Before the Storm by Jack Byrne - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for Before the Storm by Jack Byrne. It is a pleasure to welcome you here today - please do have a click round and have a read of some of my other reviews. I also joined in the tour for Jack Byrne's first book, Under the Bridge. You can read my review here. 

This book is the third in the series. I haven't read the second but I didn't think it mattered really. I had also forgotten the characters in the first book so I just met these ones head on and found them as they were, and then went back later and read my review and was like, ohhh, that's where Vinny comes in. He's the main character in this - there are brief points of view from other people but mostly it's Vinny's story.

In 2016 Vinny is a university professor. He is married to Helen and they have a teenaged son, Charlie. He's about fourteen, I think. The couple split up for a while - this is when Vinny was with Anne and they visited Ireland - but they're back together now. Helen is run off the road by a black SUV and ends up in hospital. When checking her phone, VInny finds out that she's had two messages warning her to stay away, so they are sure that the accident was in fact not an accident at all. 

Then Vinny's friend Sammo dies. He was a heroin user but everyone agrees that he wasn't using and was doing better, so it seems a bit unlikely that he would have overdosed. Helen mentions that she had seen him recently and that she had been warned off by "Macca". This is an old friend of Vinny's who is now pretending to be respectable and is a local councillor. However, his son is a bit of a heavy... 

Meanwhile the narrative also tells us about Vinny, Sammo, and Macca when they were kids, on a day when they broke into an old man's house and stole a valuable gold watch. They had meant to only take money from his electricity meter. Sammo was keeping watch outside. All three boys were thrilled with their treasure, but things quickly unravelled. The actions of that day have repercussions in the men's lives even thirty five years later. 

Again, the book is a love letter to Liverpool - I could picture the neighbourhoods and rows of houses perfectly. I really liked the mystery behind what had happened and how Vinny worked it all out. 

Thank you for having me on the tour!

Under the Bridge by Jack Byrne - Blog Tour and Review

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the blog tour for Under the Bridge by Jack Byrne. I am thrilled to welcome you here today! If you haven't been here before, please do have a click round and read some of my other reviews. 

I was intrigued by the premise of this book so signed up for the tour. I'm not sad I did and I would definitely read the next in the series. The book is set in Liverpool and it's such a love letter to the city - to the people who have made it home throughout the years, including immigrants from all over the world, to the working class people, to the unions and dockers, to the ordinary people who have made Liverpool their home, to the culture and history that it has. I've only been to Liverpool a few times but I've loved it each time. I really liked the bits set at Albert Dock because I could picture them perfectly! 

At the beginning of the book a man called Michael is working on a building site when the digger his mate is in picks up a few bones. Work stops, and more bones are found, including a skull which indicates that the person didn't die from natural causes. The police obviously step in to investigate.

Meanwhile Anne, who is mixed race, whose dad was an immigrant to Liverpool from the Caribbean, works for the local paper and is sent to go get some copy about the story. She wants a proper story to get her teeth stuck into, and she soon finds there's more going on. She interviews Michael, and a few other people, and starts to uncover things about when Michael was first in Liverpool after his arrival from Wicklow in Ireland. 

Her friend Vinny, son of an Irish immigrant that he barely knew, is trying to get on to a PhD programme at the university, to look into the history of a certain part of Liverpool and the identity of its inhabitants. He joins Anne on her search. He works a zero hours contract at a shoe shop in the city centre, and I think it's fair to say he's unhappy about it. He's also representative of millions of people in this country! 

The book then flashes backwards in time to firstly 1955, when Michael was newly arrived, and focusses on Michael's somewhat criminal background, and the people with whom he associated. It also looks at striking dockers, and their union men (one of whom I understand from the back of the book was a real person), and the clashes between the two. We also see 1965 and then the mid 70s, when the murder is thought to have taken place. 

I liked the book a lot. I thought Michael was a very complex character but it was easy to be charmed by him. I liked both Vinny and Anne and their 21st century stories. I am giving this four out of five and as I say, I'd definitely read the others in the series!