April | 2025 | Coot's Reviews

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The Café Moran is full. Six tables occupied by the usual kind of people who haunt such places. Antonia scopes them rapidly as she attempts to catch her breath before entering. Three couples acting like they’re listening to one another while checking their Instagram accounts, two hipsters pretending to write novels on their MacBooks, and a psychopathic killer. The last is the easiest to identify: he is the only one holding a book, not an electronic device.

What pisses Jon off about kidnappings is when he’s the one being kidnapped. You can’t walk down the street these days without someone bundling you into a van with a bag over your head, thinks Jon.

Fair Warning, there are spoilerish items in the following review if you have not yet read the first two books in the series.

It all began with Red Queen, the first book in this trilogy, named for a transnational police organization dedicated to solving the most serious, and most challenging crimes. (As with Alice in Wonderland there are games to be played, riddles to be solved) Special people (male and female) have been recruited, nation by nation, to run point on investigations. These folks have intellectual superpowers that have been enhanced by torturous training. Antonia Scott is Spain’s Red Queen. Jon Gutiérrez, late of the Bilbao PD, is her number two. Think Holmes/Watson or Don Quixote/Sancho Panza. He is there to keep her on some sort of even keel. She can get overwhelmed sometimes, and needs her special red pills to get right. Jon is trained on when to act on that need.

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Hovik Keuchkerian as Jon Gutiérrez and Vicky Luengo as Antonia Scott in a still from Red Queen – image from The Hindu

Their first case set the pair to track the who-and-why when a criminal murdered a child of the ultra-rich and kidnapped another. Book #2, Black Wolf, pits Antonia against a Karla-level assassin, engaged with the Russian mafia. Book #3, White King, brings the mysterious mastermind, Mr. White, into the frame.

Please do not bother trying to read White King without ripping through the first two. It would only hurt your brain. If you have not read those two, stop right here, take care of that and then come back. Ok? Cool. So, you know that the Black Wolf offered the ending cliffhanger of Jon being kidnapped by dark forces.

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Juan Gómez-Jurado – image from Zenda

As with the first book, the baddies here, for the most part, are presented as cut-out villains. Black Wolf offered the most thoughtful how-they-became-this-way look at the opposition. But you do not read these books for the deep character portraits. You read them because trying to figure out the puzzles, riddles, and mysteries parallels the rush of the repeating sequence of threat-race-resolve-release that keeps the blood pumping.

…when you think about the genre of thriller you have to have three things, social danger, physical danger for your main characters and you have to have a clock around you… – from the FLMADRID23 interview

And here we are back again. In White King, Antonia and Jon are given ridiculously short times in which to solve several cold-case crimes. Or else what? Something reeeeaaaalllly bad will happen. Tick tock.

There is not a lot going on inside the characters in these books other than concern for those close to them. All the action is on the outside, including the manifestation of Antonia’s thought processes, aside from her occasional encounters with the metaphorical monkeys that inhabit her head. Flashbacks to violent episodes from the history of Mentor and Red Queen training are interspersed with the core plot progression. They offer a clear image of one of the characters, without really going much past the basics. We get early on what is going on there, and repetition does not add a lot.

Supporting cast members offer a few surprises, as their presence in this book is enhanced and their significance in the series events is revealed, with a few walk-ons marching across the pages as needed.

Sometimes it can be a bit tough to swallow Antonia’s ability to predict events. But I guess if you give your character superpowers that sort of short-cut is to be expected. Jurado continues peppering the story with words from diverse cultures. This is a fun element.

Dharmaniṣṭhuya – In Kannada, a Dravidic language spoken by forty-four million people in India, the relief of the downhill slope. The sensation an exhausted walker has when they come to a downward stretch of the path.
Mamihlapinatapai, thinks Antonia. In Yaghan, a language spoken by a nomadic people in Tierra del Fuego, the beached eye. A look people exchange when they’re waiting for others to start something they all want but none dares initiate.

There is a persistent, but light touch of humor throughout all three books. Not LOL material, but smirk or smile-worthy for sure. Also, be prepared for some pretty nifty twists. Don’t worry. I won’t tell. But you should be pleased by them. The individual mysteries exist under the arch of a larger, all-encompassing mystery. Jurado looks to tie up the loose ends, mysteries and miseries from the entire series, so you can look forward to some satisfaction there. The pace of White King is relentless. While it seems unlikely there will be more books in the series, given that it has been over five years since this one was published in Spain, but the possibility has been left open, if he ever gets the urge.

Will the Queen take the King? Your move.

Many of us sense there’s something wrong with reality, with everything around us. With the system, other people, ourselves. Yet life bribes us, it buys our silence with the gift of sleep. She, on the other hand, doesn’t forget, can’t forget.

Review posted – 4/11/25

Publication date (USA) – 3/11/25

First published (Spain) – 10/24/19

I received an ARE of White King from Minotaur in return for a fair review, and agreeing to disable that device. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Gomez-Jurado’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Wikipedia

Juan Gómez-Jurado (born 16 December 1977) is a Spanish journalist and author. He is a columnist in “La Voz de Galicia” and “ABC”, distributed in Spain, and he participates in multiple radio and TV programs. His books have been translated into 42 languages and he is one of the most successful living Spanish authors…

Interviews
—– Juan Gómez-Jurado on his Antonia Scott thrillers: ‘There are ideas within ideas’ by Mini Anthikad Chhibber
—–FLMADRID23Publishers Weekly en Espanol | Juan Gomez-Jurado – really in English – video – 20:37
—–Hindustan Times – Interview: Juan Gomez-Jurado, author, Red Queen by Arunima Mazumdar

My reviews of Gomez-Jurado’s prior books in the series
—–2024 – Black Wolf – Antonia Scott #2
—–2023 – Red Queen – Antonia Scott #1

Items of Interest
—–Google Play Books – preview – audio – 16:13
—–Wiki – Karla – an assassin in the John Le Carre George Smiley series

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… just after Christmas, Alice Webber started to get sick. She complained of pains in her sides like needles being pressed there. When they lifted her shirt, there was a pinprick rash and blood welling up as if the skin had been broken. A few days later she started vomiting. By this point Alice was too weak to get out of bed so her mother put a bowl beside it. When she came to empty it, she found watery bile and clots of black hair, like you’d pull out of a plughole. Another time Alice coughed up a handful of sewing pins bent into strange shapes. She developed a fever which made her start seeing things. She got delusional.”
“In what way?”
“Alice told her parents that a witch was spying on her through the chimney breast. She said the witch had a black tongue and her face was ‘all on upside down.’

“She was saying such odd things. At school, then here at home. Sometimes it was like she was listening to music you couldn’t hear, you know? I’d catch her just staring at the fireplace and her lips were moving but no sound was coming out. When I asked her what she was doing, she said”—here Lisa sighs, fretful and ill at ease. It’s clear she isn’t comfortable talking about this—“she said that the dead wanted her to open her throat.”

When Sam Hunter and Mina Ellis pull up at 13 Beacon Terrace in Banathel, an English backwater, there is a crowd gathered. Mostly people wanting something from the girl inside. They seem to think she can communicate with the dead, and there are people with whom they would love to reconnect.

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Daisy Pearce – image from her site

Sam is a reporter who specializes in debunking superstitious claptrap and fraud. Mina is a recent graduate in child psychology. Sam had asked her along to offer an evaluation. Well, there is certainly something off happening at the Webber household

Alice Webber has tales to tell. (She’s the girl you see giggling with her friends at the back of the bus or fooling around in the arcades. Normal. Unexceptional.) She believes there is a witch living in the walls of her bedroom. She can tell because she sees the witch’s eyes looking at her through gaps in the brick chimney. It began when a group of (not really) friends play a mean trick on her at a supposedly haunted house. Now she hears and speaks in voices.

For a moment I think she is speaking—I can see her shoulders twitch, her mouth slowly moving—but the voice I hear is slurring and thick, heavy. Like a throat full of molasses. It is a language I don’t recognise, Germanic maybe. The words spread like a ripple, like oil on water, dark and tainted. It fills me with something icy and unknowing and I taste the bitterness of bile in the back of my throat.

Both Sam and Mina (“It’s my dad. He took my mother to Whitby Abbey while she was pregnant with me. My poor brother narrowly escaped being called Van Helsing.”) have arrived with significant emotional baggage. Sam lost his seven-year-old daughter, Maggie. Mina lost her brother, Eddie, when they were kids. Both Mina and Sam hold out hope that they can somehow reconnect with their lost ones, maybe reduce the guilt they both feel. Is there any chance Alice can actually help them? Alice may look like an average teen with professional aspirations that end at the beauty salon, but what if there is something operating through her?

The novel has a feel of both contemporary spook story and a folk horror tale, rich with back-country superstition, practices, and beliefs. Banathel has a long history of belief in witches, and a rich supply of hagstones everywhere you look. It is reminiscent of works like Tom Tryon’s novel Harvest Home and the 1973 horror classic, The Wicker Man, reliant on deep rural isolation.

The tension ramps up with every strange new event, encouraged by the persistence of contemporary doubt, ancient superstition, the growing crowd and its increasingly threatening regard for the girl. Do they want to help her or use her, or do they want something else? In addition, while there is a mystery in every horror tale, there is also a tension between where magical manifestations leave off and human agency steps in. Ditto here.

While it certainly seemed fun for Mina to have such a nominal root in classic horror, (a pearl among women) it did not seem to me that enough was done with her nifty name. And for a psychologist to be entangled with someone so clearly wrong for her was disappointing. (Although I suppose many of us have had that experience.) As for seeing someone looking through gaps in bricks, did no one consider maybe a bit of plaster, spackle, or poster of a favorite musician to cover the spaces? Or maybe hiring a handyman named Bert to have a go at clearing it out?

On the other hand, the lovely details of dark manifestation that Pearce weaves into her tale, the sights, sounds, and textures, add that frisson that every good horror novel needs. The overarching heat that bears down on all provides another layer of dread. It might even enhance the feel of this book for readers to take it on in July.

I have a particularly high bar for fright. It is a rare horror novel that keeps me up at night. There are real-world stresses and manifestations of evil that offer that service quite happily. Something in the Walls came close, but caused no lost zzzzzzzs here. Not to say it will not for you, who have a more usual receptivity to such things. It did, however, offer an appealing lead, a tantalizing mystery, a colorful portrait of a tucked-away place, and kept up a brisk tempo.

Most witch hunts are a bad idea, but it might be a better one to track down Something in the Walls. There may be a thrill or two just lying in wait for you.

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Review posted – 4/4/25

Publication date – 2/25/25

I received an ARE of Something in the Walls from Minotaur in return for a fair review, and my agreeing to get the hell out of their chimney. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Pearce’s personal, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile – from her site

Daisy Pearce was born in Cornwall and grew up on a smallholding surrounded by hippies. She read Cujo and The Hamlyn Book of Horror far too young and has been fascinated with the macabre ever since.
Daisy began writing short stories as a teenager and after spells living in London and Brighton she had her first short story ‘The Black Prince’ published in One Eye Grey magazine. Another short story, ‘The Brook Witch’, was performed on stage at the Small Story Cabaret in Lewes in 2016. In 2015 The Silence’ won a bursary with The Literary Consultancy. Later that year Daisy also won the Chindi Authors Competition with her short story ‘Worm Food’. A further novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award…Daisy currently works in a library where she stacks books and listens to podcasts on true crime and folklore.

Interview
—–Bloody Good Reads – Chapter 109 – Daisy Pearce – audio – 38:38 – on writing what she loves

Items of Interest from the author
—–Crime Reads – DAISY PEARCE ON POLTERGEISTS, MISOGYNY, AND COMING OF AGE IN A FRACTURED WORLD
—–Short story – The Brook Witch – linked from her website
—–Short story – The Spirit of Christmas – linked from her website