The Stranger Times by C.K.McDonnell

 

Hannah needs a job but hasn't held one down in years and has no experience. Having lost her marriage and her home (which she burned down) she has very little left, so is desperate for employment. Circumstances mean that she ends up working at 'The Stranger Times' for an obnoxious drunk alongside a bunch of random misfits.

Just, as it seems the divide between the world as we see it bumps up against the other world that exists alongside it. Manchester is the busiest place for the dark deeds that The Stranger Times reports on and the staff are just starting to realise that the stories they thought were a load of imaginations gone wild, are in fact true.

Some of the characters might be considered a bit unrealistic, but I did find that the editor reminded me of someone I have worked with in the past (just a little), so it did give the story more chance of being believable character-wise.

I haven't read any works by this author before and I would read his books again, but only the fantasy ones, I'm not interested in comedy. There were places where the author lost me a little, so I carried on reading and filled in the gaps as best I could.

"‘So, whatever your name is, couple of things you need to know about me. One – my sense of smell is perfectly fine, and two – I really dislike being lied to. Oh, and three – I’m, y’know . . . Magical'."

Thank you to NetGalley and Bantam Press for approving me to read this book.

3/5 Stars (What this means...five-stars-applied-carefully)

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Official description: 

  

There are Dark Forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular) and so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them. A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but more often the weird) of modern life, it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable . . . At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little (and believes less) of the publication he edits, while his staff are a ragtag group of wastrels and misfits, each with their own secrets to hide and axes to grind. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got her own set of problems. It’s when tragedy strikes in Hannah’s first week on the job that The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious, proper, actual investigative journalism. What they discover leads them to a shocking realisation: that some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly, gruesomely real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker foes than they could ever have imagined. It’s one thing reporting on the unexplained and paranormal but it’s quite another being dragged into the battle between the forces of Good and Evil . . .  

 

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