the financial exposé Moneyland, a Sunday Times bestseller, and two celebrated books about the former Soviet Union: The Last Man in Russia (shortlisted for the Dolman Prize) and Let Our Fame Be Great (shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and winner of the Cornelius Ryan Award). His journalism appears regularly in the Guardian, The New York Times and GQ. (Photo: Twitter profile)

Connect with Oliver
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