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Jan 21, 20211 min read
843. Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club
Good, and very different, despite feeling slightly negative about the author as a clever dick TV quiz show presenter. Set in a retirement...
Jul 11, 20201 min read
798. Delia Owens - Where The Crawdads Sing
A thank you present for Paddy from Cristina next door, whose novel Paddy ‘proof read’ to anglicise the prose. (Cristina is Italian but...
May 18, 20201 min read
778. Kate Atkinson - Big Sky
I had read this before, but Paddy convinced me it was a new book, so I decided to buy and read it before finding it on my Kindle. It is...
May 1, 20201 min read
771. Ruth Rendell - Road Rage
These books are quite good, and a welcome change. This has a fairly complex plot, about protests against a by- pass, and a series of...
Mar 29, 20201 min read
760. Leonardo Padura - Havana Gold
Felt like trying one of these again. The central figure (the Count, Conde, he seems to go by various names) despite being a policeman in...
Dec 19, 20191 min read
736. Denise Mina - Garnethill
Have read this before, and it is a lot more fun than no 735. The family drama is very good, and both Maureen and Leslie are good, strong...
Dec 2, 20191 min read
733. Denise Mina - Conviction
Haven’t read any of her more recent books; this is quite unlike the (as I remember it) rather gritty working class realism of her early...
Nov 21, 20191 min read
731. Patrick Modiano - The Black Notebook
Heard about this guy on Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’. Apparently quite a well known writer, has written loads, Nobel Prize listed, but I, like...
Nov 13, 20191 min read
728. Tana French - The Likeness
This is a case of ‘make a really poor TV adaptation of a book (Dublin Murders BBC 1)’ and drive a reader back to the original book. This...
Oct 26, 20191 min read
725. Jessie Burton - The Confession
This was on the radio a few weeks ago and is her much heralded 3rd book. I found it hard work, and not frankly that good. The narrative...
Oct 4, 20191 min read
718. Ed McBain - Lullaby
I have enjoyed a couple of McBain’s recently, but not this one. The main plot (about the murder of both a baby and her child minder) was...
Sep 8, 20191 min read
713. Agatha Christie - The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd
Haven’t read any for many years but 707 sparked my interest. This is a good and really brilliantly plotted whodunit – if you haven’t read...
Aug 31, 20191 min read
707. Kate Weinberg - The Truants
This was far better and I devoured it far faster. A debut novel about kids at university and their beguiling lecturer Lorna, who teaches,...
Aug 30, 20191 min read
706. Mick Herron - Joe Country
I may not have been in the right mood, but thought this was one of his weaker books. Weak and slowly developed plot line and just not a...
Aug 10, 20191 min read
703. Liane Moriarty - Nine Perfect Strangers
One of Paddy’s – this pretty good. Sounds a bit Dorothy Sayers from the title and not that dissimilar in certain ways. Nine (perfect...
Jul 26, 20191 min read
699. Walter Mosley - Devil In A Blue Dress
I enjoyed this less and less as it progressed, and found the ending completely incomprehensible as the plot unravelled. It starts off...
Jul 22, 20191 min read
698. Ed McBain - Kings Ransom
Insomniac night after finishing 697, grabbed another short book from the (crime) bookshelf. Despite, I think, what people would say,...
Jul 20, 20191 min read
697. Julian Barnes - Before She Met Me
Needed something easy to read after the rigours of 696 so plucked this off the bookshelf. It is pretty low grade really – a tiresome...
Jul 12, 20191 min read
695. Louise Penny - Kingdom Of The Blind
These books are (becoming, for me) a bit repetitive. This (I think) is no.14 and I have missed 13, so bits of plot. The Three Pines...
Jul 7, 20191 min read
694. Kate Atkinson - Big Sky
The return of Jackson Brodie. This was good, but not as rich as some of the previous books; read a bit as if her agent or backers had...