{"id":271,"date":"2003-04-24T20:14:16","date_gmt":"2003-04-24T20:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2003\/04\/the_white_lione\/"},"modified":"2003-04-24T20:14:16","modified_gmt":"2003-04-24T20:14:16","slug":"the_white_lione","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/the_white_lione\/","title":{"rendered":"The White Lioness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0099450097\">this<\/a> whilst studiously avoiding The Guardian&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/review\/story\/0,12084,938817,00.html\">review<\/a> last Saturday, when I saw &#8220;Reviewers of thrillers usually remain tactfully reticent about plot details&#8221; in the first line.<br \/>\nTo be fair, when I came back to the review after reading the book, it wasn&#8217;t as bad as I thought in terms of giving away the plot. But I don&#8217;t like reviews that spoil any plot. I guess that if I know that I&#8217;m going to read a book come what may, I&#8217;m not likely to read the review at all. Reviews are really to point me towards books I&#8217;d otherwise have ignored.<br \/>\nSo what of The White Lioness itself? Well despite being published completely out of order (it&#8217;s the third), it sits well withing the Wallander universe. His father&#8217;s still alive, and he&#8217;s missing Baiba.<br \/>\nThe big difference with this book is that a considerable amount is set in South Africa and involves real people. I don&#8217;t suppose that the plot is that far-fetched, but somehow when you read a novel that tells you what real people are thinking in a fictional set-up, it seems wrong.<br \/>\nRoll on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/1843430614\">next one<\/a> in September!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read this whilst studiously avoiding The Guardian&#8217;s review last Saturday, when I saw &#8220;Reviewers of thrillers usually remain tactfully reticent about plot details&#8221; in the first line. To be fair, when I came back to the review after reading the book, it wasn&#8217;t as bad as I thought in terms of giving away the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}