Read The Last Days of Kira Mullan by Nicci French ★★★☆☆ 📚
Tricksy whodunit, lots going on. A long story even though I raced through it. Side trip to asylum, with very unpleasant staff. Plenty of detail & red herrings. Gaslighting, mental health& murder turn out to be a good holiday read.
Tag: ★★★
Read: Smoke and Whispers by Mick Herron ★★★☆☆
Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller★★★☆☆ 📚
Increasingly crazy survivalist father takes his 8 year old daughter to live in the German woods. Tells her it is the end of the world. Told from the girls POV with compulsive foreboding leading to a guessable horror on the last page.
Read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood ★★★☆☆ 📚
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.’
Sometimes uncomfortably gripping. A touch of The Secret History.
Read Why we Die by Mick Herron
Read: The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Heron ★★★ 📚
Effective Detective as you would expect. Maybe a bit too much physical action for me. Nice twist to end setting up further stories.
Read: Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin ★★★☆☆ 📚
I am reading more Rankin, not necessarily in the right order. This early Rebus is a wee bit different than the later versions. A nicely tangled plot woven across Edinburgh society from junkies to the higher reaches. Corruption all the way.
Read: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ★★★☆☆ 📚
Dystopia, prisoners fight to the death. Illuminating prisons & racism. Parallels with sport, advertising & reality TV. Quite a page turner, too much on weapons, technical details etc. great footnotes mix fact & fiction.
Read: Prophecy by S.J. Parris ★★★ 📚
Good fun trip to Elizabethan London.
Read: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler ★★★☆☆ 📚
Another Octavia E. Butler and again I felt it might be a young adult book. The slavery was a lot less horrific than say The Book of Night Women. The time travelling characters didn’t seem too put out by suddenly being pulled into the past. Still story jogged along.