Tag: books
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Silver by Chris Hammer
Having just read and loved Scrublands, I was delighted to discover a sequel has just been published. Once again, we follow Martin Scarsden, just a few weeks after the events of Scrublands. He’s just been away in the city writing a true-crime book that summarises the events of that earlier title. Now he’s somehow ended…
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Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade
The premise of this book is so ridiculous that I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, had I not heard a really good review of it. I got the audio book of this, and it was laugh out loud funny – I had to be careful where I listened to it! View From The…
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Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Another title that has been kicking around in my home for a while, but which has all the ingredients for me to really enjoy. Spies at wartime; a post-war BBC radio setting; multiple timelines. Juliet has been plucked from an administrative government job to help run a monitoring operation out of a London flat. The…
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A Very Murderous Christmas by Various
This anthology had been kicking around for a while, so over Christmas I finally got around to reading it. It’s a collection of short stories by various writers, all of which have been set around Christmas. Not all of them are tales of murder, and not all of them are by famous writers. Indeed, not…
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Ness by Robert McFarlane and Stanley Donwood
Orford Ness, on the Suffolk coast is a remarkable place. I first visited it as a child when we were spent a week of our summer holidays in Walberswick further up the coast. Since then I’ve visited a few times, always heading to the remote village of Orford and then getting the National Trust run…
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Scrublands by Chris Hammer
When I first saw Scrublands appear on bookshelves, I thought that perhaps it was the usual story of another publisher jumping on the bandwagon of Jane Harper’s very successful outback crime thrillers. But towards the end of 2019, as various readers and writers compiled their “best of” lists, Scrublands kept appearing. I’m so glad I…
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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…