Man and Lewis Man

Here is another guest blog from Man. Following on from enjoying The Blackhouse by Peter May, these are his thoughts on the second book in this trilogy, The Lewis Man....



After having enjoyed The Blackhouse by Peter May, I wanted to return to windswept Lewis, and the lives of its island folk. As I found a Kindle in my Christmas stocking The Lewis Man was my second purchase (after the long-sought Irving Wallace novel, The Man) though it was my first Kindle read. And what a good read it was...


The Lewis Man starts with a corpse being dug out from a peat bog. Fin Macleod, our hero from The Blackhouse, permanently resettled in Lewis (albeit bedding down in a tent) and trying to rekindle his youthful relationship with his old flame Marsaili, launches an unofficial investigation into the mystery of the deceased. In a refreshing change from many crime series, while Fin drives the story on in the present, the narrative focuses upon Marsaili's father, Tormod MacDonald. Tormod is stricken with Alzheimers and haunted by fragments of his childhood in the grim shortage-ridden austerity Britain of the early 50s. Past and present weave together into a dark tale of post-war wrongs reaching down through the years.



I'd recommend curling up with the Lewis Man on a cold'n'gusty winter's night, 4/5.


Once this Man has finished The Man he looks forward to reading The Chessmen, the conclusion to Peter May's atmospheric trilogy.


Thank you again to Amanda for allowing me to blog!



Thanks, Man. You are welcome. Please feel free to review books for us anytime.

DEITY by Steven Dunne

I was very kindly sent DEITY by its publisher, Headline, some months ago. Here, finally, is my review. This was not a Kindle book, but rather the traditional paper variety.


I loved this book and sincerely hope that the review does it justice!



Deity by Steven Dunne. 2012. Headline. Paperback £6.99. 533pp. ISBN 978-0-7553-8368-9.

This book was simply awesome! Thanks to its extremely disturbing, original, story line and it being very well written, I was hooked right from the start and zipped through it really quickly. I love books that mess with my head and this one certainly did that.

DI Damen Brook is a far from happy man. He lives a lonely life, in a spartan cottage in Derbyshire, with an empty fridge, and lives to work, haunted by his failure to catch a serial killer known as The Reaper and still fragile after his mental breakdown. A body is discovered in a local river and thought to be a jumper until the autopsy reveals a distinct absence of lungs. Brook and his team check with funeral homes and mortuaries to ensure that no bodies have gone missing recently. Then the appearance of a second body in a similar state suggests this is the work of a particularly gruesome killer who likes to mummify his victims. Brook is determined to find the responsible party but is suddenly taken off the case when four college students go missing. Initially this is thought to be quite straightforward; the students’ passports are missing and it looks as if they have gone off on holiday together. However, Brook is not so sure and is convinced there is more to this case than meets the eye. The fact that all of the teenagers come from dysfunctional homes, and are struggling with more than the average amount of teenage angst, makes him fear the worst. Things come to a head when his own daughter, who is visiting for a short while, goes missing, and Brook is in a race against the clock to save her as well as himself.

This book deals very well with the traumas of growing up and discovering that life is not guaranteed to be the plain-sailing “do anything you want, darling” breeze that children are led to believe by well-meaning parents. It also focuses on how people crave their 15 minutes of fame and how some will do just about anything to get it. The twist at the end of DEITY is one of the best I have read for a long time. I thought that I had guessed the ending pretty early on and was simply delighted to be proved wrong. Happily, there are more books featuring DI Damen Brooks and I am really looking forward to getting my hands on them.

Extremely highly recommended.

In Memoriam

It was a great shock to discover that Maxine Clarke, one of the best known and best loved crime fiction reviewers, had passed away.

Although I never met her in person, she was one of the first to welcome me "on board" when I joined the Eurocrime team and was always extremely encouraging about my reviews. She said she loved to read them - praise indeed from someone who wrote reviews as well as she did and worked for NATURE; that most hallowed scientific journal that every biologist dreams of publishing in.

As you can see, she even commented on my Tombstoning review - the last post on this blog. I shall treasure her warm remark. It was a delight to read and is now all the more precious.

Maxine was so friendly and took time to make you feel welcome. There is now a huge hole in the crime fiction reviewing community. I am sure that every one of us will feel her loss.

Can I extend my thoughts and prayers to her friends and family, who must be missing her most dreadfully. I hope the outpouring of love and best wishes from around the world in response to the sad news will do just a little to warm your hearts in the days ahead.

Amanda xx

Tombstoning by Doug Johnstone

This latest review of another highly recommended read has been produced with the help of my parrot, Milly. She has been flicking pomegranate juice at me to aid inspiration. Let me assure you that pomegranate juice in the eye stings rather a lot! Little monkey!

Tombstoning by Doug Johnstone. July 2012. Epub £1.71. 256 pages (estimated).

This deliciously disturbing tale was first published by Penguin in 2006. In July of this year it became available in Kindle format and can be purchased in either version from Amazon.

TOMBSTONING is Doug Johnstone’s first novel and is simply fabulous. Although it is less polished than his latest book, HIT AND RUN (still my Eurocrime Number 1 for 2012), it radiates with the talent that Johnstone is chock-full of and I love it. This is another book that messes with your head: a sure fire way to get onto my favourites list.

David Lindsay was born and raised in Arbroath. His best friend falls off a cliff in mysterious circumstances just before his 18th birthday, and David is the last person to see him alive. Churning with more questions than answers, he turns tail and runs, all the way to Edinburgh, where he stays and tries to forget. One day many years later he receives an email, from a certain Nicola Cruikshank, that turns his comfortable, if tedious, life upside down. Nicola has news of a school reunion and David, or Dave, as he now calls himself, is invited. David’s heart does a double flip, as Nicola was the girl at school that he fancied. He nervously replies and ends up meeting Nicola for her to arm-twist him into going to the reunion. Delighted that Nicola is still extremely attractive, he agrees to go and a few Saturdays later finds himself driving northward on a journey that will bring him head on with his childhood traumas. Instead of being a cathartic putting to rest of the past, the trip uncovers a whole hornets’ nest of trouble and once again David finds himself seeing the broken body of a friend, dead at the bottom of the cliffs. Who, or what, is the cause of this latest ‘accident’? Its timing is too good to be a coincidence and, with a finger of suspicion pointing at him, David takes it upon himself to find out the answers.

By far the best part of TOMBSTONING, for me, is Johnstone’s vivid description of David’s feelings towards the school reunion and the subsequent behaviour of his supposed ‘grown up’ school mates, that were nasty back in the day and are still pretty unpleasant people. I love the way the story keeps you guessing and hoping that things turn out OK (that’s the thing with Johnstone – there is no guarantee of a happy ending). The central characters are well developed and likeable and the pace of the story keeps you hanging on, wondering.

I have given this book 4 stars in my Amazon review. While I like it enormously, it isn’t as good as Johnstone’s later offerings, so I can’t give it 5 stars. Having said that, I do think this author is awesome and am delighted to have two more of his books waiting patiently on my ‘to be read’ pile!

Links to reviews

Here are some links to reviews on Eurocrime that have been written for books by the authors I went to see at Bloody Scotland.....


Allan Guthrie Savage Night Slammer

Craig Russell A Fear of Dark Water, The Deep Dark Sleep

Karen Campbell Shadowplay, Proof of Life

Denise Mina The Field of Blood, The Last Breath

Ann Cleeves Silent Voices, White Nights

Peter May The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man

Gordon Ferris The Hanging Shed, Bitter Water

Russel MacLean The Lost Sister

The Black House by Peter May

I reviewed this awesome book for Eurocrime last year (see here) and it gives me great pleasure to put this review on my blog. Man (otherwise known as Mike) wrote this review recently and is my first guest blogger.

I hope you enjoy the review, and the book. If you've not read it yet you should hurry up as the final part of the trilogy is due for release in January 2013!!!

Upon arriving at Bloody Scotland, Scotland's first crime fiction festival, in September, I resolved not to buy any more books ("any more" as I'd a hefty stack back at home). But, the temptations of the text proved too strong and I came back with a few, one of which was The Blackhouse by Peter May.

Fin Macleod is a detective with Lothian and Borders Police based in Edinburgh. On top of investigating a grisly, unsolved murder Fin is struggling to both accept the death of his young son in a hit-and-run and to save his marriage. Despite these woes, Fin's guv dispatches him to the remote Isle of Lewis on the North-west of Scotland, as the local bobbies have a murder that bears a startling similarity to Fin's Edinburgh case. For Fin this is not only a new case, but a return home after many years of self-imposed exile. As he investigates, and true to the genre, he meet his childhood friend, Artair Macinnes and sweetheart, Marsaili, old memories return to haunt him, and long buried secrets from the past are dragged into the present.

The Blackhouse is an atmospheric read. The wind-swept, wave-battered, spare Lewis, populated by tough, God-fearing folk provides a suitably brooding landscape for Fin's investigation. May provides plenty of local colour (much of it shades of black and grey) with the stand-out being a gruelling description of Lewismen's annual guga harvest on the barren Atlantic rock of An Sgeir (An Skerr - non-Gaelic speakers, like me, will find the pronunciation page most useful!) May's use of third-person for Fin in the present and first-person for Fin in the past, helps us to contrast then and now and how our childhood experiences shape our whole lives, for better or worse. My only complaint was a sudden ending, but no worry, the next in the trilogy, The Lewis Man, is now out, and the conclusion, The Chessmen, arrives in January.

Just the read for a dark autumn evening, 4/5.

A big thank you to Amanda for allowing me onto her blog :-)

Bloody Scotland - IV

After all those months of planning and looking forward to going, we've been and are home again, unpacking the pile of signed books and adding the new ones to their designated places on the shelves. It was a fantastic weekend. The good news is that there is going to be another one! Same weekend next year! I am tempted to book a room in the same hotel already.

So, to conclude my short pieces about the events we attended...

Event number 5 was on Sunday and called Wild Girls. It featured Karen Campbell and Denise Mina, and was chaired by Craig Robertson. What a fantastic event! Quite a lot of the time was spent discussing author gender and how female authors are perceived as crime writers. We were also treated to readings by both ladies from their latest books. The audience was lively and interested, so the questions for the authors flowed and the hour ended all too fast.

The final event was The Red Headed League, which included a reading of the Sherlock Holmes adventure with the same name. Ten of the authors who spoke during the festival had parts in the reading. It was superb.

Finally, this event was concluded with an award ceremony for the winner of the Glengoyne short story competion Worth The Wait that had been held prior to the festival. The winning story is first rate and has been published in an anthology of the best stories from the competition. It is available from its publisher, Blasted Heath.

The final award of the festival was given to the winner of the Scottish Crime Book of the year award. The short list of six (Charles Cumming – A Foreign Country (Harper Collins); Craig Russell – Dead Men & Broken Hearts (Quercus; Denise Mina – Gods & Beasts (Orion); Peter May – The Lewis Man (Quercus); Philip Kerr – Prague Fatale (Quercus; Will Jordan – Redemption (Random House)) must have been very difficult to choose from but the winner was Charles Cumming. Excellent choice.

I'll follow this post with links to various reviews and photos.

It is a real shame to be home and back to normal after such a great weekend. I have a whole year to start to look forward to the next one!