Books Read in July

 Where did July go? I don't mind... it's not my favourite month by any stretch of the imagination... but it just whizzed by. Possibly because I had two lots of visitors? Which is always nice but means I'm behind with reviews and also commenting on my favourite blogs. I will try catch up. 

So, I read six books in July. Some I reviewed, some I did not. I wish I had the time to review everything, but I can at least mention them all here.

32. The Half Bird - Susan Smillie. This is a non-fiction book about a woman who sailed from the UK to the Med. and around it. Well, supposedly. She didn't actually get going until about halfway into the book, and the first half just felt like a load of waffle. The actual sailing around the Med. bit was quite good - there just ought to have been more of it. 3 stars

33. An Act of Foul Play - T.E. Kinsey 4 stars

34. Not to Be Taken - Anthony Berkeley 4stars

35. Godmersham Park - Gill Hornby.  

Thirty one year old Anne Sharpe is from a genteel family, until her mother dies and Anne suddenly realises she has no home and nowhere to go. She has to resort to being a governess and gets a job at Godmersham Park, the home of Edward Knight (formerly Austen) and his family. Her charge is Fanny Knight, aged 12, an enthusiastic, likeable, intelligent girl. Things could be worse. But a governess holds a strange position in a large household, neither a fully paid-up member of the servants, nor a proper family member. Things are difficult, made even more so when the servants take against her. Still, she is very much liked by Edward's brother, Henry Austen, who has charm aplenty and the sort of personality that wishes to know about everyone. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I thoroughly enjoyed this fictional account of the life of Anne Sharpe. In real life her and Jane Austen really were friends but not a lot more is known about the friendship. Sadly, Jane herself does not appear until halfway through the book. Until then the book concentrates on the indignities Anne suffers and you feel very sorry for her. Henry Austen takes centre stage quite a lot and he is full of ambivilence, something he was in real life apparently. His charm made him popular but the target of said charm needed to be careful. This is Gill Hornby's second book about the Austen family, Miss Austen, which concentrates on Cassandra Austen, was very good too. And now there's a new book out - The Elopement - how that fits in with the family I don't know, but I assume it does somehow and I will be reading it. 5 stars

36. Hyperion - Dan Simmons. This was a reread for me. I read it first in 2016 and my review is HERE. I saw mention of the whole series of four on Youtube recently and decided I wanted to read the next three, but would need to refresh my memory by rereading the first book. It was every bit as good the second time around, if not better. I see I reserved book 2 from the library but clearly never read it, I have bought it now and plan to read it in the autumn. 5 stars (I gave it 4 in 2016.)

37. Walking the Woods and the Water - Nick Hunt. The author plans to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor who walked from The Netherlands to what was then Constantinople, back in the 1930s. How much have the countries he passed through changed, are people's attitudes the same? Some very interesting answers ensue. Enjoyed this one a lot. 4 stars 

So, I was pleased with my July reading month. I read 4 fiction novels and 2 non-fiction travelogues and they were all quite varied. Only The Half Bird was a bit disappointing, the rest were all top-notch. And now we're into August, another of my least favourite months, roll on September! Hopefully there will be some more good books read during August but as yet I'm not sure what they will be. 

 Happy reading and I hope you're all keeping well. 

 

Two crime yarns

 I am, of course, waaaay behind with book reviews, three books to be honest, so I'll try (hoho) to be brief and deal with the two crime novels first. 

 First up, An Act of Foul Play by T.E. Kinsey, this is book 9 in the author's 'Lady Hardcastle and Flo' series.

Lady Hardcastle, amateur sleuth and sometime spy, and her sidekick and maid/companion, Flo, are celebrating Lady Hardcastle's birthday with an evening out in Bristol. They're attending a comedy play and have thoroughly enjoyed the first half. Everyone but Flo take themselves off during the intermission and she can't help but notice a lot of noise coming from behind the curtain. Sure enough, when the curtain rises for act two, the actors strolling onto the stage to engage with the actor who should be there to meet them, find him dead in a chair. Of course, the two women can't help but get involved but find themselves having to work with a new, rather clueless, detective. There's nothing for it but for the two to go undercover and join the acting troupe. This is another fun instalment of an excellent comedy crime series. By comedy, I don't mean it's a laugh a minute, the comedy is in the relationship between Lady Hardcastle and Flo and the banter they engage in. If I'm honest, theatre set scenarios are never my favourite: I don't know why... but we all have our foibles. But this was good, and fun, and never less than enjoyable but not my favourite in the series.  I gather for the next couple of books the two go into 'spy' mode rather than whodunnit, that too is not my favourite genre but I own them so will read them to see how I get on. Although this series is on the lighter side, I would not refer to them as 'cosies', the humour and the writing take them out of that category in my opinion. 

Next, Not to Be Taken: A Puzzle in Poison by Anthony Berkeley, one of the excellent, now very long, series of vintage crime novels reissued by the British Library. 

So this is one of those very English forms of vintage mysteries (published in 1938) set in a quintessential country village, Annypenny in Dorset. (That county is full of these villages still.) It concerns a group of six individuals, all friends and very much involved in each other's lives. The narrator is Douglas, a fruit farmer and he lives with his wife, Frances. Just up the lane from them is John Waterhouse and his wife, Angela. He's a retired engineer of sorts who has worked all around the world. Angela is frail in the manner of one who enjoys her illnesses. And then there's the doctor, Glen Brougham who lives with his sister, Rona, she's as clever as he is but without the qualifactions. What happens when John Waterhouse dies is the business of this story. The doctor treats him for indigestion type problems when he complains of pains and feeling unwell. When he dies 'natural causes' goes on the death certificate but an almost estranged brother isn't happy and demands a proper autopsy. It turns out John's been poisoned and it's clear it must be one of the five people closest to him, but why would any of them want him dead? So Anthony Berkeley is not one of my favourite rediscovered authors. I find him clinical and always looking on the unpleasant side of people's natures. And this book is like that too 'but' I liked it a lot more than the previous two books I've read by him. I enjoyed the village setting and the closed circle theme, the slow reveal of secrets is something I enjoy too, no one is quite what they seem in this type of book. The doctor's analysis of Angela and the reason for her mystery health issues I found quite fascinating. Berkeley does human nature very well, despite his tendency to always think the worst of people. This book was apparently part of a competiton... it was published in a newspaper in instalments and at a certain spot the book stopped and people had to send in their solutions. I gather no one got it quite right. Berkeley is still not my favourite Golden Age crime writer but am glad I gave this one a go as it really was excellent. 

 

Books read in June

 So, here we are, halfway through the year. Incredible. Wherever you are I hope the summer heat is not too intense - those in the northern hemisphere of course. (I have no idea whether anyone in the southern hemisphere, Oz or NZ etc., reads my blog.) We've had a couple of short heatwaves but our 'heatwave' temps are not comparable to places where the heat is serious. It doesn't get to 40C (104f) here, for instance, which it frequently does in other countries. So it's all relative. I personally hate anything over 30C (86f) and am really not a summer fan at all! Give me autumn or winter, and I'm mostly happy with spring too, but not summer. 

Anyway, enough of the weather report. Books. I read 6 in June, with not a dud among them, so for me, it was a good reading month.

26. A Book of Bones - John Connolly 

27. Death Rites - Sarah Ward 

28. Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky 

29. Pandora - Susan Stokes 

30. Lessons in Crime - edited by Martin Edwards (to be reviewed)

31. Death Sentence - Damien Boyd.

This is book six in Damien Boyd's 'Nick Dixon' series. It starts with a frightening death, underwater in a cave. And that's left hanging until a long way into the book. The real start is the discovery of a dead body in a WW2 pillbox on the side of of a canal in Somerset. It turns out to be a man named Alan Fletcher, and someone has killed him and  made him inhale brick dust before he died. It's bewildering and Nick Dixon and his team get nowhere until they discover that the dead man was a decorated Falklands war veteran and begin to investigate what happened to him in that war. This series is one of the best police procedural series you will find anywhere. It's painstaking in its attention to little details and I find it fascinating. The main characters have lives and partners, Nick lives with one of his former junior officers so she has had to be placed elsewhere within the Somerset police force. But none of this overwhelms the plot of each story and neither are there sob stories and angst and alcoholics and God knows what else. It's ordinary life as we know it, late home from work, both tired, so grabbing takeaways or nipping to the pub to sit by the fire with pie and chips. It does help of course that I know most of the settings of each book because I live in the next county to Somerset and have lived there in the past. It all feels so real. Another terrific instalment of this excellent series. I'm waaay behind, this one was written in 2016, so this year I want to read more and catch up a bit as there are now fifteen books!

So there you go, I couldn't choose a favourite as I enjoyed them all - all were four or five star reads... that's a good reading month.

I hope you're all keeping well. I say this as several of my blogging pals are not having a good time at the moment with health issues of spouses and bereavements. And I don't know if anyone remembers the lovely Pat from the blog, Here, There and Everywhere. We became good friends almost from the moment I started my blog in 2007, sharing a love of books and Star Trek and chatting on the phone occasionally. Very sadly, she passed away a couple of weeks ago, her health had not been good for years but it was still a real shock. She will be sadly missed. So please take of yourselves.
 

A couple of titles

So, just catching up on reviews of two books I've read over the past couple of weeks. So far, I seem to be having a decent reading month. I've read just 4 books but all were good. 

First up, Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

So, this is book two in the author's 'Children of Time' trilogy. I read the first book eighteen months ago (I actually thought it was much more recently than that) and my review is HERE. I can't see any other way to speak about book two other than to reveal spoilers to book one, so please, if you're going to read this series, STOP HERE! Okay. So, representatives of Kern's world from book one, the spiders, and of the human ark ship from Earth, take off in a space ship to find other planets that were terraformed by humans. They find a planetary system. Flip back a couple of thousand years to read what happened here. Terraformers came from Earth but things go pear-shaped when they lose communication with Earth, a disaster has happened there. The terraformers are on their own. Something then happens to one of them, they think it's a minor accident: it's not. Flip forward again and the spiders and humans are approaching the system with no idea what they'll find. What they find is the result of experiments one of the scientists was doing thousands of years ago. Right, so this can easily be read as a standalone but probably best to read Children of Time first. But Children of Ruin is a whole new, very scary, ballgame. I'd say bordering on sci-fi horror, it certainly would be if it were a film and not a book. As I found with book one, it's not the people who stick in my mind it's the world-building and ideas. It's not always easy to follow, and is perhaps overly wordy, but goodness me, I look back at it and see a fantastic book. What an amazing writer Adrian Tchaikovsky is. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads as it wasn't quite the book that Children of Time was, it's a 4.5 really. But if you like a bit of hard science fiction, you can't really go wrong with this series. I've just checked Fantastic Fiction for the title of the next book, Children of Memory, only to find this is not a trilogy at all, book four is due out in 2026! Excellent. 

Lastly, Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman.  

It's 1798 and Pandora 'Dora' Blake wants to be a designer of exotic jewellry. She lives with her uncle in a shop of antiquities that used to belong to her parents. They were archaeologists who died when Dora was eight and since then the famous shop has gone downhill, her awful uncle filling the shop with tat. There's no tat in the basement though, and when a beautiful vase is delivered and goes straight down there, Dora decides to investigate surrepticiously. She's aided by Edward Lawrence, a stranger who comes to see her one day. He's trying to gain entrance to the Society of Antiquaries and wants her help. Dora realises that the two can help each other in achieving their dreams, but not how much danger this is going to place both of them in. So this is a sort of Gothic mystery combined with a bit of Greek myth, based on the story of Pandora opening the box etc. It wasn't quite as myth based as I was hoping, I felt the link between Dora and the vase was not fully explored. It was very good on London of the late 1790s, the squalor and the crime in particular and how hard it was for 'everyone' to survive let alone for a woman to try to get a foothold in what was considered the male preserve of jewellry designing. Hermes, the magpie, was an interesting touch. The uncle was a bit 'too' awful, verging on being a caricature. All in all, I did enjoy this one but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, rounded up from 3.5 as I'm more inclined to do that than round down. 

So, my current read is this:

 I absolutely love an academic mystery so this is a 'must read' for me. Martin Edwards has done a fantastic job of collecting together an excellent clutch of short stories based in schools and colleges. I'm three quarters through and will review it when I've finished. 

A couple of quick reviews

 

So we've had 'No-mow May' here in the UK and that's my excuse for one of my lawns looking like this. In actuality my gardener, who cuts the grass, couldn't do it last week as it was raining too hard. And if I'm honest, I absolutely love how cheerful this looks and how many insects and birds it attracts. These are not dandelions, as some people think, but something called Catsear (Hyphochaeris radicata) and they're what happens when you don't keep a perfect lawn. I have lots of lovely clover too and the bees 'really' love that! Important to keep them happy these days. 

Anyway, this is a book blog not a horticultural, 'Monty Don' fangirl page. :-)

My first book for June (started in May in fact) was A Book of Bones by John Connolly. Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time knows how much I adore this series. This is book 17 and my interest is not flagging at all. 

So this is basically a continuation of book 16, The Woman in the Woods, which I see I did not review properly. In that, an individual named Quayle wreaked havoc all over the US, but ultimately in Maine, looking for the missing pages to an Atlas which, when complete, will alter the world - and not in a good way. Quayle returns to London after these events and it's there that Parker, Louis and Angel head after a stop-over in The Netherlands to gather information. In the UK, the body of a woman has been found in an abandoned village near Hadrian's Wall, connected to The Familists from book 16. The police are investigating and realise that there's a connection to other bodies discovered all over England. When Parker arrives in the UK is he going to be a help or a hindrance to their enquiries? This was 675 pages long but as usual with John Connolly, it didn't feel like it at all: I whipped through it. It's different to others in the series in that it's half police procedural as Connolly concentrates a lot on the Northumberland police trying to trace the woman's killer. There are also little 'weird' stories inserted into the text, from the past. This worked very well for me and added to the mystery of what The Fractured Atlas is. What Parker actually is - and Louis and Angel - is also known to readers of this series, oddly one of the police officers actually put her finger right on it but was joking when she said it. That was a bit of an 'Oh' moment. I've just discovered that there's more about the history of this 'Atlas' in Connolly's second book of short stories, Night Music, which I own but haven't read. I shall be doing that thing very soon. I must add that this is not a series for people who don't want to read about people dying in nasty ways. And Connolly does not mind who he kills. It's not quite Game of Thrones, but not everyone survives! Just sayin'. I plan to try and catch up with this series this year, I have five left to read as book 22 came out last month. 

Next, Death Rites by Sarah Ward. I thought the author was new to me but when I checked I realised I'd read In Bitter Chill, the first of her Peak District series about DC Childs. Death Rites is the first book in her 'Carla James' series, set in New England. 

Carla James is an English archaeologist from Oxford. She lost her husband recently and is looking for a change of scenery to take her mind off her loss. She gets a position at an elite university in the town of Jericho, 'somewhere' in New England. The body of a woman is found in a country area outside the town. It's surrounded by various objects or artifacts and Carla is called in for her opinion on these. None of it makes a lot of sense to her but she can't resist continuing to look into the murder, and that's when she starts to find connections with a handful of other killings and suicides that have happened over the last few years: the connections could lean towards the occult. The police actively try to dissuade her from investigating but their antipathy does nothing but spur her on. But who, on the university campus can she trust? And why won't the police listen to her? So this was very well written and pacey - a pageturner so I read it quickly. I think I saw the series mentioned by a blogging friend but I'm afraid I can't remember who. I found Carla a bit annoying at first, possibly too pushy and overstepping the mark at times. Then I saw how obstructive the police were being and I started to get annoyed that they couldn't see what was in front of them... and it didn't help that they were not pleasant people. At one stage Carla does not know who to turn to for help and I have to confess to thinking, 'Call Charlie Parker!' The setting of a New England university town felt realistic, we drove through a few when we were over there at various times. But I do wish the author had said which state it was in. There is apparently a Jericho in Vermont and it looks lovely, but too small to have a uni. Anyway, an interesting start to a new series. Will I read more? I'm not sure. It was good enough but I have a 'lot' of books on my tbr mountain, so we'll see. 

So now I have to choose a new book... think about me at this difficult time.

Books read in May

I can't believe it's almost the end of May, before we know it we'll be halfway through the year. Scary. I'm very behind with book reviews, so I shall do a quick catch-up in this post and see if I can keep rather more up to date in June. Hoho.

I read six books in May and these are they:

20. The Shell House Detectives - Emylia Hall

21. The Man in the Dark - Susan Scarlett

22. A Thousand Feasts - Nigel Slater. A collection of memoir 'essays' of his travels, mainly concerning food. Japan features heavily but also Scandinavia, the Middle-East. Beautiful, lyrical writing as always. 

23. Some Desperate Glory - Emily Tesh.   

This was an excellent sci-fi yarn, set on a large asteroid type rock, Gaea, where a group of refugees have taken up residence and created a warrior training society. They want to avenge the destruction of Earth by the Majoda who have now formed a confederation of planets. We follow Kyr, a female Amazonian type fighter, leader of her section and one of the best fighters on Gaea as she waits to see where she is assigned after training. What happens is a shock and she follows others who abandon Gaea, only to discover that nothing is as it seemed. This was very good, but it does divide the crowd a bit on Goodreads, and I can see why. Kyr is a bit one-dimensional, but she's been brain-washed since birth so... I liked the ideas and world building and the aliens. I thought it was a very solid sci-fi yarn.

 

24. Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters

Oddly enough, this one features another blonde-haired Amazonian lead female character in the shape of one, Vicky Bliss. She's an art historian come adventurer, sort of a female Indianna Jones figure. There's a long lost cabinet/sculpture thing by a Reformation artist to be found, so her and her boyfriend decide on a competition to be the first to find it. Off they pop to a castle in Germany and all kinds of weird shenanigans ensue. I only gave this a 3 star rating on Goodreads because it grated quite a lot with me. I know it was written in 1973 so a bit of latitude is required but the constant 'which is better? men or women?'  got quite annoying and I didn't care for the way Vicky and her boyfriend treated or spoke to each other. And why didn't they work together? It didn't make sense. There was a decent sense of Germany and its villages and castles so that was a plus. But in all honesty, I was disappointed by this one. The author is more famous for her Amelia Peabody books, of which I've read a couple - they're okay but I never felt the need to read all of them. I supsect this author is just not for me.

25. Sisters Making Mischief - Maddie Please.

A complete change for my last book of May. A contemporary fiction offering that centres on Joy Chandler. Joy is newly divorced and in her sixties, Hubby having left her for his secretary. He was a piece of work quite frankly and the family, a son and daughter and their various wives, husbands and kiddies, are not much better. Joy provides a wonderful Christmas for them... it's a disaster because they're so awful... so Joy ups and goes to France to visit her sister, Isabel, in Brittany. Here she starts to relax, help out a bit with gites and the antiques, meets new people and realises she's better off without Hubby, which we all could've told her from the start. This was a great deal of fun with nice characterisation and a really good sense of rural Britany and its people. Eugenie, the French, hypochondriac mother-in-law was a hoot and the French love interest bearing a resemblance to Harrison Ford didn't harm either. Enjoyed this a lot. 

 

So actually, that was not a bad reading month. Out of six books, just one I felt was a bit average and slightly disappointing, the rest were all very readable, particularly The Shell House Detectives, The Man in the Dark and Sisters Making Mischief. So nothing to complain about there. 

My current read is this:

 

This is book number 17 of John Connolly's wonderfully creepy and weird Charlie Parker series. Most of the books take place in the USA but the action this time has moved to The Netherlands and then the UK, up near the border of England and Scotland beside Hadrian's Wall. And it doesn't disappoint. John Connolly continues to be my favourite author and his Charlie Parker books my favourite series. 

I hope you all had a good May and are keeping well and reading lots of good books! 

 

Catching up

I seem to be in a perpetual state of 'Catching up' so it's nothing new that I'm three books behind with my reviews. Let's see if I can be brief for once. (Hint: nope, didn't manage it, 'bout time I stopped kidding myself I can do it. )

First up, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson.

Constance Haverhill is currently on the south coast of England, acting as a companion to the mother of her previous employer, a Lady of the Manor type, who kept Constance's mother close by as they had been close friends for years. Sadly, her mother has now died. Constance has been running the estate farm but now her brother is back from WW1 with a wife and Constance, for several reasons, is not required. So here she is, temporarily in a seaside town with no idea what her future holds. Enter Poppy Wirrall who has been riding a motorbike during the war and doesn't want to give it up. So she's starting a business ferrying women about the town in a sidecar attached to her motorbike. It's not long before Constance is involved with Poppy and her business and that of trying to entice Poppy's brother, who lost his leg in the war, to help restore an old aircraft. I think I first heard about this book on Constance from Staircase Wit's blog. It was one of her favourite books from last year (I think) and I can see why as it's a delight. Yes, it's full of get-up-and-go and fun ideas. But it also has serious issues as a theme, that of men returning from the war and needing their old jobs back, or new ones. And it was really hard for the women too because they had learnt independence and liked being useful. And some, like Constance, were cast adrift with nowhere to go and no prospects: she needed a job to live. The book is full of interesting, very individual characters whose lives and futures I became very caught up in. It maybe overdid the female angle just a smidgeon but I could forgive this quirky book that because it was so well written and 'fun'. 

Next, The Shell House Detectives by Emylia Hall.

Ally Bright, a woman in her sixties, has a beach house on the coast of Cornwall. She's been a widow for a year, her husband, Bill, was a retired policeman, still rather immersed in the community, whereas Ally liked to live a more solitary life as an artist. Her peace is shattered one night when a young man, in quite an agitated state, knocks on her door looking for her husband. Feeling unable to help him, Ally sends him away. Next day, ex-policeman, Jayden, is one of the people to find the young man at the bottom of a cliff, barely alive. Did he jump or was he pushed? Ally, feeling partly responsible, and Jayden, missing his policing days, set about finding out. This was so good. For my money, it wasn't purely a murder mystery story. The found family aspect, the concentration on the characters, what their lives were and why they were as they were, made this more of contemporary fiction book with a strong element of crime. I would also not put this into the 'cosy' crime genre. What I also loved about the book was its very strong sense of place. I know the area where it's set, the north Cornish coast, not up near the Devon border, but right down in the Penzance/St. Ives area of West Penwith. As someone from that area, it was the perfect setting. I already have book 2 on my Kindle, it takes place at Chistmas so I may well leave it until November or December to read that.

Lastly, The Man in the Dark by Susan Scarlett, written in 1940 by the author, Noel Streatfeild, of Ballet Shoes fame.

Marda Mayne is 26, and the eldest sibling of a GP and his wife. Until now she's worked as a dispenser in her father's surgery but finances suddenly become tight and Marda decides to find another paying job. She's taken on by one, James Longford, as a companion to his 17 year old American ward, Shirley, who is about to come and live with him, having lost her father. James was blinded in a racing car accident and has withdrawn into himself, becoming a recluse as he doesn't want to be a burden or to have his friends pity him. It doesn't take sparky Marda long to realise that things in this mausoleum of a household need to change and with Shirley's help the two set about their mission to bring light and joy back into the house. So, this was a delightful, undemanding read, no mention of the war so I presume it wasn't actually written in 1940 but possibly a few years earlier. The whole point of the story was that of bringing James back into the real world and that was well done. I liked Marda and her sparkiness and common sense, Shirley was a trifle more annoying, especially her rather overt attentions to James but her heart was in the right place, unlike James' awful sister. This is a lovely, gentle, amusing read, republished by Dean Street Press, that I would recommend to anyone feeling the need for that kind of thing at the moment. At £2.99 the Kindle versions of these republished books are very reasonable and I have quite a collection now. 

I was going to say that that's me up to date but I've actually also just finished Nigel Slater's new book of memoir type essays, A Thousand Feasts, mainly about food, but I'll talk about that another time as this post is long enough. I'll just leave you with this bookish quote from him, which made me laugh:

 Annotations tell a story too. My aunt put a simple pencil tick in every Mills and Boon romance she borrowed from the library so she could spot those she'd read. An entire literary lifetime of stories of 'doctor falls in love with nurse'. I have a cookery book, picked up in a charming shop near Kew gardens, that is annotated by the previous owner. A recipe for 'Moist fruit cake' comes with the grumpy addition, 'No it isn't'.

I hope you're all well and finding as many good books to read as I am. :-)