Tag: Reviews

#BlogTour #BookReview Blackstone Fell by Martin Edwards

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BLOG TOUR BANNER_BFWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Blackstone Fell by Martin Edwards. My thanks to Sophie at Ransom PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Head of Zeus for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do hop over to Instagram and check out the post by my tour buddy for today, Jan at Jan_is_reading.

Blackstone FellAbout the Book

Yorkshire, 1606. A man vanishes from a locked gatehouse in a remote village. 300 years later, it happens again.

Autumn 1930. Journalist Nell Fagan knows there’s only one person who can get to the bottom of this mystery: Rachael Savernake. But someone wants Nell dead, and soon, while investigating a series of recent deaths at Blackstone Sanatorium, she’s missing entirely.

Looking for answers, Rachel travels to lonely Blackstone Fell, with its eerie moor, deadly waters and sinister tower. With help from Jacob Flint – who’s determined to expose a fraudulent medium at a séance – Rachel will risk her life to bring an end to the disappearances…

Format: Hardback (416 pages)             Publisher: Head of Zeus
Publication date: 1st September 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

Find Blackstone Fell on Goodreads

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My Review

Blackstone Fell is the third book in Martin Edwards’s Rachel Savernake series. I haven’t read either of the earlier books in the series – Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall – but I don’t think it is essential to have done so in order to enjoy Blackstone Fell. If anything waiting for the first appearance in person of Rachel Savernake, having had snippets of information about her from other characters, only increased my curiosity. And wasn’t it worth the wait because she makes a fascinating central character, a sort of female Sherlock Holmes (but without the pipe).

Rachel is a rich young woman whose early life is shrouded in mystery (although it will be more familiar to readers of the earlier books). As Rachel admits, she loves the thrill of the unexpected. ‘Puzzles, mysteries – the more outlandish, the better.’ She guards her privacy with ‘a ruthless zeal’ and is a formidable adversary.  The members of Rachel’s household – Martha Trueman, Martha’s brother Clifford and Clifford’s wife Hetty – are devoted to her; not so much servants as a ‘tight-knit cabal’. Rachel is good at utilising their talents as part of her investigations whether that’s gathering gossip or conducting a little subterfuge.

I confess it took me a while to familiarise myself with the different inhabitants of Blackstone Fell and understand the layout of the village. (The book contains a map but this wasn’t included in my advance digital copy.) Safe to say there are the usual features of small village life: gossip, petty rivalries and tall stories exchanged at the bar of the public house.

The book has a number of different strands including those inexplicable disappearances from Blackstone Lodge, efforts to expose a medium who is preying upon the loved ones of the deceased and a series of deaths from natural causes (or were they?) at a local sanatorium.  Throw in some religous zealotry, infidelity, poison pen letters, financial skulduggery, greed and thwarted ambition, and you have a heady mix all set against the backdrop of a remote location.  ‘The brooding moors, the deadly marsh, Blackstone Leap.’

Blackstone Fell contains many of the elements of classic crime fiction including a denoument at which, with all the suspects gathered together, Rachel reveals the solutions to what turn out to be more than one mystery.  A neat touch is the addition of a ‘cluefinder’ at the end of the book (apparently all the fashion during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction) in which the author identifies the pages on which clues appeared. Well done if you spotted any of these because most of them passed me by, but then I don’t have the observational skills, breadth of knowledge or deductive ability of Rachel Savernake.

Blackstone Fell will appeal to fans of classic crime fiction (think Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers),  those who like to be immersed in the milieu of an earlier age and who enjoy the challenge of unravelling an intricate plot.

In three words: Intricate, clever, intriguing

Try something similar: Dark Dawn Over Steep House by M.R.C. Kasasian

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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#TopTenTuesday Education, Education, Education

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Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

  • Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
  • Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
  • Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
  • Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is a freebie on the theme of school. I’ve done my homework and come up with ten books set in educational establishments where dark deeds are the lesson of the day. Links from the title will take you to my review or the book details on Goodreads.

Different ClassDifferent Class by Joanne Harris – After thirty years at St Oswald’s Grammar in North Yorkshire, Latin master Roy Straitley has seen all kinds of boys come and go… But every so often there’s a boy who doesn’t fit the mould. A troublemaker. A boy capable of twisting everything around him. A boy with hidden shadows inside.

TTT School A Murder of QualityA Murder of Quality by John le Carre – George Smiley was simply doing a favour for Miss Ailsa Brimley, and old friend and editor of a small newspaper. Miss Brimley had received a letter from a worried reader: “I’m not mad. And I know my husbad is trying to kill me.” But the letter had arrived too late: its scribe, the wife of an assistant master at the distinguished Carne School, was already dead.

NewBoyNew Boy by Tracy Chevalier – The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s’ suburban Washington schoolyard, where kids fall in and out of love with each other before lunchtime, and practise a casual racism picked up from their parents and teachers.

MadamMadam by Phoebe Wynne – For 150 years, high above rocky Scottish cliffs, Caldonbrae Hall has sat untouched, a beacon of excellence in an old ancestral castle. A boarding school for girls, it promises that the young women lucky enough to be admitted will emerge “resilient and ready to serve society”.

TTT School The Prime of Miss Jean BrodieThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark – She was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the ‘creme de la creme’ of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome.

TTT School Notes on a ScandalNotes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller – When Sheba Hart joins St George’s as the new pottery teacher, lonely Barbara Covett senses that she has found a kindred spirit. But Barbara is not the only one drawn to Sheba.

NeverLetMeGoNever Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. 

IfWeWereVillainsIf We Were Villains by M.L. Rio – As a young actor at an elite conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same characters onstage and off – villain, hero, temptress – though he was always a supporting role. But when the teachers change the casting, a good-natured rivalry turns ugly, and the plays spill dangerously over into real life.

TTT School The History ManThe History Man by Malcolm Bradbury – Howard Kirk is the trendiest of radical tutors at a fashonable campus university. Timid Vice-Chancellors pale before his threats of disruption; reactionary colleagues are crushed beneath his merciless Marxist logic; women are irresistibly drawn by his progressive promiscuity. A self-appointed revolutionary hero, Howard always comes out on top.

TTT School Gaudy NightGaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers – The dons of Harriet Vane’s alma mater, the all-female Shrewsbury College, Oxford, have invited her back to attend the annual Gaudy celebrations. However, the mood turns sour when someone begins a series of malicious acts including poison-pen messages, obscene graffiti and wanton vandalism.