Category: Books
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The Lost Man by Jane Harper
The Lost Man follows on the heels of Jane Harper’s two previous crime fiction novels set in the Australian outback – Force of Nature and The Dry. But unlike those two, this novel does not feature her detective Aaron Falk. The Lost Man’s setting feels even more remote and desolate than those previous titles. The…
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The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Lucy Foley follows up her very successful and popular whodunnit, The Hunting Party, with a new take on the closed-circle of suspects genre. Like her previous work, The Guest List is great fun. The setting this time is a remote Irish island, where online magazine editor Jules is getting married to TV outward-bound presenter Will…
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
This is a review of both Neil Gaiman’s novel, but also of the theatrical production that recently began at the National Theatre. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, published in 2013, is said to be the most autobiographical of Gaiman’s work. The plot starts in the present day as an unnamed man returns…
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The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
The Hunting Party is very much a traditional whodunnit, but updated to 2019. The plot includes: A remote location with no way in or out A limited list of suspects A group of friends who on the surface all like one another, but that hides some seething resentment between some of them An appealing locale…
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Keep Him Close by Emily Koch
Two mothers: one with a dead son, and one with a son who has admitted to killing the other. Keep Him Close jumps back and forward between Alice and Indigo (as well as occasionally other characters), as they try to understand what happened on a night out in the city when Alice’s son Lou fell…
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Pattern Recognition
I have a confession to make. I’m way behind on William Gibson, despite him being one of my favourite writers. I was recently talking to a friend of mine about William Gibson and his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. It was a book I loved, except… I hadn’t read it. Instead, I heard a Radio 4…
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Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
Starve Acre is a chilling little book – perfect to be read at this time of year, when the long dark nights are upon us. Starve Acre itself is the name of a house sitting somewhere in the wild Yorkshire moors, miles from anywhere. It’s not a farm, although the land does include a large…
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Blue Moon by Lee Child
I’ve never read any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, and I felt it was about time to put that right. He’s one of the bestselling writers in the world, and although I’ve never read him, I’ve seen and heard him interviewed on multiple occasions. What little I know of Reacher comes from the two…
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Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds
I’ve had a copy of Cassandra Darke sitting around for about a year, without having really picked it up to read until now, and there’s absolutely no reason for this. It’s great. Posy Simmonds is the author of a series of literary themed graphic novels with perhaps Tamara Drewe (a retelling of Far From the…
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The Night Fire by Michael Connelly
As sure as night follows day, there’s a new Michael Connelly each autumn, and this time around we get a novel that features his three key characters: Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller (the “Lincoln Lawyer”), and Renée Ballard. There are several stories going on at once in this book, but the two key stories are the…
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All the Rage by Cara Hunter
There has been a brutal attack on a girl in Oxford. She was fortunate that the attacker was scared off by a passing police car, but the victim was viciously assaulted. DI Adam Fawley is on the case, with the victim not keen to really come forward for reasons which become clearer later. In the…
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Super Pumped
As I write this, WeWork, the office sharing business, has just been taken over by its primary backer Softbank, themselves having invested more into the business that its current valuation. I confess that I’m a sucker for stories like this – over valued Silicon Valley “unicorns” that can’t possibly deliver everything they’re promising investors. Having…