I am so thrilled to be taking part in the blog tour for the latest Chastity Riley novel by Simone Buchholz, River Clyde. My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to the publisher, Orenda Books, for my digital copy of the book, which I have reviewed honestly and impartially.

I always go into writing reviews of Simone Buchholz’s books with a sense of inadequacy and trepidation because I know, whatever words I put down on the page, they are going to be inadequate to describe what I just read. In the case of River Clyde, I am feeling this even more keenly than usual because this book is so unlike anything I’ve read before, so difficult to describe, so impossible to categorise.

It’s more of a surreal dreamscape than a classic crime novel, with the story wandering between the mean street of Hamburg, the mean streets of Glasgow, the blasted heath of Rannoch Moor and the interiors of the messed up minds of the main characters, all still trying to process the tragic events which occurred in Hotel Cartagena. This book brings the reader much closer to Chastity than we have ever been before, I left the book feeling like I had crawled into her skin and was watching things unfold from behind her eyes, and it was sometimes a bizarre place to be.

Anyone who has read any of the previous Chastity Riley novels will know that they are not your run of the mill crime novel, but Simone has taken the story telling to a completely different place in this book. The crime that the police in Hamburg are trying to solve is a mere footnote in the book, and afterthought, a distraction from the real meat of the story, which is the fallout that are all feeling personally after the horror that unfolded in the last book and the fact that Stepanovic treats the investigation as such is a clear indicator of what is important to all of these people now. Riley has gone a step further and removed herself from Hamburg and her old life altogether to travel to Scotland in search of family history. Both running away, and running towards, her story here is one of soul-searching. She is looking for a place in the world, now that everything she had in Hamburg seems to be gone.

Anyone looking for a straight forward crime investigation is looking in the wrong place and I think, if you aren’t familiar with the previous Chastity Riley books, this wouldn’t be the ideal place to start. Go back, at least one novel, and catch up on previous events. It will help make sense of what is going on here and be immensely rewarding in its own right. For those of you who have read the previous books, be prepared to be confronted by a completely different novel, and a different view of all of the characters you believe you’ve come to know. They are all finding surprising ways to process their grief, none more so than Chastity herself. All of her usual BS-free, no-nonsense acerbic personality is here, but we see more of her underbelly, more of her inner softness and vulnerability and it is enlightening. There is a blurring of reality and fantasy throughout, the reader, along with the character, finds it hard to tell what is true and what is imagination. There is confusion, pain, understanding, realisation and a letting go. It’s melancholy and life-affirming in equal parts, and I found the whole thing painful and very moving.

Simone Buchholz writing continues to be brutal, honest, startling, fearless and utter unique and her books leap out from the literary landscape in a way that demands they be given attention. Once you’ve read one, you’ll never forget her voice and you’ll be addicted to the rush immediately. A year is too long to wait between hits. I feel the need now to go back to the beginning and ride the whole rollercoaster from beginning to end, although I’m unsure if my nerves could take the force of the full blast in one sitting. I don’t know where she will go with this character next, that’s part of the appeal of the books, but I’m here for the hit.

River Clyde is out now as an ebook and will be published in paperback on 17 March and you can buy your copy here.

Please make sure you check out some of the other blogs taking part in the blog tour:

About the Author

What a fabulous way to start off the blogging year. This is my first Varg Veum novel, but it definitely won’t be the last one I read, as I was completely sucked in to his world.

Coming in to the series completely cold, it took me a little while to sort out what Varg’s situation was and who he was as a character, but that just made me more intrigued by the book. We are dropped straight into the action as there is the discovery of a corpse and a disappearance in the first couple of pages, and we are introduced to Varg’s fractious relationship with the local police in Bergen. In the best traditions of hard-boiled PIs, Varg can’t resist getting involved in situations that should really be left to the police and inveigles his way into the heart of the investigation, managing to get information that the police struggle to access, because he doesn’t have to do things by the book.

There were three particular aspects of this novel that particularly made this book stand out from a run-of-the-mill PI novel. The first was the intricacy and complexity of the plot. Taking the very topical issue of climate change and ecological protest as one of its central plot points, Gunnar weaves together two different crimes to make a story of such devious twistedness that I truly had no idea what was behind the crimes or who was the perpetrator at any point and I would never have got to the conclusion by myself in a million years. The author clearly has a mind like a fiendish labyrinth and how he managed to keep it all straight as he was writing is a skill I would like to learn. I think I need to go back and try and find all the clues I missed the first time now I know how it unravels.

The second aspect I loved was the writing. For a dark crime novel, the writing is utterly poetic. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book in this genre where the author manages to wax so lyrical about landscape, people and feelings and have it sit so naturally beside the darker aspects of the plot. It was a real pleasure to read, and made the book stand out for me as a literary cut above the herd.

Finally, and probably most appealing to me, was the beautiful evocation and exploration of the landscape of Norway. The book really brings it to life and it is fascinating to me as a country that is so vastly different to our own. A place of vast wilderness, where travel by ferry is as natural as taking a bus or train. Where being surrounded by nature is the norm and the populace really appreciate and revel in the natural landscape that surrounds them. It is a place that fascinates me and which features at the top of my bucket list, and I thoroughly enjoyed losing myself in the sense of place which this book evoked. A book that was transportative in so many different ways.

This book has set a high standard for the coming year and I highly recommend it to fans of Nordic Noir, who are looking for a novel that represents the pinnacle of the genre.

Bitter Flowers will be published on 21 January and you can pre-order your copy from all good bookshops or online here.

Please do check out the rest of the tour as detailed below:

One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim. Staalesen has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour); Where Roses Never Die won the 2017 Petrona Award for Nordic Crime Fiction, and Big Sister was shortlisted in 2019. He lives with his wife in Bergen.

About the Translator

Don Bartlett lives with his family in a village in Norfolk. He completed an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2000 and has since worked with a wide variety of Danish and Norwegian authors, including Jo Nesbø and Karl Ove Knausgaard. He has previously translated The Consort of Death, Cold Heart, We Shall Inherit the Wind, Where Roses Never Die and Wolves in the Dark in the Varg Veum series.