A quiet Christmas. A little sunshine. A lot of food. Good company. Good books. I couldn’t ask for more.

Here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.

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This week, I went back to an old Stephen King novel that I missed when it came out, finally read the third Thurdfay Murder Club novel, tried a humorous Urban Fantasy that didn’t make me smile and read na excellent Christams thriller.

A spectacularly dark and electrifying novel about addiction, religion, music, and what might exist on the other side of life. 
In a small New England town, in the early ’60s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs Jacobs; the women and girls – including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister – feel the same about Reverend Jacobs. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity. 
Then tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, the preacher curses God, mocking all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town. 
Jamie has demons of his own. In his mid-30s, he is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll. Addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate, he sees Jacobs again – a showman on stage, creating dazzling ‘portraits in lightning’ – and their meeting has profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings. Because for every cure there is a price….

‘Revival’ (2014) is the life story of Jamie Morton, who we first meet as a six-year-old, playing in the dirt with his toy soldiers when the shadow of the young, charismatic Reverend Jacobs falls over him. One way or another, Jamie spends the rest of his life in that shadow. As we follow Jamie from his boyhood into his sixties, we see his life constantly being reshaped by encounters with the Rev, who Jamie thinks of as his Fifth Business. Both men are damaged, the Rev by grief at the loss of his family and his faith, and Jamie by his addiction to drugs. Both men are driven by a curiosity that becomes a compulsion. Both are tied together by the use of what’s described as ‘Secret Electricity’, a force that the Rev spends decades researching. 

I was totally immersed in Jamie’s life. Stephen King’s writing is beautiful and compelling, even when the things being written about are ugly or unpleasant. David Morse’s narration was pitch-perfect. 

Jamie felt real to me. His story was, in retrospect, a sort of confession, offered partly as an act of atonement for how he lived his life. The writing was equally vivid when recalling the happy and sometimes traumatic days of his childhood, the dark, self-destructive days of his abasement by drugs, his enduring relationship with music, his loves, his friendships, and the mistakes that poisoned his life. 

I loved the ambiguity of the ‘power’ that the Rev wields. It could be science. It could be trickery. It’s probably both. What’s certain is that that power changed something inside Jamie, tainting everything he saw and did after that with the possibility of mental illness, or of revelation, or of accurate remembrance. 

As with many of King’s novels, the monsters in this book are mostly human, and they are not uniformly monstrous. I can see that the depiction of Revivalist Tent meetings as more carnival act than Christian communion might upset some people, but this isn’t a general attack on religion, just a look at how one man uses it for his own purposes. The understanding of death and what follows it, which comes to dominate Jamie’s perception, is bleak and very far from Christian. Whether it is real or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s as real to Jamie as the possibility of Heaven is to a true believer.

When true crime podcaster Harley Granger drifts into Madeline Martin’s bookshop days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up a past that Madeline would much rather forget.
Granger’s work has earned him fame and wealth – and some serious criticism for his various unethical practices. Granger also has a lot of questions about the night Madeline was left for dead, the only surviving victim of killer Evan Handy.
Handy, who also murdered Madeline’s best friend and is suspected in the disappearance of two local sisters, has been in jail for a decade. Since then, though, three other young women have gone missing in similar circumstances. Is the true predator still out there somewhere?
As Christmas approaches and a blizzard bears down, Madeline must confront the past to answer questions that have haunted her since that day. Is the truth more terrible than she ever imagined?

‘Christmas Presents (2023) ‘ is a powerful novella-length thriller about the damage a serial killer does to a small town. It’s clever, original, tautly-crafted, surprising, and propulsive. It uses dual timelines with great precision to maximise both the tension  of the story and empathy with the victims and survivors.

What I liked most about it was that the focus was on the women, not on the killer. The story felt grounded in the community of the small town. The plot twists added to the tension, but didn’t feel like magic tricks. Family, friendship, and second chances were as central to the story as the darkness unleashed by the killer. 

There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .
A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.
At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who’s got problems of her own.
When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

‘THe Stranger Times’ won the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work. It’s the first of five books in a popular humorous Urban Fantasy series set in Manchester. It’s recieved lots of positive reviews.

I abandoned it after 10%. The opning scene was intriguing. Eveything after that was over done It was cringe-worthy stuff that read so much like a 1980s British SitCom that I could almost hear the canned laughter tracks.

It is an ordinary Thursday and things should finally be returning to normal.
Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club is concerned. A decade-old cold case leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers.
Then a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill…or be killed.
As the cold case turns white hot, Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), while Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim chase down clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?

I delayed reading ‘The Bullet That Missed’ because reviews suggested that it was not as good as its predecessors. At the start of the book, I wondered if it was going to be worth reading. It felt too mannered – too conscious of itself. The story didn’t pull me in. It seemed to be winking at me like the third season of a much-loved SitCom where the subtext is:”Aren’t you happy that we’re back? Think how much fun we’re going to have.” 

What I liked most about the first book was how grounded it was in closely observed reality amplified by optimism, luck and friendship.  This book felt like it had lost most of that. Now we’re dealing with spies and mercenaries and organised crime. It was still fun, but it was a more facile, less original fun, and that disappointed me.

The book got better in the second half, mostly thanks to the humour. But it stayed way off in fantasy land.

Bogdan emerged as my favourite character. The way he responded to Stephen’s questions about whether he, Stephen, is ‘going doolally’ was wonderful.

I’m going to stick with the series in the hope that the next book is better. 

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This week’s book buying focuses on Speculative Fiction and Mysterieshas, with some books combining both. I have Steampunk, AI and robotics, murder on a Space Station and two mystery series.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.
As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

I’ve decided to finish off this series in the next couple of months. I’m hoping the fourth book will be a return to form.

I decided to buy both books of this Steampunk duology together. I’m fascinated by the idea of a technology revolution that makes Steampunk obsolescent.

Aarhus, Denmark. When anthropology student Anna Kiehl vanishes during her evening run in the local forest, no one notices. But the next morning, her body is found—naked, throat slit, a bouquet of poisonous hemlock on her chest. The city is horrified. Who would kill a young mother and stage her death like a macabre offering?
Lieutenant Detective Daniel Trokic of the East Jutland Police takes the case, but the deeper he digs, the more unsettling the details become. Anna’s young son has gone mute. Her apartment has been wiped clean. And in her mailbox lies a book written by a renowned neurochemist researching antidepressants—who vanished without a trace eight weeks earlier. Are the two cases connected?
As Trokic races to uncover the truth, one thing becomes terrifyingly clear: Anna carried a secret someone was willing to kill for. And that person won’t hesitate to kill again.

‘Dark September‘82006) won Inger Wolf the Danish Crime Academy’s debut prize. It kicks off her five-book Lieutenant Detective Trokic series. I’m boping that this will be the beginning of a new series for me.

The alien lords rule with an iron grip. Feudalism has returned – only now, AI is the sword. Every citizen receives a Digital Ego AI brain implant connecting the mind to the System. Day and night, it becomes your pleasure. It shapes your thoughts. It decides your worth.
The overlords have judged most of humanity obsolete. The culling has begun.
In a world where technology dictates every move, the most dangerous weapon is independent thought. A young man survives a strike that erases his memory and kills his family. Rescued by a rogue AI and a centuries-old operative, he is thrust into a war he can’t remember and a destiny he didn’t choose. He has never aspired to be a hero, yet his power might be the one to tip the odds in humanity’s favor. During his training, he must conceal his abilities and keep a low profile, helping the rebel Uprising from the shadows.
Their secret weapons? His mental power to access the Field, and a rogue AI evolving past her code, growing something even the overlords fear: Conscience.

This is a roll of the dice for me. I’m intrigued by someone applying Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to near future AI technology.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.
But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime—and fast—or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board….

I enjoyed Mur Lafferty’s ‘Six Wakes’ (2017). I held off reading her Midsolar Murders series, partly because I hate waiting a year for the next book to come out and partly because I wanted to see how the series was received. The third book was published in July, and the series seems to be developing a fan base, so I’ve decided to give it a try.

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This week’s reading is a trip back in time. I have a Stephen King novel from 2014, the third ‘Thursday Murder Club’ novel from 2022, the first ‘Stranger Times’ novel from 2021 and the first Cal Leandros novel from 2006.

The path to enlightenment is fraught with danger when Greenwich Village PI Rachel Alexander and her pit bull, Dash, investigate the death of a tai chi practitioner
Did she jump or was she pushed? Devastated by the loss of their only child, David and Marsha Jacobs hire Rachel to find out why Lisa leaped to her death from the fifth-floor window of her martial arts studio. The tai chi instructor, who was studying to be a Zen Buddhist priest, seemed to have it all: beauty, brains, a vocation she adored, a sexy lover—and her beautiful, sad-eyed Akita, who may have been the only witness to her death and is still grieving the loss of his mistress.
Refusing to believe that Lisa would abandon her beloved pet—and with only a suspicious suicide note to go on—Rachel and her canine assistant, Dash, hit the streets of downtown New York, retracing the dead woman’s steps to figure out whether she was yin to a killer’s yang.

I read and enjoyed the first Rachel Alexander and Dash Mystery, ‘This Dog For Hire’ (1996) six years ago. I’d meant to carry on with the series but, for some obscure reason, the rest of the series wasn’t available in the UK as an audiobook. This audiobook version was relesed in 2025 so now I can carry on with the series,(although only books 1,2, 3, and 6 of this seven book series are available as audiobooks).

A young woman falls asleep on a deserted beach and wakes to discover the body of a man whose throat has been slashed from ear to ear . . .The young woman is the celebrated detective novelist Harriet Vane, once again drawn against her will into a murder investigation in which she herself could be a suspect.
Lord Peter Wimsey is only too eager to help her clear her name.

I’m reading the four Harriet Vane / Peter Wimsey novels out of sequence. I started with the third book, ‘Gaudy Night‘ (1936). Then I want back to the first book ‘Strong Poison‘ (1930). Now I’m going to read the book that sits between the two of them ‘Have His Carcase‘ (1932). It’s been on my shelves since I finished ‘Strong Poison‘ in 2020 but I got distracted by reading all the Christie books along the way.

When Mrs King, housekeeper to the most illustrious home in Mayfair, is suddenly dismissed after years of loyal service, she knows just who to recruit to help her take revenge.
A black-market queen out to settle her scores. An actress desperate for a magnificent part. A seamstress dreaming of a better life. And Mrs King’s predecessor, who has been keeping the dark secrets of Park Lane far too long.
Mrs King has an audacious plan in mind, one that will reunite her women in the depths of the house on the night of a magnificent ball – and play out right under the noses of her former employers…

I saw ‘The Housekeepers” (2024) described on GoodReads as “‘Oceans Eleven’ meets ‘Downton Abbey‘”. It sounds like it should be a fun historical heist story with the domestics taking the opportunity to teach the upper classes a lesson. Personally, I hope none of them get caught.

By night, they fight in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. 
By day, they are friendly next-door neighbors. 
Neither of them know that their alter egos are archenemies. 

‘The Lies of Vampires and Slayers‘ (2023) might be tropey slush or it may become one of my favourite Urban Fantasy series. I’ve decided to travel in hope.