REVIEW: SOUND by Catherine Fearns
Sound:
'Can you hear it?A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. It appears to be a heart attack, until a second acoustician dies a few days later in similar circumstances.
Meanwhile, there’s an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, and outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub. Not to mention strange noises coming from the tunnels underneath Liverpool. Can it really be a coincidence that death metal band Total Depravity are back in the city, waging their own form of sonic warfare?
Detective Inspector Darren Swift is convinced there are connections. Still grieving his fiancé’s death and sworn to revenge, he is thrown back into action on the trail of a murderer with a terrifying and undetectable weapon.
But this case cannot be solved using conventional detective work, and D.I. Swift will need to put the rulebook aside and seek the occult expertise of Dr. Helen Hope and her unlikely sidekick, guitarist Mikko Kristensen.'
My Review:
Phew! What a roller coaster ride! I was honestly sad to finish this trilogy. I hope the characters find new life in other works. We had genetic mamipulation and unholy fire, now sound makes an impact in the third book. All the threads woven in the first two books come together very satisfyingly here. The use of sound is particularly evocative, which I hope will be exploited in any Audio telling of the tale.
There's also much satisfaction to be had in the final situations of the characters. Love of course plays a part but at no time does this interfere with the detective story that lies at the heart of this enthralling story. Kudos to the author for making her characters human, flawed but always recognisable. If anything, some were tantalsiingly enigmatic, such as the Satanic metal band.
Liverpool the city is a character unto itself.
How marvellous to read this kind of genre-busting story and not have it
set in the capital! The author is clever to uses her intimate knowledge
of Liverpool to such vivid effect. More than anything, I feel she
has inhabited each of her characters in turn,
from the Calvinist nun to the death metal guitarist and it is this
strange habitation that has made this series of novels such a singular
read. More please.
Author Bio:
Catherine Fearns is a writer from Liverpool. Her novels Reprobation (2018) and Consuming Fire (2019) are published by Crooked Cat and are both Amazon bestsellers. As a music journalist Catherine has written for Pure Grain Audio, Broken Amp and Noisey. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Toasted Cheese, Succubus, Here Comes Everyone, Offshoots and Metal Music Studies. She lives in Geneva with her husband and four children, and when she’s not writing or parenting, she plays guitar in a heavy metal band.
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