WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Crime Fiction with Mat Coward: April 4, 2022
New titles from Louise Hare, Christobel Kent, Cate Ray and Peter Lovesey
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
LENA is a struggling London club singer in the 1930s in Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare (HQ, £14.99), who receives an out-of-the-blue offer to take up a potentially career-making role in New York. The timing is convenient, as she has an urgent reason to vanish from her usual haunts for a while and a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary sounds like a good spot in which to lie low.
People warn her that the US may not be a safe place for a black woman, but Lena is confident that her dark looks can pass for Mediterranean. When a murder takes place on board which has echoes of the event from which she is fleeing, it’s clear someone is setting Lena up as a scapegoat in a dynastic power play.
A golden age ocean liner is a great setting for a whodunnit, and Hare has also created a delightful central character.
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