Tag: NetGalley

#BlogTour #BookReview #Ad Sepulchre Street by Martin Edwards

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Sepulchre StreetWelcome to the opening day of the blog tour for Sepulchre Street by Martin Edwards, which is published tomorrow, 11th May 2023. My thanks to Kathryn at Head of Zeus for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the post by my tour buddy for today, The Puzzle Doctor.

Sepulchre StreetAbout the Book

‘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.

Format: eARC (400 pages)             Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 11th May 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Find Sepulchre Street on Goodreads

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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Sepulchre Street is the fourth in the author’s historical crime series featuring Rachel Savernake. It’s a series I only discovered when I read the previous book, Blackstone Fell.

Rachel Savernake is not so much a private detective as a personal detective pursuing investigations that spark her interest. As she herself admits, ‘It’s the thrill of the chase. I yearn for it like an addict craves the needle’ and her favourite pastime is ‘Asking  what if?’ But it’s not just any old crime that attracts her: her taste is for the ‘exotic’.

The author teases us by continuing to hold back information about Rachel’s past growing up on the remote island of Gaunt.  (Some readers may find this frustrating but I find it tantalising.) What we do know is that she is a very wealthy young woman. However, her early life remains shrouded in mystery. She zealously guards her privacy and is a formidable adversary.  Beware what she carries in that glittery evening bag! She’s incredibly well read, resourceful and imperturbable in even the most fraught situations, although, at times, her lack of fear appears to some to verge on recklessness. In fact, she’s just supremely confident she’ll be able to find a way out of any situation.

The members of Rachel’s household – Martha Trueman, Martha’s brother Clifford, and Clifford’s wife Hetty – are devoted to her. Although performing the role of servants – housekeeper, cook and chauffeur come bodyguard – it’s clear they’re the closest Rachel has to a family and may know more than they’re letting on about her past. Rachel is particularly good at utilising their various talents as part of her investigations whether that’s gathering gossip or carrying out a little subterfuge. Crime reporter, Jacob Flint, is once again involved in the story. It’s fairly obvious he has a huge crush on Rachel. He himself admits that from the moment of their first encounter she has fascinated him ‘to the point of obsession’.

The author describes Sepulchre Street as ‘as much a thriller as a detective story’ and the story certainly involves some dramatic scenes, often involving poor Jacob who seems to make a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s also a returning character who’s not your common or garden villain but performs the role of shady behind-the-scenes manipulator.

Rachel’s attempts to discover the reason behind the grisly death of Damaris Gethin, carried out by Damaris’s own hand, involve a number of other characters and plot lines which attract the spotlight for much of the book. Some of these plot lines incorporate quite contemporary themes. Of course, Rachel, who possesses observational and deductive skills to rival Sherlock Holmes, arrives at the answer to the mystery well before everyone else, including, I suspect, most readers. In fact her methodology – ‘I simply follow an idea until I find something that proves that I’m wrong’ – has a distinctly Holmesian flavour.

Sepulchre Street will appeal to fans of classic crime fiction (think Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers) and those who enjoy the challenge of unravelling an intricate plot. A neat touch is the addition of a ‘cluefinder’ at the end of the book (apparently all the fashion during the ‘Golden Age of Murder’ between the two world wars) in which the author identifies all the clues you very likely missed.

In three words: Intriguing, clever, entertaining

Try something similar: A Gift of Poison by Bella Ellis

Martin EdwardsAbout the Author

Martin Edwards has won the Edgar, Agatha, H. R. F. Keating, Macavity, Poirot and Dagger awards as well as being shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize.  He is President of the Detection Club, a former Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association and consultant to the British Library’s bestselling crime classics series.

In 2020 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to crime fiction.

Connect with Martin
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#BookReview #Ad Bone China by Laura Purcell

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Bone ChinaAbout the Book

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft’s family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken.

But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm.

Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.

Format: ebook (448 pages)                        Publisher: Raven Books
Publication date: 19th September 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Bone China on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
Disclosure: If you buy a book via the above link, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

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

My Review

The book alternates between three different timelines, curiously in the reverse order to what you might expect based on the blurb, opening with the woman who now calls herself Hester arriving at Morvoren House.  The events forty years earlier involving Louise Pinecroft’s efforts to help her father in his experimental treatment of patients with tuberculosis don’t appear until later in the book. This part is fascinating as it illuminates the lack of knowledge about the causes of the disease at the time (probably late 18th Century) but it is also rather distressing to witness the “treatments” Dr. Pinecroft inflicts on his patients in an increasingly crazed desire to succeed in finding a cure.

I was particularly drawn to Hester’s story as we find out more about the reasons for her sudden departure from her previous employment as maid to Lady Rose. I thought the author did a great job of making us feel sympathy for her whilst at the same time introducing a sense of unease as we learn what has occurred in previous positions she’s occupied. Her desperation to be valued by Lady Rose and her disappointment when she realises the difference in their social position can never bring about the sort of relationship she desires is painful to witness. At the same time, she commits an act that has dire consequences and I liked that the author challenged the reader’s view of Hester in this respect.  The later parts of Hester’s story and, in particular, the final scene, I found less credible.

The ailing Miss Pinecroft that Hester encounters is very different to the Louise Pinecroft of forty years before and I wasn’t totally convinced by her transformation from down-to-earth capable young woman to a Miss Havisham type figure sat in a gloomy room full of china.

The book certainly has many of the ingredients you look for in a Gothic novel: a chilly brooding house in a remote location, unexplained noises and locked doors that don’t seem to keep things out. In fact, Hester’s first impression of Morvoren House is as something ‘not just bricks and pebbles but a living thing’. And Creeda, employed as nursemaid to Miss Pinecroft’s ward, with her strange ways, belief in fairies, changelings and the need for protective talismans, makes for an unsettlingly creepy character. (With her black gown and habit of suddenly appearing, she’s a bit Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, a bit Grace Poole from Jane Eyre.) But are the strange goings-on the result of malicious human agency, the product of a disturbed imagination or an actual supernatural presence? It’s up to the reader to decide. For me it all got a little bit bonkers towards the end but if you’re looking for a dramatic climax to a book then you won’t be disappointed.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Raven Books via NetGalley

In three words: Atmospheric, chilling, unsettling

Try something similar: The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements

Laura PurcellAbout the Author

Laura Purcell is a former bookseller and lives in Colchester with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Her first novel for Bloomsbury, The Silent Companions, was a Radio 2 and Zoe Ball ITV Book Club pick and was the winner of the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award, while Laura’s Gothic chiller, The Corset, was acclaimed as a ‘masterpiece’ by readers and reviewers alike.  (Photo: Twitter profile)

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