The Return of Captain John Emmett - Elizabeth Speller

That Captain John Emmett had been one of the few young men lucky enough to return from the carnage of the Great War only made it even more incomprehensible to his family and friends that he had apparently taken his own life. Although her brother had returned from the fighting of World War I mentally fragile and suffering from shell shock and was placed in a nursing home to recover, he had seemed to be  slowly improving in the weeks before his lifeless body was shockingly discovered lying in a lonely wood.

His sister Mary could not reconcile herself to the idea that her beloved brother could have committed suicide, so enlists the help of one of Captain Emmett's former school friends to investigate her his sudden death.  But Laurence Bartram has ghosts of his own to contend with, as he too had fought in this 'War to end all Wars' and while he was in France he had lost his young wife and baby in childbirth.

 But as Bartram starts his investigations, he discovers that there have been other mysterious deaths besides that of Captain Emmett's, and that they are all in some way linked to a tragic battlefield execution.  Can Bartram uncover the truth before there are any more deaths? And what really happened to Captain Emmett in his nursing home? And what is the significance of a shadowy group of young war poets?

Elizabeth Speller's novel evocatively conjures up the febrile atmosphere of the years immediately after the Great War, where people were trying to return to some semblance of a normal life even though most had lost sons, husbands and brothers on the battlefields. This is a novel about the secrets people hold and that every man or woman who returned from the war was irrevocably changed and had dark places in their hearts and minds where even their closest companions could not reach.

The story also charts the tenderness and growing relationship between Bartram and Mary, who is a young lady with her own secrets to hide.

These days we find it hard to comprehend that a whole generation of young men could lose their lives in a hail of machine gun fire and artillery shells in a wet, muddy field, or that soldiers who were little more than boys could be shot in the foggy early light of dawn for their perceived cowardice, but this books explores how people were trying to come to terms with this new reality and the problems and tests of faith that it threw up at them.

This book will take you straight back to those traumatic post-war years, so go and find yourself an old fashioned pub in London, and order yourself some hearty pie and mash with a pint of real ale for lunch while you read!

Vacation Packing List: Save Your Back, Time and Money - Elisabeth Sowerbutts

Are you busy packing for your summer holidays and carefully choosing your holiday books so that you can do all that reading that you have been meaning to catch up on while lazing by the pool or tanning on the beach? Well, then maybe you would do well to go back a step and actually get a book on how to plan your holiday packing properly?

It might seem a bit strange to buy a book about vacation packing, but as all the airlines are getting tighter and tighter on their luggage allowances and are charging more and more for excess baggage (yes Ryanair I am talking about you!), then maybe we do need all the help that we can get!  Personally I have never got farther than roll your clothes don't fold them, and have never managed to not take far too many clothes that I don't get to wear.

Happily for us hopeless packers, one of my fellow writers on HubPages, Lissie, has written a book for us, telling us everything we need to know about how to do our holiday packing - Vacation Packing List.

Vacation Packing List will show you a whole new perspective on planning your holiday packing, including some innovative uses for satin pyjamas and how best to incorporate your photographic and reading requirements into your packing.

This invaluable little book is also very competitively priced, so you won't be using any of your precious holiday spending money to learn all of these invaluable holiday packing tips.  Learn to pack right, and you can then just float through your holiday, free as a bird, and concentrating on enjoying yourself!

Read the book over a Ploughman's and half a lager at the pub and then get back there and get on with that holiday packing!

2012 A Conspiracy Tale - Bryan Collier

Are you a David Icke fan? Then you will probably love 2012 A Conspiracy Tale by Bryan Collier, as this book has all the elements of reptilian aliens, secret government agendas and treating the general population like cattle. It kicks off with Mitchell Webb, CEO of technology company IDSys, landing a huge government contract to produce Radio Frequency Identification Devices.

However, Mitchell doesn't realise what a Pandora's box he has opened by accepting the contract and soon comes to fear that the huge amount of money that the company will be making are not worth the loss of autonomy and government scrutiny he is now under.

Although influential doors are opened to him for the first time, he finds himself inhabiting a world of smoke and mirrors where nothing is what it seems. A huge terrorist attack on the Channel Tunnel enables the government to pass laws that demand that all UK citizens have to have one of the devices implanted under their skin in the interests of national security and ensure that citizens are able to be tracked at all times.

As the implant programme starts to unfold, Mitchell and his friends and colleagues at IDSys uneasy when people who refuse the implants have all their access to their bank accounts and social services removed, several people around them have nasty accidents and they get more information on secret, influential groups who seem to have even more power and influence than the government itself.

As they have to go on the run when suspicion falls on them, will Mitchell and his small band of followers be able to unravel the truth in time to avert a major catastrophe for the Earth and also manage to stay alive?

Mitchell struggles to believe the whole story when it is revealed, but have they been in time to change the course of events and save mankind?

An interesting story, very detailed, with lots of threads of popular conspiracy theories embedded in it.  However, overall it all felt a bit clinical and I found some of the characterisation fairly shallow, which sometimes made it difficult for me to care too much about what happened to them. However, if you like your fiction without too much emotion thrown in, you will enjoy this book.

If I said read this book while eating a Mars bar, it might give too much away, but you may as well wash all that chocolate down with some full fat coke!

Zombie Apocalypse - Stephen Jones

Vampires stand aside, as it seems to be the year of the Zombie both in literature and on the small screen.  After hiding behind my hands during much of 'The Walking Dead' (I don't do gore very well - that poor horse!), I was surprised at how many Zombie books now inhabited the horror shelves at the book shop. So I made my choice, paid my money and took home Zombie Apocalypse by Stephen Jones.

Well, actually it is not by Stephen Jones, but was written by a collaboration of different writers and in the unusual format of being a series of letters, emails, reports, memos and even tweets describing the unfolding horror show and tragedy.

Zombie Apocalypse is set ever so slightly in the future and kicks off in London, where the economy is even crumblier than it is now and personal freedoms have been curtailed to a great degree. To throw the citizenry some 'beer and circuses' and raise the mood of the nation, the governments decides to splurge a lot of money on a New Festival of Britain.

The idea of the Festival goes down like a lead balloon with most people, but the authorities plough on creating new venues and transport links.  For some reason, they decide to do some construction on the site of an old plague burial ground in South London, that has had a sinister reputation for centuries.

As the bodies of the plague victims start to be removed, corners are cut, regulations are not followed, and strange things start to happen. A scientist who was investigating the possible public health risks disappears, and strange figures start to be reported wandering around in the vicinity of the old church.

One dark night it all starts to go to hell in a handcart and several police officers are attacked by strange, shambling figures who seem to have a preternatural strength. Anyone who is bitten, chewed, or even scratched by one of these creatures rapidly shows massive signs of infection in the wounds, develops a high temperature, and eventually appears to die. Except......they don't!

They rise again as the living dead - zombies who have an insatiable hunger for human flesh.  The rapid collapse of society, the pitiful response of the government, and the blind panic and incomprehension of ordinary people are all played out via such mediums as a teenage girl's diary, desperate texts, police reports and blog posts (strangely there always seems to be mobile phone reception and access to the internet - usually the first things to go down in my experience - but hey they needed a book!)

As Britain fails when trying out a final solution to halt the Zombie plague in its tracks, the contagion inevitably finds its way over into the rest of the world, with the US, Mexico and Australia all being infected.

Enough gore to satisfy the horror fans and enough of a story for the rest of us, it makes an intriguing, if disturbing, read.  Is the state of our economy and sense of hopelessness that many people feel behind this explosion of zombie literature? Do people really feel that we are somehow in the 'end days'?

My only criticism of the book is in its ending, which I found a little absurd. Yes I know that on one level the whole idea of zombies is absurd, but I didn't like the ending which I don't want to give away.  Suffice to say that it brings a whole new meaning to 'you are what you eat'!

One to read trembling under the duvet with a double vodka and coke and an extra large bag of Maltesers!

The Sugar Queen - Sarah Addison Allen

If you are in the mood to snuggle up on the old, comfy sofa and read a book in one gulp, then choose 'The Sugar Queen' by Sarah Addison Allen. 'The Sugar Queen' is one of those books that you will just want to keep on reading and not put down until you have finished it, so brew a large pot of tea, put together a plate of doughnuts and chocolate cupcakes and dive right in!

'The Sugar Queen' is certainly a romance, but it is a romance with a difference, where the supernatural weaves gently with the mundane to form a satisfying whole. The story kicks off when lonely Josey Cirrini, who still lives with her mother at the age of 27 and secretly stores chocolate, cookies and fizzy pop in the back of her closet for lonely binges, comes home to find a strange women hiding in her closet. Much to Josey's consternation the woman, Della Lee Baker, seems to be in no hurry to leave and Josey cannot think of a way to get rid of her without her mother finding out about their uninvited guest.

With the arrival of Della Lee, Josey's previously well-ordered life starts to unravel, as she finds that she has to defy her mother and start building a life for herself outside her home. She makes her very first friend when she goes to buy a sandwich for Della Lee at Chloe Finley's coffee shop, and tries to help Chloe with the problems she is experiencing in her love life. For Chloe's handsome lawyer boyfriend Jake has admitted to cheating on her, and Chloe's life has fallen apart.

Josey also has a love secret, as she fell in love with their mailman, Adam, the first time that she laid eyes on him, but has never dared to tell him how she feels as all her life she has been told she is unattractive and believes that no man would ever be interested in her.

So can Josey find the strength to carve a new life for herself away from the confines of her home and her mother; to escape the shadow that her long-dead, but powerful and charismatic father still casts over the small town that he developed into a successful ski resort? Who is the enigmatic Julian and why is he so keen on telling Chloe the identity of the woman Jake cheated with on that one, fateful night? And who is the young woman who is found murdered in the river?

This is a book about long-buried secrets, and people who have to find out who they really are before they can move on to become the people that they were meant to be. A book where exactly the book that you need can magically appear on the counter, new homes can be found and old family wounds exposed to the air to heal. 'The Sugar Queen' will reaffirm your faith in love and that there is meaning and purpose in every life.

The Summer Psychic - Jessica Adams

What would you do if you were interviewing a shaggy, Australian psychic who predicted the future by gazing into a bucket of seawater and one of the first things that he said was that the two of you would get married by the following summer? Local Brighton reporter Katie Pickard is sent to interview Jim Gabriel in his cubbyhole at the back of a crystal and psychic shop, when she is given this piece of news about her future, along with a whole raft of global predictions for the years to come.

Unfortunately for Katie, Jim Gabriel has never given these types of messages about future world events before, so how accurate are they?  Also, she soon discovers that the newspaper that she works for is in imminent danger of closing down, and so loses interest in the psychic story and Katie is put under pressure to come up with stories that will sell papers fast. Katie's woes are compounded when she discovers that Courtney Creely, the slightly sinister witch who works in the shop where Jim gazes into his bucket has a book of spells that includes one that promises an instant and unpleasant end for any woman who comes between her and Jim Gabriel.

But as Katie has just discovered that her old heart throb, the slightly disreputable but still glamorous rock musician Pete Oram, has just split up from his wife and she starts a relationship with him, she couldn't possibly be in any danger from Courtney's spells could she?  But as the scramble to save the newspaper goes on, Jim Gabriel starts confiding more and more in Katie, and Pete proves that the road to true love can indeed be rocky and not quite what she thought it would be, will Katie be able to keep her job, her sanity and ultimately find the true love that she deserves?

So as this is a seaside yarn, why not get some fish and chips still in the newspaper and a can of coke and sit back and find out how Katie deals with Courtney, when she manages to wangle a job with Katie's boss bringing her coven with her, supports Jim as his predictions make it into the media and eventually force him into retreat in Hastings, and navigates her troubled romance with the rock star on the rebound, Pete Oram. So will Jim Gabriel's predictions come true?

The Lost Book of Salem - Katherine Howe

Connie Goodwin is pursuing an academic career at Harvard and keeps her feet firmly on the ground.  But when her vague, new age mother asks her to clear out her grandmother's house in the New England town of Marblehead, Connie makes a discovery that will change her life forever.  When she finds the name Deliverance Dane written on a small scroll of paper shoved into an old key hidden in the family bible, her research takes her back in time to the witch trials that were held in nearby Salem in 1692.
 
When she is offered an exciting new academic position by her professor, Manning Chilton, he hints very firmly that he wants her to discover a new source of reference for her historical studies, one that has never been used before.  Connie becomes very excited when she finds out that Deliverance Dane was directly involved in the Salem Witch Trials, and that she had used a spell or 'Physick Book'.  Determined to track down Deliverance's book, Connie's research leads her into the arms of Sam, a handsome young steeplejack who is restoring an old church in Salem, and straight into the path of danger.  It seems that Connie is not the only person who is desperate to get their hands on Deliverance's spell book, and it is only when Sam's life is put in danger that Connie realises to what extreme lengths she is going to have to go to keep him safe.
 
The Lost Book of Salem is interesting in the way that the modern day story is intertwined with the story of Deliverance Dane and her daughter and grandaughter.  The story skilfully weaves between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and it isn't until the end that Connie realises how much these stories of the past are connected to her and her family.
 
A good book for the summer, and maybe serve it up with a glass of cold beer and a hotdog!