All of the Marvels: An Amazing Voyage into Marvel’s Universe and 27,000 Superhero Comics by Douglas Wolk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother took me to Harry McCormick's newsagents to choose a new comic, replacing The Beano and The Beezer of which I have become tired. I chose one with a bright red and blue character on the cover - Spider-man Comics Weekly Nr 100. This black and white UK reprint of the original US comics was my first introduction to the Marvel Universe, a love affair that has lasted almost 50 years.

Unlike their Distinguished Competition, Marvel has never pressed the reset button, and Douglas Wolk's ALL THE MARVELS argues that the interconnectedness of all the stories, at least since, maybe even well before, Fantastic Four issue one in 1961, the fact that any event in their history can impact later stories, is part of the key to Marvel's success. Wolk read over 27000 comics, those featuring the major characters, Spider-Man, Avengers, Hulk, but also lesser known protagonists, like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Dazzler, and he finds the threads which bind the whole thing into, as he puts it, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created.

Wolk's book is entertaining, the footnotes possibly even more so. He took me right back to Harry McCormick's and the world of wonders that that first reprint opened up. I'm now re-reading Master of Kung-Fu and Black Panther and looking forward to revisiting with Stan and Jack and Steve and Roy and Gerry and the rest...

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#BlogTour - The Party House by Lin Anderson

'A real page-turner' – Ian Rankin

The Party House by Lin Anderson is a deeply atmospheric psychological thriller set in the Scottish Highlands, for fans of Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware and Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium.

Devastated by a recent pandemic brought in by outsiders, the villagers of Blackrig in the Scottish Highlands are outraged when they find that the nearby estate plans to reopen its luxury ‘party house’ to tourists.

As animosity sparks amongst the locals, part of the property is damaged and, in the ensuing chaos, the body of a young girl is found in the wreck. Seventeen-year-old Ailsa Cummings went missing five years ago, never to be seen again – until now.

The excavation of Ailsa’s remains ignites old suspicions cast on the men of this small community, including Greg, the estate’s gamekeeper. At the beginning of a burgeoning relationship with a new lover, Joanne, Greg is loath to discuss old wounds. Frightened by Greg’s reaction to the missing girl’s discovery, Joanne begins to doubt how well she knows this new man in her life. Then again, he’s not the only one with secrets in their volatile relationship . . .

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My first experience of the author, Lin Anderson’s THE PARTY HOUSE is very much a psychological thriller. The novel begins with the disappearance of Ailsa Cummings, a seventeen-year-old who vanishes from the woods surrounding the village of Blackrig in the Scottish Highlands, presumed by many to have run away, perhaps back to her former home in Glasgow. Five years later, the village is slowly recovering from the  devastation caused by the deaths of five children and a district nurse, their deaths due to a Covid 19 variant introduced by lockdown breaking visitors to the eponymous Party House, owned by an investment company. Post-lockdown, the return of outside guests to the resort causes some in the village to take their anger out by destroying a hot-tum on the property, inadvertently exposing the remains of Ailsa, her body buried below its base.

The story is told, in the third person, by Greg Taylor, the head gamekeeper at the estate, and his new girlfriend, Joanne Addington, newly arrived from London. Greg and Joanne have only recently met, he a little taken aback by her acceptance of his invitation to come to Blackrig. Both, it quickly becomes clear, have something to hide, Greg feeling guilty for what he sees as his part in introducing the virus into the village, Joanne hiding from something, or someone, back in London. But do either, or both, of them have deeper secrets to hide?

Lin Anderson draws very realistic relatable characters. Both main characters are flawed, are hiding things from each other. The newness of their relationship and their, understandable though frustrating, reluctance to share their thoughts, leads to tension between them. The arrival of Greg’s egotistic boss and of the police investigating Ailsa’s death intensifies the tension. Greg, with all of the men who were in the village when Ailsa disappeared, is once again under suspicion. His tendency to lose his temper makes Joanne question the speed in which they became entangled, as does Greg’s ex’s obvious dislike of her.

The book is very evocative of the highlands near Inverness. Lin Anderson perfectly captures the uniqueness of remote communities and the wariness towards outsiders. THE PARTY HOUSE is one of the first novels I have read to describe the devastating impact of Covid 19, the effects continuing even as the village emerges from lockdown measures. The book is thrilling, the tension slowly building to a stunning conclusion. I enjoyed it tremendously and look forward to exploring the author’s Scotland set Rhona MacCloud series of crime novels.

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Lin Anderson is a Scottish author and screenwriter known for her bestselling crime series featuring forensic scientist Dr Rhona MacCloud. Four of her novels have been long listed for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year, with FOLLOW THE DEAD being a 2018 finalist. Her short film River Child won both a Scottish BAFTA for Best Fiction and the Celtic Film Festival’s Best Drama Award and has now been viewed more than one million times on YouTube. Lin is also the co-founder of the international crime writing festival Bloody Scotland.

The Last Party by Clare Mackintosh

INTRODUCING DC FFION MORGAN, IN THE UNMISSABLE NEW SERIES FROM #1 BESTSELLER CLARE MACKINTOSH

'Superb, with echoes of Agatha Christie' PATRICIA CORNWELL
'A dark delight of a murder mystery' JANICE HALLETT
'Detectives Leo and Ffion make a storming debut' BELINDA BAUER
'Mackintosh is just getting better and better' PETER JAMES

On New Year's Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests.
His lakeside holiday homes are a success, and he's generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new neighbours. This will be the party to end all parties.

But not everyone is there to celebrate. By midnight, Rhys will be floating dead in the freezing waters of the lake.

On New Year's Day, DC Ffion Morgan has a village full of suspects.
The tiny community is her home, so the suspects are her neighbours, friends and family - and Ffion has her own secrets to protect.

With a lie uncovered at every turn, soon the question isn't who wanted Rhys dead . . . but who finally killed him.

In a village with this many secrets, a murder is just the beginning.Sometimes, revisiting the past is the only way to rescue the present . . . 

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Going into a new Clare Mackintosh novel is like opening a lucky bag - you know you are going to get something good but you’re not sure what it will be like. The last three of her books I have read have been uniformly good but radically different - AFTER THE END, a profoundly moving story about the choices faced by parents of a terminally ill child; HOSTAGE, a plane hijack novel which flew much higher, and was better written, than another, very hyped book on a similar theme which was released at the same time; and this, THE LAST PARTY, a modern whodunnit with interesting characters, snappy dialogue and an intriguingly fun protagonist in DC Ffion Morgan.

There are echoes of Agatha Christie, even the likes of Midsummer Murders, in the story of the investigation into the murder of the developer of a lakeside holiday complex on the Welsh border. The holiday homes are occupied by a cast of suspects, each less likeable than the last, each seemingly with a reason to want Rhys Lloyd dead. Ffion, like Lloyd, a local also has to consider her friends and neighbours as potential suspects - few in the village welcomed the influx of rich English people on their lake. Ffion’s situation gets even more complicated when she is paired with Detective Leo Brady from Chester Police, who turns out to be a one night stand to whom she gave a fake name.

As might be expected from Clare Mackintosh, the story is a little darker, the characters more rounded than your typical cosy murder mystery. There is a lot of humour in the book but it goes deeper, into relationships, workplace bullying, racism, exploitation. There is a lot more going on than appears on the surface and that is something that THE LAST PARTY shares with the author’s other novels. DC Ffion Morgan will apparently return and I really hope that THE LAST PARTY is the first in a successful series.

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With over 2 million copies of her books sold worldwide, number one bestseller Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Both Clare's second and third novels, I See You and Let Me Lie, were number one Sunday Times bestsellers. All three of her thrillers were selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club, and together have been translated into forty languages. After the End was published in 2019 and became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, and in 2021 Hostage flew straight into the top ten. Together, her books have spent more than sixty weeks in The Sunday Times bestseller lists.

#BlogTour - Cold, Cold Bones by Kathy Reichs

Sometimes, revisiting the past is the only way to rescue the present . . . 

Winter has come to North Carolina and, with it, a drop in crime. For a while, temporarily idle forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is content to dote on her daughter Katy, finally returned to civilian life from the army. But when mother and daughter meet at Tempe’s place one night for dinner, they find a box on the back porch. Inside: a very fresh human eyeball.

 

GPS coordinates etched into the eyeball lead to a Benedictine Monastery where an equally macabre discovery awaits. Soon after, Tempe examines a mummified corpse in a state park, and her anxiety deepens. 

There seems to be no pattern to these random killings, except that each mimics in some way a killing that a younger Tempe witnessed, analysed, or barely escaped. 

Who or what is targeting her, and why? 

Helping Tempe discover the answers is Detective Erskine 'Skinny' Slidell, retired but still volunteering with the CMPD cold case unit - and still displaying his gallows humour. But as the two infiltrate a bizarre survivalist’s lair, even Skinny’s mood darkens. 

And then Tempe’s daughter Katy disappears.

Electrifying, heart-stopping and compulsive, this is Tempe’s most personal and dangerous case yet . . . 

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COLD, COLD BONES is the 21^st novel in Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan series, and the first I have read. I am usually loathe to jump into the middle of a series, particularly one so long-running, but I didn’t feel lost and the novel can absolutely be read as a standalone. Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who helps police investigations by studying the bones of the deceased. She has a grown daughter, Katy, who has just returned from her second tour of duty in the United States Army and Tempe is helping Katy set up her own place. I felt that I got to know the characters very quickly, the slight tension between the mother and her adult daughter. Tempe narrates the story and Kathy Reichs writes her in a very conversational, familiar way; she addresses the reader directly, as a confidant; ‘You get the picture…’

When Tempe finds a human eyeball in a package left on her doorstep, a startling enough discovery, she finds map coordinates etched in miniature on the surface, coordinates which lead her and, retired, cold case detective, Skinny Slidell to the location of a head which went missing from a dodgy crematorium a few years earlier. Then a mummified corpse is found hanging from a tree, in circumstances which echo a previous investigation in which Tempe was involved. Tempe begins to suspect that someone is intentionally mimicking her previous cases to target her.

Not having read any of Kathy Reichs’ previous work, I am unsure whether the echoed murders are those that constant readers are familiar with, but, again, my enjoyment was unimpaired as Tempe recalls each, initially with some confusion and then growing anxiety when it becomes clearer that the killer is targeting not only Tempe but also those close to her.

COLD, COLD BONES is an exciting and thrilling mystery. I enjoyed the characters, particularly the relationship between Tempe and Skinny. The crimes reminded me of the likes of the movie Seven. There is some body horror, macabre humour, particularly from Skinny, and just enough red herrings and assorted creepy suspects to keep the reader guessing. The novel works because of the skill in which Kathy Reichs writes Temperance Brennan. This may well be a series I have to go to the beginning of…

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About the Author 

Kathy Reichs’s first novel Déjà Dead, published in 1997, won the Ellis Award for Best First Novel and was an international bestseller. Kathy was also a producer of Fox Television’s longest running scripted drama Bones, which is based on her work and her novels. Kathy uses her own dramatic experiences as a forensic anthropologist to bring her mesmerizing thrillers to life. One of very few forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, Kathy divides her time between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Montreal, Québec.

Thanks to @RandomTTours, @simonschusterUK, @Tr4cyF3nt0n, and @KathyReichs