Tag: book club

Book Review – The Cracked Mirror by Christopher Brookmyre

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About the Book

FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW. THIS IS NOT THAT CRIME NOVEL

You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.

You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a Sunday best hat.

Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might just come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.

Format: ebook (496 pages) Publisher: Abacus
Publication date: 18th July 2024 Genre: Crime

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My Review

The Cracked Mirror is described as ‘a cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly’. (Having never read a book by Michael Connelly that didn’t help me much.)

Initially, the story alternates between two different storylines. There’s Penny Coyne, known for solving murders in Glen Cluthar which, like St Mary Mead in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, has an unusually high death rate for a small village. However, the latest murder in Glen Cluthar has a darker side to it than Penny’s used to. Added to this, she’s beginning to worry about strange lapses in her memory and wondering if she should follow her nephew’s suggestion that she move into a residential home. Being fiercely independent, it’s something she has resisted up until now.

And then we have LAPD detective Johnny Hawke, who’s not afraid to bend the rules in order to bring bad guys to justice and is always a hair’s breadth away from death. He’s investigating a death which in all respects looks like suicide – room locked from the inside – but about which Johnny has his doubts.

At this point the two storylines come together as both Penny and Johnny find themselves – for different reasons – in the same hotel in Scotland where a society wedding is taking place. Suddenly something happens which has similarities with the case Johnny was investigating meaning Penny and Johnny find themselves becoming partners, albeit with very different approaches when it comes to solving crimes.

That makes it sound straightforward but it gets increasingly complicated as more and more characters are introduced to the point where I found it hard to keep track of who was who and how they were related. And at around 80% of the way through, well let’s just say it goes in a completely different direction that left my head spinning even more. (Some readers may pick up references that eluded me meaning it doesn’t come as quite such a surprise for them.)

I loved Johnny and thought he was an authentic representation of the maverick cop beloved of American crime thrillers. I didn’t get the same feeling about Penny, perhaps because of the contemporary setting and the fact Glen Cluthar is soon left far behind.

If the author set himself the challenge of creating a mind-bending crime novel then he definitely succeeded. If you’re game for a crime novel that will get your brain working hard, The Cracked Mirror will be right up your street.

In three words: Clever, imaginative, complicated

About the Author

Christopher Brookmyre was a journalist before becoming a full-time novelist with the publication of his award-winning debut Quite Ugly One Morning, which established him as one of Britain’s leading crime writers. His 2016 novel Black Widow won both the McIlvanney Prize and the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year award. Brookmyre’s novels have sold more than two million copies in the UK alone. He also writes historical fiction with Marisa Haetzman, under the pseudonym ‘Ambrose Parry’.

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Book Review – The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke

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About the Book

This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke tells the story of a girl, a boy and the heart they share.

In doing so she explores a history of remarkable medical innovations, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons, but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.

Format: Paperback (288 pages) Publisher: Abacus
Publication date: 5th June 2025 Genre: Nonfiction

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My Review

The Story of a Heart is not just the moving story of Keira and Max, one of whom is destined to die and the other destined to live, but also a fascinating insight into the medical advances that have led to the possibility of successfully transplanting a heart from one person to another, such as respirators, tissue matching and drugs to prevent rejection. However, as the author makes clear, the process is still fraught with risk and uncertain outcomes, the average life expectancy after receiving a heart transplant being only 14 years.

The author’s description of the heart as ‘a toiling, tireless, muscular miracle’ is just one of the striking images in the book. I liked the way she drew attention to the ‘metaphorical richness’ of the heart. ‘Hearts sing, soar, race, burn, break, bleed, swell hammer and melt. They can be won or lost, cut or trampled, and hewn from oak or stone or gold.’ As she points out, such is the heart’s centrality to the English language, its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to 15,000 words.

I particularly enjoyed the sections describing the intricate logistics and the many people involved in the delicate process of moving a heart from the donor to recipient in an optimum condition and in sufficient time to allow it do its life-saving work. The book demonstrates how much of a team effort this is but also that the people involved never lose sight of the fact this is a precious gift that has come about as a result of a person’s death. One of the many moving scenes in the book is Keira’s father waiting outside the hospital to see the box containing her heart being loaded into an ambulance for its onward journey. Another is when a moment of silence is observed by the surgical team before they begin organ retrieval.

The author briefly touches on the ethical dilemmas surrounding transplant surgery given that there are always more patients awaiting a transplant than there are organs available, and that the healthiest organs are likely to be those of a young person. At its most abhorrent, there are countries in the world where organs are for sale.

As you read The Story of the Heart prepare to be moved to tears, to be uplifted by the courage of the individuals involved and to marvel at the skill and dedication of medical professionals, as well as the pioneering individuals responsible for developing technology that seemed unimaginable at the time. The book demonstrates that the NHS at its very best is a remarkable institution and one that we would do well to cherish.

Tackling a difficult, complex subject with clarity and sensitivity, and just about steering clear of sentimentality, The Story of a Heart is a well-deserved winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction 2025.

This was a book club pick (by me) and I’m delighted to say everyone throughly enjoyed the book, including one person who has personal experience of the journey the book depicts.

In three words: Moving, informative, inspiring
Try something similar: Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

About the Author

Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and the author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books. The most recent of these, Breathtaking (2021), was adapted into an acclaimed television series, broadcast on ITV in 2024. It reveals how she and her colleagues confronted the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and longlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Your Life in My Hands (2017) documents life as a junior doctor.

Before going to medical school, Rachel was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Lancet among others, and appears regularly on television and radio. Inspired by a visit to Ukraine during the conflict in late 2022, Rachel founded a UK-registered charity, Hospice Ukraine, which supports the work of local palliative care teams in Ukraine. (Photo/bio: Publisher author page)

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