City of Masks by SD Sykes

City of Masks
By SD Sykes
Published by Hodder (Paperback - 25 January 2018)
I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher.

Publisher's description

1358. Oswald de Lacy, Lord Somershill, is in Venice, awaiting a pilgrim galley to the Holy Land. While the city is under siege from the Hungarians, Oswald lodges with an English merchant, and soon comes under the dangerous spell of the decadent and dazzling island state that sits on the hinge of Europe, where East meets West.

Oswald is trying to flee the chilling shadow of something in his past, but when he finds a dead man on the night of the carnival, he is dragged into a murder investigation that takes him deep into the intrigues of this mysterious, paranoid city.

Coming up against the feared Signori di Notte, the secret police, Oswald learns that he is not the only one with something to hide. Everybody is watching somebody else, and nobody in Venice is what he or she seems. The masks are not just for the carnival.

My verdict
Reading City of Masks was like coming back to old friends, as I loved the first two books in the Oswald de Lacy series. This book is set seven years on from The Butcher Bird (Book 2). This time, SD Sykes transports readers to 14th Century Venice, where Oswald and his mother wait for a galley that will take them on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

City of Masks is a medieval murder mystery with an intricate plot, well-drawn characters and a realistic period setting. When the grandson of an old family friend is found murdered, Oswald is set the task of discovering the killer, due to his previous success as an amateur detective. At first he refuses but, thanks to gambling debts, he reluctantly takes on the case, in need of the financial reward.  As I expected, having read the previous books, there are lots of red herrings, twists and turns and surprises right until the end.

However, City of Masks seems very different from its predecessors, and I don't mean that in a bad way at all. The first two books are set just after the Black Plague in Kent, and had a claustrophobic feel to them with a smaller cast of characters - think of them as Oswald's 'coming of age' years, as he progresses from novice monk to Lord Somershill. I would suggest that you read all three of the books in order, as City of Masks does contain a few subtle references to Oswald's past.

City of Masks has a darker, almost melancholy, feel to it, set in a busy city on the cusp of war. Oswald has matured since the first two books, influenced by recent events that are revealed as the book progresses, and is struggling to fight his inner demons and overpowering feelings of depression. His domineering mother provides some light relief and entertainment amid all the darkness.

Venice is one of my favourite cities and I certainly felt that SD Sykes brought it to life with her in-depth research and colourful prose, contrasting the wealth and splendour with the poverty and squalor. I look forward to seeing where Oswald finds himself next, whether it's back home in Kent or on yet another foreign adventure.

The Deaths of December by Susi Holliday

The Deaths of December
By Susi Holliday
Published by Mulholland Books (16 November 2017)
I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher.

Publisher's description

The hunt is on for a serial killer in a thrilling festive crime novel.

It looks like a regular advent calendar. 

Until DC Becky Greene starts opening doors...and discovers a crime scene behind almost every one. 

The police hope it's a prank. Because if it isn't, a murderer has just surfaced - someone who's been killing for twenty years. 

But why now? And why has he sent it to this police station? 

As the country relaxes into festive cheer, Greene and DS Eddie Carmine must race against time to catch the killer. Because there are four doors left, and four murders will fill them...

It's shaping up to be a deadly little Christmas. 

My verdict
I'm a great fan of Susi (SJI) Holliday's writing, having enjoyed her Banktoun series - Black Wood, Willow Walk and The Damselfly. So I was very excited to read her new book, The Deaths of December. 

This is a police procedural with a Christmas theme. Someone has sent negatives of crime scenes in an advent calendar to the police. I loved the new characters - DC Becky Greene and DS Eddie Carmine - who have to figure out whether this is a prank or if there's a serial killer on the loose. I have no idea if this is the start of a new series, but I really hope it is, as I'd love to watch them develop.

The Deaths of December is definitely Susi Holliday's best one yet. It reads very differently from her others, proving the flexibility of her writing skills. I feel like I've watched her grow as an author over the last couple of years. This chilling book has a great twisty plot, with a race against the clock, and is lots of fun (in a sinister murderous kinda way). It also has realistic dialogue and great descriptive writing. It kept me guessing and I couldn't put it down.

I have to be honest - I don't 'do' Christmas, not in the way most other people do (please don't hate me for writing that). And I don't read Christmas-themed fiction. Or rather, the only Christmas-themed fiction I usually read involves crime, thrills and... erm... murder.

So The Deaths of December was a perfectly wrapped festive read for me. And I'm sure it will be a perfect Christmas stocking filler for other crime fiction fans too. Buy it!!!!

This Beautiful Life by Katie Marsh

I am delighted to be today's stop on the blog tour for This Beautiful Life by Katie Marsh. This Beautiful Life was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 27 July 2017.


This Beautiful Life
By Katie Marsh
Published by Hodder & Stoughton (27 July 2017)

Publisher's description

What happens when you get the second chance you never expected?
Abi is living her happy ending. She's in remission and is ready to make the most of her second chance at life. But during Abi's illness her family has fallen apart. Her husband Johnhas made decisions that are about to come back to haunt him, while her teenage son Seb is battling with a secret of his own.

Set to the songs on Abi's survival playlist, this is the story of what happens next as Abi tries to rebuild her family. Can she bring the people she loves most in the world back together again... before it's too late?

My verdict
Katie Marsh has done it again. Smiles and laughter sprinkled with tissues and tears are how I would describe her books.  Or maybe tissues and tears sprinkled with smiles and laughter. I can't decide which combination was triggered the most while I read This Beautiful Life, a stunning book that's honest, beautifully written and filled with raw emotion.

I loved both of her previous books, and still she's managed to top them. Yet again, she's tackled a health issue that will be close to people's hearts - the impact of cancer on the whole family. A terrible disease that leaves few families untouched. Abi is in remission from cancer and now needs to put her family back together. I lived these characters' lives as if I were a fly on the wall - or rather, inside their heads, reading their thoughts, feeling their feelings... Abi's family felt like mine - and could be mine as I feel I know them all so well.

This Beautiful Life left me an emotional wreck, taking me on a family's rollercoaster journey as they look towards the future. Just as well I finished reading this late at night after the rest of the household had gone to bed, as I was clasping a box of tissues in my hand. There's a Spotify playlist associated with the book. The song titles are scattered between chapters, making this book seem ever so real and ever so personal. I tried to read it slowly, but couldn't put it down.

Bring on the next Katie Marsh book. I'll be waiting with tissues at the ready, prepared for more tears, smiles and laughter. This is going to be one of my favourite books of 2017.

I received an Advance Reader Copy.

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Racing Against Reality by Matthew Blakstad - Lucky Ghost Blog Tour

I'm delighted to welcome Matt Blakstad to my blog today for his Lucky Ghost blog tour, to talk about 'racing against reality'. Lucky Ghosts was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 27 July 2017. 

Racing Against Reality

By Matthew Blakstad

Photo credit: Paul Treacy

Remember when we still thought 2016 was a gruelling year? From the death of David Bowie to the pundit-defying outcome of the US presidential election, those twelve turbulent months left many of us begging for 2017 to begin. I guess we should have been careful what we wished for.

For my part, I spent last year writing my second full-length novel, Lucky Ghost. I started it on the 2nd of January 2016. (On the 1st I confess I was in no fit state.) By the time I finished the edit, Trump was president. Like my debut novel, Sockpuppet, my second book is set in the near future. It imagines a world very much like our own, only more so. A world where people go about wearing digital veils known as Mesh, which coat their worlds in comforting virtual illusions. They call this augmented reality The Strange.

Here’s the thing about writing a story set in the near future: you need to keep your eyes closely trained on the present. As we all know, it takes months – or even years – for a finished novel to make it into bookshops, by which time the world can have shifted in fundamental ways. Leaving the author’s bleeding-edge vision of the future looking as hackneyed as a 1970’s space opera. The risk is low for authors lucky enough to live in stable times. Right now, though, world events are moving faster than an Eastenders storyline – and they’re quite a bit less plausible. In times like these, the writer can end up in a race against reality.

As I wrote Lucky Ghost, real-world events began to accelerate ever faster, forcing me into constant revisions. I became a bit like Gromit, frantically constructing a toy railway line, split seconds before his train runs over it. In June, for instance, when the EU referendum result came in, I realised that the future I was writing about needed to be one where Brexit had already happened. Ideas about separation – both inside our society, and between Britain and the wider world – began to write themselves into my story. The Syrian crisis, which was already displacing hundreds of thousands of people onto the European continent, threw out the backstory of one of my protagonists, a troubled young hacker with the online handle Thimblerig. Then came the US election campaign, and the vicious spate of online attacks that plagued it. Attacks that originated in Russia and other former soviet nations. Inside my story, these events helped shape the Belarusian extortion syndicate that wages a digital attack on Britain. Even 2016’s spate of celebrity deaths, and its impact on our national mood, found an analogue in the novel.

Yet in spite of all these conscious responses to an ever-bleaker supply of news, it was only in February of this year, as I read through the typeset page proofs of Lucky Ghost, that I spotted the most glaring mark that 2016 had left on my story. As I picked my way through the final typeset pages – a painstaking but immensely rewarding part of the publication process – I realised that the book’s central metaphor, of people who choose to live inside inside a comforting, illusory version of reality, was not some fanciful futuristic conceit. it was exactly what had been going on around me as I wrote.

In a time of carefully-targeted fake news, where everyone from Russian hackers to mainstream political campaigns are barraging us with their own preferred versions of reality; where we’re spending ever more of our time in digital cocoons that show us only the things we already believe to be true; where the divides in our culture have become so starkly drawn that two people’s view of the self-same event can be irreconcilably different – in this environment, what else could I have chosen to write about, but deadly digital illusions, and the willing consumers of alternative facts we all risk becoming?

Lucky Ghost is a conspiracy thriller for a time when a large part of the world’s population prefers conspiracy theories to facts. Maybe, in the end, my book has at last caught up with the world around it. Time will tell who’s first to cross the finish line.

About Matthew Blakstad

Matthew Blakstad’s first career was as a professional child actor. From the age of ten, he had roles in TV dramas on the BBC and ITV, in films and at theatres including the Royal Court. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, he began a career in online communications, consulting for a range of clients from the BBC to major banks. Since 2008, he has been in public service, using his communication skills to help people understand and manage their money.

Find Matthew on his website and Facebook page and follow him on Twitter - @mattblak

About Lucky Ghost

Lucky Ghost
By Matthew Blakstad
Published by Hodder (27 July 2017)

Publisher's description

Early one morning, blogger Alex Kubelick walks up to a total stranger and slaps him across the face. Hard.

He smiles.

They've both just earned Emoticoin, in a new, all-consuming game that trades real-life emotions for digital currency. Emoticoin is changing the face of the economy - but someone or something is controlling it for their own, dangerous ends.

As Alex picks apart the tangled threads that hold the virtual game together she finds herself on the run from very real enemies. It seems only one person has the answers she seeks. Someone who hides behind the name 'Lucky Ghost'.

But Lucky Ghost will only talk to a young hacker called Thimblerig - the online troll who's been harassing Alex for months.

Will Lucky Ghost lead Alex and Thimblerig to the answers they seek - or to their deaths? 

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Sockpuppet by Matt Blakstad

Sockpuppet
By Matt Blakstad
Published by Hodder (Paperback - 26 January 2017)

Publisher's description

Twitter. Facebook. Whatsapp. Google Maps. Every day you share everything about yourself - where you go, what you eat, what you buy, what you think - online. Sometimes you do it on purpose. Usually you do it without even realizing it. At the end of the day, everything from your shoe-size to your credit limit is out there. Your greatest joys, your darkest moments. Your deepest secrets.

If someone wants to know everything about you, all they have to do is look.

But what happens when someone starts spilling state secrets? For politician Bethany Leherer and programmer Danielle Farr, that's not just an interesting thought-experiment. An online celebrity called sic_girl has started telling the world too much about Bethany and Dani, from their jobs and lives to their most intimate secrets. There's just one problem: sic_girl doesn't exist. She's an construct, a program used to test code. Now Dani and Bethany must race against the clock to find out who's controlling sic_girl and why... before she destroys the privacy of everyone in the UK.

My verdict
Sockpuppet is an impressive thought-provoking debut.

This modern day whodunnit is based around a fictional social media platform called Parley (which I assumed is similar to Twitter). State secrets, and personal secrets, are being deliberately revealed by an online bot called sic_girl. It's clear that someone is on a mission to create havoc, but who and why?

Matt Blakstad has created a page-turning dark conspiracy thriller, based on acute observations of a digital society governed by online activity, political ambition and instant communication. There's plenty of computer jargon (and I have to admit it took me a while to get my head round some of it), making this a perfect thriller for computer geeks!

The plot is fast paced, ambitious and multilayered, with various complex underlying themes. But ultimately, reading Sockpuppet taught me two important things ...
1. Whatever you do online, remember that somewhere, or rather everywhere, someone is watching your every move.
2. Always check, double-check and triple-check the terms and conditions before you proceed with ANYTHING!

The recent & possibly ongoing NHS malware attack proves how relevant Sockpuppet is to modern society - this thriller is a warning to us all.

I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher.

A Life Without You by Katie Marsh

A Life Without You
By Katie Marsh
Published by Hodder Books (14 July 2016)
ISBN: 978-1473613652

Publisher's description

Can you ever outrun the past?

It's Zoe's wedding day. She's about to marry Jamie, the love of her life. Then a phone call comes out of the blue, with the news that her mum Gina has been arrested. Zoe must make an impossible decision: should she leave her own wedding to help?

Zoe hasn't seen Gina for years, blaming her for the secret that she's been running from ever since she was sixteen. Now, Gina is back in her life, but she's very different to the mum Zoe remembers. Slowly but surely, Gina is losing her memory.

As she struggles to cope with Gina's illness, can Zoe face up to the terrible events of years ago and find her way back to the people she loves?

My verdict
A Life Without You is a heartbreaking story of love, loss, tragedy and family secrets.

Zoe and her mother Gina haven't seen each other for years, after terrible events tore the family apart. When Gina is arrested on Zoe's wedding day, Zoe realises that her mother isn't the woman she remembers and maybe it's time for them all to face past mistakes.

A Life Without You focuses on early-onset Alzheimer's and its devastating impact. You can tell that the author, Katie Marsh, has had direct experience of this terrible disease by the way her characters struggle to cope. The book also portrays a damaged mother/daughter relationship and whether it's possible to forgive, forget and move on.

A Life Without You is carefully layered, with beautiful writing, very real characters and a tight plot.  In some places, it's funny and heartwarming. In others, it's sad and thought provoking. All of the writing is emotionally charged. The story tore at my heartstrings and left me in tears by the end.

I loved Katie Marsh's first book My Everything. A Life Without You is yet another book that makes you think about the future and how important it is to grab life by the horns and live it to the full when, and while, you can.

I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Jewel in the Crown Blogger Treasure Hunt

Today I'm one of several blogs taking part in the treasure hunt to celebrate the publication of the second novel in Vaseem Khan’s Baby Ganesh mystery series, THE PERPLEXING THEFT OF THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN!

The grand prize: a diamond necklace (well OK, it's cubic zirconia, but still pretty and on a lovely silver chain!) plus a copy of THE PERPLEXING THEFT OF THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

The runner-up prize (x3): a copy of the book

The challenge: 

The team at Crime Files have hidden six code words on book blogs around the web. All you have to do is follow the clues to find your way to the right blogs and locate all the code words. When you've found them all, put them together and send the full six-word answer to competition@hodder.co.uk. 

Everyone who submits the right answer before this Sunday night will be entered into the prize draw! Click here for full terms and conditions.

Congratulations on finding your next code word and clue!

Code word 4 unlocked: SCHOOL

For clue number five, we suggest that you look -

On a blog that is just a collector of books.

Good Luck!

My Everything by Katie Marsh

My Everything
By Katie Marsh
Published by Hodder (27 August 2015)
ISBN: 978-1473613638

Publisher's description

On the day Hannah is finally going to tell her husband she's leaving him, he has a stroke . . . and life changes in an instant.

Tom's only 32. Now he can't walk or cut up his own food, let alone use his phone or take her in his arms. And Hannah's trapped. She knows she has to care for her husband, the very same man she was ready to walk away from.

But with the time and fresh perspective he's been given, Tom re-evaluates his life, and becomes determined to save his marriage. Can he once again become the man his wife fell in love with, or has he left it too late?

My verdict

I loved My Everything. It's highly thought provoking - one of those 'what if' books that feels very real and touches your heart.

The night before Hannah plans to leave her husband Tom, he suffers a devastating stroke at the age of 32. Hannah has to rethink her plans - all her hopes and dreams are shattered in a moment. She feels that she can't leave Tom at a time when he needs her most.

My Everything is an intriguing and believable story that's written with great tenderness. It switches between Hannah and Tom's past and present, showing how their relationship changed over time. They fell out of love - is it possible to fall back into it? Can they, and their relationship, change again, as Tom makes that long journey back to health? Or is it time for both of them to move on?

The book is beautifully written and I didn't want it to end. This is a story about guilt, love, regret, friendship and hope. It's about pursuing your dreams and following your heart - finding out who are you and not letting others define you. It's one of those books that makes you think about your own life - whether you're achieving your own dreams and, if not, what you can do about it. You never know what's in store.

I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.