The Heart Ladder by Sibby Spencer

Today my blog tour review is for The Heart Ladder by Sibby Spencer, a book that took me in a totally unexpected direction! Many thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel's Random Resources for the invitation and to the publisher for my review copy.

The Blurb

As the war in Vietnam stutters to a close, a heavily pregnant Faith flees America for a new life in England. Leaving behind everything she knew, including the mystery of what happened to the father of her unborn child after he went missing behind enemy lines. Three decades on and her son, thirty-something slacker Dan, knows he's wasting his life in pubs, nightclubs, and his dead-end job. That all changes, though, when a man with storied eyes and an old army jacket introduces himself as the father Dan never had a chance to know.

But is Jacob, a battered and broken war veteran, really who he claims to be? As Jacob's true purpose in seeking him out becomes clear, Dan comes to understand that his life is very far from meaningless - and that the choices he makes might have deadly and irredeemable consequences.

Readers who enjoy genre-bending books that play with themes of reality and identity will love The Heart Ladder!

The Heart Ladder was published by TRM Publishing on 9th March 2021.


Buy Links

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08YFL166K
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YFL166K

My Review

I really wasn't sure what to expect from The Heart Ladder. But after an amazing holiday in Cambodia and Vietnam last year I was attracted to the mention of Vietnam, and we learned a little about the war on the holiday. 

Faith arrives in England heavily pregnant from the US to move into her late aunt's house. She's looking for a new start following the disappearance of her baby's father, Jacob, during the Vietnam War, assumed missing in action. She settles in to life and baby Daniel is born.

We then jump forward thirty odd years where we find Dan living in his own place and working in a bookshop (I disagree with the blurb that describes this as a dead-end role - it's my ideal job! 😂). But he's spending his weekends drinking and taking recreational drugs and wants to find some meaning in his life. Just as he thinks he's found something he meets Jacob, a man claiming to be his father. It's a meeting that will change the course of Dan's life. 

I found the characters in The Heart Ladder relatable, particularly Faith, maybe because I'm a mother of (young) adult children. I found her to be kind, compassionate and open. The same couldn't be said for Dan, who I found to be quite unlikeable much of the time, but still relatable. Wasting his weekends in a haze of alcohol, he tends to push away those who care about him - colleague Fiona, mum Faith and Jacob, newly on the scene claiming to be his dad. Jacob intrigued me - limping, full of war stories, yet hard to contact and very keen that Faith hears nothing of his sudden appearance. There's a scene where Jacob spends an evening with Dan's colleague Fiona after 'bumping' into her. This turns out to be a much more significant moment than it first appears.

There are some big, wide ranging themes here - love, loss, grief, friendship, politics, radicalisation and how our decisions can have huge consequences. About two thirds in it shifts from being a straightforward family drama into something else entirely. I felt there were some moments in this section of the book that were handled clumsily but I enjoyed the idea overall and found The Heart Ladder generally to be an enjoyable and quick read discussing some important issues.

The Author

Sibby Spencer is an author, poet, podcaster and regular book reviewer for BBC Radio Derby. She enjoys playing around with the themes of reality and possibility, and creating characters who are very human in their flaws - yet capable of revelation and redemption. She loves getting lost in a good novel, swimming in the sea, learning new things and dancing in her kitchen. She lives in Derbyshire with her husband and two children.


Author Social Media Links

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SibbySpencer
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sibbywrites/

The Acapulco by Simone Buchholz (translated by Rachel Ward)

Good morning, lovely people! Today I'm joining the blog tour for The Acapulco, the latest in the Chastity Riley series, by Simone Buchholz, translated by Rachel Ward. But I've not got a review, as usual, because I'm behind with this series. Instead, I've got a fab wee extract for you. And it acts as a sharp reminder that I really need to catch up with Chastity because this sounds ace! Many thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours and to the publisher for providing the extract. 

Enjoy!

 

The Blurb

State Prosecutor Chastity Riley faces her most challenging case yet, with a violent serial killer at large, who might just be uncatchable…

A serial killer is on the loose in Hamburg, targeting dancers from The Acapulco, a club in the city’s red-light district, taking their scalps as gruesome trophies and replacing them with plastic wigs.

Chastity Riley is the state prosecutor responsible for crimes in the district, and she’s working alongside the police as they investigate. Can she get inside the mind of the killer?

Her strength is thinking like a criminal; her weaknesses are pubs, bars and destructive relationships, but as Chastity searches for love and a flamboyant killer – battling her demons and the dark, foggy Hamburg weather – she hits dead end after dead end.

As panic sets in and the death toll rises, it becomes increasingly clear that it may already be too late. For everyone…

The Acapulco was published on 13th April 2023 by Orenda Books. 

Extract

SHOWTIME

'As a child, if my dad sent me down into the cellar, I used to sing quietly to myself. Just quiet enough that I could still have heard if some faceless hunchback had loomed up on my left, but loud enough to delude the monsters. Now, as I walk towards forensics, I’d quite like to sing.

Faller’s behind me on the stairs.

‘Showtime!’

‘Ghost train,’ I say, waiting a moment until we’re in step.

‘How are you?’ he asks, looking appraisingly at me. He’s worrying again.

‘I’m tired,’ I say. ‘And not in the mood for a second encounter with a mutilated woman.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘somehow they seem even more threatening on the slab.’

‘When you’ve seen them the second time, it’s much harder to forget what they look like. Have you spoken to the two Filipino sailors?’

‘Yes,’ says Faller. ‘They’re acting like they’re too shocked to speak. But I don’t think they can know anything of interest to us. They don’t seem the calibre we’re looking for. Besides which, their ship sails again this evening and there’s no real reason to keep them here.’

Faller as ever. I think he’s right and I trust his judgement. The old man will know how to assess the situation.

‘And what do the SOCO guys have to say?’

‘A fair bit,’ says Faller. ‘The upshot of which is that we don’t have a single usable line on the perpetrator, not even a footprint. Rained cats and dogs again last night. The bloke was in luck with the weather.’

‘What makes you so sure our murderer’s a man?’ I ask.

‘Throttling someone,’ he says, ‘is not exactly a woman’s thing, is it?’

We walk side by side down the last few steps, and the further down we get, the smoother and more sterile everything gets, the grey stairs and walls look so slippery that once you’re down, you might as well forget ever making it back up.

‘Everything OK?’ Faller asks.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘everything’s OK.’

Ahead of us there’s the steel door to pathology, behind that is the plastic curtain, and behind that is what remains of a crime. I’d like to link arms with him but don’t have the nerve.

Open door, curtain aside, dance of the dead.

The pathologist is washing his hands. By and by, I join in, and the moment I’ve finished here, I’ll wash my nose out too. The disinfectant smell of these clinical catacombs makes me all jittery. Sweet and lemony, spilt Sicilian liqueur plus Domestos. And once you’ve smelled it, you can’t get it out of your nose all day. Whatever I want to eat or drink later, it’ll taste of post-mortem. Most days after a visit to the university hospital cellars, I just don’t ingest anything else.

The room is fully tiled, and bathed in a greenish shimmer. The girl is lying under a neon light on the horrible, high dissecting table. Her skin is very white, almost transparent. Running around her neck is the imprint of her deadly encounter with a strangulation device, and a fraction further down, running parallel and at right angles to it, are two finely stitched, pale-reddish lines. One runs along her collar bones, one down from the little hollow beneath her voice box to her pubic bone. Opened, closed. The bright-blue wig is on a shelf between the wash basin and the table, packed up in a freezer bag. Her face is young, pretty, and almost a touch cheeky. I’d put her at mid-twenties, tops. Her skull is just one big disaster zone. I can barely look.

‘Go ahead, doc,’ says Faller.

This is our division of labour: in pathology, he basically does the talking while I try not to keel over.'


The Author

Simone Buchholz was born in Hanau in 1972. At university, she studied Philosophy and Literature, worked as a waitress and a columnist, and trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. In 2016, Simone Buchholz was awarded the Crime Cologne Award as well as runner-up in the German Crime Fiction Prize for Blue Night, which was number one on the KrimiZEIT Best of Crime List for months. The critically acclaimed Beton Rouge, Mexico Street, Hotel Cartagena and River Clyde all followed in the Chastity Riley series, with The Acapulco the latest in the series. She lives in Sankt Pauli, in the heart of Hamburg, with her husband and son.

STOP!! Waking Up Tired by Ralph Montague

Today is my stop on the blog tour for STOP!! Waking Up Tired, a workbook to help improve your sleep, by Ralph Montague. I didn't feel my sleep was too bad but I am frequently tired so figured something wasn't right, and was interested to see if this book could help me. Many thanks to Kelly Lacey at Love Books Tours for my invitation and to the author for my review copy.

 

The Blurb

FED UP WITH WAKING UP TIRED & EXHAUSTED?

You are most certainly not alone. Many people long for a better quality of sleep, however, it’s been made unnecessarily difficult with contradicting advice, thousands of sleep studies and unpronounceable words leaving you more confused than when you started on your quest to simply get a good night’s sleep.

THIS IS WHERE “STOP!! WAKING UP TIRED…” CAN HELP!

This workbook was written to make things simple and easy to action, with a no-nonsense approach to sleep. The information and advice is easy to follow, light-hearted in nature and will help you achieve the deep sleep that dreams are made of.

In this workbook, we will cover the core areas in your life where change needs to happen, in an approach that is easy to action. Split into three sections: Remove, Improve and Action.

- Remove: Discusses the habits and lifestyle choices that are having devastating effects on your sleep.

- Improve: Covers everyday routines where making simple changes, can enhance and dramatically improve your sleep and in turn your health, happiness and outlook on life.

- Action: In line with the philosophy of the STOP!! workbook series, the targets are realistic and actionable to follow, with two action plans to help make the first step to stop waking up tired, a very real and exciting reality and the second step, the pathway to rejuvenating nights of deep, relaxed slumber.

With journal-style questions and prompts throughout the book, as part of the actioning process, STOP!! Waking Up Tired… allows you to get a clear understanding of where you are today, where you can be in a matter of just a few days, and where you could only dream of a few days ago, for a new more energetic and happy future you.

When partnered with other titles within the series, STOP!! workbooks can help you become the person you always dreamed you could be.

IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT NOT WAKING UP TIRED EVERY MORNING, HAVING MORE ENERGY AND SLEEPING BETTER BUT DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START, THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FOR YOU.

Stop!! Waking Up Tired was released by FCM Publishing on 16th March this year.

 

My Review

So I reckoned it could only be helpful to read a book designed to improve my sleep and STOP!! Waking Up Tired offered me that. Part instruction manual, part work book, part journal, it gives information in clear simple steps with places to make notes of your current situation and plans for improvement. 

Early in the book there is a multiple choice quiz to determine your chronotype - the natural indication of your body to sleep at a certain time, also has an influence on appetite, exercise, productivity and core body temperature. I'm a bear, if you're interested! 

Then, taking a different subject area each chapter, Ralph details what we can remove, or improve to make our sleep better. Subjects covered include mobile phones, tvs, etc, alcohol and caffeine, what you eat, noise and the state of your bedroom. There are questions at the end of each chapter with room for notes, together with a short action plan around that topic. Many of the causes of poor sleep given are probably common sense but it's good to have them presented all together and the author gives lots of helpful suggestions for changing things, or at least improving them. Some of these suggestions involve spending money but there are plenty that are free, which is where I'll start. All of them are presented with the understanding that change takes time and effort, and that not all the suggestions are for everyone . 

I didn't get why the chapter on waking up to go to the bathroom was only aimed at men (other than for women to learn what men went through with their bladders). I'm fairly sure women sometimes/often need to use the loo in the night - this one certainly does! I would've liked some more discussion in the medication chapter and there were a few places in the book that could've been better edited/proofread. But, overall, I think STOP!! Waking Up Tired is a really useful book stuffed full of suggestions, big and small, to help improve our sleep. I won't be doing them all but there are some I'm going to try, starting with being more consistent with my sleeping and waking times, eating earlier and going to bed a bit earlier to help get the hours I need. So the book has been a helpful nudge in the right direction for me and one I will go back to - I just need to start putting things into practice now! And I see that the author's next STOP!! workbook is going to be in reducing stress, so I 'ok be checking that out too. 

The Author

Ralph is a longevity coach from Monmouthshire, Great Britain with a focus on sleep and energy mastery. Ralph’s passion for longevity evolved from working within the anti-ageing industry for over twenty years. This, coupled with hands-on experience of living life to the full in his younger years, and wanting to maximise health in his current years, prompted Ralph to put his knowledge and expertise into a series of informative and entertaining self-help books, to encourage people to live longer, with truly life-changing results for readers.

Ralph studied at Reading University completing a BSc in Investment Banking, followed by an MSc in Real Estate and is also the author of the UK’s leading aesthetics business book; The Profitable Clinic.

Ralph is an expert when it comes to longevity, having maintained his youth with the tips in his book, and owning the following longevity and anti-aging devices; Cryotherapy Chamber, Localised Cryotherapy Device, Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber (HBOT), Oxygen Facial Device, Skin Repair Pen, Fat Freezing Machine, Red Light Therapy, Adaptive Oxygen Therapy, HIFU Machine and a HIFEM Accelerated Muscle Stimulation device – all at his home address. Ralph recalls with humour an afterparty with friends, as six of them squeezed into his single use hyperbaric oxygen chamber that evening, well morning!

The first within the STOP!! Series, is aptly named STOP!! Killing yourself – The Beginners Guide to Living Longer by Removing and Improving, encouraging readers to maximise their longevity with easy-to-follow guidance, checklists and prompts.

Ralph has just finished his next project; Sleep Mastery courses, helping individuals and companies achieve rested and rejuvenating sleep habits. Ralph plans to have a series of books dedicated to longevity, sleep and energy with simplistic, no-nonsense advice, for minimal fuss and maximum results.

Ralph says; “I’ve lived the life and partied (too) hard for most of it, now it’s time to unwind and relax to ensure my remaining years are filled with as much joy as my younger years, but with a laid back lifestyle instead of a full-throttle one! I want to share what I’ve learnt on my journey incorporating this new approach with others who may be in my position – I’m the proof in the pudding that it works.”

The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Ola Dahl (translated by Don Bartlett)

Today is my blog tour stop for The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Ola Dahl, translated by Don Bartlett. My thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for the invitation and to the publisher for my review copy.

The Blurb

Daniel Berkåk works as a courier for the Press and Military Office in Stockholm. On his last cross-border mission to Norway, he carries a rucksack full of coded documents and newspapers, but before he has a chance to deliver anything he is shot and killed and the contents of his rucksack are missing.

The Norwegian government, currently exiled in London, wants to know what happened, and the job goes to writer Jomar Kraby, whose first suspect is a Norwegian refugee living in Sweden, whose past is as horrifying as the events still to come…

Both classic crime and a stunning expose of Norwegian agents in Stockholm during the Second World War, The Lazarus Solution is a compulsive, complex, richly authentic historical thriller from one of the godfathers of Nordic Noir.

The Lazarus Solution is published by Orenda Books and comes out on 27th of this month.

 

My Review

I had only read one other book by this author, The Courier, and that was a wee while ago, so it was good to get reacquainted with his writing. My knowledge of what was happening in Sweden and Norway during the second world war was also lacking so it was interesting to learn a bit about that too. 

After a courier working for The Norwegian Legation in Sweden is found dead and the papers he was carrying are missing, writer Jomar Kraby, much to his surprise, is tasked with finding out what happened. Meanwhile, Kai Fredly, newly arrived in Sweden from Norway, is looking to find out about the death of his older brother. Told from their alternating points of view, the story that follows is interesting and complex, leading to a tense and exciting denouement. 

 

I liked Jomar. By his own admission, he's a man past his prime, perhaps mainly due to his love of alcohol. It's been some time since he wrote anything of note and nobody is more shocked than him when he is asked to investigate Daniel's murder. But the Norwegian government, future exiled in London want someone low key, not noteworthy and with no real connections to the Legation, where leaks are suspected. So Jomar comes across as very human, fallible and relatable with a dry sense of humour and a bluntness I found charming. 

Kai often comes across as a young man in too deep, being swept along by events he can't control. Whilst he hadn't been particularly close to his brother, in fact their beliefs were very different, he was all the family Kai had left and he wants to know what happened to him. There aren't many women in the story and of those that are a few are quite enigmatic, untrustworthy. Sara was a standout for me, a richly described character. 

I must confess that I did get a bit confused as to what was happening in Sweden (because So many Norwegians were there) and Norway but that was entirely down to me, not because of the writing. Once I got my head around that I really enjoyed following both investigations, and thought the way the storylines wound around each other before dovetailing together was great. 

But what really made The Lazarus Solution stand out for me were all the small details, the scene setting and the historical stuff -  drunk German soldiers singing political songs on a Swedish train, the politics of the day, the social events, everything. The text is well researched and richly layered, making it easy to picture the scenes, to imagine yourself there. A great story to immerse yourself in, with engaging characters and a tense, exciting denouement. 

And a big shout out to Don Bartlett for his brilliant work here. Translators are ace, I'm so grateful to be able to enjoy fantastic foreign works because of their hard work. 

The Author

One of the fathers of the Nordic Noir genre, Kjell Ola Dahl was born in 1958 in Gjøvik. He made his debut in 1993, and has since published fourteen novels, the most prominent of which is a series of police procedurals cum psychological thrillers featuring investigators Gunnarstranda and Frølich. In 2000 he won the Riverton Prize for The Last Fix and he won both the prestigious Brage and Riverton Prizes for The Courier in 2015. His work has been published in 14 countries, and he lives in Oslo.