Midnight Crossroads
Charlaine Harris (Orion)
***
Book fling
This is the first of a trilogy set in the dusty, one-traffic-light town of Midnight, Texas, where the residents are an eclectic, supernatural bunch – all with secrets. Among them is online psychic Manfred Bernando, his witch neighbour Fiji, and Lemuel, a vampire living in the basement of a pawn shop. This is not just fantasy, it’s a murder mystery with perhaps a tad too many red herrings and hackneyed rednecks as the bad guys. Yet, it will satisfy Harris’s die-hard fans.
- Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt
The Steady Running of the Hour
Justin Go (William Heinemann)
****
Book buff
The title comes from a poem by WWI poet Wilfred Owen, and one of the three interlacing time periods in the novel is 1916 and the Somme campaign. The other two are 1924 and the British Everest expeditions of that year, and 2004. In the last, one Tristan Campbell’s life is overturned by news that he will inherit a huge fortune if he can prove his descent from a certain Ashley and Imogen, who enjoyed a dizzying week of intimacy before Ashley was shipped off to the Western Front in 1916. The novel is part-love-story, part-double quest, and lots more besides. It’s difficult to do justice to its huge tapestry.
- David Pike @pikedavey
Kill Yourself and Count to 10
Gordon Torr (Penguin)
*****
Book buff
This is about Greefswald, a camp in the Northern Province where anyone considered unfit for the Nationalist army’s Calvinist-scripted needs was sent for “rehabilitation”. The humiliation, degradation and physical privations of the conscripts makes for sickening reading. The frothing-mouth madness of the apartheid regime is fully on display here – a madness that enabled a rogue psychiatrist to build a camp for his favourite broken toys. And the writing! It is filled with shaking rage, splattering the page with disgust and sorrow, speaking for those who no longer can’t, or won’t, or don’t know how.
- Zoe Hinis @ZoeHinis
Book details
- Midnight Crossroads by Charlaine Harris
EAN: 9780575092853
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- The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go
EAN: 9780434023202
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- Kill Yourself & Count to 10 by Gordon Torr
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EAN: 9780143538691
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