Category: Reviews

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

Over the last few years, Pushkin Press have been publishing Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries in new English translations. This is the latest, but I found it different from the previous ones in several ways.

First, where the other books are full-length novels, Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is a novella (this edition also includes another short story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, to make the book more substantial). Yokomizo’s detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, plays a prominent role in the first story, but a very small one in the second – in fact, I wouldn’t really call that one a Kindaichi mystery at all as he only appears right at the end. Both stories belong to the type Yokomizo refers to in the prologue as ‘faceless corpse’ mysteries – in other words, where the murder victim has had their face destroyed so they can’t be identified.

The other main difference is in the setting. Usually the Kindaichi mysteries are set in rural Japan – a small village, a country house, a remote island – but Murder at the Black Cat Cafe has a city setting: Tokyo’s red-light district, an area known as the Pink Labyrinth. First published in 1947, the story takes place just after the war and begins with a policeman on patrol discovering the faceless body of a woman in the garden of the Black Cat Cafe, an establishment owned until very recently by the Itojimas, who have just sold it and moved away. Beside the corpse is the body of a black cat, which has also been killed. It’s assumed that the cat is the famous mascot of the Cafe – until the Cafe’s black cat emerges alive and well. Where did the other cat come from and who is the dead woman?

I enjoyed the post-war urban setting, but with the second story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, we are back on more familiar ground with a family living in a remote village. The patriarch, Daizaburo, has two sons – one legitimate and one illegitimate – who are almost identical apart from their eyes. When both young men go to war and only one returns alive, having lost both eyes, questions begin to be asked. Is this man who he says he is or could he be pretending to be his brother?

Both of these stories, then, feature mistaken or stolen identities and people who may or may not be impostors and both have enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the truth is revealed. The first one was probably the stronger mystery, but I did enjoy the second one as well and liked the way the story unfolded through letters sent from a sister to her brother. I’m already looking forward to the next Kindaichi book, She Walks at Night, coming next year.

Thanks to Pushkin Vertigo for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 2 for RIP XX

A History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke

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If you had to choose a selection of poems to represent your country’s past, which ones would you pick? What can poetry teach us about a nation’s history, culture and identity? These are some of the questions Catherine Clarke sets out to answer in this wonderful new book which tells the story of England through twenty-five famous and not-so-famous poems.

Beginning with the 8th century poem Cædmon’s Hymn, written in Old English, the book then moves chronologically through time, ending with Zaffar Kunial’s The Groundsman from 2022. Familiar names including Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Lewis Carroll are all represented, but so are some lesser known poets from more diverse backgrounds such as Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American woman to have her poems published, and Grace Nichols, an immigrant to Britain from Guyana. The poems have all been selected for what they can tell us about specific moments in English history: Viking raids, the Battle of Agincourt, the plague, the miners’ strikes, the Great Storm of 1987 and many more.

Before picking up this book, it’s important to know that it shouldn’t really be approached as simply a poetry anthology. Not all of the poems appear in full – many are just extracts – and they haven’t necessarily been chosen for the beauty of the language. The literary merit of each poem is discussed only briefly or not at all, as Clarke is more interested in the life of the writer, why they chose to write that particular poem at that particular time and how the poem fits into the wider context of what was happening in England during that period. Each poem is given its own chapter and with twenty-five of them to get through, the chapters are relatively short, although still long enough to say everything that needs to be said.

I enjoyed every chapter – although I was already familiar with most of the historical figures and topics discussed in the book, it was interesting to see them from different, unusual perspectives and to discover some new poems I’d never read before. Some of my favourites were Mary Leapor’s Crumble Hall, written through the eyes of a servant in an 18th century country house; Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, describing a train briefly stopping at a station in 1914; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children, a protest against child labour during the Industrial Revolution.

I can highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in English history. If you also like poetry it would be helpful, but not essential! I thought it was a fascinating approach and it would be good to read about another country’s history seen through the lens of its poetry like this.

Thanks to Penguin Classics/Allen Lane for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley.

Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife by Martin Edwards

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I was drawn to this book by the title and cover and as I’d been wanting to give Martin Edwards another try – I didn’t really get on with Mortmain Hall – I decided to read it. I’m pleased to say that I really enjoyed this one!

Harry Crystal, who narrates part of the story, is the author of thirty-two mystery novels. When online influencer Carys Neville describes his books as ‘dozy crime’ and accuses him of being an Agatha Christie copycat, Harry finds himself dropped by his publisher. Receiving an invitation from the Midwinter Trust inviting him to spend Christmas in the village of Midwinter and participate in a murder mystery game with a cash prize for the winner, Harry decides to accept. After all, he doesn’t have much else to do and winning something would help him to feel less of a failure.

Midwinter, considered one of the most remote settlements in England, is a tiny former mining village in the North Pennines. Privately owned by the Midwinter Trust, it’s advertised as a place to retreat from the outside world. Harry arrives during a period of heavy snow to find that the village really has been completely cut off from the rest of the world, with no phone or internet access. To his dismay, Carys Neville is one of the other contestants, along with four other people, all of whom are involved in some way with publishing or crime writing. Winning the prize isn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped!

Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife is the title of the mystery put together by Trust director Bernadette for the six guests to solve. Clues and evidence relating to this fictional mystery are given in separate chapters titled Bonus Puzzle Content. The reader can try to solve this mystery for themselves, as well as a ‘real’ mystery which begins to unfold involving the guests, staff and Trust members. However, this structure didn’t work quite as well as I expected; the mystery-within-a-mystery feels undeveloped and is referred to less and less often as the book goes on so that when the solution was eventually revealed, I didn’t really care – and it seemed that the players didn’t either.

The Midwinter storyline was much more compelling than the Miss Winter one. I loved the setting and Edwards does a great job of conveying how remote and isolated the village is, beginning with the atmospheric drive from the station across deserted snowy moorland. Although I felt that some of the characters could have been stronger, I enjoyed the sections written from the perspectives of Harry Crystal and another of the guests, the publicist Poppy de Lisle. It’s not clear who can and can’t be believed, what the true motives of the Trust are or why these particular six guests have been invited to Midwinter, so there’s a lot to unravel.

Edwards is clearly a big fan of Golden Age mysteries (he’s the editor of the British Library Crime Classics series) and the influence of Christie and other authors is obvious here. He also includes a Cluefinder – a device sometimes used in GA mysteries – at the end of the book, listing all the clues that appeared throughout the story with references to the chapter they are found in. Unfortunately, I hadn’t spotted many of those!

I didn’t love everything about this book, then, but I did find it very entertaining and was surprised by some of the plot twists towards the end. It would be a perfect book to read during a winter snowstorm.

Thanks to Aria & Aries for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 1 for RIP XX

All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

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I’m ashamed to say I had never come across this classic American children’s novel until Constance of Staircase Wit recommended it when I commented on one of her reviews that I would like to read more about life on New York’s Lower East Side. Constance kindly sent me a copy, which I have now read and enjoyed!

First published in 1951, the book follows five young sisters through a year of their childhood in 1912. Ella, at twelve, is the oldest and four-year-old Gertie is the youngest, with Henny (Henrietta), Sarah and Charlotte in between. They are known as an ‘all-of-a-kind family’ due to being all girls – or, as the librarian refers to them, a ‘step-and-stairs family’ because of their evenly spaced ages. They live in an apartment on the Lower East Side and Papa runs a junk shop nearby while Mama looks after the children and their home.

In the first chapter, Sarah is upset because a friend has borrowed her library book and lost it. She’s sure she’ll be in big trouble and banned from going to the library ever again. However, the librarian, Miss Allen, is sympathetic and, knowing that the family would be offended by charity, she agrees to let Sarah pay for the book one penny a week. Miss Allen becomes a good friend to the girls after this and we meet her again later in the book, but meanwhile there are lots of other adventures to be had – including making a fun game from dusting the apartment, going to the market with Mama, and getting lost at Coney Island.

This is such a charming book, I’m sure I would have loved it as a child. The five girls are all very endearing and Taylor gives them all individual personalities of their own. Ella, being nearly a teenager, is the most mature of the sisters and is beginning to form romantic attachments; ten-year-old Henny is independent and rebellious, while Sarah is more studious. The two youngest girls are less well developed, but Gertie, the baby of the family, looks up to Charlotte who is two years older and they have a particularly close relationship.

One of the most interesting things about this book is that the girls belong to a Jewish family, so we are given lots of descriptions of them preparing for Jewish holidays such as Purim and Passover (as well as celebrating the Fourth of July) – and because the girls are so young, Mama and Papa explain to them the meanings of each custom and tradition, which can be very helpful for non-Jewish readers! Not many of the books I remember reading as a child featured children who were anything other than Christian, so it’s good to know that this book existed even if I wasn’t aware of it.

This is a lovely book (and also the first in a series). Thanks to Constance for introducing me to it.

The Elopement by Gill Hornby

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This is the third novel Gill Hornby has written based on the lives of members of Jane Austen’s extended family. I loved Miss Austen and Godmersham Park, so I was looking forward to reading The Elopement, which focuses on Jane’s niece, Fanny Knight, and Fanny’s stepdaughter, Mary Dorothea Knatchbull.

Fanny’s father is Jane’s brother Edward, who was made the legal heir of their wealthy Knight relatives and inherited three estates at Steventon, Chawton and Godmersham (Fanny appears as a secondary character in Godmersham Park). For a long time it seems likely that Fanny is going to remain a spinster until, in 1820, she marries Sir Edward Knatchbull of Mersham-le-Hatch at the age of twenty-eight. She doesn’t love him and he doesn’t love her, but Fanny has always been a practical person and decides that it could still be a marriage that works well for both of them.

Sir Edward has five children from his previous marriage and Fanny is sure she can be a good stepmother to them. However, there’s tension between Fanny and the only daughter, Mary Dorothea, from the beginning. Fanny is not a naturally loving or compassionate person and Mary finds it impossible to warm to her, viewing her as aloof and distant. Things come to a head when Mary falls in love with a man her father considers unsuitable. She knows she can expect no empathy or understanding from Fanny, so is forced to do something drastic.

It took me a while to get into this book. The pacing is uneven, with the first half being very slow and the second much more gripping. The title is maybe slightly misleading, as the elopement doesn’t happen until late in the book and doesn’t really play a big part in the story, although the buildup and consequences do. I think I would have preferred not to have known there was going to be an elopement so I wouldn’t have spent most of the book wondering when it was going to happen.

Hornby focuses less on Mary Dorothea’s romance and more on the relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter, which gets off to a bad start and worsens throughout the book. I went from feeling sympathetic towards Fanny to disliking her more and more as she tries to align herself with her husband’s views and closes her mind to Mary’s feelings. Still, the portrayal of Fanny and Sir Edward’s marriage illustrates the limited options available to 19th century women who would often marry out of duty, necessity or to meet society’s expectations. Mary is trying to do something different and marry for love.

In her author’s note at the end of the book, Hornby explains that she has based the novel on Fanny Knight’s own diaries which she kept from 1804 to 1872. I haven’t read the diaries so I don’t know how the personality of the real Fanny compares to the fictional one, but I was sorry not to have liked her more considering that Jane Austen apparently described her as her “favourite niece”.

I’ve learned that following the recent TV adaptation of Miss Austen which was shown earlier this year, The Elopement is also going to be adapted under the title Miss Austen Returns (I’m not sure why they’ve missed out Godmersham Park). Cassandra Austen, the star of Miss Austen, only appears once or twice in this book so I imagine she’s going to be given a much bigger role in the new adaptation. I’ll be interested to see what Gill Hornby’s next book will be about; I’m sure there’s still more she could write about the Austen family and there seems to be a never-ending appetite for it by readers and TV viewers!

Thanks to Random House UK, Cornerstone for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Katabasis by RF Kuang

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Alice Law is an American PhD student who is studying Analytic Magick under the guidance of Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge University. Along with her equally brilliant rival, Peter Murdoch, Alice is considered the most gifted student in the department, but sometimes spells can still go wrong and she is horrified when Professor Grimes steps inside one of her pentagrams and is whisked away to hell. How will she finish her degree without Grimes to advise her? The only thing to do is to enter hell herself and bring him back.

A decision to go to hell is not something that should be taken lightly, particularly as the price of going and coming back again is half of a person’s remaining lifespan, but Alice feels she has no choice, especially as she was responsible for the disaster. However, she’s not at all pleased when Peter Murdoch insists on coming with her. She and Peter were once friends but their academic rivalry has driven them apart. Will they be able to work together to navigate their way through hell and rescue Professor Grimes?

RF Kuang is an author I keep seeing on other blogs I follow, but I’ve never tried one of her books myself until now. Whether this was the best one I could have started with I don’t know – the premise certainly sounded fascinating and there were plenty of things I enjoyed about the book, but overall it didn’t quite deliver for me. I think a big part of the problem is that I found Alice difficult to like; Peter was a more engaging character, but apart from some flashbacks to his early life, we don’t see much of the story through his eyes. Professor Grimes was even less sympathetic – the more I learned about him, the less I cared whether he was rescued or not and the weaker Alice’s motive for following him into hell became.

Hell is an unusual setting, although there have obviously been several classics set there, including Dante’s Inferno, which are referred to repeatedly throughout the book as Alice and Peter discuss the experiences of those who have visited the underworld before them. Kuang’s portrayal of hell draws on many different sources, including Dante with his circles based on various sins, and elements of Greek, Chinese and other mythologies. I particularly enjoyed reading about the Weaver Girl who presents Peter and Alice with a challenge to determine whether one, both or neither will cross the River Lethe, as well as their first encounters with Shades and creepy ‘bone-things’. I was a bit confused, though, because the entire underworld seems to be populated by students and magicians and as our protagonists wander through the ‘Eight Courts of Hell’, they find that one resembles a library and another a campus. Where did all the people from other walks of life go? Was there a separate hell for everyone else?

Katabasis (the title is from the Ancient Greek term for a descent into the underworld) falls firmly into the ‘dark academia’ subgenre as well as fantasy. As well as all the characters being academics and hell resembling a university, Alice and Peter also have lots of long, detailed discussions about algorithms, paradoxes and the science of magic. None of this interested me very much and I felt it slowed the story down, but I’m sure other readers will get more out of these sections than I did. One thing that did intrigue me was the time period in which the book is set. I assumed at first that it was a contemporary setting, but then came across lots of references to music, culture and scientific developments that seem to place the book in the late 1980s. It didn’t seem to have any actual relevance to the plot, so I’m curious to know why Kuang chose this particular period.

I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to try a book by Kuang at last, but based on this one I don’t think she’s an author for me.

Thanks to HarperVoyager for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The House of Seymour by Joanna Hickson

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I’ve enjoyed some of Joanna Hickson’s previous historical fiction novels, so I was looking forward to reading her latest one, The House of Seymour, which is the first in a new trilogy. Sadly, I found it disappointing and I probably won’t be continuing with the next two books, but there were still enough things to like that I don’t feel I’ve wasted my time.

This book is not about Henry VIII’s wife Jane Seymour as you might expect, but her ancestors – specifically her great-great-grandmother, Isabel Williams, and her husband, John Seymour. We first meet Isabel, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, in 1424 when she becomes betrothed to John, the ambitious Lord of Wolf Hall in Savernake Forest, Wiltshire. From very early in their marriage, it becomes clear that their relationship is not going to be a happy one. John is a cruel and ruthless man preoccupied with political advancement and winning the support of the Duke of Gloucester, protector of the young king, Henry VI.

Isabel finds some solace in her relationship with John’s young cousin Edmund, a much kinder man than her husband, and also a new friendship with Jess, a shepherdess who has been forced to leave her home near the village of Avebury. Jess and a farm hand, Addy (Adhelm), had taken shelter from a storm in the Long Barrow – an ancient burial chamber – only for Addy to disappear without trace. Accused of witchcraft, Jess takes refuge at Easton Priory where she meets Isabel and is given a position in her household.

The narrative is divided mainly between Isabel and Jess, although we also occasionally see things from the perspective of John and other characters. The voices and attitudes of both women felt too modern for my taste – I prefer to feel fully immersed in the period when I read historical fiction – so I couldn’t quite manage to believe in them as convincing 15th century people. As my blogging friend Jessica of The Bookworm Chronicles explains in her review, even using the name Jess is an anachronism.

I did love the setting – or rather settings, as there are two main ones. The first is Wolf Hall, or Wulfhall to use the spelling of the time, which becomes home to Isabel’s family after John inherits the wardenship of Savernake Forest. The other is Avebury, an atmospheric place with its Neolithic stone circles, ancient barrows and monuments. Although the characters do sometimes cross paths with members of the royal court, most of the book takes place in these two settings and the surrounding areas so the focus is mostly on Isabel’s household and Jess and her family. The problem here is that none of the characters really came to life for me and most of them lacked depth. The book as a whole felt a lot lighter and less substantial than Hickson’s other recent ones.

Although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I would have liked, it was still good to learn a little bit about the Seymour family and their history. I’m probably not going to read the second book when it comes out, but I’ll be interested to hear whether it’s stronger than this one.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.