The novel begins with a deliberately disorienting scene. Sarah Remlinger wakes bound hand-and-foot in the dark trunk of a moving car, soaked in an enormous amount of blood that she gradually realizes is not hers. Even stranger, she knows what is going to happen before it happens. She knows there will be a boy at […]
The novel begins with the death of Mordechai “Mordy” Horowitz, an elderly, deeply religious man in the Orthodox Jewish community of Newstead Hills. One snowy December morning, his regular synagogue carpool friends—Sam Hirsch, Shlomo Tannenbaum, Max Rosen, and Irving Eisenberg—arrive at his house and become worried when he does not answer. Shlomo enters with a […]
Mortal Passions is a dark-academia vampire novel centred on Laura Wyck, a twenty-six-year-old English PhD student at the unnamed University of ———, a beautiful but financially collapsing old institution to which she has devoted almost her entire adult life. Laura is intelligent, romantic, self-dramatising and chronically uncertain about what is good for her, and the […]
This is the new instalment in the Joona Linna series that deliberately reconnects the series to Jurek Walter. The book opens with the myth of Medusa as a woman who is victimised and then punished instead of her attacker, becoming a monster because of the injustice done to her. That idea becomes the model for […]
Baby Queen is a Southern crime novel centred on Natalie “Nat” Link, a thirtysomething entrepreneur who has returned to her family’s Alabama honey farm and is trying to turn its declining beekeeping business into a cosmetics company. What Nat does not initially understand is that the respectable family business has always had another side: her […]
Andrea Morstabilini’s In Vacuo is a Gothic science-fiction novel about Henry Caxton, a poor boy who becomes the ward and eventually the medical apprentice of the brilliant, secretive Dr Robertson Hammond. What initially appears to be a Victorian Gothic mystery about a suspicious childbirth and a locked room gradually reveals itself as a story about […]
Patricia Cornwell’s Rapid and Fatal opens on Good Friday with Virginia chief medical examiner Kay Scarpetta called to the Alexandria mansion of billionaire security magnate Adam Quilton and his wife, Mimi. Both have collapsed and died while eating Chinese takeout from Fen Palace. The scene initially looks like an extraordinary double allergic reaction: Adam and […]
Alma Katsu’s Incarnate is a supernatural technology thriller about Dorothy Wagner, a gifted but profoundly isolated visual-effects artist who creates a flawless virtual influencer and then begins physically transforming into her. What initially appears to be a story about artificial intelligence, deepfakes and online celebrity gradually becomes a Faustian horror narrative in which attention itself […]
Anna Richmond’s Tide is narrated by Imogen, a London museum curator whose seven-year-old son, Thomas, vanishes in the River Thames under horrifying and mysterious circumstances. The novel follows the immediate disappearance, the destruction of Imogen’s marriage, the uncertainty surrounding what she witnessed, and the long aftermath of a tragedy that is never conventionally resolved. The […]
Other Worlds Than These is the third Talisman novel, a late-return fantasy quest in which an aging Jack Sawyer, widowed, haunted, half-exiled in Mid-World, and physically endangered whenever he returns to America, must help stop a reality-wound called the Gullet before it tears the world apart. It wants to be a completion, a tribute, a […]