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.