pickA well-known birdwatcher is found dead in a marsh pool but killed by a blow to the head. The father of a young birdwatcher who is one of the suspects asks George Palmer-Jones to investigate.
One of the author's earlier works, from the 1980s. It nods towards the classic mystery mode, but is trying to break free, quite literally as characters rush about from Norfolk to the Scilly Isles to the North of Scotland at a moment's notice.
pickI had to read this quickly for book club but it would have been better as a dip in and out of book. I was a bit put out to find when I googled the author after I'd finished reading that the author had actually been in Jakarta while I was reading it to do some talks and readings which finished the day before.
pickThree young Pakistani-Americans go on a road trip from New York to New Orleans.
Fun with an interesting perspective but a little heavy-handed with the social commentary at times.
#whereareyoumonday
With 3 Pakistani-American teens on a road trip from New York to New Orleans
so-soReviewed together withe first in the series under Empty Nests
so-so(Reviewing this & the sequel Bowerbirds together because they were originally written as one story)
Head of major Silicon Valley firm meets and falls for IT technician while giving a motivational talk to students.
I enjoyed the development of the characters' relationship and their back stories. The one big sex scene was actually quite boring and went on far too long. I'm not sure the HEA actually solved the issues that led to the near break up.
bailedI read this 25 or 30 years ago and loved it, as I did all of Anne Rice's books I read at that time. This time round I DNF-ed. I got just over half way through and couldn't be bothered any more.
pickI thoroughly enjoyed this series as I raced through staying up way past my bedtime, eager to find out more about the characters' back stories as their relationship developed through the smallest touches and changes of expression.
pickAlways moved laterally because he is so low-key his bosses tend to forget he exists, Arthur is advised to be more outgoing. He very slowly makes friends with Martin, a coworker with a very austere lifestyle who keeps to a very strict routine. When that routine is interrupted by illness Arthur poses as Martin's boyfriend as he has nobody else. He makes some surprising discoveries about Martin's life outside the Agency. Could the lie become reality?
pickAn excellent series of 2 novellas and a short story. All the stars.
pickA literary friend of Perilla's asks him to look into the death of her husband, though nobody, including the widow, seems particularly sorry he's dead. Meanwhile Corvinus's adopted daughter and her husband find a body which somebody had stabbed even though he was already dead of natural causes.
A nice twisty tale, made even more so by the fact that I kept getting Perilla and Marilla confused.
pickA consul's wife asks Marcus Corvinus to look into the death of her uncle, whose death Alexander the Great has assured her in a seance was murder rather than an accident.
Very funny first few chapters lead into an intriguing historical mystery which made me wonder when certain names cropped up how it would gel with real events and which was told by a narrator with a consistently amusing “voice“.
so-soIn the build-up to QEII's coronation, a polio survivor is working as a stage magician's unseen assistant.
I thought this was a murder mystery with a gay detective and so was getting more and more confused waiting for a body (which never appeared) and for more exploration of gay life at the time (which only had a few mentions near the end). If I'd known what I was actually getting into I might have been in a better frame of mind to appreciate it.
pickMoving into a care home, Joan meets Jim. Neither likes the other much but could this be their last chance for love?
Lovely, not overly saccharine, romance.
Let me try this for an opening.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
so-soOne member of a hunting party in Canada goes mad and runs off into the forest, apparently under the influence of something called the Wendigo.
I realise I was supposed to be creeped out, but I just wasn't. Meh.
panArchaeologists find an anomalous artifact while excavating a Mycenean tomb.
There is a decent hard SF story struggling to get out of this 1985 novel but in the first and last thirds it is buried beneath the author's near-racist attitudes to his Greek characters (males are sleazy, both sexes are sadistically violent) and the pages and pages of physical description of the main female character.
pickShort story about Lev from the Fiona Griffiths series. He's an interesting character but I should probably have left this till later despite the chronology.
pickA former prostitute and drug addict, who seemed to have been turning her life around, is found dead in a squat with the body of her 6 year old daughter. Next to her body is a credit card belonging to a multi-millionaire who had died in a plane crash 6 months earlier.
pickThe author takes a historical approach showing what problems with a Newtonian-based view quantum theory was reacting to and then how it has developed over the years. The easiest parts of the maths involved are relegated to an appendix, although the author stresses that it's impossible to fully understand the theory without the maths. Even in this stripped down form I was struggling but I think I did get glimmers of understanding here and there.
Interview, October 2006
Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park.
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
panWhen the HQ of the Peculiar Crimes Unit is blown up with Arthur Bryant inside, John May finds links to their first case together when he joined the unit during the Blitz.
I went into this with high hopes having heard good things about the series and expecting urban fantasy along the lines of the Rivers of London. It wasn't like that at all. It was basically a procedural investigating a series of gruesome crimes committed in a London theatre. ⬇
pickMrs Brown is away on a training course for new symbionts of space stations but expects to be back before the shuttle bringing the new Earth ambassador arrives and before the Gneiss trial of Princess Tina and her advisors finishes. In the meantime Mallory should keep an eye on Eternity's functions and stay out of trouble and NO MORE MURDERS. Yeah, right.
Another great mix of fun, suspense, and intriguing mystery.
pickStanley Yelnats is falsely convicted of stealing a celebrity baseball player's sneakers. He is sent to a reformatory where the inmates are forced to dig holes in a brutally hot desert. Intertwined with Stanley's story are stories of his ancestors.
I found the first part of this rather meh, but the second and third parts were more interesting and I ended up rooting for Stanley and Zero as the fates turned towards them rather than against them.
pickMurders have a way of happening in the vicinity of Mallory Viridian, so she leaves Earth for an alien space station, Station Eternity, where there are only two other humans and she keeps contact with them to a minimum. But now a group of VIPs and tourists from Earth has been allowed to come to visit.
Interesting world building and aliens & an intriguing mystery. I'm not quite sure how the story can continue so I'm diving straight into the sequel.
pickPoirot's admirably efficient secretary is thrown off her stride by the strange goings-on in the hostel managed by her sister. Poirot agrees to investigate.
Perhaps I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been doing but I don't understand how the rucksack business actually worked in practice or why the green ink was spilt.
pickAn informative and interesting biography of the author convincingly showing how much she was a victim of not only misogyny but also intellectual snobbery and how progressive many of her works were when looked at in the cultural climate they were written in.
