Hodder & Stoughton Archives

Book review: The Second Wife by Ali Lowe

June 5, 20262 min read

The Second Wife by Ali Lowe is the third book I’ve read by the English-born Aussie author and features warring siblings of the grown kind and a punitive and ill-tempered father… albeit one who’s a billionaire and celebrating his 70th birthday. It unfolds from several points of view that of birthday boy Irving’s wife, (Gen), Irving’s daughter in law (Celia) and Molly the cruise concierge for the elite 9th deck revellers. Their stories are interspersed by transcripts of a podcast, made following the fateful cruise which ends in a death… or two.

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Book review: The Widow by John Grisham

October 9, 20253 min read

I very much enjoyed most of The Widow by John Grisham. We’re introduced to likeable lawyer, Simon who gambles more than he should, sleeps in his office pending separation and divorce from his wife, and seemingly just scrapes by. He first assumes that drafting the will of 85 year old widow Eleanor will net him his usual $250 fee – and something that his assistant will (in fact) do on his behalf. However, Eleanor happens to mention her husband holding shares in Coca Cola and Wal-Mart and he realises he could be sitting on a big pay day.

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Book review: A Good Place to Hide a Body by Laura Marshall

July 11, 20242 min read

A Good Place to Hide a Body by Laura Marshall starts off with a prologue and it’s a clever move by Marshall. Not the use of a prologue of course as it’s quite common, but the way she leaves us hanging at the end of it… allowing us to make certain assumptions, before moving three months into the past when a family’s lives were turned upside down.

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Book review: Middle of the Night by Riley Sager

June 30, 20242 min read

According to Goodreads and this site Middle of the Night by Riley Sager is only the second book I’ve read by the American author since 2017 when I inhaled the popular, Final Girls. Although a couple of more recent books seem familiar, perhaps I only coveted them from afar rather than getting review copies or picking them up. Like Final Girls this is centred around an old mystery, stirred up when one of the players returns to his childhood home.

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Book review: The Chamber by Will Dean

June 11, 20243 min read

Holy schmoly! What a ride this book was. I’m not usually a fan of ‘action’ oriented novels and tend to skim over fight scenes and the like, even when the author obviously knows their stuff. Having said that, in the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed TJ Newman’s heart-in-mouth novels involving plane-based drama. I know one or both are being translated onto the big or small screen and I can see why. The Chamber by Will Dean blew me away for similar reasons. It’s a literal pressure cooker of a novel – centred around a saturation diving crew – in a sardine can 100m below the ocean’s surface. Their work is dangerous enough but throw in some suspicious deaths and you’ve got an extraordinary locked-room mystery.

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Book review: The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly

April 28, 20243 min read

I started reading The Instruments of Darkness by John Connolly and had one thought: “OMFG!” His opening paragraph, his phrasing, his over-use of metaphors, whip-smart prose and witty narration… I was blown-away.

Very weirdly – I discovered that I have never read anything by Connolly in past (unless it was pre-2011 when I started tracking my reading in Goodreads). I mean, I’ve heard of Connolly obviously, and his Charlie Parker series but I’m agog that this was my first of his books. Which is probably why I had no idea that this series (or perhaps his work in general) has a supernatural undercurrent.

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Book review: The Trivia Night by Ali Lowe

February 25, 20223 min read

I usually try to avoid books featuring warring parents (both the intra and extra-familial kind). As a non-parent myself, novels featuring yummy mummies or daddies or parents trying to outdo each other; those where the parenting skills of others are judged; and even discussions about the way children are parented make my eyes glaze over.

It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy these books but it means I’m less likely to engage with the characters, though I realise they’re excellent bookclub fodder for groups of school mums and the like. They are – of course – of more interest if they feature something dire… like a disappearance or a murder, which The Trivia Night by Ali Lowe does.

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Book review: The Last Thing To Burn by Will Dean

January 5, 20214 min read

I’d completely misunderstood the blurb for The Last Thing To Burn by Will Dean. I assumed it to be one of those kidnap victim sagas about someone abducted and held for many years (like Room and many books since). And it kinda is. But’s also about the far weightier and fraught topic of human trafficking, or at least its aftermath and its repercussions.

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