Disclosure: ARC provided by Netgalley.

Wolves and dodgy insurance salesmen come together in a thriller about a mentally ill young man who takes up a post as an intern at a company specializing in purchasing life insurance policies from the terminally ill and then collecting on them when those individuals die.

Two ravens greet Quin Lighthorn when he turns up for work on his first day as an intern at Safe Haven. Quin, we learn, has been released from a mental institution in order to help the FBI investigate Safe Haven, but as the story unfolds it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and before long Quin finds that murder is part and parcel of the modus operandi of his new employer.

Safe Haven has many types of “wolf” in its sales force and they prey as a pack to seek out the weak and the wealthy at hospitals and hospices building their list of prospects as they seek to make financial killings.

Before long, Quin has witnessed a murder and from that point on knowing who and what to believe   becomes increasingly tricky. Quin, though a likeable character is too trusting — possibly  because of his mental illness — and this makes him a somewhat unreliable narrator.

While some of the twists and turns in the plot may stretch belief In the Company of Wolves is an entertaining and exciting read with moments that are genuinely scary. I liked it a lot.

[Disclosure: An Advance Readers Copy (ARC) of In the Company of Wolves by James Michael Larranga, published by CreateSpace, was provided via Netgalley. ISBN 9781478320418. Expected date of publication 1 September 2013.]

Disclosure: An Advance Reader’s Copy (ARC) was provided by Netgalley. Click the image to view this book’s detail on Amazon.

“She didn’t know that preparing for the end of the world would make it that much more likely to come.”

Amaranth and her daughters Amity and Sorrow are fleeing from a religious cult led by Amaranth’s husband, Zachariah. Amaranth is driving and fearful that they are being pursued. With drama, tension and suspense Peggy Riley hooks her reader in the short, opening scene of Amity & Sorrow, the story of a mother and her two daughters Amity and Sorrow who run away from a closed community where is Amaranth is the most senior of the fifty wives of Zachariah.

It quickly becomes clear that while Amaranth is protecting her daughters, the elder girl — Sorrow — wants nothing more than to return to her father where she enjoys some status as the cult’s “Oracle”. The younger girl, Amity, from whose point of view much of the story is told, is protective of her older sister but Sorrow is clearly disturbed and the question of what has caused this is one of the darker themes of this short novel.

When Amaranth crashes the car into a tree, she and her daughters find refuge on a farm where the owner, Bradley, is struggling to make a living from land that traditionally yielded wheat but is now being used for crops like rapeseed.

Planting Seeds

The planting of seed is a recurring theme throughout Amity & Sorrow. Growth is the miracle and seeds are the foundation for growth but they can only be planted in the ground that you are given. They must be planted at the right time and tended in order to flourish and, even then, success is not certain: “You water, you tend, and sometimes seeds don’t take.” So hope is necessary too.

On the cult’s farm, going into the fields is forbidden but Bradley’s farm hand, a Mexican boy named Dust encourages Amity to challenge what she has been taught: “God makes fields grow. God makes the harvest and the seed and the rain. They should have taught you God is a field,” he tells her.

Amaranth — a life-giver — finds jars of unused seeds stored on Bradley’s farm and want to plant them but  Bradley is reluctant to allow her for fear that she might not be around long enough to look after them. “Don’t put seeds in you can’t tend,” he cautions.

Rules for Living

Just as scattering seed, tending seed and reaping what you sow are a theme in Amity & Sorrow, so too is the idea of living by rules and how it is that people sometimes make choices to abide by rules that seem bizarre to an outside observer. The cult has many rules — it is forbidden to talk to strangers, forbidden to go into the fields, hair must be covered at all times, only women and wives can spin in prayer. Bradley’s house, too, appears to have rules. When Amaranth tries to open the porch door it slams in her face “as if the house itself has rules it wants to keep”. But some rules are “stupid”, some are made to be broken, and sometimes there are — or should be — no rules. Amaranth is afraid to challenge the rules and Dust has no rules: “I don’t need rules. I have sense and guts,” he says. Through Dust, Amity learns to question the rules — “It made her wish she’d though to ask at home, when someone might have answered her. Why did she never ask why?”

Aside from its insights into why people entrap themselves by what they choose to believe, learning to question the rules is perhaps the key  take away from Amity & Sorrow.

Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley is published by Little, Brown & Company. April 2013. ISBN 9780316220880. An Advance Reader’s Copy was made available via Netgalley for the purposes of this review.

Disclosure: An Advance Reader’s Copy (ARC) of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.


There is something about the apparent gaiety and glitter of the years immediately preceding WW1 that is somehow alluring to contemporary readers — “a world both distant and near to our own” as Hugh Brewster puts it in the prologue to Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage — The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World.

More than 100 years on from the loss of Titanic in April 1912, stories of her passengers continue to fascinate modern readers. Brewster focuses on Titanic’s first-class passengers — among them the celebrities of the day — from fashion designer Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon to tennis star, Karl Behr, from President’s aide Archie Butt to artist Frank Millet.

Some of the names are familiar — Astor, Ismay, Guggenheim — from movies like Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember and James Cameron’s Titanic — others perhaps less so, but the portraits presented by Brewster are immensely human and fascinating for the detail that they provide.

For a factual, historical book Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage is a very engaging and fast read beautifully illustrated with photographs. Inevitably, the reader becomes come caught up in the drama of the sinking but Brewster maintains focus on the the individuals rather than on the ship and the book is particularly moving for what it has to say about the aftermath of the sinking and the glimpses it provides in the postscript, “Titanic Afterlives”.

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s first-class passengers and their world by Hugh Brewster is published by Broadway Paperbacks. ISBN 9780307984814; eISBN 9780307984715.