In summary, Dead Stock by Rachel Ward is the story of a pair of supermarket-working amateur sleuths who solve the mystery of some missing cats. For a book that’s over three hundred pages long, not a lot else happens. It drags.
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I’ve not yet found doctors and policemen to be getting younger, but it is a sobering thought when you discover a successful novelist is 29 to your 30, especially when you feel incredibly young yourself. Fresh from a Saltire Society First Book of the Year nomination, and a Betty Trask Prize win, for his 2016 debut, Kirkcaldy’s Daniel Shand has a new offering in the shape of Crocodile. This is the story of Chloe, who is spending the summer before high school with her grandparents as her mother can’t cope, although this reason is not evident to Chloe. She hangs about with a group of troublesome boys and gets up to some high-jinks, but it is in the aftermath of a family caravanning holiday that real danger strikes, and Chloe must find her own way to safety, re-discovering what that means.
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Long-distance walker Chris Townsend’s latest travelogue seems politically timely. Along the Divide is his account of walking Scotland’s Watershed in the time between two referendums, Scottish Independence in 2014 and EU membership in 2016. Opening with the line: “A watershed, a divide, between two worlds”, Townsend introduces us to the main themes of his book – the physical Watershed (“a line that links continuous high ground…the ridge between two valleys”) and the political divide of a nation. The Watershed of Scotland runs between the Atlantic and the North Sea, covering 1,200km through the Southern Uplands, Central Lowlands, Highlands and the Flow Country – helpfully a printed map is provided allowing readers to get their bearings! A selection of stunning photographs of the sights and views Townsend encountered also feature in the centre of the book, and they are an absolute treat.
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Collision Theory is a novel about a screenwriter that could have been written as a film script. Journalist Todd Zuniga’s debut, penned under the name Adrian Todd Zuniga, would work well on the screen, but unfortunately works less so on the page. Short and succinct in its two hundred pages, it doesn’t need to be any longer for its content.
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Much hype has surrounded Transcription for the best part of a year now, though we’ve seen and heard nothing more than the title and the cover image of a flamingo. For a book that isn’t published until September this year, it has a lot to live up to. However its author is popular, multi-million selling Kate Atkinson, and this is her first literary outing since the critically acclaimed A God in Ruins in 2015. So it is worth the wait.
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