What I read

Two more Mick Herrons, Spook Street (Slough House #4) (2017) and London Rules (Slough House #5) (2018), keeping up the high level.

This could not be said of Jonathan Kellerman, City of the Dead (Alex Delaware #37) (2022). This at first seemed to promise that the victim was murdered for some reason to do with her scammy, scammy, ( Read more... )

What I read

I already mentioned some of my thoughts evoked by Luster, though I realise that there is more to the book than the issues there. Though also there is the feeling that it falls into 'fiction written by young person who has done MFA/creative writing degree', and okay, I daresay in these dreadful days once they emerge with their shiny ( Read more... )

What I read

A Skeleton in the Family (Family Skeleton Mystery #1) was quite readable, but I was expecting somehow a bit more supernatural beyond the 'o hai! living skeleton!' aspect, because the rest of the story was pretty much straight murder mystery (okay, with the reasons for skeleton becoming skeleton at the root). The background of adjunct ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Giant Dark which was okay without really pinging my buttons - and I did want rather more sense of her as a creative artist, it seemed a bit assumed? that she was this not exactly voice of a generation but of a particular niche group, almost mediumistic?
Lisa Berne, The Redemption of Philip Thane (The Penhallow Dynasty, #6) ( Read more... )

What I read
Finally finished Fuckology, with a sense of duty dispatched.
Read another Elswyth Thane, The Light Heart (1947), which comes immediately before Kissing Kin and I'm not sure I ever read before back in the day. Runs from the accession of Edward VII to middle of WW1. A bit more reflective of attitudes, manners and assumptions of the day, ( Read more... )

What I read
Well, Arabella is one of the better Heyers - I mean to say, a heroine who is, by Heyer standards, a positive SJW, no? and the hero is a good deal less noxious alpha than some - a man who takes a delight in winding up aspirants to style by the dandelion thing is something of an improvement, and we even discover that he is capable of ( Read more... )

Okay, I am not going to judge a historical romance on its linguistic choices, because honestly, I sometimes think Heyer was totally over-egging the pudding and determined to show off her research and by god, she had spent all that time poring over Pierce Egan and she was not going to waste it -
- so I will cut a certain amount of slack over ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Sprig Muslin - Amanda is certainly a candidate for a
( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Tom Tiddler's Ground, which was quite good, might try more Ursula Orange. Wondered whether anyone has ever done a study of that genre I have noted, novels written more or less contemporaneous at the period of the Phoney War, with the various tropes of evacuees, muddle, blackout, etc. Coincidentally there passed across my ( Read more... )

Reminders of the longer history, a little behindhand of Black History Month:
The story of a man who became one of Britain's first black gardeners is being marked with a rose named in his honour.
I’m a fourth-generation black British man. Yet still I’m made to feel I don’t belong. My great-grandparents came here in the 1800s. Too few people realise ( Read more... )