Enjoy Life

Spring 2025 Book Reviews

The pick of the latest hardbacks and paperbacks, reviewed by Simon Evans

The Daughter, by TM Logan

It is every parent’s worse nightmare, turning up to pick up your daughter from university only to find she has disappeared. For Laura it is all too real, and things are about to get worse as she discovers her daughter has been missing for weeks and may be caught up in something sinister and life-threatening. The twists keep coming in this absorbing thriller.

Published by Zaffre Price £16.99 Pages 400 ISBN 9781804185148

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact, by Keith Cooper

Films such as Star Wars, Dune and Avatar, and the work of science-fiction visionaries like Arthur C Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, have fired the imagination of science-fiction fans for decades, but how realistic are their predictions of what alien planets might look like? That, and much more besides, is discussed in this fascinating, accessible book, with the author concluding that the real exoplanets (any planet beyond our solar system) being discovered by scientists and astronomers today far surpass the strangeness of any film or work of fiction.

Published by Reaktion Price £15 Pages 248 ISBN 9781789149944

Scouse Republic, by David Swift

Liverpool has always seemed separate from the rest of the United Kingdom, but why? That is the question Liverpudlian historian and author David Swift seeks to answer very personal, overview of his native city’s past, present and future. At one time Liverpool was hailed, perhaps a touch extravagantly, as the Florence of the North, such was its booming port, extravagant architecture and vibrant culture.

More recently the city has become better known for its global cultural influence, sometimes toxic politics, and wholesale regeneration. Swift is sensitive to many of the myths and tropes that surround Liverpool, but is proud of its people’s reputation for being both generous of spirit and resilient in the face of adversity.

Tribalism persists, however, not least when it comes to the city’s main football teams, and one of my favourite of many personal anecdotes is Swift’s recollection of the wedding reception where the DJ, not realising he was in a room full of Evertonians, proceeded to play the national anthem of Liverpool FC, You’ll Never Walk Alone. That a near riot was narrowly avoided should come as no surprise to supporters of those two great clubs.

Published by Century Price £25 Pages 320 ISBN 9781408719701

Bowieland, by Peter Carpenter

In 2016, following life-saving open-heart surgery, the poet Peter Carpenter was told he had to take a brisk walk every day. This was no problem for someone who had always enjoyed walking, and Peter decided to combine this with another great passion, David Bowie, using his daily perambulations to follow in the footsteps of Bowie, discovering locations key to an understanding of the rock star’s life and art.

Very much in the tradition of his friend Iain Sinclair’s key work of psycho-geography, London Orbital, in which Peter appeared, we are taken to locations as disparate as Heddon Street, Soho, site of the Ziggy Stardust cover and the asylum that figured on the original US sleeve of The Man Who Sold The World, as well as the Berlin locations that inspired Bowie’s masterful trilogy of late-Seventies albums.

Full of literary, cultural, musical and historical references that shed light on Bowie’s life and art, it’s a delightful journey of discovery.

Published by Monoray Price £22 Pages 320 ISBN 9781800961548

These Foolish Things, by Dylan Jones

Whenever I and my fellow cub reporters on my first local weekly newspaper offered up a story involving a local TV news reader opening a supermarket, or a mid-ranking journo signing their latest tome at the local bookshop my news editor would always moan, “They’re just journalists like us, they’re nothing special.”

He had a point of course, and Dylan Jones is, from one angle just another journalist, albeit one with a particularly distinguished career, having graduated from style magazines in the Eighties to colour supplements in the Nineties, on to editorship of GQ and then the Evening Standard. And, of course, he has some great stories to tell, many involving his early years as a struggling art student in late Seventies London and his stints on the era-defining magazines IQ, The Face and Arena.

The stories become less interesting the higher Dylan climbs up the food chain, a seemingly endless round of luxury launches, glitzy parties and glossy celebrity encounters, but he still manages to capture what already feels like a lost world and I especially enjoyed the story of how he sent grizzled old sports reporter Hugh Mcllvanney to interview entitled, up-themselves Hollywood star Eddie Murphy. Genius.

Published by Constable Price £12.99 Pages 464 ISBN 9781408719862

Her Sister’s Killer, by Mari Hannah

At a party celebrating his partner and friend Frankie’s promotion, DCI David Stone stumbles across something that may hold the key to the unsolved murder of Frankie’s sister, decades earlier. Meanwhile Frankie struggles to find her feet back in uniform in a, she hopes, new temporary posting, blissfully unaware of the secrets being unearthed by DCI Stone. It’s an excellent entry-level introduction to the reliably gripping Stone and Oliver series, of which this is the fifth novel.

Published by Orion Price £9.99 Pages 400 ISBN 9781398715981

Also newly published…

 In Neil Lancaster’s new nailbiter When Shadows Fall (HQ, £16.99), DS Max Craigie investigates the case of a climber who appears to have fallen off a mountain and discovers a disturbing pattern emerging, suggesting this may have not been the tragic accident it originally appeared to be. In the spirt of the the Thursday Murder Club, Tess Gerritsen’s The Summer Guests (Bantam, £20) finds Maggie Bird’s ‘book group’ of retired spies on the case when their friend is named as a suspect in the disappearance of a teenage girl, and there’s more amateur sleuthing to be found in Murder at the Palace, by NR Daws (Orion, £20), when the housekeeper at Hampton Court investigates after one of the ladies in residence is found dead…

Set in 1925 London, Miss Burnham and the Loose Thread, by Lynn Knight (Bantam, £16.99), tells of Rose, an ambitious designer-dressmaker, who finds herself privy to the torment of a major client who has lost her inheritance to a swindler and determines to play detective to bring the thief to justice. She finds out, however, that sleuthing can be a deadly game…

Newly reissued is Lost Voices of the Falklands War, by Max Arthur (August Books, £12.99), an important document of the conflict told through interviews with soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought in the war, and in Mike Croissant’s Bombing Hitler’s Homeland (August Books, £12.99) the retired CIA officer tells how the courageous men of the US Fifteenth Air Force – including his uncle – resisted wave after wave of German anti-aircraft battery attacks to bombard Linz, one of Germany’s most valued assets, and the town Hitler described as home…

Retired detective turned Snowdonia park ranger Frank Marshal is called out of retirement to investigate a mysterious disappearance, and finds his past coming back to haunt him, in Marshal of Snowdonia (£9.99). It’s the latest from crime writer Simon McCleave, whose DI Ruth Hunter series of novels is set to be filmed as a major TV series…

In On The Hippie Trail (Avalon Travel, £25), esteemed American travel writer Rick Steves revisits his life-changing 1978 adventures travelling from Istanbul to Kathmandu, drawing on diaries kept at the time, and Heartbreaker (Constable, £25), is the colourful memoir of Mike Campbell, lead guitarist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from 1976 to 2017. It’s a quintessentially rock and roll rags to riches story, that’s both tender and moving…

Answering an advert for a job at a bookshop in York, Evelyn Seaton meets William, an aspiring writer who, like Evelyn, has secrets he’d rather keep hidden, but, together, can they find a new future? The answer is to be found in Sophie Austin’s engaging romantic novel The Lamplighter’s Bookshop (HarperCollins, £9.99)…

Death At The White Hart (Michael Joseph, £16.99) is an engrossing crime novel from Chis Chibnall, the creator of Broadchurch and former show-runner of Doctor Who. When a body is found in a picturesque Dorset village there are no shortage of suspects, as detective Nicola Bridge soon discovers, and buried secrets bubble up to the surface. And Date With Destiny (Pan, £9.99) is the final instalment in Julia Chapman’s Dales Detective series, with the unlikely named sleuths Samson and Delilah having to put aside personal differences, not least worries about their upcoming wedding, to catch a killer at large in Bruncliffe…

In The Last Bell (Simon and Schuster, £25) acclaimed sports Donald McRae looks at boxing in the 21st century, going behind the scenes, examining the extraordinary highs and lows, the triumphs and the tragedies that only boxing can produce. McRae also reveals how and why the sport has beguiled him over the past 50 years, and even provided his salvation when he went through an especially dark period in his life…

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