A Bunch of Minis…
As regular visitors will know I’ve been complaining about a reviewing backlog for ages, and threatening to take drastic action to clear it. So here goes – five rocket-speed judgements on books that I read months ago and didn’t take adequate notes of at the time. Buckle up – we’re about to break the sound barrier!
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Hunting Time (Colter Shaw 4) by Jeffery Deaver
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Colter Shaw is the son of a survivalist, and uses the skills he was taught in childhood as a bounty hunter, tracking missing people for rewards. In this case he is tracking a scientist who has gone on the run with her young daughter, fleeing from her violent ex-husband who has just been released from prison. But of course there’s more to it than that, as Colter realises when he discovers a couple of hit-men are on the trail too…
This started out as a trilogy with an underlying story arc that was resolved in book 3. I’m glad he’s brought Colter back for a fourth outing, and without the background story this one stands alone, and is even more fast-paced since it has only one storyline to contend with. An excellent thriller.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, HarperCollins via NetGalley.
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The Rasp (Colonel Gethryn 1) by Philip MacDonald
😀 😀 😀 😀
I enjoyed this a lot when I read it, but it has faded almost entirely from my mind now, so here’s how Goodreads describes it:
A victim is bludgeoned to death with a woodworker’s rasp in this first case for the famed gentleman detective Anthony Gethryn. Ex-Secret Service agent Anthony Gethryn is killing time working for a newspaper when he is sent to cover the murder of Cabinet minister John Hoode, bludgeoned to death in his country home with a wood-rasp. Gethryn is convinced that the prime suspect, Hoode’s secretary Alan Deacon, is innocent, but to prove it he must convince the police that not everyone else has a cast-iron alibi for the time of the murder.
What stands out in my mind is the fun characterisation of Gethryn and his two friends and colleagues, a newspaper publisher and his secretary. The secretary especially is more fun than a lot of the female characters of male Golden Age authors. This is one for my Murder, Mystery, Mayhem challenge, so I regret not giving it a proper review. Oh well!
Challenge details:
Book: 20
Subject Heading: The Great Detectives
Publication Year: 1924
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Barchester Towers (Barchester Chronicles 2)
by Anthony Trollope
😀 😀 😀 😀 🙂
Back in the cathedral city of Barchester for this one, which tells of the tension between those who wish to reform the church for a modern age and those who want to stick to the old traditions. Full of wonderful characters – Mr Slope is as slimy as Uriah Heep though not as evil, and Mrs Proudie is the entertainingly domineering power behind the henpecked new Bishop’s throne. It continues the story from The Warden of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor. It answers the question of how to write a second book when you’ve married off your heroine at the end of book 1 – simple! Have Husband #1 die of a sudden illness, wait a few months and put poor Eleanor back on the marriage market! I loved this, though not quite as much as The Warden. In this one Trollope spreads his wings, covers more characters and more subjects and as a result the book sprawls a bit and doesn’t have the same tight focus. It does have some great social commentary and some wonderful set-piece comic scenes though! Timothy West’s narration is a delight!
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Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Again, I loved this and am kicking myself that I didn’t make notes! It sometimes happens that I’m enjoying a book so much I forget to pause! The blurb puts the plot succinctly: “Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel travel across Iceland, and then down through an extinct crater toward a sunless sea where they enter a living past and are confronted with the origins of man.” A great adventure story and I may well re-read it in the future, so maybe it will get a proper review some day!
This one was on my Classics Club list, but since I’m not reviewing it I’m going to replace it with another science fiction classic – City by Clifford D. Simak
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Good Morning, Midnight (Dalziel and Pascoe 21)
by Reginald Hill
😀 😀 😀 😀
When Pal McIver commits suicide in a particularly elaborate way, it mirrors exactly the death of his father some ten years earlier. But were both deaths suicide? Or was one or the other – or both – murder? Dalziel had been involved in the earlier investigation but not Pascoe, and now Pascoe finds that Dalziel seems to be obstructing the investigation into the second, possibly because of his friendship (or is it more?) with the enigmatic Kay Kafka, wife of the elder Pal and (wicked?) stepmother of the younger.
One of his more convoluted plots that touches on the big news story of the time – the war in Iraq – and involves some murky spy stuff of both the American and the British kind. Not one of my favourites, although as always with Hill, there’s much to enjoy in the interaction between the regulars, and there are some excellent one-off characters like the aforementioned Kay. I’ve read it at least three times now and the plot doesn’t seem to stay in my mind – too much going on in it, I think! Enjoyable, though, and moves Hat’s story on from the previous two books.
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Phew! If you made it to the end, well done! All these books deserve better and all are recommended. And now they’re all off my list and my conscience – hurrah!
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