A ghostly tale of mystery, intrigue, murder and eccentric royals.

If you enjoy ghost stories, you will enjoy this one by Tim Roux, a masterfully told tale about a reluctant psychic named Paul Lambert, a ghost named Alice,  assorted other ghosts, and a chateau inhabited by an eccentric British Earl (the Earl of Affligem), his family, a mob of hangers-on and the chateaux’s original royal family, who do not enjoy the crowd and all their noise at all. And if all this isn’t enough to hold your interest, there is also a serial killer to catch

It’s Alice who is the most interesting ghost, because she falls in love with Paul (very frustrating for both)and badly wants to expose her killer. And this is where Roux does something very, very interesting: Alice, you see, is the young French woman Alice Picard in Tim Roux’s novel Little Fingers, who elopes with Mary to Spain and never returns. I’ve wondered whatever happened to Alice, and now I know. The chief suspect for her murderer is, she says, her ill-tempered and abusive father who was enraged at her because she had taken up with Mary. But Alice isn’t the only character from Little Fingers that shows up here. Retired police inspector John is also here.

If you’re looking for a ghost story that’s packed with ghosts and drama, pick this one up, take it home, and enjoy it.

One final comment: I’m not convinced that most of the characters in the novel aren’t really ghosts. That’s a mystery for you to solve.

An easy 5 star read. 

Murder, village intrigue, pedophilia -- WHO is the villain?

“Little Fingers” is a truly remarkable novel. Opening as the main character Julia Blackburn is being interviewed by police Inspector John Frampton. “There is a serial killer out there. He is living in that brain of yours as an unrecognised memory, a shadowy computation, and he must be stopped.” Inspector Frampton is a doggedly patient man who must get at the truth and stop the killings going on in the village of Hanburgh. Julia is the most recent person to have seen recently murdered Tom Willows. He is determined to tease the truth from Julia’s mind. Who is this mysterious woman? He persists doggedly forward. “That is what makes you a policeman,” she says; “You have the mind of a drill bit.”

Life in the little village of Hanburgh was relatively tranquil until Julia Blackburn arrived and rented one of the largest houses in town. Who is she and what does she want from the people here?

There is Mary, Julia’s friend and lover; Mary Knightly, wife of George and adopted daughter of Dr. Beringer, local physician and pedophile. There is Samantha, whom Mary Knightly calls “a bastard daughter of a whore”. Not to be outdone, Samantha calls Mary Knightly “a jumped up little poisonous turd.” No love lost there. There is Brenda, waitress at the local pub, a fund of knowledge about everything going on in Hanburgh. Who is Julia Blackburn, and what is she doing here? It isn’t until late in the novel that we find out who the killer is, and why. The killer’s purpose? To exact revenge on the people who made or her life miserable when she lived in Hanburgh. But ... who is the killer? At one point in her interrogation with Inspector Frampton, Julia asks :”If I am the fall guy, who is the murderer?”

Julia belabors the Inspector’s ears with philosophical asides. “We do such trivial things with all that intelligence we have been lavished with. We could work towards a better world, towards making even the smallest of differences, and we waste our time worrying whether somebody of no importance likes us or not.” “We are not balanced. We go from peaceful intentions in peacetime to murderous ones in war. We are easily provoked to hatred by the simplest of cynical exploiters. We fall for the same trick a thousand times without recognising it... You would think that we would  have reached satiety with all that we cram our homes with and later take to the dump. Apparently not. Rather than counsel ourselves that enough is enough, we carry on accelerating our desires, and cheering on people whose only intent is to profit from them. We may be decent, but we are certainly stupid.”

Rather than distracting from the story, these monologues add to the picture of Julia’s mind. Is she ...? You’ll have to read the novel to find out. It’s a remarkable piece of fiction that you won’t soon forget. I certainly won’t.

A clear 5 star read.

Available in paperback and Kindle.

Because the Night -- A guest blog by Tim Roux

There has been an extremely interesting development in the book world – the prestigious hotel group Radisson Edwardian have set up a book club whereby they give all their guests at their Radisson Edwardian Bloomsbury Street Hotel, London, a courtesy book of the month.

Why Bloomsbury? Well, based on the Bloomsbury literary group of the early 20th century, as you might suspect.

It a bit boggles the mind how the literary editor of the Radisson Edwardian Book Club, Chris Moss of trendy London guide Time Out, chooses a book to meet the tastes of all 14,000 guests who stay there each month, but it has to be a lovely idea for people like us who enjoy a good book and, it has to be said, a good hotel, starving authors that we are.

There you are, you arrive at the hotel tired and in need of instant relaxation, the TV doesn’t appeal, you’ve seen all the movies, what you need is a good book – hey presto, here it is and, if those guests are exceptionally lucky, it will be a Night Publishing book too.

Oh come on, nobody gets that lucky.

Funnily enough, though, that is why Night Publishing is so-called. It was originally set up to supply fun business books to business travellers in hotels – not the stuff that you hang on your wall as a trophy in the unlikely pretence that you have actually read it – all ten pages that matter out of 500 anyway – but really entertaining business-related books like Matt Beaumont’s ‘Company’ or Maxx Barry’s ‘Syrup’.

Well, that idea never took off – why would a hotel be interested in offering its guests books? – but it lingered on in the publisher’s name and in its Relax at Night book showcase brand.

Full circle. Here is the Radisson Edwardian Book Club keen to indulge its guests in a good book like T.S. Elliot’s poems (they really want you to have a good night’s sleep, those guys) or ‘A Room With A View’ (geddit?), and here is Night eager once again to step up to the mark to supply them at least occasionally with just the sort of book that will make their guests happiest, a naturally talented and tasty treat from a much cherished free range author.

Happy ever after.

And what books are Night suggesting first to the Radisson Edwardian Book Club? Well, there is Charlotte Castle's Simon's Choice, the broad appeal family drama which asks “Would you accompany your dying child to heaven?”

Then there is Danny Bent's You've Gone Too Far This Time, Sir!  chronicling the everyday adventures and misadventures of Danny Bent as he cycled 10,000 miles from London to Chembakolli in Southern India with a very sore bum and chased across mountain tops by a masked robber on horseback (headline - 'Vicious bum chases aching bum').

Third suggestion: The Bookie's Runner, Brendan Gisby's seminal portrait of a man of no importance - his father - who thought he had worked out how to get one big win on the horses before he died, and he was right, but …...

And then the truly outrageously good, as-Jane-Austen-would-have-written-it-if-she-had-been-born-in-Atlanta-Georgia, The Wilful Daughter, where a successful middle-class blacksmith is absolutely determined to marry off his five eligible and beautiful daughters to the right suitors in the appropriate order, and his fifth, most attractive and wilful, daughter is equally set on having it, and the man she loves, her way.

Finally a lyrical fable, a plea for friendship across races, however unlikely that might be, a book for all ages and all time, George Polley's The Old Man and The Monkey. 

Hell, I would stay in the Radisson Edwardian Bloomsbury Street just to read those books.

P.S. Actually I would like to add a personal story of my experience with the Radisson Edwardian hotel group. I used to live between France, Belgium and the UK, so travelled a lot into London Heathrow, London Luton, London Stansted and London Gatwick airports. One day I arrived at Heathrow desperate to get onto the Internet and to have some lunch. I had travelled past the Radisson Edwardian hotel at Heathrow many times and it looked really pretty, so on that basis alone I bowled in there and said “I don’t suppose you will accept this from a non-resident, but I would love to get on the Internet and I would love to have lunch, will you help me?” They were charm itself, they offered me my own office and a not expensive lunch, and I did everything I had to do in 3-4 hours. They are still my favourite Heathrow airport hotel (and I do have experience of a few others).

Anyway, if you think that the Radisson Edwardian Bloomsbury Street Hotel might be worth a free book, here it is:

Tim Roux, Publisher, Night Publishing (UK)

An Intriguing and Very British Novel

Tim Roux: Shade + Shadows. Night Publishing, using CreateSpace. May, 2010. Paperback 262 pages, $11.95

The novel opens on an argument/discussion between Jane and Alan Harding, a middle-aged married couple who are clearly fond of each other. They use this light-hearted spat to relax party guests and get them in a lighter mood. Alan calls these little spats “the cyclical celebration of [our] being a cohesive unit.” This is representative of his way of speaking and thinking: formal, bland and rather detached. In Alan’s words, his and Jane’s relationship is “impenetrably harmonious.” It makes their daughter Sarah crazy. If they would only show some level of irritation with each other, but they don’t. Most people don’t behave the way they do, but they are not most people, they are Alan and Jane Harding.

A very successful chiropractor, practitioner of alternative medicine and healer, Alan is able to cure everyone’s ailments by combining homeopathy, kinesiology, distance healing, prayer achieve miraculous results that even he sometimes doesn’t understand. Some of his methods, which would be illegal in any medical and psychological practice, present no problem for him due, it seems, to patient loyalty.

Then, halfway through the novel Alan’s idyllic world begins to unravel due to some hidden secrets in his life as a young medical practitioner stationed in Saudi Arabia. There are some very ugly people involved, it isn’t very pretty, and it challenges Alan’s detached manner. Is all lost? You’ll have to read the book to find out, as I’m not giving the secret away.

The only problem I have with the novel is its voice which, because it is Alan’s voice, is as detached and bland as he is. But it is very much in line with similar characters I’ve encountered in British literature, movies (“Remains of the Day”) and BBC sitcoms, some of them beautifully parodying them (“Fawlty Towers” and “Keeping Up Appearances” being two of my favorites). That aside, I think it is well-worth the read, and for readers who really like this style, very much worth it. The story itself is an interesting one.