My Book Reviews for May 2026
My Book Reviews for May 2026
My book reviews for May 2026 are for two psychological thrillers, three literary thrillers, one literary novel, three mysteries, one Young Adult mystery, one middle-grade novel, two historical fiction books and one non-fiction title on literature and history. It was a bumper and varied crop of goodies.
The Cold, Cold Sea by Linda Huber
On a trip to the seaside, three-year-old Olivia disappears and is feared drowned.
The story starts from the viewpoint of her mother, Maggie. We see her initial disbelief, her frantic search, her panic and her despair. I thought the story would be about her coming to terms with her loss but always having niggling doubts at what happened. Because it’s a thriller, I expected those doubts to grow until an alternative version of events presented itself towards the end of the novel.
However, the story suddenly moves somewhere else entirely – to a different family in a different county and presents an unsettling portrayal of childhood trauma. Although we check in with Maggie now and again, the main plot features two other protagonists. One is a terrifyingly unstable character and the other is a woman trying to do her job despite doubts about those in her care and in her ability to do the right thing. As a reader I was chilled by the former and willed the latter to see what was in front of her face.
This psychological suspense novel was chilling, thought-provoking and unputdownable.
In the last Lane Holland mystery, Murder Town, Lane was undercover for a prison governor, trying to locate the man’s missing daughter. The case gave Lane the private eye bug again. Since then, the urge to investigate when he’s not supposed to has grown stronger. In Vanish, he contrives to gain work experience on a farm that’s been run as a commune for thirty years. It’s the last place three missing people were seen.
At the farm, he trusts no one. He intends to keep his head down and work the manual tasks he’s been given while secretly observing the young farm owner and other commune residents and accessing the office paperwork. But his plan is thrown into chaos when a face from his past shows up, also undercover. It’s a person who has the power to send Lane straight back to jail.
This was the smoothest of reads. Every word was invisibly good, and I sped through in two days. I love the protagonist, Lane. I like his sister and his almost-friend. (I won’t say who because that would be a spoiler.) I think he’s a truly unique sleuth – I’d never come across one in his position before I read this series. The mystery was deftly unravelled, and I felt rather smug because I guessed, before Lane, who might be behind some of the unfortunate events. And the ending… exactly what I hoped for. More books on the way, methinks. Hoorah.
This is the third Australia-set Lane Holland novel I’ve read. I’ve loved them all. Here are my reviews of W.A.K.E and Murder Town.
Festival Days by Julie Anderson
This is the third part of the Clapham Trilogy of mysteries set in London in the years after the Second World War. This story takes place in the summer of 1951 during the Festival of Britian. Visitors flocked to the major cities for Festival events. Accommodation was, thus, hard to find. The deep bomb shelters at Clapham South were turned into a dormitory-style hotel. Bunks were two shillings a night and, for an extra charge, meals were delivered by nearby hospital kitchens.
In this fictional version of events, hospital administrator Ellie Peveril discovers the bodies of a man and a woman in the tunnel of the deep shelters while she’s delivering meals. The case is investigated by Ellie’s friend, Detective Constable Faye Smith. Faye is already working a case about underground gambling dens.
This is the third outing for sleuths Faye and Ellie. We see them operate in an era of restricted opportunities for women. Faye is trying to make her mark as one of the few female police detectives and Ellie is planning her wedding while also trying to hold onto her independence. Their investigation will lead them into the dark and dangerous world of organised crime.
The setting feels authentic. We see the legacy of the Second World War in the bombed-out wastelands of Clapham, formerly factories and workers’ dwellings, and we hear of the hunting grounds of Europe, where people smugglers are on the lookout for vulnerable young women on the streets and in displaced persons’ camps, some previously incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.
As well as being a darkly reflective historical mystery, it is a fast-paced thriller. The closing stages towards the dramatic finale were especially page-turning and provided a super and shocking reveal.
Although this can be read as a standalone, I’d recommend enjoying the full experience of all three books in the trilogy. Here’s my review of the first title, The Midnight Man.
Westerns: a women’s history by Victoria Lamont
Although academic in its approach, this book is a very readable exploration of women authors of westerns and how they frequently used/subverted the genre to shine a light on the political and social inequalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Victoria Lamont sets the writers in the historical context of, for example, the women’s suffrage campaign, the Maverick Law about unbranded calves (1884), the end of open range farming and the Johnson County Rustlers Wars of 1892.
Early female Western writers were social reformers. In her novel The Administratrix (1889), Emma Ghent Curtis used the figure of the cowboy to advocate for female suffrage. A mandate in favour of women getting the vote depended on the support of working-class, Hispanic, black and immigrant men. But supporters of female suffrage were mocked in the press as ‘men in petticoats and women in pantaloons’. By creating a masculine cowboy protagonist who championed women’s rights, Emma Ghent Curtis offered working-class men a role model they could identify with and not feel emasculated for supporting women’s rights.
Early twentieth-century women western writers drew analogies between women and cattle as patriarchal property. The branding of cattle was used as a metaphor for the suppression of women through marriage.
In The Rustler (1902), Frances McElrath depicted cattle rustling not as rogue cowboys cheating big, honest ranchers, but as a class struggle of inequality and exploitation, where hardworking farmhands battled to receive cattle and payments to which they were entitled. McElrath also had her female protagonist refuse marriage and highlighted how the right to own property was a masculine privilege.
B.M. Bower didn’t use her first name, Bertha, because the editor of the magazine in which her breakthrough novel was serialized insisted her identity be concealed. And even 17 years later when she was outed as a woman, her publisher Little, Brown didn’t want to promote the fact, although male readers found it funny that she’d fooled them, and women thought ‘good on her’. Her contemporary was male writer Owen Wister. Whereas he was an Easterner who knew cowboys from being a guest of a manager on a wealthy ranch in Wyoming, B.M. Bower acquired authenticity through living on a cattle ranch in Montana where her husband worked. Bertha’s westerns sold second only to Zane Grey, but archives show the publisher was quite dismissive of her.
Victoria Lamont argues that the whole question of archiving is gendered. During their writing lives, Owen Wister and Zane Grey had wives to keep house while they wrote books and went on extended fishing and hunting trips. Female writers, on the other hand, had household chores and caring responsibilities. After their deaths, the male writers’ archives were maintained by female family members. B.M. Bower’s daughter tried to publish her biography but didn’t have the finances. When late twentieth-century scholars argued for the significance of the western cannon, women writers were excluded. Lamont posits (p158) that scholarship should not downplay the role that material relations play in the production of culture. This just reinforces the ideological, material and institutional obstacles that exclude women from a given cultural field and even makes the effects of these obstacles look natural.
One fascinating chapter in the book is about the indigenous woman Mourning Dove who wrote Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1929). Early female writers were Ango-Americans who aligned themselves to an extent with the ‘frontier club’ – the network of elite white men who were well connected to leading publishers. Mourning Dove was of mixed Okanagan and white ancestry. She spoke Salish and lived on the Colville reservation in Washington State, formed in 1872 to confine nomadic tribes displaced by US expansion into the Pacific Northwest. Victoria Lamont argues that Mourning Dove’s writing had three influences:
1. Therese Broderick’s The Brand (1909) about a white woman married to a mixed blood man.
2. The ‘yellowbacks’ – lowbrow westerns Mourning Dove read growing up. According to Victoria Lamont, later in the twentieth century, Native American writers tended to be privileged individuals with mobility and access to an Anglo-American education. Mourning Dove would have had more restricted access to reading and education, hence she adapted the conventions of the yellowbacks she was familiar with.
3. Tribal storytelling practices that had much in common with these ‘yellowbacks’. The formulaic plots, stock characters and recurring motifs of westerns aligned with repetition in oral storytelling which uses repetition as a mnemonic device.
In Mourning Dove’s novel, Cogewea is a mixed raced woman who is courted by two men: Jim, an honourable, mixed-blood cowboy; and Densmore from the East. Densmore is after the land settled on her as a result of the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. He woos her by feigning deep interest in her tribal heritage. They elope but, when she innocently remarks that her land is worthless, her beats her and leaves her tied to a tree. She is rescued by Jim. Mourning Dove used her plot to voice important grievances.
The Dawes Act promised to introduce Native Americans to individual ownership and the Anglo-American economy but, in reality, it drastically reduced Native American land holdings. Mourning Dove mirrors this with Densmore’s evil strategy to seize his new wife’s land.
Mouring Dove depicted cultural assimilation as having the same agenda as cultural violence. In traditional westerns, Native American characters tended to be neutralized either by death or by being married off to white men, which led to the disappearance of their tribal culture. Mourning Dove subverts this convention through her denouement when mixed-blood Cogewea marries mixed-blood Jim. They will go on to have children and continue their Native American culture.
In using the name Densmore, she takes a swipe at ethnography, the study of human culture and societies. A prominent, early twentieth century ethnomusicologist was Frances Densmore. As well as taking the name for her villain, Mourning Dove also writes a delicious send-up of a folklore collector when Cogewea’s friends make up lies for the woman to scribble in her little notebook. (See pages 87 to 88.)
Ethnographical thinking of the time was that researchers had a mission to preserve Native American culture in print before it disappeared. The premise was that oral storytelling was primitive and would be eradicated once Native Americans progressed to literacy. In fact, oral and written traditions had long co-existed in indigenous cultures.
Ethnography presented the native lifestyle as having been conquered, whereas Mourning Dove used the western to show the ongoing resistance to Anglo-American domination. The Native American way of life was in conflict and dialogue with Anglo-Americans and their culture but not vanquished.
Ironically, Mourning Dove was encouraged by her editor, Lucullus McWhorter, to write Cogewea because he saw it as an important work by what he believed to be the first indigenous woman to write a novel. However, he didn’t want her to write more novels; one was quite enough. Instead, he persuaded her to undertake ethnographic fieldwork. Although McWhorter considered himself pro-Indigenous rights, it was through the Anglo-American lens that oral storytelling needed recording before it disappeared. Victoria Lamont argues Mourning Dove would have rather written more novels to further her goals as an activist storyteller.
Early pulp western fiction targeted a general readership of both genders. In the 1920s, new magazines emerged that separated readerships into masculine westerns and feminine western romances such as the serials Ranch Romances and Western Stories. Whereas early westerns by women challenged marriage and domesticity, the Romance Westerns depicted women alone and vulnerable in the West. They might have inherited property from fathers or late husbands, but – whether they were submissive or rebellious - they needed the patriarchal protection of a cowboy to rescue them.
Even a series character like by Muriel Ives’s Sheriff Minnie – a middle-aged, sturdily built woman in sheriff’s hat, chaps, boots, spurs, badge and gun – ultimately gets married. Similarly, the beneficiaries of her crime-fighting duties are often young couples who marry at the end. The stories continue after her marriage with her husband wanting her to give up work and concentrate on cooking his dinner.
In her conclusion, Victoria Lamont points out that, despite being largely forgotten, the early women western writers who subverted the genre paved the way for what came later. She quotes from The Happy Family, a short story by B.M Bower (page 159), where the cowboy protagonist had previously been a graceful circus performer in spangled tights. Bower’s softening and rounding out of the macho protagonist was adopted by later filmmakers. For example, the 1939 film Destry Rides Again presented Jimmy Stewart as a milk-drinking, pacifist sheriff, and in Clint Eastwood’s revisionist western Unforgiven (1992) he plays a former gunfighter now teetotal and haunted by the murders he committed.
This book is a fascinating insight into women writers of westerns, now largely and wrongly forgotten. In describing the social and political context in which they wrote, Victoria Lamont explains much about early twentieth century America. Well worth reading for anyone interested in seeing history and literature through a feminist lens.
I borrowed this one from my local library after it was recommended by a member of the book club I attend. It’s a terrific book.
In 1965, twenty-year-old Frankie horrifies her wealthy parents by enlisting as a nurse for Vietnam, a decision partly based on a desire to join the photos of male family members on her father’s hero board. It’s a baptism of fire for the newly qualified nurse. The author describes in visceral detail the frenzy and blood-soaked chaos of combat nursing. Two experienced nurses take Frankie under their wings but it’s hard to get used to the horror around her and to the shock of losing people she grows to love.
When she returns to the USA, she faces a new challenge. Support for the Vietnam War is waning and it’s difficult for traumatised veterans – especially female ones – to find their place.
Well-written with plenty of cultural and political period detail. I liked the book so much I bought a copy for my Kindle.
The Desert Nurse by Pamela Hart
Against her strict father’s wishes, twenty-four-year-old Evelyn enlists in the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1914. It’s the closest she can get to her intention to become a doctor. It’s an aim that will remain a pipe dream until she’s thirty, when she will receive her inheritance from her late mother and be able to afford medical training. There’s no chance of inheriting early because her father refuses to release the funds held in trust. If she were to marry, her husband would take charge of the trust, but that’s an even worse prospect for independent Evelyn. After she has shaken off her father’s control, she has no intention of her finances being controlled by another man.
The other viewpoint character is Dr William Brent, a skilled doctor, who enlists partly to prove to himself he’s able as any man. A survivor of childhood polio, he walks with a painful and pronounced limp and is misjudged by many.
Evelyn and William find themselves working together in operating theatres in Cairo and Alexandria. Soon the admiration they have for each other’s skills and opinions develops into personal affection. But, with neither of them intending to marry, they force themselves to concentrate on their patients, shrapnel-filled soldiers stretchered in from the frontline at Gallipoli.
The writer captures well the mores and language of the 1910s, and her descriptions of operations on the wounded men are authentic and visceral.
This is the first book I’ve bought and read by Pamela Hart but I’m keen to read others.
The Secret Thread by Eve Chase
Mimi Mott, celebrated designer and style icon, now in her 70s, is auctioning off her estate, intending to tell her life story through selected objects.
She appoints inexperienced but super-keen Jo O’Mara as her assistant to catalogue the items and write up Mimi’s revealing reminiscences. But Jo has a secret she doesn’t (but also does) want Mimi to know.
And what secrets is Mimi holding? What happened at the Wiltshire manor house where her family worked during the summer of 1969? Who died on the night of the glittering party?
As she spends time with Mimi and her memoir, Jo is drawn into a world of jealousy and sibling rivalry and risks both her personal and professional position to unravel the truth.
This is a book of detail – the objects, fashions, décor, architecture, gardens and people. With its structure of using the proposed catalogue entries to spark Mimi’s revelations and propel Jo’s story forward, it’s the perfect project for Eva Chase. She excels at this kind of beautiful, evocative and descriptive writing. Fans of the author will not be disappointed and are in for a treat.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
In Case I Go Missing by R. N. Swann
Fenny, Sam and Sarah have been best friends since they were eight and solved the mystery of who stole the school library books. At the time, Sarah declared she would one day solve the world’s biggest mystery.
But now they’re seventeen and Sarah has stopped hanging out. When she doesn’t show up to Sam’s brother’s engagement party, Fenny calls time on the friendship. But then the police arrive: Sarah is missing.
As this wisecracking Young Adult mystery progresses, we see something of the dysfunctional families and backstories of these engaging protagonists.
Good for fans of Karen M. McManus, Holly Jackson and Ravena Guron.
This is an independent review of an early copy. With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity.
The Talk of the Party by Foluso Agbaje
Bukola Obanile is matriarch of a wealthy and prominent Lagos family. Her sixtieth birthday party must be perfect and – more importantly – be seen to be perfect. Appearances are everything to maintain status in high society. Five hundred guests are invited to the lavish event. But her four children have their secrets, and the risk of any one of several scandals breaking on the big day is mounting. Told from several viewpoints in the weeks and days before the party, the novel creates rounded, interesting characters.
The story reminded me of Maeve Binchy’s Silver Wedding, which featured a family with secrets, planning an anniversary party for the parents. Just as Binchy richly evoked her Irish setting, Agbaje does the same for Lagos with sumptuous descriptions of food, clothing and customs.
This is an independent review of an early copy. With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity.
From the blurb: In a remote valley in Idaho in 1981, a man, a woman and three children stop running to wash the blood from their hands and bodies. They are the few survivors of a tragedy. Their only choice now is, somehow, to become a family.
Five years earlier, Opal and her husband James arrive in the small mining community of Silver Valley, drawn by promises of fortune and independence. There they meet Baron Rowe, the charismatic visionary who controls the community with an iron fist. Baron's son Denny has spent his life trying, and failing, to live up to Baron's expectations, and to protect his little sister Maude from their father's excesses.
Soon, a tragic accident will change all their lives. And five years later, change will come again at the barrel of a gun . . .
This tale of survival and trauma is ideal for fans of distinctive characters, vividly described setting and richly constructed prose. It must surely be in line for a literary fiction award or two.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Such a Nice Girl by Andrea Mara
Old friends, Siobhán and Grace, attend a 3-day wedding with their respective daughters, Ré and Luna, at a luxury house in a well-to-do area of Dublin. The property belongs to the ‘Bridezilla’ Emma-Rose, who is to become the third wife of Charlie. As well as being an old friend of Siobhán’s, the groom is Grace’s ex-husband and father of her daughter, Luna. Also sleeping in the house is Xavi, Charlie’s son from his first marriage.
On the morning after the wedding reception, Siobhán and Grace wake with hangovers and hazy memories of the night before. They discover their daughters aren’t in their room and there’s evidence of a struggle. When the mothers contact police, the gardaí match the case to a mystery call they had at 4 a.m. from a girl saying her roommate was attacking her with a knife. The panicked whispering on the police recording is too indistinct for a positive identification, but Siobhán and Grace both think their child is the caller.
Despite assuming each other’s offspring is the attacker, they work together and visit the girls’ friends, one by one, to find out where they might be. Gradually, they learn there’s a lot they don’t know about the daughters.
It’s a complex web of characters, including the members of the patchwork family, the friends, Luna’s ex-boyfriend Theo, the wedding planner Jasmine, the catering manager Ben, and Aidan, an older guy that Ré had been meeting in London. And who is the mysterious Laura who’s been messaging Luna since a disastrous all-girls’ holiday earlier in the year?
The fluently written, twisty psychological thriller will be a surefire hit for this bestselling author.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Ideal for readers who are looking for an unusual perspective and narrative style. There's plenty of authorial intervention as we see the past, present and future of five people on a platform at Victoria Station. The present timeline covers the five minutes before one of the five is going to fall in front of an arriving train. As much literary character study as thriller, there's lots here to enjoy for readers looking for something a little different.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller
Ursula was taken into care as a young child and spent the next few years being passed between caregivers and children’s homes. In 1987, at the age of sixteen, she moves into a halfway house and longs for friends and love.
She works in the post room of an art college. When she’s befriended by young colleague Sue and meets Sue’s chaotic but happy mother, grandparents and siblings, Ursula thinks she’s found her happy-ever-after. But even Sue’s brother warns her that Sue is fickle and prone to moving on.
Sue persuades another colleague, Vince, to invite Ursula to move into a squat with him. Aspiring film maker Sue is a frequent visitor and uses the fully furnished property as the backdrop for a horror film.
Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned sculptress being pursued by a true-crime documentary maker who wants to interview her about the events of 1987 and an unsolved disappearance.
Although there are some elements of mystery and suspense in the premise, this book sits firmly in the literary genre with explorations of childhood trauma, yearnings, navigating a confusing world and mental illness. As befits a literary novel, descriptions are visceral with much thisness of detail.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller by Amelia Tait
This breezy middle-grade novel has a great premise: thirteen-year-old Lily finds herself time-travelling to different eras. Wherever she lands, she has the same family and friends, but they are unaware of their future selves and don’t know Lily has time-travelled.
A fun read with some nice period details to appeal to middle-grade readers, it’s a story about coming of age, friendships and getting along with others.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.
Her Rising Star by Rachel Sargeant
Book three in my Gloucestershire Crime Series was published yesterday. The first reviews are lovely:
‘I absolutely love this series and this is a great addition to it. Roll on the next one!’ Kaz Loves Books
‘This author is one who knows how to draw a reader in, keep hold of them and then pull something out of the bag that completely throws the reader.’ Sarah Reads
‘Her Rising Star is a subtle locked room mystery that’s engaging and full of surprises.’ Peter turns the page