So here we are. After the mind numbing banality and apparently endless pages of The Kills, I needed something to decompress. Something easy, something short, something that I can take my brain out for and still enjoy. Who better fulfils that remit that Miss Marple by way of Midsomer Murders? As some of you may be aware, I’ve read a fair few of these books and this instalment is number 12 in the still ongoing series. Not bad when you consider the author is knocking on 80 years old. When we […]
Death would be preferable to reading this again
Since I don’t want to be a total Debbie Downer about this book, I’m going to start with a positive. Ten years after first attempting to do so, I have finally ploughed my way through all 13 books on the Man Booker Prize Longlist. Some years I didn’t bother to try (mostly years when Hilary Mantel was on the list) and other years I’ve lost interest or had such a bad book experience with one of the novels that I’ve abandoned it. But, spurred on […]
I Like You Very Much. Just As You Are
Falling in love with a work of fiction or a fictional character can be a tricky business, and in many ways it resembles and reflects the experience of falling in love with a so called real person. Which is why Dustin Rowles comparing the Veronica Mars movie experience to briefly reuniting with an old lover was so apt, and also why I’m going to shamelessly steal that analogue for the purposes of writing a review for The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, the first in the […]
An evocative road-trip through 1800’s India.
The Strangler Vine is an interesting novel – part road-trip, part examination of British-Indian relations in the 1800’s and part detective story starring an opium addicted poet, a by-the-book soldier, a shady mercenary and a bloodthirsty cult. If all that sounds like a bit much to take in, it’s not as Tarantino as described! It’s a carefully plotted novel, slowly dropping plot-points like breadcrumbs along the road at regular intervals. The story follows the mismatched duo of William Avery, a self-important junior officer in the East […]
The Disappointing Disappointment
I’ve loved Barbara Vine for like ever. I know she doesn’t exist and is in fact Ruth Rendell, but still. It’s an irony that I have not now nor have I ever had any desire to read a Rendell novel. Vine first showed up on my radar when A Fatal Inversion was televised for the BBC way back in time before the hula hoop. Okay, it was like 1992 or something but still, I’m old, alright? Anyway, I read the book of that, then burned my way […]
Just What Kind of Fake Psychic Are You?
Ah, Linwood Barclay. As I have documented on previous reviews, I loved him, then I nearly broke up with him, and then with Trust Your Eyes, he won my heart all over again. This short sharp little story first appeared as a novella titled Clouded Vision, which was published for the Quick Reads initiative. Barclay has expanded the original novella into a fully fledged novel (though still short, at just 270 pages), though as I haven’t read the original, I can’t do a compare and contrast. Barclay brings back […]