This is a book one read under protest. One morning at breakfast one was attempting to explain to the mater that literary affection must be pure and unsullied, it must not mirror life. If it did, it would be unpleasantly sweaty and redolent of bodily fluids.

Around halfway through one’s peroration, she got up from the table, temporarily abandoning a plate of greasy egg and sausage to scrabble around in the escritoire that leans drunkenly in one corner of the breakfast room. She returned to the table bringing with her a torn and dogeared paperback with which she proceeded to beat one about the head.

“This is a proper exploration of human emotion. Read it and for f***’s sake learn something. There will be questions later.”

Adjudging discretion the better part of valour. One read it.

My Review

A plain female child grows into a plain woman. Somehow she catches the eye of a man. Who turns out to be married. Then she runs away. Then she goes back

End of story.

Honestly, gentle reader, it does nothing for one. The heroine lacks romance, beauty, allure, etcetera. Although the hero is quite exciting, I suppose. But if one’s distaff parent hadn’t insisted….

Star rating. One out of five. Plus a half for a slightly sexy hero.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Big bigger got someone to come and make a mess of the orchard. There was sandpits and holes with plastic cups inside.
He spent hours there hitting a ball with a stick.
The gnomes were fascinated, but the moles were incensed. It seems them cups echoed something rotten and woke up baby mole.
They stood it for a week.
Early one morning Big stuck his hand into a cup to get the ball he had just knocked in there.
His screamed and ran with blood pouring from his hand.
Mole looked out of the cup and showed his sharp teeth…

Jane Jago

…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…
Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson have their day disturbed when a body turns up near their house.

Leo grinned.
‘I have plenty of ideas. To start with, we are comfortably off and slightly famous. Plus, Riverview is the nicest house in the village and Mike owns it outright; inherited from her mum. She was born in this house, so she’s the local girl made good. The incomers have all tried to inveigle her into their cliques, but she has no interest in their vapid pseudo-middle-class ploys. She trims the ends of her hair herself, and I’ve been with her for better than twenty years, during which time she has never entered a nail bar, used a personal shopper, or given a shit what any of that lot think. Her friends are those she had from childhood, not boring incomers. Then there’s me: I’m American, not entirely Caucasian, and not interested in their gym bunny bodies, or in playing golf with their soft, white husbands. And to round it off there’s my wife’s delightful cousin, Lila, a scrawny bitch who has a holiday home at the other end of the village. She has spent her life alternately envying Mike and taking advantage of her sweet nature, and likes nothing more than stirring up the neighbours with the odd fairy tale or two. So.’
By the end of this masterly dissertation all the coppers were hiding their amusement with difficulty. The WPC got herself together first.
‘Would you mind looking at some pictures?’ Mike shrugged and Leo went to sit beside her. The policewoman passed them a sheaf of pictures. Nobody said anything for quite some moments as the pictures occupied all their attention. Mike looked at one for a very long time then whispered something to Leo, who got up and loped off.
‘He won’t be a minute.’
Leo came back into the room with a large leather-bound photograph album, which he set on the coffee table in front of Mike. She opened it with some distaste and, finding whatever it was she sought, left it open and walked into the garden. Leo spread his hands.
‘We sort of recognise the face in the reconstruction. It looks very much like one of the nurses at the care home where Mike’s dad lives. He has dementia. Anyway. The nurse is much older than your estimates for the floater. But the face is remarkably similar. Mike would prefer not to look if you don’t mind. This was about the last time her dad actually provably recognised her.’
The young policeman swallowed audibly, and all three nodded before looking at the photograph. It showed an elderly gentleman, with a clever, ugly face, sitting in an armchair. Mike sat on one arm grinning, and a stocky woman in a nurse’s uniform sat on the other. The woman’s round, smiling face was remarkably similar to the artist’s impression of the body found in the swimming hole.
‘The nurse is called Sylwia. She’s Polish.’ Mike had returned on soft feet. ‘She’s still working at the care home. I saw her Thursday.’
‘What care home is it?’
‘It’s called Holly Lodge and it’s in Exeter.’
Leo wrapped his arms around Mike and hugged hard. She reciprocated. Then he turned his face to the coppers. ‘Would you like a couple of copies of this picture? I could put a jpg on a disk as well.’
The oldest policeman cleared his throat. ‘That would be most helpful. But there’s something else. We are asking for DNA samples.’
Leo smiled a bit twistedly. ‘You can have blood, or hair, or a mouth swab with pleasure.’
‘A mouth swab will be perfectly acceptable.’
Leo nodded and the WPC got out a sealed swab and a plastic pot. She efficiently swabbed his mouth, then sealed the swab in its pot and labelled it neatly.

From Shall we gather at the river? a hard hitting murder mystery thriller by Jane Jago which is available for 0.99.

President Milwood had been thrilled to be the one invited to meet the aliens until they actually arrived.
“So you see,” they explained, “that all this time you humans have believed you were a naturally evolved species you were mistaken.”
Face pale with shock, the President made excuses to the alien delegation and withdrew from the meeting room.
How was she going to tell the population of Earth that humanity was an experimental genetic hybrid testing some obscure hypothesis and the research was now concluded, the funding cancelled and the planet to be cleaned up ready for the next experiment?

E.M. Swift-Hook

… or ‘How To Speak Typo’ by Jane Jago

atate (adjective) – looking as if it has been chewed by a rodent

arpmit (noun) – fireproof glove used in World War Two

bugnee (noun) – leg joint of a beetle

doungut (noun) – hefty stomach often the result of eating too many doughnuts

eflephant (noun) – profane pachyderm 

garvity (noun) – body weight in a swimming pool that has a high concentration of p*** in the water

juist (noun) – fight club for dyslexic knights

kagewl (noun) – Australian raincoat

laibel (noun) – itchy scratchy thing in the neckline of overpriced middle-management shirt

macntosh (noun) – badly assembled macaroni cheese

maitain (noun) – cocktail made from white rum and suntan lotion

nuppel (adjective) – bendy, but prone to rashes

oange (noun) – fruit with something missing

preogress (noun) – ancestor of Shrek (female)

qieen (noun) – yet another middle class rice substitute (this one tastes like rugby changing rooms smell)

restrong (noun) – middle class eating house

stgate (noun) – church entrance

tset (verb) – to examine straitly 

ubra (noun) – something to give your chest a lift

Disclaimer: all these words are genuine typos defined by Jane Jago. The source of each is withheld to protect the guilty.

Having to sit at home and talk to each other was highlighting the biggers’ mutual loathing, and big bigger had obviously decided to do something constructive.
He and middle-sized bigger waited at the gate while a lorry deposited a number of packages on the driveway.
Garry Gnome puzzled out the letters on the biggest box.
“Lux Yerry Tree House.”
“You sure Gaz?”
“Yup. And anyway there’s a picture of a tree house by the writing.”
The gnomes looked at each other in disbelief. How were the biggers going to build a tree house in a garden with no trees?

Jane Jago

What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…

“The Chola syndicate was one of the most successful criminal organisations we have seen in the ‘City for decades. Chola increased the total wealth of his sector of the ‘City by an estimated fifteen percent, although, with the exact figures being hard to confirm, that is a very conservative estimate and it was probably a fair bit more than that. Needless to say, he was also making a lot of money for himself. A hell of a lot — and much more so than any of his competitors. Mostly through reinvesting what he got from protection and rake-offs from legit businesses. Then, two years ago and little more than a year after appearing in the ‘City, both Chola and Baldrik vanished. Disappeared off our screens completely and they haven’t surfaced since. Their turf was taken over by Eritch Dragure.”
Grim frowned. It was just getting really interesting, then it hit into a very obvious and clear end game. When two top criminals vanished in the ‘City, you didn’t call in an investigator, you dredged the river or just poured a drink and made a toast. He leaned back and wondered all over again why he was here and what this briefing was supposed to achieve.
The next presentation continued to focus on the same two men. This one went into what was known about them on a personal level. It seemed a little pointless now, but Grim sat through it politely.
Outside of what might be termed his ‘work’, the nearest Baldrik came to any kind of hobby was physical self-improvement and even that was clearly work-related. To Grim, he seemed to have had a very bleak, empty life.
Then came the information on Durban Chola. He liked supporting the arts and according to the techie’s research he was deemed mostly same-gender preference in his sexuality, but had not been linked with any specific men during his time in the ‘City. However, there was some evidence of a female relationship with one Charity Sweetling.”
Even before the name had been spoken, Grim had found himself leaning forward again. He knew her face. He had encountered her in connection with another case. The sudden disappearance of the professional killer Zathery Ryle — she had been the last person to see Ryle alive. At the time she had even been on his own list of suspects as a possible agent in his disappearance, but no hard evidence had survived to either back that up or disprove it. From what he had known of her then though, it was more than a bit of a surprise to see her held close on the arm of one of the big ‘City Names. She was not any kind of glamorous celeb, just a regular freighter pilot. Looking at the images he could only wonder, out of idle curiosity, how that had happened. But that was all it was — idle curiosity. The fact remained that all the information being given here pointed to the idea that Chola and Baldrik were both going to be dead.
When it was all finished, Jecks thanked the data nerds and dismissed them. They needed no encouragement to go, smiling now that they were being freed from the onerous duty of sharing the fruits of their labours in person rather than through screens. People like that made Grim feel he should self-identify as a technophobe — or maybe more a technophile-phobe. Once the doors had closed again, it left just four of them.
“Right,” Jecks said. “Thoughts?”
Grim said nothing. He was wondering who the other woman was, the one with the over-polished politician look. He had a strong suspicion that she was the one who had told Jecks not to introduce her and that she was not a fan of getting down and dirty with the CSF. Which left Grim convinced she was someone well known in public life, but he was not up enough on politics to be sure. In the four chambers of government which ran the Coalition, there were over two thousand politicians and that was before you started in on the devolved Sector or individual planetary governments.
Cista Tyran spoke up. “I spent two years working on these people, sir. With all due respect, some of what we just saw there was complete bollocks. If you recall, I was the one who ran Jaz Baldrik as an informant for the best part of four cycles, before that was — was stopped.” Her tone was bland, but cut through with an obvious undertone of resentment.
Grim regarded her with a new level of interest. If she had dealt successfully with a man like Baldrik, maybe there was more to her than he had supposed.

From Iconoclast: Mistrust and Treason a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.

You’re new, did Sals hire you – the manager?
Thought so.
Me?
Oh, I’m always here, propping up the bar. Ain’t that the lie now? It’s propping me, of course.
Used to be two of us, Johnny and me, til Johnny missed one too many protection payments. They didn’t mean to kill him, just beat him up a bit. But his heart…
‘Course was years ago, now it’s just me. Me and my drinkie, here.
None of your business if I’ve had too many.
What’d’ya mean haven’t I a home to go to?
I’m home already. I own this damn bar.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Murder Mystery Monday celebrates some of the best indie murder mystery fiction that we’ve found. This week we look at Stories of Togas, Daggers, and Magic by Assaph Mehr

Say hello to Felix the Fox, detective, magician and rogue. Felix is the son of a bankrupt suicide who makes his living solving mysteries. He lives in Egretia – which you may need to keep reminding yourself isn’t Rome.

Egretia is the author’s own creation. It is, indeed, a world based on ancient Rome but with its own life and its own particular ideas and ideals. This is an interesting and complex notion, that is handled with some skill. The world Felix inhabits quickly takes life, and the sounds, smells and geography are very well portrayed. Felix himself is a handsome devil, who knows he is attractive to women, but the author manages to avoid smug or vain. In the end, I liked our hero even if it took a while. He is well drawn, but I could wish for a little more meat on the bones of the other characters, especially the females.

Murder in Absentia

In its essence this is a simple whodunnit. A young man dies and our hero is tasked with finding out how, why, and who is responsible. I don’t think it is in any way a spoiler to say that this is no ordinary death, there is no poison, and no fatal wound. So what killed Caeso? Finding out is a dangerous and complex business, and one that draws the reader deep into Egretia and the world in which it sits.

This is a cracking story and a guaranteed page turner although I felt it took a few chapters to get properly into its stride. It’s an excellent read, and is twisty enough for the most dedicated of mystery readers, complex enough for lovers of fantasy, and scholarly enough to feed the interest of alternative history buffs.

As an aside here, on character development, the person, aside from Felix, we come to know best in Murder in Absentia, is dead when we meet him.

In Numina

In Felix’s second outing, a wealthy landlord finds his tenants are leaving, spouting tales of horrific events and whispering that the old gods – the numina – came alive and cursed the buildings. The landlord does what everyone in the city does whenever there is any rumour of dark magic – he calls for Felix.

Our hero has to separate fact from superstition – not an easy task, but Felix is uniquely qualified, being half detective and half magician. Even if he isn’t the greatest at either job.

This story gives us more of the internal struggles of Felix the human being, while still offering a thundering good mystery.

I shall hope to meet Felix again.

Big Bertha had a headache, which meant that most of the gnomes were walking carefully. But there’s always one idiot.
Today it was Norbert, who was voicing the latest conspiracy theories loudly and nasally. He had got to the lizards in human costume who were invading somewhere called the White House when Bertha appeared. She stomped over and squirted something between his teeth.
The ensuing silence reigned unbroken until Bertha disappeared.
“Superglue,” someone whispered. “He’ll be okay in a year or two. If he learns his lesson. Don’t piss off Bertha. And. Listening to biggers is deleterious to gnomely health…”

Jane Jago