Murmuration by Robert Lock #blogtour

Murmuration by Robert Lock (Legend Press, published on 12 July 2018) is a historical novel set on the Blackpool Pier.
This beautiful book will take you on a journey through history. It is a completely absorbing and thoroughly intelligent read.

It begins with a description of the starlings gathering on the pier roof only to take off in the air and settle into a shifting cloud: the murmuration. The birds dance above the pier for one hundred and fifty years, and many stories have passed beneath them.
"Men and women, their children, their children's children; lives so brief and fragile when compared to the enduring strength of the pier, but possessing a depth of feeling that iron and timber would exchange theie immutability for in an instant. Only the ephemeral can truly appreciate the infinite".

We move back in time to the beginning of the pier, to 1865, when it's starting to take shape above the sea. We meet Georgie Parr, a music hall comic, looking at the pier with his wife.
Georgie builds his career on lewd jokes and smutty innuendos which delight the working class public and enrage the middle class' conventionality and conformity. He revels in his scandalous reputation.
His personal life is full of loss and sadness. His wife dies in childbirth, and his only beloved child follows her nine years later, dying of scarlet fever. He drowns his sorrows in drink and frequents the prostitutes for snatched moments of relief and intimacy.
One such encounter, with a prostitute, young enough to be his daughter, ends in a horrid tragedy.

In 1941 a local boy, Mickey Braithwaite, watches the starlings from the roof of the theatre on the pier. He is a proud member of the Observer Corps. Nowadays he would be called as having special needs. Having watched the starlings, Mickey is convinced they have given him a message to save his Mum, and he runs through the dark town to the Salvation Army building to rescue her. His Mum is saved, but almost everyone else who stayed in the building, is buried under the bombed ruins.

In 1965 the fortune-teller Bella Kaminska is cynically telling fibs to the punters who visit her booth. She is good at reading people and has no scruples in deceiving them, "dispensing her bogus prognostications", that is until she has an unpleasant encounter with a threatening young man.

Then we are in 1989, with the local pier archivist Colin Draper. He's a loner, who lives with his disabled mother. He comes across Georgie's scandalous story and tries to discover what has really happened a hundred years before. As his mother's only carer, he relishes and resents the part in equal measure.

And then there is Sammy Samuels. Another comedian who builds his career on lecherous dirty jokes.
His repertoire is dated and he's relying on the former glories. He lives alone, in a drab flat, and treats everyone with scorn and derision. Women are objects for him. Just like in Georgie's case a young prostitute would be his undoing.
Will the history repeat itself and end up in a tragedy and complete ruination?

Times change, characters come and disappear into oblivion, deficient and wanting.
But it's the deckchair attendant Mickey who's most fulfilled in his life.
"Mickey appeared to inhabit a different world, a place of wonder and infinite possibility, hidden from most people's view behind the theatre scenery of the tangible..."

Humans and starlings aside, this is also a book about the sea resort, and its pier.
"Where once restraint and optimism had proclaimed the town's vigour, now there was only garishness and despondency. The resort, like every other in the country, had been abandoned by all those thousands that once thronged its beach in favour of sun and sangria..."

Murmuration is like a Bayeux Tapestry, with one story embroidered on a cloth after another, scenes changing from the past to the present and lined smoothly at the joins. The pier and eternal starlings provide the connecting thread and background.

"It was then that the archivist realised the pier was the perfect metaphor for civilisation and everything it represented, lifting humanity above the chaos which boiled and churned not so far beneath. And the pier was also a bridge, linking solid ground, the prosaic and understandable, to an entirely different realm, one of delicacy and magic..."


This review is one of the steps of the blog tour. If you fancy reading what the other bloggers thought about this novel, check out the following route:

Disclosure: I received a proof copy of the book for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are my own.

A Necessary Murder by M.J. Tjia (second Heloise Chancey novel) #blogtour

Summer vacations and new paperbacks are inseparable. If you prefer historic mysteries, look no further.
A Necessary Murder by M.J. Tjia (Legend Press; out on 2 July 2018) is set in the Victorian London. This is the second novel featuring the one and only Heloise Chancey, the courtesan and private detective. It would help if you've read the first book in the series, but this sequel reads as a standalone quite well.

The beginning of the book is very grim. A young child is found murdered in the outhouse (or necessary, which is another old-fashioned word for it). (The first novel in the series also starts with a graphic, disturbing scene).
A few days later a man is killed in a similar manner on Heloise's doorstep.
Heloise must use her wits (as well as sexual charms) to find out the killer. Her devoted maid and confidante Amah Li Leen has to face the demons of her own, and find out how the past is entwined with the present.

Heloise is a complicated character. I didn't like her much in the first novel, as I think she is totally wasting her talents on being a courtesan, which is basically a glamorised prostitute. She sells her body for money and comfort, while she doesn't really need it any longer. She is quite superficial, and her lack of scruples is pretty obvious.

Her current lover (or one of them) is going to be a father, and Heloise feels mightily annoyed when he goes to his country home to be there for the birth of his child. How dare he indeed?!

She is wilful, selfish, ego-centered and vain to the point of obsession. She is preoccupied with her looks and outfits, understandably in the profession she has chosen. If she were living nowadays, I imagine there would be a stream of edited pouting selfies on Instagram with beauty-related hashtags.

She is fond of her maid Amah, but at the same time does not care enough to look into her troubles closely.
Amah's story makes a compelling narrative, and you start to understand her better. A Necessary Murder tells us more about Amah, than Heloise.

The historical background of the Victorian London is believable, dark, menacing and gruesome.
You feel dropped amidst the Victorian England with its prejudices and morals (or lack of them), and explore the different strata of society.

This is not a cozy mystery, and if you are easily offended by sex scenes, this might be not the right series for you, though sex is downplayed in the 2nd book.

This review is one of the steps of the blog tour. If you fancy reading what the other bloggers thought about this novel, check out the following route:

Disclosure: I received an advance proof copy of the book for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are my own.

The Visitors by Catherine Burns (Blog Tour)

The Visitors by Catherine Burns (Legend Press) is a creepy, disturbing and upsetting Gothic tale of our times.

Marion Zetland is a shy spinster in her fifties, who lives with her older brother. She sleeps surrounded by her teddies, and on the surface of it, has been victimised by her overbearing family. She has been cruelly taunted and bullied at school (the narrative shifts from the present to past, and back to the present). Everyone including her nearest neighbour takes advantage of her.
Marion lives a life of an amoeba, or even a parasite, who eats, sleeps and daydreams. Her life is void of meaning or purposes.
She is not entirely stupid, yet she has convinced herself to keep herself to herself and ignore her brother's secret activities in the cellar. By ignoring the horrors below she might pretend that nothing sinister is happening. She can lounge on the sofa, daydreaming, stuffing herself with cakes and biscuits and watching romantic films on TV non-stop.

Suddenly, her brother John has a heart attack and is admitted to the hospital. He asks Marion to go down the cellar steps and care for his visitors.
Marion can no longer pretend that evil does not dwell in their house.

It is a very sinister read, which poses moral questions about how easily a victim might become a perpetrator, and whether we are born evil or made evil.

It also made me think about my own past. Years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was a University student, and pretty naive at that too. All of a sudden it felt like the whole world has open its doors, you just need to stretch your arm and grab your chance. The newspapers were full of ads of possible jobs abroad, via some unknown freshly-created agencies.
I was quite taken by an idea of working as a nanny in Great Britain, imagining myself a kind of a new Mary Poppins. I loved working with children, and thought it would have been perfect. Thanks goodness, I never did apply.
Many of those naive Russian (and Eastern European) girls ended up trafficked into prostitution and slavery, some managed to escape, some disappeared without any trace.

Without giving too much information, there are some gruesome disturbing scenes that will haunt you for a long time.
The book is very clever, as it explores the depth of evil, when a seemingly harmless victim turns out to be pure evil.

Disclosure: I received an e-copy of the book for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are my own.

The Winter's Child by Cassandra Parkin (Blog Tour)

The Winter's Child by Cassandra Parkin (Legend Press) is a dark contemporary tale of love and grief.

Susannah Harper's son Joel went missing five years ago, without trace. Her whole world collapses, and she becomes obsessed with finding her son's fate. To help herself, she starts writing a blog which is her way of coping with the horrible reality.
Her husband leaves her, and she is trying to rebuild her life and piece together the truth.

On the last night of the Hull Fair she visits a fortune-teller who tells her that her son Joel will come back to her on Christmas eve.

This episode made me think of my own visit to the fortune-teller at the Oxford Fair over 20 years ago. It was an interesting experience.

Susannah is not a likeable character. As much as you sympathise with her tragedy, there is something disturbing about her.
The story goes back in time to the days of Joel's adoption and his childhood, and you can see how her parenting style doesn't help this deeply damaged boy. Joel has complex special needs, and Susannah tries to cocoon him from reality.
There were more than one moment when I could easily identify with her. Due to my older son's special needs, I am an over-protective mother to both of my boys. I'm exactly the same when it comes to building a protective dome around my family, and making my sons the centre of my universe.

Yet Susannah is smothering her son. She is finding excuses for all the wrongs her son does, and doesn't accept her own culpability. Effectively she disarms her son rather than helps him. And Joel is a very challenging boy, as many children with special needs are.

Susannah writes her confessional blog, and has a strange fascination with psychics. On one hand, she hopes to find the truth about her son's whereabouts with the help of psychics, spending a fortune, on the other hand, she tries to expose them as charlatans. She seems not quite know which is true.

She befriends a mother of another missing boy. Jackie comes from a totally different background, and she is not portrayed too sympathetically either. The only thing these women have in common is their missing boys. Susannah's privileged background allows her to live on her own in a big house, she doesn't work and clearly has means to support herself and pay for psychics.
Yet both Susannah and chavvy Jackie are vulnerable, and their pain is intolerable.

Susannah is slowly losing her marbles. She sees her phantom Joel in the crowd, she has visions or hallucinations of being drowned in the mud, she hurts herself without realising it and blames her ex-husband for the injury. She is a woman possessed.

Without giving away spoilers, I found the ending not very credible. Also her affair with someone in the position of trust who should have known better is not entirely convincing.
It is a gripping read, but very uncomfortable, chilling and emotionally-draining.


Disclosure: I received a free e-copy of the book for the purposes of reviewing. All opinions are mine.