{"id":927,"date":"2004-11-24T23:12:47","date_gmt":"2004-11-24T23:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2004\/11\/playing_with_fi\/"},"modified":"2004-11-24T23:12:47","modified_gmt":"2004-11-24T23:12:47","slug":"playing_with_fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/playing_with_fi\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing With Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/033049161X\">Playing With Fire<\/A> is something like book number fourteen in the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.inspectorbanks.com\/\">Inspector Banks<\/A> series and it&#8217;s the latest edition out in paperback. Banks is on the case of an arsonist who&#8217;s killed two people in a barge fire as the novel starts. As usual, we get to meet a colourful handful of likely candidates and there are a few twists before a few hundred pages later we reach a conclusion.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve now read the last five novels, and there&#8217;s a new <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0333989341\">hardback<\/A> out in January, while I&#8217;ve missed a non-Banks <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0330426729\">paperback<\/A> (the Amazon review that&#8217;s there at the moment doesn&#8217;t make it likely I&#8217;ll be rushing either), and we&#8217;re still due a mass market <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0330418521\">paperback<\/A> edition of some collected stories that were published a couple of months ago.<br \/>\nWhy all this publishing at the same time? Well <A HREF=\"http:\/\/books.guardian.co.uk\/review\/story\/0,,1151844,00.html\">this story<\/A> from earlier in the year goes some way to explaining it. Despite his phenomenal sales, Robinson hasn&#8217;t actually had all his books published yet in the UK (he resides in Canada). I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s a time limit that Pan Macmillan are working to, but it must have something to do with it all.<br \/>\nBut back to the book. I did enjoy it, but I just felt that some things seemed to be mentioned a couple too many times. It&#8217;s almost as if we&#8217;re hostage to some of the slow readers at the back of the class who may not recall something that happened a hundred pages earlier. But I&#8217;ll be reading the next Banks novel, and have plenty of back copies to get through.<br \/>\nIncidentally, I think that my reading this is testament to the fact that Ottakers occassional <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/000139.html\">99p book promotions<\/A> really do work!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>033049161X<\/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-927","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\/927","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=927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/927\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}