Tag: NetGalley

#BookReview Sanctuary Motel by Alan Orloff @levelbestbooks

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About the Book

Mess Hopkins, proprietor of the seen-better-days Fairfax Manor Inn, never met a person in need who couldn’t use a helping hand — his helping hand. So he’s thrown open the doors of the motel to the homeless, victims of abuse, or anyone else who could benefit from a comfy bed with clean sheets and a roof overhead. This rankles his parents and uncle, who technically still own the place and are more concerned with profits than philanthropy.

When a mother and her teenage boy seek refuge from an abusive husband, Mess takes them in until they can get back on their feet. Shortly after arriving, the mom goes missing and some very bad people come sniffing around, searching for money they claim belongs to them. Mess tries to pump the boy for helpful information, but he’s in full uncooperative teen mode — grunts, shrugs, and monosyllabic answers. From what he does learn, Mess can tell he’s not getting the straight scoop.

It’s not long before the boy vanishes too. Abducted? Run away? Something worse? And who took the missing money?

Mess, along with his friend Vell Jackson and local news reporter Lia Katsaros, take to the streets to locate the missing mother and son — and the elusive, abusive husband — before the kneecapping loansharks find them first.

Format: eARC (254 pages) Publisher: Level Best Books
Publication date: 24th October 2023 Genre: Mystery

Find Sanctuary Motel on Goodreads

Purchase links 
Hive | Amazon UK 
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

The Fairfax Manor Inn may be a bit run down (and the adjoining mini golf course may have seen its last hole in one) but the motel is a place of generosity and philanthropy thanks to Mess Hopkins who has a heart of gold and makes a wonderfully engaging protagonist. I think most of us would agree with his view: ‘So many people in this world . . . needed help. And not just a cup of sugar or a hand moving a heavy sleeper sofa into the basement. Serious life-changing help.’ Unfortunately his Uncle Phil, who has been given reponsibility for overseeing the business in the absence of Mess’s parent, would be the exception.

Mess forms a really touching relationship with Kevin, the teenage son of the missing woman, although doing so takes a lot of patience. By the way, if you’re wondering how Mess got his nickname, you’ll have to read the book.

I loved the cast of secondary characters, particularly Mess’s friend and sidekick, Vell, who has a seemingly inexhaustible list of contacts. He boasts, ‘I got my own personal Internet, on the streets. People see me coming, they’re dying to tell me stuff. Think of me like Vellipedia.’ I also really enjoyed the back-and-forth banter between Mess and Vell. Mama (although she’s actually Vell’s grandmother) is another fantastic, larger than life character. She has a laugh ‘like a thunderstorm’, is a giver of huge bear hugs, has turned her ability to read people into a money-making venture and believes there’s no such thing as a table with too much food. Just as well, as both Vell and Kevin, have seemingly insatiable appetites.

If Mess and Vell are the good guys then of course you need some bad guys to even things up and the author provides us with plenty, including the missing woman’s abusive husband and some heavies working for the local organised crime head honcho. Mess and Vell have some narrow escapes and in the process of resolving the mystery of the disappearance of Kevin’s mother uncover some distinctly dirty goings-on.

A motel with its ever changing population of guests is a great location around which to base a crime mystery series so I’m looking forward to future arrivals at Fairfax Manor Inn, plus seeing if its owner can avoid making a ‘mess’ (sorry!) of his budding relationship with Lia.

Sanctuary Motel is an enjoyable crime mystery with a plot that will keep you guessing and characters you’ll find yourself rooting for.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Level Best Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Entertaining, intriguing, humorous

Try something similar: In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy

About the Author

Alan Orloff has published ten novels and more than forty short stories. His work has won an Anthony, an Agatha, a Derringer, and two ITW Thriller Awards. He’s also been a finalist for the Shamus Award, and has had a story (‘Rule Number One’) selected for the Best American Mystery Stories anthology.

He loves cake and arugula, but not together. Never together. He lives and writes in South Florida, where the examples of hijinks are endless (Photo/bio: Author website)

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#BookReview Byron and Shelley by Glenn Haybittle

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About the Book

The characters in Glenn Haybittle’s first collection of short stories are all caught in moments of life that bring about a revelation of identity.

A young woman who, after the war, catches sight of the guard who knocked to the ground her blind grandfather on the platform at Auschwitz. The backstory of the man accused of murdering Martin Luther King. The experience of a young girl on Kristallnacht and the subsequent tragic upheavals in her life. A dance teacher accused of sexually abusing one of his young students. A man constrained to return to his mother and look after her while she goes through dementia. A CIA operative grooming a patsy to take the blame for an assassination.

Format: eARC (285 pages) Publisher: Cheyne Walk
Publication date: 16th October 2023 Genre: Short Stories

Find Byron and Shelley on Goodreads

Purchase links 
Hive | Amazon UK 
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My Review

The stories in this collection vary in subject matter and location, and, in particular, in length. Initially I found it hard to detect in all of them the underlying theme of identity described in the blurb. However, gradually I did start to see the connections, some of them obvious (but not necessarily apparent at the time of reading an individual story), some more subtle and others just the odd mention of a name or place. An example of the first is the stories entitled ‘The Patsy’ and ‘Raoul’ whose sinister mood only increases when you read the second story.

There were two standout stories for me. The first was the very moving ‘Mother Love’ in which a son who is caring for his mother suffering with dementia, who has become ‘like a puzzling anagram of herself’, struggles to come to terms with the change in his role, the intimacy of the tasks he has to carry out and the difficult decisions he faces.

The second was ‘The Girls of his Youth’ in which the reader witnesses the chaotic thoughts of a man, possibly also suffering from dementia. Written in a style akin to stream of consciousness, he continually harks back to his past punctuated by a refrain that occurs over and over again. ‘The girls of his youth. The girls of youth break his heart. The girls of his youth make his heart whole again.’

I also enjoyed the first story in the collection, ‘Archaeology’, in which a recently widowed man has to deal with feelings of guilt about his wife’s death and his acute sense of loss. ‘Bereavement is sometimes like wading across a succession of snowfields with no landmark in sight. You are a lone small figure in a vast barren landscape. Other times it’s like a Ferris wheel ride. Like being strapped into a swinging spinning bucket. The dizzying dislocation from familiar grounded reality. The brain regrouping, re-coding, re-evaluating, adjusting itself to a bewildering change in the engrained mental landscape.’ He is also coming to terms with the change in his role, that ‘he’s no longer a husband, just a father’, and gradually realising his limitations as a sole parent to his two young daughters.

The story that gives the collection its title is the longest in the book. Subtitled ‘Brits abroad’ it might just as well have be entitled ‘Brits behaving badly’. Jake arrives in Italy and meets Felix, an actor who has recently played Byron in a film and Ivan, who is writing a biography of Shelley. Alongside their drink and drug fuelled escapades they attempt to discover the whereabouts of a young woman who has mysteriously disappeared. The story’s conclusion is a clever echo of events in the lives of the poets of its title.

The book contains some wonderful descriptive writing and imaginative metaphors. ‘The waves embroider the shingled beach with a ragged silvered stitching; the percussive assent they make as they break and the lamentation as they withdraw over the pebbles seems to come from a distance in time as well as space.’

Byron and Shelley is an interesting and varied collection of stories, with a few misses but also with several that would repay rereading.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Cheyne Walk via NetGalley.

In three words: Intriguing, insightful, diverse

Try something similar: The Wooden Hill by Jamie Guiney

About the Author

Glenn Haybittle is a translator and freelance writer from London who lives in Florence. He currently translates academic books for the Florence University and Italian history books for a Florentine publisher. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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