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#BookReview The Room of the Dead (Betty Church Mystery 2) by M.R.C. Kasasian @HoZ_Books

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The Room of the DeadAbout the Book

December, 1939. Having solved the case of the Suffolk Vampire, Inspector Betty Church and her colleagues at Sackwater Police Station have settled back down to business. There’s the elderly Mr Fern who keeps losing his slippers, Sylvia Satin’s thirteenth birthday party to attend and the scintillating case of the missing bookmark to solve. Though peace and quiet are all well and good, Betty soon finds herself longing for some cold-blooded murder.

When a bomb is dropped on a residential street, both peace and quiet are broken and it seems the war has finally reached Sackwater. But Betty cannot stop the Hun, however hard she tries. So when the body of one of the bomb victims is found stretched out like an angel on Sackwater’s beach, Betty concentrates on finding the enemy much closer to home…

Format: Hardcover (432 pages)   Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 11th July 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime, Mystery

Find The Room of the Dead (Betty Church Mystery #2) on Goodreads

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My Review

The Room of the Dead is the second in the author’s Betty Church Mystery series. True to form, I’m reading the series out of order, having read the first and third books – Betty Church And The Suffolk Vampire and The Ghost Tree – before this one. However, at least I can reassure readers new to the series that The Room of the Dead works perfectly well as a standalone. There are brief references to events in the first book, but nothing that would spoil your enjoyment of this one.

The book sees the return of the mostly hapless collection of individuals who constitute the Sackwater police force: Constable ‘Dodo’ Chivers (as barmy as her name suggests), Constable Box, Constable Bank-Anthony (‘Bantony’), Constable Rivers, identical twins Constables Lysander and Algernon Grinder-Snipes, Sergeant Briggs (‘Brigsy’) and the perpetual thorn in Betty’s side, Inspector Sharkey (referred to as ‘Old Scrapie’, although not within his hearing).

You’ll have deduced by now that the author has a penchant for giving his characters unusual names such as Simnal Cranditch and Garrison Orchard. And if you’ve read any of the author’s other books you’ll be prepared for the frequent puns, wordplay and quirky chapter titles. As a John Buchan fan, my favourite was ‘The Twenty-Nine Steps’, although where the other ten went I’ve no idea!

When it comes to solving cases, once again Betty demonstrates she has more brains in her little finger than all of her officers put together. And she’s going to need all that brain power as the investigation gets increasingly complex.  Fans of the author’s Gower Street Detective series, will be pleased to see March Middleton, Betty’s godmother, turn up to lend a hand and demonstrate the miraculous powers of observation and deduction she learned from the Gower Street detective himself, Sidney Grice.  I love Betty as a character and was delighted at – hold the front page – a hint of romance in the air… or among the sand dunes to be more precise.

The Room of the Dead is engagingly silly at times and some readers may tire of the frequent fun poked at the Suffolk accent, but it’s entertaining nonetheless and the solution to the mystery turns out to be slightly darker than you may have expected.

I received a review copy courtesy of Head of Zeus via NetGalley.

In three words: Engaging, humorous, ingenious

Try something similar: The Custard Corpses by M. J. Porter

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M R C KasasianAbout the Author

M.R.C. Kasasian was raised in Lancashire. He has had careers as varied as a factory hand, wine waiter, veterinary assistant, fairground worker and dentist. He is the author of the much loved Gower Street Detective series, five books featuring personal detective Sidney Grice and his ward March Middleton, as well as two other Betty Church mysteries, Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire and The Room of the Dead. He lives with his wife, in Suffolk in the summer and in Malta in the winter.(Photo/bio: Publisher author page)

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#BookReview Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray @vintagebooks

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Two Storm WoodAbout the Book

1919. On the desolate battlefields of northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial.

Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest. His task is upended when a gruesome discovery is made beneath the ruins of a German strongpoint.

Amy Vanneck’s fiance is one soldier lost amongst many, but she cannot accept that his body may never be found. She heads to France, determined to discover what became of the man she loved.

It soon becomes clear that what Mackenzie has uncovered is a war crime of inhuman savagery. As the dark truth leaches out, both he and Amy are drawn into the hunt for a psychopath, one for whom the atrocity at Two Storm Wood is not an end, but a beginning.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)         Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication date: 13th January 2022 Genre: Category: Historical Fiction, Mystery

Find Two Storm Wood on Goodreads

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My Review

Two Storm Wood is billed as a historical thriller and whilst there is certainly a thriller element to it, it wasn’t the most compelling aspect of the book for me. In fact, I guessed a key part of the plot pretty early on thanks to some detail in the prologue.

For me, the key strength of the book was how it revealed the ‘debris’ of war, whether that’s material debris, such as abandoned military equipment or bombed out buildings, human debris such as the bodies (or remains of bodies) of fallen soldiers like those Captain Mackenzie’s battalion is tasked with recovering and identifying, or physical debris in the form of the damaged and scarred bodies of those who survived but were terribly injured.

And then there’s the psychological debris: the survivors traumatised by what they witnessed and what they were forced to do. If you’ve never considered just what close combat, such as carrying out a silent raid on an enemy trench, involves in reality, Two Storm Wood will leave you under no illusions. ‘An enemy who chose the bayonet, the knife or the club was an enemy who had lost touch with self-interest, the calculating instinct for self-preservation, an enemy devoted to the collective cause, unafraid to die.’ As the book reveals, often only drugs could provide the necessary impulse to carry out orders, to blank out the dreadful memories or to provide the strength to endure days spent in endless watchfulness.

Amy Vanneck encapsulates the grief of those whose siblings, spouses or loved ones never came back or whose fate remained unknown.  Perhaps unusally given the times, she travels alone to the heart of the now abandoned battlefields searching for the truth about how her fiancé Edward Haslam died, or if indeed he did.  As she edges closer to the truth, it becomes increasingly clear that ‘War is a contest of violence, not virtue’ and the cruelty of what one human being can do to another knows no bounds.

With its vivid battle scenes, Two Storm Wood conjured up pictures in my mind that I’m not sure I want to recall in a hurry. The book powerfully, and at times graphically, illustrates that ‘War poisons everything that it does not destroy’. It also features one of the most evil and ruthless fictional characters I’ve come across in a long time, a key ingredient for a really absorbing thriller.

I received an advance review copy of Vintage via NetGalley.

In three words: Chilling, dark, immersive

Try something similar: The Glorious Dead by Tim Atkinson

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Philip GrayAbout the Author

Philip Gray was inspired to write Two Storm Wood by his grandfather who fought in the First World War. (Photo credit: Author website)

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