Inside Out by Thorne Moore

 

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You can buy Inside Out.....Here

You can find out more about Thorne Moore.....Here

You can find an article by Thorne Moore about writing Sci Fi.....Here

The Blurb...

Triton station, Outer Circles headquarters of Ragnox Inc, on the moon of Neptune, is as far as the intrepid can go. It’s a place to make money, lots of money, and for seven lucky travellers, bound for Triton on the ISF Heloise, that’s exactly what they intend to do.

Maggy Jole wants to belong. Peter Selden wants to escape. Abigail Dieterman wants to be free. Merrit Burnand wants to start again. Christie Steen wants to forget. No one knows what David Rabiotti wants. And Smith, well, Smith wants everything.

Does it really matter what they want? The journey to Triton will take them eleven months – eleven months to contemplate the future, come to terms with the small print of their contracts, and wish they’d never signed. But changing their minds is not an option.
Sometimes it really is better to travel… than arrive.

My Review..

7 desperate and disparate people, 3 women and 4 men, sell themselves into what amounts voluntary penal servitude in the lawless outer reaches of the Solar System. If they survive their 7 year stretch there is the opportunity for enormous wealth.

But its an 11 month journey on ISF Heloise. Captain Foxe, a latter day privateer, is their captor but as the journey progresses and we discover more about the downfall of our less than magnificent 7, Foxe becomes their mentor and catalyst.

I do not usually read Sci Fi. I chose this book because I have read, and enjoyed, a few short stories by the author (Thorne Moore.) This is her first sojourn into future fiction, so I thought we could take the journey together and it does not dissapoint.

In her previous writing Thorne was very good at writing "creepy" things so I was half expecting "Space Creepiness" ala Alien or similar but no, this is a straight forward ensemble odyssey both in space and within each characters souls and that is the beauty of this book.

Being a very good author Thorne realises that Sci Fi isn't really about spaceships and ray guns any more than crime fiction isn't really about vials of poison and twirling moustaches. It is always about people and their stories and how they interact. We may come for the genre but we stay for the universal stories. So we learn their backstories, how they fell from grace and how they came to do a deal with the devil incarnate. As we take on board their histories we fear for their future when Captain Foxe delivers them to Triton. I can give no higher praise than to say for vast tracts of this book, I forgot I was reading a Sci Fi novel. The intertwining character arcs and plot development were that engaging.

A major part of  any Sci Fi is the world building and Thorne builds an intriguing and often scary scenario. A few Super Corporations dominate from top to bottom and throughout space. To get a "contract" is akin to getting citizenship in ancient Roman society. There are connections with our generation too, chandeliers, T shirts, snooker tables et al. All these things remind us that we are connected to that time and place. It's a very clever trick, its helps us to invest in the story, it could be us. There are laws as far as Jupiter but from there on outwards, it is the wild west rule of the ruthless. The rationale for Thorne's scenario is an added appendix in the book and it is fascinating, and more scarily quite possible given the way society has progressed in recent years. 😧

Really good book. I enjoyed my time with the crew and passengers of the Heloise. We made good progress together. We started as strangers and ended as friends. What started as  

journey towards fear may yet end in redemption.

Selected Quotes...

‘Hey, this is Platinum City, we’re talking about. The real thing.’ Selden picked his teeth. ‘Is that so?’ Merrit sneered and moved on to Christie. ‘How about you?’ ‘I’ve seen the real thing,’ she said, hidden behind her dark glasses. ‘It stinks.’

"That was the rub. He’d shown her the leash. Gilded it might be, but she wanted no more of it. She’d command her own life, her own money– assuming she could acquire some. Abigail had never given a thought to the exacting science of economic management. Inexhaustible funds had always been on tap. Now she had to go prospecting."

"No longer the bee’s knees, or the cat’s whiskers, just the donkey’s arse."

"David didn’t seem capable of comprehending crime, let alone carrying it out, but one had to wonder why he’d been packed off to the Outer Circles. It was a common ploy to mislay the black sheep of the family."

"As they approached, they could see three other freighters docked on, like piglets on a sow."

About the author....

I grew up in Luton but I have lived in north Pembrokeshire for the last few decades. I decided to be a writer at the age of about five, which is why I ignored my headmaster’s advice to study law and make a lot of money. Instead, I studied history at Aberystwyth, and much later, sneakily took a law degree through the Open University when my old headmaster would know nothing about it and couldn’t say I told you so.

I worked for some years in a library before deciding that I wasn’t fit to be an employee, so I left to become self-employed, making miniature furniture and running a restaurant with my sister Liz. These days I more or less write full time in my old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

With my fellow author and good friend Judith BarrowI ran the Narberth Book Fair for several years, before handing it on to the Queen’s Hall.

I am a member of Crime Cymru, a Welsh crime writers collective.

Thornes Other Books...

A Time for Silence...Here

The Covenant...........Here

Motrherlove.............Here

The Unravelling......Here

Shadows..................Here

Long Shadows.........Here

The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd

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You can buy The Unwanted Dead.....Here

You can follow Chris Lloyd......................Here

You can follow Orion Publishing..............Here

The Blurb..,

Paris, Friday 14th June 1940. The day the Nazis march into Paris, making headlines around the globe. Paris police detective Eddie Giral – a survivor of the last World War – watches helplessly on as his world changes forever. But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim. To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was. 

All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home…

My Review...

Chris Lloyd has succeeded brilliantly on two fronts with this novel, location and character. 

The cover of the book is great in that it truly conveys the situation. It is Paris but it is upside down. It's Paris but not as Eddie (our anti-hero) knows it. The majority of the population has fled, leaving old folks, crooks and refugees. Into this mix add the German occupying army and nazi enforcers and it makes for an explosive cocktail. It's dark, it's empty, it's moody. It has commandeered hotels and sleazy clubs where German Officers and organised crime rub shoulders. It's not a matter of who he can trust, Eddie knows he can trust no-one but he has to distrust some more than others. The author sets the scene beautifully. 

The author has also created a tough, vulnerable, relentless, thug of an honest cop in Eddie Giral. Eddie is a war veteran with all that entails. Eddie is determined to track down the killer of four Polish refugees. His investigations lead him to Wermacht Officers, the Gestapo, the Resistance, corrupt police officers and an  American journalist. The tightrope Eddie has to walk becomes smaller and smaller  Everyone has a dark secret and Eddie's got a couple that he keeps his close to his chest. He is so self destructive that he had to leave the woman and child he loves in case they caught in his explosive perimeter. Another quality that Eddie posseses is durability, the poor bloke has had more pastings than Mike Tyson' s sparring partner. Everyone wants a pop at him.

The author has obviously done his research with regards to the occupation of Paris (also has an interesting piece re research at the end of the book.) and  has slotted the murder mystery neatly into the historical background like a hand into a glove.

This book has got a bit of everything, murder mystery, crime fiction, spy thriller but its driving force is the location, the history and Eddie. 

Selected Quotes...

"We are more similar than we seem, Edouard. Good men in bad times."

"And bad men in good times"

"I thought again that the Germans were more than prepared for war. It was the peace that had taken them by surprise."

"Next to me at the bar,two prostitutes were eyeing a table full of youthful officers, looking like acne in a uniform."

 "I'd probably have another small scar to call my own, though, so I went to pour myself a glass of whisky to mark the occasion. I looked at the amount left in the bottle and wondered whether I'd be able to afford another scar."

About the Author...

Straight after graduating in Spanish and French, Chris Lloyd hopped on a bus from Cardiff to Catalonia and stayed there for over twenty years. He has also lived in Grenoble - researching the French Resistance movement - as well as in the Basque Country and Madrid, where he taught English and worked in educational publishing and as a travel writer. He now lives in South Wales and is a translator and novelist.

The result of his lifelong interest in World War 2 and resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, The Unwanted Dead (Orion) is his first novel set in Paris, featuring Detective Eddie Giral. Chris is also the author of the Elisenda Domènech crime series (Canelo), featuring a police officer with the newly-devolved Catalan police force. 

Mists & Megaliths by Catherine McCarthy

 

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You can buy Mists & Megaliths............Here

You can follow Catherine McCarthy....Here

The Blurb....

Welcome to Wales, land of mists and megaliths, where mythical creatures and ancient spirits lurk in the strangest of places.
This collection of 10 supernatural stories offers a flurry of folklore, a gathering of ghosts, and even a cosmic cave creature.

Stories include...

Lure: A fisherman who nets the tail fin of a lure becomes obsessed with finding the rest, but what else lies hidden in the ancient lake?

Carreg Samson: A Neolithic burial chamber stares out to sea, remembering times long since past, but when it loses its heart of stone to a young girl the repercussions are hard to bear.

Coblynau: An old man watches the mountain which was once a slag heap of coal. He listens for the knock of the Coblynau, certain they will come for him... soon, just like they did to warn of the Aberfan disaster.

Author Catherine McCarthy’s second collection invites the reader on a regional journey, evoking a sense of quiet horror from the cosmic to the Gothic.

My Review...

This is a really good collection of short stories that give a real flavour of the dark, Celtic folklore of Wales and bring it into the modern era. A mini Mabinogion.

Horror really isn't my thing so was a tad wary of doing  a review for a horror book. However, this book is not so much horrific as supernatural/creepy.  Turns out that I really enjoyed this Welsh Twilight Zone. There are 10 terrifying tales, so there is sure to be something for everyone.

1. Gragen. A tale about a jealous sea spirit.

2. Two's company, threes a shroud. Comic claustrophobia in a grave.

3. Jagged Edges. The spirit of a railway man haunts a disused station.

4. Mara. What actually is a spirit box?

5. Retribution. When a village is turned to idol worship, And a monster is caged.

6. Ysbrid Y Mor. A stranger comes promising hope, do you let him in?

7. The Ice House. What we do in life echoes in the afterlife.

8. Lure. Who is fishing for who?

9. Corblynau. The mining trolls of Wales.

10. Carreg Samson. If the ancient standing stones could talk.

Each tale offers a little something a little different from the comedy of Two's company, to the foreboding of catastrophic karma of  Carreg Samson, to the moral tale of being a welcoming people in Ysbrid Y Mor.

What really comes through in the writing is a respect, awe and dare I say love for the ancient tales and locations of Wales. I have been to a few of the locations in the book. Namely the ice-house, Cefn Coed Cemetery, Porthgain and as a young lad swam in Cefn Golau pond next to the cholera graves. (Now having the read the ice-house, the fact that I swam there creeps me out a bit 😳.) She has chosen the locales very well, because having been there I can testify that they do, indeed, feel like "Thin Places." A Thin Place is where the dividing line between this world and the next is at its most shallow and can, on occasion, be breached. 

Aside from the creepiness of the tales, the writing can be powerful and gripping. In one section in particular in Corblynau the last miner in Wales is in a nursing home and suffering from dementia and the way the author writes about him is absolutely heart breaking.

There is also a short pre-amble before every tale, which gives a little background information and sets the scene. A nice touch and very informative.

This collection is a display of the dark, spiritual heritage of Cymru. As well as being ripping yarns in themselves they give you something to ponder about in your own lives afterwards.

Selected Quotes...

"If Charles were still able to give a derisory snort, he would have done so, but the cartilage in his nasal passages had long since decomposed."

"The end of the line. Or was it the beginning? Harold thought it depended entirely on one’s perspective."

"I suppose in retrospect I hoped to glean some reaction from the creature, however small, and it made me wonder as to the instinctive need in us humans to communicate with our fellow men. You see, the more accustomed I grew to the creature’s appearance, the more readily I accepted it, until it seemed almost human."

"Decades of coal dust nestle in lungs which rattle like a percolator as he breathes."

About the author...

Catherine McCarthy is a spinner of dark tales, often set in her native Wales, U.K.
She has published two novels and two collections of short stories and her new novella, Immortelle, will be published by Off Limits Press in July 2021.
Her stories have appeared in anthologies such as Graveyard Smash, The One That Got Away, and Diabolica Britannica, and her flash fiction has been published by Crystal Lake Publishing and Flame Tree Press.
In 2020, she won the Aberystwyth University Imagining Utopias prize for creative writing.
Catherine lives in an old farmhouse with her illustrator husband and its ghosts, and when she is not writing may be found hiking the rugged coast-path or photographing ancient churchyards for story inspiration.

Fatal Solution by Leslie Scase

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You can buy Fatal Solution.....Here

You can see the Crime Cymru page for  Leslie Scase..... Here 

Published by Seren, You can visit their website......Here

The Blurb....

In this new mystery Inspector Chard is confronted with another murder in bustling Victorian Pontypridd. On the face of it the case appears unremarkable, even if it isn’t obviously solvable, but following new leads takes Chard into unexpected places. A second murder, a sexual predator, industrial espionage and a mining disaster crowd into the investigation, baffling the Inspector and his colleagues and putting his own life at risk as the murderer attempts to avoid capture.

Once again Leslie Scase takes the reader back to a time and place where, despite the pretensions of Victorian society, life is cheap and passions strong. His research brings Pontypridd vividly to life, and historical events drive along the plot of this page-turning story of detection, as Chard navigates a way through the clues and red herrings, and a lengthening list of suspects, towards the poisoner.

Atmospheric, authentic, Chard and the reader are left guessing until the final page.

My Review...

This is the second in the Inspector Chard novels. Chard is an Englishman from Shropshire who ends up as an Inspector in the Welsh Valleys boom town of Pontypridd in the 1890s. Set against the backdrop of the recent massive Albion colliery disaster and the fight for control of the hugely lucrative Welsh rail industry. Chard isn't quite a fish out of water but he is definitely in the wrong river. Three murders happen in quick succession. Are they linked? Can he stop his bumbling superior from interfering? Can he stop internal jealousies in the ranks. The Welsh Wyatt Earp has his hands full.

I absolutely loved this book and if I could give more than 5 stars I would. It succeeds on all fronts.

Historically it is excellently researched and presented. You are living the period from such nuggets as cocaine being legal, to workhouse ettiquette to the day to day life of a miner.

The whodunnit aspect of the book is also excellent. The author sets numerous traps for you to fall into. Just when you think you know who the villain is, they are exonerated and the spotlight falls on someone else. I have been known to spot the killer early on in a crime fiction novel, however on this occasion the author had me flummoxed until the reveal. Then of course with hindsight the path to the killer is all too clear.

Thirdly and most impressively he gets the culture of the Valleys right. I am from the valleys and  in all the years that I have been reading, I always looked for two things. First to expand my view of the world that I am not familiar with. Secondly I have always looked to find books that reflect my heritage, and my sense of belonging, to show me, my own hinterland. The valleys are quite a large part of south wales with a large population but are hardly noticeable in literature. The only notable exceptions that I found as a young man being How green was my valley by Richard Llewellyn  and Rape of the Fair Country by Alexander Cordell.  While both have their merits I always felt they didn't quite nail it. Llewellyn was actually an Englishman and I think sub-consciously was describing the valleys from the outside looking in (although the character of Dai Bando was superb, and I saw many men of that type.) While Cordell's world was about ironmaking not coal. The culture of the valleys is very different from any other part of Wales. I have heard said about the valleys that Cardiff was only a few miles and different world away. I feel the author gets the feel of the valleys.

This book ticks all the boxes and more for me. After reading this book, I immediately went and bought the first in the series. I think I may have a new favourite author and his name is Leslie Scase.

Selected Quotes...

  "George and Dai were indeed in the fifth cage. As it descended, the two men glanced up to watch the sky slowly disappear from view as the cage went deeper into the dusty, claustrophobic world they would inhabit until they emerged to once again breathe fresh air."

"The blueish tinge of parts of the man’s skin, and the discolouration of a small scar on his cheek, where coal dust had long ago been rubbed into the cut to seal the wound, spoke of Mr Jones’s past."

"Do you read, Inspector? Fiction, I mean.’ Chard was taken aback by the change in topic. ‘Occasionally,’ he responded. ‘I often read. It takes me away from the difficult realities of life. It feeds my soul in some ways."

"But I hate children,’ moaned Dai. ‘There you are, perfect qualifications for a teacher."

About the author...

Leslie Scase is a former civil servant, born and educated in south Wales but living now in Shropshire. He is a member of the Crime Cymru writers' collective, and of the Crime Writers Association. He has given talks on crime and punishment in the late Victorian period, and has appeared at literary festivals and has been interviewed on radio. His Inspector Chard series will run to seven volumes.