mtvessel | Tinkingumble

Oct 2020
Grave Secrets - Alice James – Solaris, 2020
[Disclosure: This book was written by a friend, so this is more an introduction than a review.]

In S.A. Wakefield's wonderful children's book Bottersnikes and Gumbles, there is a character called Tinkingumble who has Tinks, bright ideas that sound like a spoon tapping a glass. At one point in the story, Tinkingumble's faculty gets stuck until an accident causes it to unstick, causing him to tink wildly like a cash register, and he has to sit under a bush to sort out all the good ideas. This book feels a bit like that.

Welcome to the world of Lavington Windsor, Staffordshire estate agent by day, zombie-raising necromancer by night (she has never found a way of making her hobby pay). Toni, as she is known to her friends, is a scatty redhead with a nice line in witty banter and an unfortunate love life. Balancing her compulsion to raise the dead with her day job is hard enough, but when she is introduced to Oscar, an eligible vampire who is looking for a place to live with his coterie, things get a whole lot more complicated.

This precis may sound like it is shaping up to be a romance, and it is, but there is a lot more going on. Wodehousian repartee is combined with social comedy, political satire, gruesome fight scenes, and some genuinely interesting worldbuilding based around the regenerative properties of vampire blood. For me the vampiric politics was rather reminiscent of the TV series True Blood and, presumably, the Sookie Stackhouse novels on which it was based (I haven't read them), but the rural Staffordshire setting helps enormously in grounding the more fantastical aspects, and a not-evil necromancer is an interesting new twist.

The rich mix does raise a few issues related to reader expectations. There is a Chekhov's corpse in chapter one that promises a murder mystery, but this is sidelined once Oscar comes on the scene. In fact the mundane side of Toni's life - her police officer brother Will and the colleagues at her place of work - feels under-developed, at least in this book. This is understandable given that the paranormal elements are the big draw, but some readers may feel short-changed. Likewise, Toni has no less than three (possibly four?) potential romantic interests which means that the chief one, Oscar, isn't given much chance to develop as a character.

Still, all that may change with time. The author has written several more books in this series which I sincerely hope will see the light of day. There are so many interesting ideas in this one that, like Tinkingumble, it may take a few of them to sort everything out.