Reviews 

I like Ellory, but he seems to be obsessed with the murder of teenage girls (see no.1054). This approaches the same issue from a...

I love this book, although the plot has its incoherences. A very lyrical bildungsroman, but peppered with a series of very gruesome...

Have read this before and it is brilliant. Starts with a murder, and then looks for the next 100 or so pages like a police-procedural,...

Have read this before, but tried to read it more seriously/critically, in view of the book group meeting later this week. Not really sure...

Subtitled ‘Anne Brontë and the Art of Life’, this is very good. Effectively an impressionistic biography of the Brontë family (who all...

Last read this 10 years ago and it remains brilliant. A Cuban ex-Mafia killer tricks the FBI or CIA into listening to his whole life...

I like Ricky Ellory, but this disappointed me. Felt very repetitive and structurally very similar to others; gruesome murder of women, a...

Never heard of the author; one of a series set in London during the blitz. Unclear why the central detective has to be an aristocrat...

Never heard of this guy, or read anything of his before. 1930’s upper class decadence and sexual depravity meets 1930’s intellectualised...

Remains, probably, my favourite book, but it is seriously long! (although lots of distractions over the last few weeks – cricket,...

Wanted a short book by George Eliot and there aren’t many, so went for this one. It is hard work – Marner is an opaque and rather...

This could have been called 'Gangs of New York', but I think someone else got there first. A long and at times hard work book. The...

I think he is quite patchy and this is not one of his best (which are very good). A fictionalisation of the Kennedy assassination in (I...

I think George Eliot is my favourite 19th century novelist. This is brilliant. I first read it as an A level set text probably nearly 50...

A library book of Paddy's – we think this may have shared the Booker Prize with the new Margret Atwood. Predominantly, it initially...

Never read this before and I thought it was really good. She writes clean, strong, prose and there were lots of bits of plot that are...

I think reading 714 in Malaga exercised my reading muscle and perhaps that was why I couldn’t be bothered with 715. I think, on the 3rd...

Ellory is possibly my 2nd favourite thriller writer, unlike Herron which has bits of the best of Dickens and Le Carre, Ellory is an...

Have read this before and am not entirely sure what to make of it. A bildungsroman (is that what they are called?), about a boy brought...

I have read this before with little memory of it, but would say it is the best of 2018 so far. Really clever plotting, looks like a...