Reviews 

Insomniac night after finishing 697, grabbed another short book from the (crime) bookshelf. Despite, I think, what people would say,...

A book whose provenance I don’t know; must have been my father’s if the marginal jottings are in his handwriting. Not unlike a Rebus...

The only one we had in the house; I had read before but had no memory of it, perhaps a bad omen. I felt quite cheated by this; an...

This was a good, big and difficult book. The basic plot premise is that a man buys a humanoid type machine, I believe for £85k. He and...

This was as good as the other 2 (665 & 666 above), and despite my negative comments about e-reading above, you can buy these without...

McBain is a very good writer and I have lots of his books on the bookcase, which I haven’t read for years. I have wasted a lot of money...

Mc Bain is undoubtedly a clever writer and the general ‘police procedurals’ summary masks this. Here we have a play within a play within...

Well, close on the title. Very much the successor to 663 (which I think you would have to have read first) but, for me, less compelling....

I loved this – book of the year so far. It began with her parachute drop into France in 1942 or 3, and then bounced back into her...

A midnight flit downstairs to find a book having finished 663 at 83% on the kindle; an annoying habit of the modern publishing industry...

This was very good; neither Paddy nor I had read it before, but it is a rattlingly good plot with bits of Jane Eyre influence. A gauche...

This was well plotted but really it ran into melodrama. My memory of May’s earlier books is of dense plotting, linguistic challenges...

This is a strange book. A girl disappears in a small village, and one assume abductions, or worse. The style of the book is to ‘hover...

Mankell’s last book, completed I think not long before he died. Unsurprisingly, quite a gloomy book, about an elderly retired doctor...

Another of P’s from the library. Totally different from 506 - if that was a quasi 18th century novel about society, this was very 20th...

The 6th DS McAvoy book. This one was certainly different; set not in Hull but New York, and with a splenetic plot involving the Mafia,...

The 5th Aector McAvoy book, and although I think flagged by Richard & July, I thought the weakest. Otherwise as 494!. Get this on Amazon

The 4th book. As 493 above! Get this on Amazon

The 3rd Aector McAvoy novel. On holiday so I didn’t write up book notes every time I finished a book, so I can’t remember much of the...

Did indeed! This guy is very good, and these are high class police procedurals, with a good variety of police colleagues of McAvoy, who...