How Did I Get Here?

How Did I Get Here? is a book that could be an exciting fictional tale, but it isn't. It is, instead, an exciting factual tale.

In it, computer, internet and cyber security expert Tony McDowell writes a riveting story of how he did get to where he is in his life.

He did not have a very auspicious start in life, his family didn't have much money and was beset with problems in their back-to-back house in the Midlands city of Birmingham.

He was brought up with a series of hopes and promises, all of which were smashed like a bag of lightbulbs being dropped.

Rather than being crushed down by these setbacks, only child Tony decided that he was going to succeed in spite of every setback.

He took the decision to leave school early on the strength of a job offer to enter the then extremely new field of computing, right at the beginning in the mid-1960s.

He became a computer programmer and absorbed the complex computer languages that the behemoth devices of those days required to keep them running.

He took up a very good job offer in South Africa, but found himself troubled by life under the apartheid regime.

However, success in his chosen field meant that he could return home to the UK and to fulfil the dream of running his own business.

His efforts paid off handsomely and his business grew to the point that, unless he actually wanted to, he need never work again.

However, his life was to take a different turn when, after a chance meeting, he was introduced to the world of IT security and the use of hacking for benign and altruistic purposes. 

He launched a new business and pretty quickly it grew to the point that received so much attention that it soon garnered an offer to buy the business.

It's a fascinating and extremely well-written book and at £11.99 it is a very good read. Am I biased because I was born only five miles away in another suburb of Birmingham? I don't think so. To find out, you'll have to buy the book (it's published by Matador) for yourself!

Untangling the Webs

Untangling the Webs is a relationship novel with a difference, because author Joy Pearson has brought her readers a novel that is not only about relationships, but also a thriller, too.

It tells the stories of women and the men in their lives. There are Alison,  who is an interior designer, who is single, Julia, a married beautician, Phoebe, a widow who is nor without funds, plus Trudie, a stress counsellor, who is also a widow.

They work through a number of issues that impinge on their lives in a number of ways. Poor behaviour, deceit, cheating, shocks and stakers.

This novel starts with betrayal (the giveaway were a pair of pink angora mittens in a place where no pink angora mittens had any right to be) and quickly slipped into risky, dangerous and drunken behaviour to the aural backdrop of Pink Floyd.

It careens through hearts being dented, if not outright broken, mistakes, some seriously stupid stuff  and shows how you really can't keep a good person down, no matter how hard you try!

The women in this novel are there for each other and it works very well on several levels.

Joy Pearson is an exceptionally gifted writer who brings the lives of her characters to vivid life as they try to find some joy and happiness, again.

Will they succeed? You'll have to read the novel to learn that, but Joy Pearson has the knack to make you care enough to keep turning the pages.

It's published by The Book Guild at £8.99.

The Cyber Puppets

The Cyber Puppets is a science fiction novel from author Angus McAllister.

Scott Maxwell's life is strange. Weird, even. His wife is unfaithful, multiple times, his brother-in-law William seems to take scheming and plotting to almost ridiculous extremes, and his other brother-in-law Roddy, let's just say that his alcohol consumption is stupendous.

However, perhaps that is because Scott has married into the Laird family, one of the biggest distiller of Scotch in the entire world?

But things are starting to get even stranger. How come Scott is the only one who notices that his father-in-law has been replaced by a totally different person?

And why does Scott seem unaffected by his wife's cheating and her pregnancy? How come he has no free will? What is the cause of his memory lapses?

And what, exactly, is Mr Ramanuki up to? And Bruckner. Where does he fit in?

With all the machinations, the plotting, the twists and the outrageous behaviour, the miraculous recoveries of various family members, you'd almost think that it was a soap opera, rather than real life!

Wait a moment... what if? What if Scott really was a character in a soap opera?

(NOTE: The appearance of Professor Chandler in chapter 18 and his lecture on 20th century television programmes and especially soap opera was very well realised and took me back to media and cultural studies lectures that I have attended. This means either that Angus McAllister has a very vivid imagination or has sat through more than his fair share of such lectures!)

Scott must come to terms with the fact that not only has he being living the life of a man trapped in a false reality, that he is, in reality, living in a time 100 years beyond where he thought he was, a time when the environment had become devastated by man's stupidity.

And then Scott discovers a cataclysmic secret that really blows his mind.

But what would happen in a soap opera if the characters began to go off script? And just who, exactly, is writing the script?

In truth this plot is not unique, it has been done several times before, but not always with the panache and wit of Angus McAllister, who really is a great find as an author.

It's published by Matador at a very reasonable £8.99 in paperback and is also available as an e book.

I have to confess that I am a fan of retired professor Angus McAllister's works, including his novel Close Quarters.

Both of which are available from the That's Books book shop https://amzn.to/2kB1tO7.

Clarice

Clarice is a debut novel from Welsh-born author Imogen Radwan.

It's the summer of 1969 and Clarice is taking a look back at her life up until then. It's been a tumultuous life with political assassinations, the Merseybeat sound, all culminating in that year which became known as the Summer of Love.

From a conventional childhood including being sent away to boarding school, at age 15 Clarice falls for Jim and knows of love for the very first time.

Her life is drama free and stable, so the appearance of a spirit entity who introduces herself as Amelia and brings Clarice urgent news that a young girl's life is at risk, Clarice realises that matters need ot be investigated further.

There then befall a series of tragic events and Clarice's life is turned inside out.

Now it is the Summer of Love and Clarice is living the dream life in the hippy haven known as San Francisco. She's gone the whole nine yards, as they say, drugs, long, meaningful debates throughout the warm Californian nights whilst wearing flowers in her hair.

She is enjoying life with her live in lover, Clint. It's a long term yet hectic relationship and all seems fairly good. Except for the fact that Amelia starts to appear and with her come questions that start ot haunt Clarice, questions that go to the very heart of who or what the reality of Clarice's life really is.

But would accepting that reality shatter everything?

This is a compelling first novel, published by The Book Guild at £8.99 it can be bought from

https://goo.gl/wdCFDG

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Cream of Plankton Soup

Cream of Plankton Soup is a collection of short stories that is, and this is no tired, old cliche, but a genuinely fresh, new cliche, like no other collection of short stories that I have ever read.

In fact I think I can say that this collection of stories by Grant Sutton is possibly like no other collection of short stories in the history of short stories. Ever.

When I began to read it I felt something akin to an electric (or was that an eclectic?) current jolting its way through my mind and my body.

On the first page of the first story the reader meets Pipa, a young woman who has given birth to twins. Fathered by a vegetable of some kind, though she declines to say which type of vegetable.

The twins are called Pierre and Melone.

When the twins -who are being wheeled around by Pippa in a misappropriated supermarket trolley- begin to cry, Pippa has to soothe them by unhooking a stepladder from the trolley and playing a rather unwieldy piano accordion whilst sat atop the stepladder. For about an hour, during which time she plays random notes.

The protagonist then begins to offer Pippa a wide range of tendentious advice before he is subjected to a foul mouthed tirade about the suitability of vegetables and, indeed, all men to be good parents.

Another story touches on the problems faced by cliff faces and the attentions of confused woodpeckers, and is a fairly ordinary, yet well-paced and well told tale of regal woes as a King awaits an assassin on the top of a cliff, when the story takes a sudden and unexpected change in direction that is a genuinely WTF?? moment. Well, at least for the reader, the King -presumably- knew what was happening all along, even though it had cost him 100 brave warriors.

The remainder of the stories consists of an absolutely delicious gallimaufry of brobdingnagian proportions, including 43 bags of frozen peas, the fact that, after all, gravity does not exist, what not to do with a photocopier during a board meeting, the concepts of natural and supernatural selection and the sudden appearance of a kidnap ensemble made up of militant clowns. And then it gets really weird!

The book is enlivened, and genuinely so, by reader's comments. How could there be reader's comments in a printed book? That's an interesting question which will be answered by visiting www.planktonsoup.co.uk, after you purchase and read the book, of course.

There are also some wonderfully evocative illustrations by Ayesha Drew.

The book is published by Matador at £7.99 and can be ordered here https://goo.gl/wdCFDG.