Tag: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 26th July 2023

whatcathyreadnext4 Comments

WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

A Stranger in my GraveA Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar (Pushkin Press)

A nightmare is haunting Daisy Harker.

Night after night she walks a strange cemetery in her dreams, until she comes to a grave that stops her in her tracks. It’s Daisy’s own, and according to the dates on the gravestone she’s been dead for four years.

What can this nightmare mean, and why is Daisy’s husband so insistent that she forget it? Driven to desperation, she hires a private investigator to reconstruct the day of her dream death. But as she pieces her past together, her present begins to fall apart…

A Fenland GardenA Fenland Garden by Frances Pryor (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

A Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape – the Fens of southern Lincolnshire – by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England’s earliest field systems.

It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of ground for nature and wildlife – of repairing the damage done to a small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming.

A Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practising gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis’s account of the development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the plantsman’s trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally demanding plot of land. Above all, this is the story of bringing something beautiful into being; of embedding a garden in the local landscape; and thereby of deepening and broadening the idea of home.

The Black CrescentThe Black Crescent by Jane Johnson (ARC, Head of Zeus)

Hamou Badi is born in a mountain village with the magical signs of the zouhry on his hands. In Morocco, the zouhry is a figure of legend, a child of both humans and djinns, capable of finding all manner of treasure: lost objects, hidden water.

But instead, Hamou finds a body.

This unsolved murder instils in Hamou a deep desire for order and justice: he trains as an officer of the law, working for the French in Casablanca. But the city is trapped in the turmoil of the nationalist uprising, and soon he will be forced to choose between all he knows and all he loves…

Recently finished

Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman (Aria)

Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang (Inkshares)

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Hollow ThroneThe Hollow Throne by Tim Leach (ARC, Head of Zeus)

180 AD. North of the Wall, Sarmatian warrior Kai and his adopted tribe, the Votadini, struggle for survival, cast into unfamiliar lands by Roman reprisals.

When news arrives that an old enemy is in charge of the Votadini’s hated foes, a confederation of tribes known as the Painted People, and has roused them to action, Kai heads south towards the Wall, hoping to ally with the Romans against this resurgent threat.

Meanwhile, the Romans have heard tales of butchery and mayhem beyond the Wall. Lucius, Legate of the North, believes is is Kai and his allies who are responsible, and sends forth an expedition to capture his old comrade.

Can Kai and his loved ones survive the onslaught – or will the combined might of Rome and the hatred of their enemies spell the end for the warrior and his tribe?

#BookReview Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang @Inkshares

whatcathyreadnext

About the Book

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered – savagely beaten to death in his own study with a mediaeval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children: Alan, an archeologist; Roger, an engineer; and Caroline, a journalist. But his heirs soon find that his last testament contains a strange proviso – that his estate shall go to the heir who solves his murder.

To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into the past. As their suspicion mounts – of each other and of peculiar strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow – they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth.

Format: eARC (402 pages) Publisher: Inkshares
Publication date: 20th July 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

Find Unnatural Ends on Goodreads

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My Review

A new author to me, Christopher Huang is described as a fan of ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction and that’s easy to see because Unnatural Ends has many of the features you’d expect in a classic crime novel – a murder victim found in a locked room, a will, a series of suspicious deaths – plus a touch of the Gothic in the ancient and forbidding Linwood Hall with its stone walls and towers, and servants’ passageways.

To say the contents of their father’s will comes as a surprise to Lord Linwood’s three grown-up children – Alan, Roger and Caroline – is an understatement. They had not expected to be pitted against one another in a contest whose prize is inheritance of the entire Linwood estate. Having said that, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise given their upbringing was more a series of tests by their stern, exacting father than a conventional childhood.

The story alternates between the points of view of the three children so we see how they approach – both separately and together – the search for clues to the identity of the murderer, the means by which the murder was carried out and its motivation. But we also get occasional glimpses of recent events in their lives and recollections of growing up at Linwood Hall, a place dominated by their father. ‘Father himself was like the prelude to a storm, a gathering darkness.’ As the story unfolds and they discover more, these recollections take on a very different complexion. And what they discover is distinctly unsettling and quite unexpectedly dark.

Unnatural Ends is a really cleverly constructed crime mystery with the customary helping of red herrings, sleights of hands and unexpected reveals. But what particularly stood out for me is how the author incorporates into the motivation for the dastardly deeds a philosophy – a quite distasteful one, actually – that was surprising prevalent at the time. Plus a bit of Nietzsche for good measure. And at one point, Caroline read my mind by commenting, “This is King Lear, isn’t it?”. (I do love a bit of intertextuality.)

I usually include a ‘try something similar’ recommendation along with my reviews but in this case it could have been pretty much anything from the oeuvre of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh because Unnatural Ends pays homage to all of them without being a slavish copy. In the end, I came up with something slightly off-the-wall.

I really enjoyed Unnatural Ends for its ingenious plot and clever evocation of ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction.

My thanks to Adam at Inkshares for my digital review copy.

In three words: Clever, engrossing, intriguing

Try something similar: House of Tigers by William Burton McCormick

About the Author

Christopher Huang was born in Singapore, where he lived out the first seventeen years of his life. He moved to Canada in the expectation of cooler weather, returning to Singapore the following year to serve his two years of National Service in the Singapore Army. He studied architecture at McGill University, and lived the next twenty-odd years in Montreal. He now lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he has yet to find a proper jar of real, actual Bovril. (Photo: Author website)

Connect with Christopher
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