Blog Archives
Taking Up Life in Both Hands
Taking Up Life in Both Hands is a sharp, crowded political satire that drops readers into the overlapping worlds of Big Law, Catholic health care, presidential politics, and corporate medicine. Its central pair makes the novel work: Claire Flanagan, an ambitious young health lawyer trying to survive a morally slippery law firm, and Sister Ursula, a cigar-smoking nun determined to protect the charitable mission of the enormous hospital system she helped build. Their relationship develops from an awkward professional assignment into a genuine alliance, giving the story an emotional center beneath all the schemes, kickbacks, campaign maneuvering, and executive backstabbing.
Tim Greaney writes with the confidence of someone who knows these institutions from the inside. The legal and healthcare details feel specific without turning the novel into a textbook, and the book is especially good at showing how respectable language can disguise ugly behavior. Executives talk about innovation and restructuring when they mean profit and control. Lawyers talk about loyalty when they mean obedience. Politicians wrap raw ambition in patriotism, religion, or public service. Greaney keeps translating that polished language back into plain English, usually through Claire’s skeptical observations or Sister Ursula’s blunt refusal to tolerate nonsense.
The closest comparison is probably Carl Hiaasen, especially novels such as Sick Puppy or Strip Tease. Like Hiaasen, Greaney builds comedy from institutions that have become so corrupt and self-important that they barely need exaggeration. His cast also includes the sort of schemers, opportunists, damaged idealists, and cheerful eccentrics who’d fit comfortably into a Hiaasen plot. Greaney’s humor is more rooted in legal procedure and healthcare policy, though, and his satire spends more time explaining how the machinery works. That gives the book a heavier factual texture, but it also makes the misconduct feel plausible rather than merely cartoonish.
The novel’s greatest strength is the way its comedy and moral seriousness reinforce each other. Claire’s gradual decision to risk her career, Sister Ursula’s insistence that health care should still involve caring, and the eventual exposure of Brian Shea’s schemes give the sprawling plot a satisfying direction. The final chapters bring consequences, personal renewal, and a touching farewell without losing the book’s irreverent voice. Taking Up Life in Both Hands is an energetic institutional comedy about conscience under pressure, and its best moments come when two very different women recognize that professionalism means more than protecting the people who sign the checks.
Pages: 244 | ASIN : B0GSXMS522
The Muck: A Neo-Gothic Horror-Thriller
The Muck, by Andrew Hallman, follows Glenn Hurst, a cash-strapped ghostwriter who accepts a lucrative job writing the “origin story” of crypto magnate Brad Thorsen. The assignment brings him to the Mattison Alkaline Works, a decaying industrial complex in rural Virginia known locally as the Maw, where old chemical horrors, corporate ambition, exploited workers, invasive technology, and a maddening itch begin to converge. What starts as a vanity memoir project curdles into a neo-gothic horror-thriller about pollution, power, and the monstrous appetite to turn every human weakness into product.
I was pulled in first by Glenn, who is not heroic in the gleaming, uncomplicated sense. He is broke, defensive, lonely, vain in small ways, and painfully aware of his own failures. That makes him interesting company. His interior voice has a sour wit that never fully protects him from shame, and the book uses that tension well. The Maw itself is the real cathedral here: part factory, part castle, part tomb. Its rusted chambers, poisoned runoff, salt tunnels, and technological altars give the story a thick, tactile dread.
I really enjoyed how the horror keeps widening. The book isn’t content with one monster. It finds terror in chiggers, toxic sludge, AI content mills, billionaire self-mythology, immigration abuse, surveillance, and the old American habit of burying disaster until it leaks back into the water. There are many moving parts, and the momentum can feel almost feverish. But that excess also suits the material. This is a novel about systems that metastasize, and its best passages have the nasty propulsion of an allergic reaction you know you should not scratch.
This book is for readers who like neo-gothic horror-thriller, eco-horror, industrial horror, tech horror, and corporate satire sharpened into a blade. Fans of Stephen King’s character-driven dread and Michael Crichton’s techno-paranoia will find familiar pleasures here, though The Muck has a grimier, more caustic personality all its own. It’s smart, grotesque, and unnervingly contemporary. The Muck turns the American dream into a contaminated site, and dares you to keep digging.
Pages: 392 | ISBN : 978-1969599040
Compelling Mystery
The Magician’s Wife follows a small-town journalist who gets pulled into the mysterious disappearance of a magician’s glamorous assistant who vanishes during a live TV performance, only to reappear a week later, dead. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
First and foremost, I wanted to write a novel with a compelling ‘impossible’ mystery at its heart, and give the book the kind of hook that would instantly make a reader want to know exactly how such an impossible event could have occurred. My starting point for this particular mystery was the teleportation illusion, a classic of stage magic. A magician’s assistant gets into Box A on a live TV talent show and is supposed to reappear in Box B, but vanishes for an entire week. She then does reappear in Box B on the show’s next round… but she’s dead. My journalist, Clare, is as shocked by this as everyone else. As the books are told from her perspective, she is echoing what a reader is perhaps thinking as the narrative unfolds. It also appealed to me to have a character drawing the reader in who cared deeply about a missing person case, which is the reason Clare became a journalist in the first place, something we learn more about as the story progresses. A broader inspiration for this book (and the upcoming books in the series!) has been my husband, who is a professional stage and TV magician and with whom I worked backstage for a time. It’s been very useful having a magic advisor on hand while writing this book, especially when devising some of the methods and effects!
When creating Clare, did you have a plan for her development and character traits, or did they grow organically as you were writing the story?
I think it was a bit of both! The two main characters in this story are Clare Deyes and Mara Knight. They’re unlikely allies as they’re such different people from different backgrounds. Originally, I conceived The Magician’s Wife in third-person, to centre more around Mara. But compared to Clare, Mara can be cynical and brittle, a little dismissive and subversive. Certainly in commercial fiction, I find that a character with these traits usually has to be offset by a foil, more of an ‘everyman’ that a greater percentage of readers are able to identify with straightaway. It was true of the Sherlock Holmes stories (a big inspiration for me), and I think it still holds today. In contrast to Mara, Clare sees the good in everyone, is optimistic, and friendly. So Clare and Mara have a real Watson/Holmes dynamic. Clare’s the heart and Mara the brain; you can’t have one without the other. And it’s the contrast between these characters’ personalities that drives much of the novel’s pathos and tension. Saying that, some of Clare’s background and core motivations did grow organically as I was writing the book. As much planning as you might do, as a writer you always tend to make some discoveries about your characters as you go along – and these can often be the most exciting parts of the story!
What was the most challenging part about writing a mystery story, where you constantly have to give just enough to keep the mystery alive until the big reveal?
The Magician’s Wife is my first novel in the crime/mystery genre, and I’ve often heard other writers say that it’s possibly the most difficult genre to write in. Not only do you have to create a compelling mystery in the first instance, but you must ensure that you’re feeding clues to your reader in an ‘honest’ way, so that none of the ultimate reveals come out of nowhere. However, one of the most challenging things I found when writing this book – particularly as the story is told from the first-person perspective of Clare – was keeping in my head what a reader/Clare was thinking about the mystery at any given time (the story’s ‘logical progression’), versus what I knew was actually happening. It certainly kept me on my toes throughout the various drafts! I found having a detailed chapter-by-chapter breakdown written out before I started work on the book was invaluable, and I’ll definitely tackle future novels in the series in the same way.
When will Book Two be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?
I’m currently working on the next book in The Magician’s Wife series, and it should be widely available to readers in early 2026! It’s called Second Sight and tells the story of a young boy who claims to be having unsettling visions of the future, visions that appear to be coming true. Even stranger, these visions only started happening after a cornea transplant the boy had to save his sight. When the child makes his most disturbing prediction – that his own life is in danger – it’s up to Clare and Mara to get to the bottom of what lies behind it all in order to save the boy’s life. The setting is a bit of a contrast to the world of TV studios and stage magic in the first book, as Second Sight is largely set in an inner-city London housing estate. I’m hugely enjoying writing this series so far and have lots more impossible mysteries up my sleeve for future books. My biggest hope is that readers will enjoy them as much as I do, as entertaining someone who has parted with their money to read my work is – and has always been – extremely important to me.
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When Angel, the wife of magician Dex Devereaux, mysteriously vanishes on a live TV talent show, journalist and wannabe investigator Clare Deyes cannot resist trying to work out what happened. But a week later, when Angel reappears dead during the show’s next round, Clare is certain she is out of her depth.
Clare soon realises only one person can help: the brilliant, brittle Mara Knight – magic consultant, psychologist and wife of the world famous illusionist Travers – whose husband’s disappearance is still unexplained.
Can Clare and Mara together solve the puzzle of Angel’s death before the talent show’s live final, when they are sure someone close to Angel has something even more extreme planned?
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The Sherlock Holmes stories meet Jonathan Creek in this fast-paced, twisty mystery with a generous peppering of pathos and humour. Perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Elly Griffiths, The Magician’s Wife is the first in a brand new series from internationally published author (and real-life magician’s wife) Lora Jones.
