March is fast approaching and with it comes a whole fresh batch of new releases. There are some great ones coming up, and here are my top ten.
Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children.
But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.
A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
Two women. Two centuries. A life-changing night...
1952: Vivien and Max collide in the thick London smog. Within a few years, their whirlwind romance sees them living a quiet life on the Norfolk coast, blissfully happy with their beautiful daughter - at least, that's how it appears...
2019: Isobel is hoping for a fresh start when she inherits her beloved grandmother Vivien's house in Silverton Bay. But when she discovers an old photograph of Vivien at one of the infamous parties held at Silverton Hall in the 1950s, Isobel is forced to question how well she really knew her grandmother. Silverton Hall is a place Vivien swore she never went and never would - but why would she lie? And what other secrets was she keeping?
Together with an old friend, Isobel searches for answers. But is she prepared for the truth?
Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly - her clever, headstrong daughter, now on the cusp of leaving home.
Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday's book. Soon they are in and out of each others' homes, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo's polish lies something else, something darker. For Sunday has precisely what Vita has always wanted for herself: a daughter of her own.
To follow her dream, she’s gone from city to village – but can she ever fit in?
October 1940. Twenty-three-year-old Bobby Bancroft is working as a typist for a city newspaper, but she longs to be breaking the news herself. When she successfully applies for a junior reporter role at The Tyke, a magazine serving the Yorkshire Dales, she’s thrilled to be entering the world of journalism – even if she only gets the position because so many men are away fighting in the war.
Bobby moves to the sleepy village of Silverdale, but she quickly discovers life in the countryside is a different world. Not only does she need to win over the local animals – from rampaging bulls to belligerent geese – but there are a whole host of eccentric characters to get to know, not least of whom is her editor’s younger brother: charming but infuriating village vet Charlie.
As Bobby struggles to be taken seriously by the gruff dalesfolk, she starts to wonder if she’s made a huge mistake. Will the city girl ever find her place in the beautiful but hostile countryside of the Dales?
Nazi Spies and Witchcraft in Wartime Britain
Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which too place eighty years ago. In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm - Hagley Wood'. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case - Donald McCormick's Murder by Witchcraft - and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs - the police files, only recently released, are full of them - and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful - inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella's murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to prove' that Dr Murray was right. McCormick's own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world's oldest profession and the world's oldest crime!
A gripping, darkly comic tale of searing loss, coercive control and the consequences of taking the wrong path.
Every morning Janet Brown goes to work cleaning offices. It calms her, cleanliness, neatness. All the things she’s unable to do with her soul can be achieved with a damp cloth and a splash of bleach. However, the guilt she still carries about a devastating loss that happened eleven years ago, cannot be erased.
Then, Janet finds herself involved in a train crash and, recognising the chance to do what she couldn’t all those years ago, she makes a decision. As news spreads of Janet’s actions, her story inspires everyone around her, and for the first time her life has purpose and the future is filled with hope.
But Janet's story isn't quite what it seems, and as events spiral out of control, she soon discovers that coming clean isn't an option. Because if Janet washes away the lies, what long-buried truths will she finally have to face.
On paper, Hope Travers has an idyllic life.
Living in a bustling farmhouse with her mum, aunt and uncles, cousin and too many dogs to count, surrounded by the breath-taking Cotswolds countryside, she knows she is privileged and protected.
But all families have secrets, and the Travers family are no exception. Their farmhouse sits in the grounds of the Juniper Meadows estate, passed down through the generations and now being made to pay its own way with a myriad of businesses and projects. When a construction crew uncover what appear to be historical ruins, the history of the Travers family is put under ever closer scrutiny as a dig gets underway.
Hope may have found a blossoming romance with local archaeologist Cameron Ferguson who is running the dig, but when things start to go wrong around the estate and family secrets begin to be revealed, Hope wonders if she’s made a big mistake in digging up the past.
The True Story of Grigory and Alexandra
RASPUTIN’S RELATIONSHIP with Russia’s last Tsarina, Alexandra, notorious from the famous Boney M song, has never been adequately addressed; biographies are always for one or the other, or simply Alexandra and her husband Nicholas. In this new work, Mickey Mayhew reimagines Alexandra for the #MeToo generation; ‘neurotic’; ‘hysterical’; ‘credulous’ and ‘fanatical’ are shunted aside in favour of a sympathetic reimagining of a reserved and pious woman tossed into the heart of Russian aristocracy, with the sole purpose of providing their patriarchal monarchy with an heir. When her longed-for son then developed haemophilia, she turned to the one man capable of curing the child’s agonising pain – Grigory Rasputin. Some say that between them, Grigory and Alexandra brought down 300 years of Romanov rule and ushered in the Russian Revolution, but theirs was simply the story of a mother fighting for the health of her son against a backdrop of bigotry, sexism and increasing secularism. She liked to pray and he liked to party, but when they found themselves steering Russia through the First World War, her gender and his class gave society no option but to destroy them. Bubbling with his trademark bon mots, Mickey Mayhew’s latest book breathes fresh life into two of history’s most fascinating – and polarising – figures. This is the real story of Rasputin and his Russian Queen.
The Countess and the Tower
A thrilling tale, based on a true story, of one woman's tremendous courage and incomparable wit in trying to rescue her husband from the Tower of London the night before he is to be executed.
The heroine of A Noble Cunning, Bethan Glentaggart, Countess of Clarencefield, a persecuted Catholic noblewoman, is determined to try every possible means of saving her husband's life, with the help of a group of devoted women friends.
Amid the turbulence of the 1715 Rebellion against England's first German king George I, Bethan faces down a mob attack on her home, travels alone from the Scottish Lowlands to London through one of the worst snowstorms in many years, and confronts a cruel king before his court to plead for mercy for her husband Gavin. As a last resort, Bethan and her friends must devise and put in motion a devilishly complex scheme featuring multiple disguises and even the judicious use of poison to try to free Gavin.
Though rich with historical gossip and pageantry, Bethan's story also demonstrates the damage that politics and religious fanaticism can inflict on the lives of individuals.
Bella can’t wait to be married to her fiancée Sidney, and dreams of the day she will walk up the aisle to be given away by her widowed father, with her bookish sister Alice as her bridesmaid.
Their lives are disturbed when they receive a letter from their fourteen-year-old cousin Millie. Taken in by her austere aunt and uncle when her parents were killed in an accident, Millie says she is being badly treated and pleads to be rescued.
When the two sisters take a trip to find out the truth, things take a troubling turn. Millie is brought home to live with them, her only possessions her ill-fitting clothes and a tatty suitcase.
But soon they are questioning this act of kindness. Does their teenaged cousin just need some love and kindness? Or is she a troublemaker, with only mischief and malice on her mind…?
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