The troubled product of a broken home Ant Middleton joined the British Army at the age of 17 in 1997. A fiercely determined young man he advanced into the elite 9 Para Squadron RE and served in Northern Ireland and Macedonia. However the ultra macho boisterous hard drinking culture of his unit did not satisfy the dedicated Middleton who left to join the Royal Marines serving in 40 Commando and ultimately the Special Boat Service or SBS, the maritime counterpart of the more famous SAS the elite special forces of the British armed forces. He describes in excruciating detail the pitiless

I picked this book up because I quite like a historical murder mystery, which both the cover picture and the first few chapters seemed to promise. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is travelling across Wessex in the year 1468 to officiate at the funeral of a fellow clergyman based in a remote parish on the edge of the diocese. Conceive, then, of my gobsmackedness when our protagonist, passing the night in the austere bedchamber of the late Father Lacey, comes across a shiny rectangular object and turns it over to find a strange symbol, an apple with a bite taken out of it, etched into the

In these uncertain times, few stories strike as poignant a chord as Margaret Atwood's feminist masterpiece “The Handmaid's Tale”. Since it's publication in 1985 this story of one woman's enslavement as a human broodmare in an intensely fundamentalist regime has spawned a film and an Emmy award winning tv series. Last year, in the sequel “The Testaments”, Atwood took us back to Gilead, a country whose concept is as worryingly relevant today as it was thirty-five years ago.

This is a very enjoyable account of a real-life female detective that reads like fiction. The author quickly realised that ‘London’s Lady Detective’ worked under a pseudonym and that her life story was going to be difficult to uncover. Maud West operated from around 1905 until the eve of World War II, when she shut up shop and to all intents and purposes, disappeared from the record. Piece by piece Susannah Stapleton slowly put Maud West’s biography together, but not without many dead ends and false leads, identifying her husband and children.

Subtitled “How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match” this is the jaw-dropping true story of the marriage between Irish adventurer, Andrew Robinson Stoney (whose dubious legacy to posterity is the expression “stoney broke”) and the “richest heiress in Britain”, Mary Eleanor Bowes (great-great-great-great-grandmother of the Queen). To say Stoney was a bad husband is the understatement, certainly of this century, if not his own. An accomplished fortune hunter and ingenious schemer, he had already seen one rich wife into an early grave before he duped the Earl of Strathmore’s widow

This is a thought-provoking and engaging read that weaves together several storylines, but centres on the complex relationship between mother and child.

It begins with a house fire. The Richardson's youngest daughter, Izzy, is presumed responsible, as she is the black sheep of the family. From here we are taken back eleven months and given an account of the events leading up to the fire.

This is a thrilling account of the unbelievable but true exploits of the heroic Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a Kerry born priest who saved thousands of Italian Jews and Allied troops and airmen from the Nazis during WW2. O'Flaherty cut his teeth as a young curate in the War of Independence in Ireland where he was actively involved in the struggle against the British, in particular the notorious Black and Tans.

I’m still doing rose-tinted nostalgia this week, choosing another old favourite to review. Who knows, I might yet be shamed by those YouTubing self-improvers into having a crack at Ulysses, but for the moment I’m happy staying firmly in my comfort zone. Alliott is often dismissed as a writer of frivolous chick-lit but, while I’m not suggesting she’s up there with Joyce, I believe she can hold her own with Townsend and Fielding, and, dare I say it, acclaimed male comic writers like Simsion, Hornby or even Wodehouse himself.

It’s taken me a while to embark on this series, the delay being due to the fact that I’m not really a Potter fan and have eschewed fantasy my entire reading career. I recall picking up The Philosopher’s Stone back in the day to see what the furore was about and realising very quickly that, magic wands and flying broomsticks aside, children’s books are best left to children. So why did I decide to give JK a go after all this time? Believe it or not because my friends suggested this as an antidote to Dublin Murders, assuring me that Cormoran (as in Cormoran Strike, the PI hero of these novels)