Book Review of The Voices of The Dead by Nicola Upton

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Murder mystery at a key moment in history.

(This review is based on a review .pdf from the publisher.)

 

A wartime wedding at the Actor’s Church in Covent Garden is followed by what a popular spiritualist has suggested will be a turning point in the war, and it is indeed the heaviest air-raid of The Blitz. (From that point on, Hitler needed the resources for other things. Even before that, every major strategic objective he had met, involved the sacrifice of something he would need for his next objective. For example: Norway was captured swiftly, but holding and controlling Norway took many more troops than her surprise capture and tens of thousands of them were still there when Berlin fell.)

Josephine and other central characters of the series are already booked to travel to North Wales on secret business for the National Gallery immediately after the wedding, but the loss of friends and property in that ferocious bombing raid leads them to take others with them for a few days respite. The secret plan involves a slate mine and hundreds of priceless works of art; the unplanned interruption is a long-dead (female) body which falls into the cavern destined to protect the artworks for the duration of the war. All sorts of secrets and past traumas emerge, bit by bit, from the local community; the clever people from London struggle to fit them together, bit by bit into an explanation and an identity for the dead body.

Those traumatised by the raid on London find calm and healing not just in the Welsh countryside, but also in the architecture set in that countryside as a labour of love by a talented man and in the many paintings being hidden underneath a mountain. But there are deep stresses and strains in the local community which eventually come to a head back in London, in a most unexpected denouement. The social fissures include linguistic division and injustice, a strong class divide and that between the artistic and the strictly practical, but the widest gulf is between spiritualism and the “Chapel” which in Wales, as in rural England, was a very different thing to the Church of England.

Each of the factions has its own code of conduct; but the lesbian sleuth of a certain age faction is but two persons; Josephine Tey and her lover, Marta. Marta confesses that when her inquiries led her to seek answers in a remote farmhouse used as a lodging and workplace by male art conservators, she impulsively washed the men's dinner plates for them while she was at it! The firm but gentle admonishment Marta receives for this breach of principled lesbianism contrasts with the harshness of disputes between the spiritualists and the Chapel-goers, but also with the Chapel-goers’ humiliation of their own transgressors and angry struggles within the spirit world itself.

The Voices of The Dead by Nicola Upton is published by Faber and Faber on the 5^th of November 2026 It is the 12^th novel in the Josephine Tey mystery series.

Book Review of Reasonable Doubt by Christopher Morris

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A meticulous analysis of a careless prosecution.

(This review is based on a paid-for copy of the Kindle edition.)

On the day that Lucy Letby was first convicted, the author had only a passing interest in the case, which seemed to be dreadful beyond belief. But as the day wore on, the frenzied and sensational reporting began to ring an alarm bell or two, so he started listening to and closely watching news broadcasts and online reports, waiting for someone to describe, or at least summarise, the evidence. He eventually began to wonder if there WAS any evidence, and thus began a three year investigation which led to his reading millions of words of often complex medical information, and interviewing hundreds of genuine experts, whereas the police investigation and prosecution employed only a handful of experts, who were notable for the fact that the better they understood the weight of what they were saying, the less they found it prudent to say in public or in court and this had the effect of surrendering the witness box to one of the least reliable “expert” witnesses in legal history for more than 90% of the trial.

The author’s journey was from examining what seemed to be one of the worst serial killing cases in British history, via a belief that the only crimes actually committed might be those of negligence and omission, to a belief that there were no crimes committed at the Countess of Chester Hospital at all. The text of this book includes something of significance on every page and this means that there are hundreds of them. It’s an awesome piece of work but the author does lack one thing: knowledge of issues and legalities around bullying, stalking and harassment (especially of females) and how those laws were all being tightened in England and Wales in the same years that the Letby saga was unfolding. Armed with some knowledge of these issues it is possible to see, amongst all the evidence which Mr Morris presents with so much care and skill, that which Lucy Letby’s principal accusers created for themselves and which could have proved them guilty of criminal harassment and not just breach of codes of conduct and professional slander.

And having created that “evidence” for the purpose of both bullying Ms Letby into abandoning the career that she loved and her managers into wanting her gone, they reacted to the “grievance” panel finding in favour of Ms Letby by “doubling down” that is, they made a determined effort to get the police to commence a murder investigation, to which they handed certain cherry-picked and manipulated “evidence” including the document variously known as the “Roster Chart” and the “Shift Chart”, which was the most influential evidence in the prosecution.

If you use concocted evidence to make someone leave her job, or get her sacked, that’s harassment and if there are two of you it’s conspiracy to harass. But when you hand that concoction to the police to use in an investigation which you campaigned for and which you have been (most improperly) allowed to advise despite being the complainants and this causes your intended victim to be wrongly convicted of multiple murders and attempted murders, that’s perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Sentencing guidelines say that the penalty for perjury must be in proportion to any penalties that were imposed on the victim of your perjury. Lucy Letby was given FIFTEEN whole life prison orders.

It is the evolution of the Roster Chart originally created with the help (under protest) of hospital managers desperate to stop Lucy’s accusers making completely baseless claims by helping them to stick to the facts, into the scarcely recognisable “Shift Chart” presented at Ms Letby’s trial, which proves an intent to bully and harass Ms Letby. And in the process of making it look as if she was, uniquely, always on duty when “murders” were done, by removing others (including ALL doctors) from the chart completely, they managed to deceive not only the court into thinking that Mr Letby was often on duty and nobody else was present at the relevant times, they convinced themselves of this fact too and they changed their recollections of events to fit! A nurse being alone in an intensive care unit for premature babies with several patients requiring one to one care would not have been suspicious: it would have been an EMERGENCY and had it ever happened there would be records of an immediate investigation. There are none: it never happened that way.

The references that Amazon forbids:

The Ministry of Justice documents which give an understanding of how the law, and policies around investigation and support for stalking were changing at the time of the Lucy Letby saga, are on this link:

https://hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/publications/living-in-fear-the-police-and-cps-response-to-harassment-and-stalking/

This was the culmination of a process begun by David Blunket; it all started to actually happen while Theresa May was Home Secretary.

To read a short, but enlightening document, it is necessary for the reader to visit the “evidence” page of the Thirwell Inquiry websites and search for:

“Pages 1-3 of notes of an interview of Ian Harvey conducted by Dr Chris Green”

This is document INQ0003156 – dated 07/11/2016 but you have to search for the description not the document number; perhaps to stop bots trawling for data to feed the dreaded AIs! Click on the link with the right number, though, if you are presented with a choice of several.

Dr Chris Green, who conducted the grievance investigation on behalf of the grievance panel, was already concerned about the Roster Chart (known by several names as it evolved) precisely because it was evolving in a way which made it more and more focused on and lethal to Ms Letby, whose grievance he was investigating. What he wants to check with Dr Ian Harvey, was whether or not the Roster Chart as it once was, now names only nurses and no doctors whatsoever. And he’s trying to get Dr Harvey to see for himself how legally dangerous it is for the whole hospital if Ms Letby does file a formal complaint of workplace bullying. (If she had got her complaint in before she was accused of murder, that chart would have proved that she was being targeted for harassment by its creators and the hospital would have had to sack them and compensate her. The hospital’s legal advisors actually said that Lucy Letby suing for constructive dismissal and winning compensation was actually the BEST outcome they could expect! A criminal harassment case would be worse, and her accusers had just created proof of that.)

Beyond Reasonable Doubt by Christopher Morris is published by Cinto Press (Bath Publishing Ltd) as of the 9^th of July 2026.

Book Review of Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming

 

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(This fair review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

 

A compelling thriller about an Anglo-American intelligence agency at the fag-end of the Special Relationship, highlighting the dangers of the digital-everything culture.

The action starts in Sweden (whose intelligence-sharing agreement with the UK actually predates the Special Relationship and the “Five Eyes”). A gunman travels by riverboat to a borough some distance from central Stockholm and starts to shoot people, apparently at random but right outside the house overlooking a public park which is where the wife and daughter of the chief of “BOX 88” live. The chief, Lachlan Kite, is in London and he hears about the shootings as he’s meeting an old flame, whose son has gone missing in Athens. He is torn between several duties and loyalties, but leaves the safety of his own family in the (perfectly competent) hands of the Swedish authorities and gets sucked into rescuing somebody else’s family. Only, the old flame hasn’t told him everything he needs to know about that.

The young man who has gone missing is in love with a young woman of part-Arab descent, who takes most of the book to get around to telling the young man everything he needs to know about herself and the dangers facing them. And she knows only half the story in any case. There’s an attempt to kidnap the girl resulting in the young man being beaten up, and the pair go on the run, the young man quickly learning that it’s nearly impossible to do this in any country within the Schengen “free movement” area where all movements are closely monitored and controlled, including by AI biometric recognition of individuals appearing on any CCTV footage from almost any source, as well as people being identified and located when they appear in the background of selfies and scenic images taken and shared by others with completely benign intentions. They can be tracked by bank cards and smart phones, by passports which they need to check into hotels with or use air travel. And although all this tracking and monitoring infrastructure has been constructed for the purposes of the states in question, it is not only open to abuse by non-state actors: the non-state actors are frequently more skilled and more prolific in their exploitation of the surveillance state than the “proper authorities.”

The intensity of the dangers they face, coupled with their own limited resources (they have cash, they lack good ID) drive the young woman and the young man to run away from “civilisation” as far as is possible by surface transport within Greece and, pending the emergence of an actual plan and firm destination they survive mainly by being too terrified to do much except keep going, but they have a very near miss and they learn that their only source of fresh ID has fled Greece for Sarajevo for his own safety. They decide to travel, on the documents they have, across the Balkans and, fatally, find that non Schengen Area states are less dangerous, so they stop moving for a bit. Things get very frightening, very quickly and the climax is dramatic.

The story namechecks several American presidents in a positive way, but Trump is portrayed as a destroyer, not just of American public (and secret) services but also of America, and it transpires that US Citizens who can’t swiftly prove their identity get turned away from American Embassies. That makes for a very bleak atmosphere, but one which gets more credible with every day’s headlines from the real world. Indeed, the only thing which stops this novel being the first of a new genre of Blairtopian thrillers is that the world’s most passionate cheerleader for the surveillance tech and surveillance state portrayed in it, is never mentioned once, though his shadow falls across every page.

 

Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming is published on the 2^nd of July 2026 by HarperCollins UK/ Hemlock Press

Book review of Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell

 

 

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

 

A timely historical novel about the culture war waged in Germany before the Holocaust, which is also a deep and loving portrait of a self-invented young female artist making an impact in the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances. It is timely because it is published as Tech Oligarchs seek equivalent control over the arts as the NASDAP once did and the mechanism of control, deliberate impoverishment of the talented, is very similar in nature but further-reaching than Goebbels could ever have dreamed of.

It is apparent that whilst the accusation against the Jews is that they prosper, unduly, at the expense of the German people, it is the creative talent of the Jews which the new masters of Germany envy and fear in equal measure. The heroine, Hannah, a seamstress from a family entirely engaged in the garment business, who likes to draw, leaves home and starts out on her own, becomes interested in fine art, attracts the attention of an expert who mentors, but does not really teach her as she becomes a painter. None of the Jews in the story are hugely wealthy and only one family is even prosperous, but an Aryan female patron who funds and exploits Hannah in equal measure is indeed hugely wealthy and has several other wealthy Aryan female friends. They do not start out as obvious fascists and for several years Germany remains a democratic republic. But once there is a new Chancellor (who is not named until well towards the end of the novel) the wealthy swiftly and overtly side with the newly powerful and make themselves believe in the new doctrines, heart and soul.

Hannah gets paid lots of money to paint nudes of her wealthy patron and her friends and gives pretty well all of it away. Her art becomes both a target of the culture war and a weapon in it, used by both sides! She is betrayed by her patron and betrays her patron back, but it is the patron who rescues Hannah from imminent arrest and gets her out of Germany. The divisions are deep, but also complicated and ambiguous.

The principal difference between the culture war in the novel and that in the real world in the present day is that the historical German Chancellor passed surprise edicts and even enacted complicated legislation to deprive his victims of their rights, their jobs, their goods and their homes. The relevant quote from the present day Oligarchs is “Tech is how we by-pass the constitution” (so no need for laws at all!) and they are not just targeting an ethnic minority, or even a disenfranchised ethnic majority, or the creatives within them. All creative effort is being stripped of reward and the costs of carrying out creative activities for one’s own expression steadily ramp up. Every non-Oligarch is being steadily impoverished and the thought of what that might be preparation for makes one wonder if this novel is prophetic as well as historical?

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 16^th of July 2026.

Tales From The Topless Café, new book coming soon.

 

 

 

A sequence of eight science fiction tales set in a lightly-revised version of the author's "Forest" universe (published via HMS Press in Canada in the mid nineties) this work includes seven original Katie Hounsome illustrations (in addition to the Katie Hounsome cover art, above) and seeks to add AI-free artistic value to the text while it is testing the waters for the significant investment of work required to revise and republish "Forest", "Tiger" and "Protegeé" and finish the fourth novel in a Milligan's trilogy: "Badge of Stars."

 (The only tale containing any serious (but entirely proportionate) mayhem is left unillustrated out of prudence rather than prudery.) 

 Delays in completing this work are all down to the author and his battle with two different life-threatening illnesses, and in the meantime Katie Hounsome has been busy on other projects: https://katiehcreates.com/

 There will be an e-book edition of this, but only some e-readers will be able to reproduce the art-deco-style colour illustrations to a satisfactory standard, so the plan is for there to be an Amazon print-on-demand paperback for those who want the text with the illustrations in tangible form and for appropriate platforms to carry e-books in a format that will allow colour rendition on I-pads, PCs and similar devices.

On Kindles and other simple e-readers, the text may appear with the illustrations appearing in monochrome. If this doesn't work well, a text-only edition may have to be created. The hope is that readers who appreciate the illustrations, will buy the paperback and those who are happy with the text won't have to.

None of the e-book editions will be particularly expensive. 

It currently looks as if this will be available by Autumn 2026. 

Book Review of The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift

 

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

The second novel in a series about surviving war rather than winning it.

This well-researched story is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before and for several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (and many other places, including Shanghai’s Western enclave). Two of the central characters are female refugees; one of them a Polish Jewess forcibly separated from her Japanese husband and the other an orphaned teenage Jehovah’s Witness from Austria. From that premise, the author does an excellent job of sustaining the reader’s hope in an ending which is not unbearably bitter, and that hope is not quite dashed, either. But in doing this the author redefines success as someone who has been through the struggle still being alive after it.

There have been many accounts of how brutal the Japanese armed forces were during WW2 (which started in China years before it was happening anywhere else) and most of these are true, but the author here goes the necessary distance to show that this was not a natural behaviour for many, probably most, of the men in question and that the brutality of their training and subsequent harsh discipline conditioned the men to accept that sort of thing as normal -and to do to those weaker than themselves what those stronger than themselves were constantly doing to the soldiers in the middle. The author does not labour the point, but she makes it. The methods described resemble those of the Ottoman Empire as documented by T.E. Lawrence (from his personal experience when he was mistaken for a potential conscript) except that the Imperial Japanese Army perhaps went further in the direction of making the killing of helpless victims a standard TRAINING exercise. But both the Japanese and Ottoman Empires sought to recalibrate the sexuality of recruits towards violence and exploitation. In the present day this is being done by online lifestyle influencers rather than drill sergeants and it is possible to foresee serious trouble brewing, or actively being brewed.

The author also presents the various different peoples and factions as collections of individuals making moral choices, or else acting solely in their own interests or even on their very worst impulses. There is no tarring with the same brush. The most despicable character of all is, ostensibly at any rate, a senior member of the CCP rather than the Japanese Army, but on balance the CCP itself gets a pretty good press, though that’s partly because there’s no other group in Shanghai offering organised resistance to the Japanese. Many of the people helping the resistance are not “members” of any party and that causes them to help others with a degree of impartiality the CCP itself has never been noted for.

And a Japanese officer does win his battle with addiction, even if he loses everything else.

The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift is published by HQ on the 9^th of April 2026

Book Review of Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty

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This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley of the first story only.

The life and death by scrolling of a young Irish woman.

This is set in the present day and is based on the heroine scrolling her way through life, whilst fretting about illnesses she doesn’t have, although she forgets to tell anyone about the one symptom that actually matters! But the structure is that of a basic text-only role-playing game popular on mainframes and TRS-80 type microcomputers in about 1982. The clue is that a troll keeps appearing and trying to kill her, and this is not a reference to someone posting nasty comments online. And yes, it is relevant that the young woman is Irish because this simply would not happen to anyone who was not.

It’s very funny once the reader gets their head around what’s happening. If the other stories are as good, and and assuming that there are enough of them, then the book as a whole should work quite well. The first installment was released this St Gertrude’s Day.

Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador (Pan Macmillan) on the 30^th of April 29026.