I'm back home and almost through the busy season, so hopefully this will be the last useless placeholder for a while ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

( Annotated Holmes and Anna Clarke )

What I've Finished Reading

Brat Farrar was terrific, maybe the best Tey of all? Of course our old friend the Blue-Eyed Nymphomaniac makes an appearance, and Tey manages to shoehorn in a dig at Scottish Independence for no reason whatsoever (except the only necessary and sufficient reason, which is that it's a Tey book and no one has made a dig at ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

My very mixed feelings about Career of Evil didn't actually prevent me from reading the whole thing in about two days. ( A partial selection of mixed feelings, below the cut )

Special Announcements Can Be Murder

Starting today, I'm shifting Murder Mondays to once every two weeks, to make room for some RL projects that are not as much fun as fictional homicide investigations. If I get really bad at time management, I might eventually do the same with the Wednesday Reading Meme, but we'll see.

What I've Finished ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

There is a Tide goes off an interesting deep end: [SPOILER for the entire book]Lynn, the demobbed Wren who is dissatisfied with civilian life, decides to marry the "dangerous and attractive" (if you say so) manipulative brother of the rich uncle's widow, because, like BBC Sherlock's John Watson, she can't handle not living dangerously. Is a legally ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

Scales of Justice was pretty middle-of-the road Marsh, with a low-key investigation of a grisly murder. There was quite a lot of buildup regarding a shameful village secret, which made it even more disappointing when [Vaguely-worded but effective spoiler!]local prejudices against outsiders are 100% confirmed, and the true motive turns out to be barely more ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

The Silkworm. Ouch, Rowling, that was nasty! I think she gets away with it though. I don't know. It's nowhere near as good a confrontation scene as the immortal Leg Incident and its lead-up in The Cuckoo's Calling, though it is a good solution to a difficult problem and very cleverly seeded. For some reason I never ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

The Great Mistake racked up a huge body count by the end, and was enjoyable on the whole but not always completely engaging -- I got the feeling the characters would have played better in a movie, where their faces could do a lot of the work of making them more memorably likable or un-. Even the Thirties suburban ( Read more... )