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Feb 7, 20191 min read
656. Ian Rankin - Strip Jack
An early (I think) Rebus novel, pre Siobhan Clarke and Cafferty. This is pretty good - about an up and coming (married) politician caught...
Mar 15, 20181 min read
577. Jake Arnott - The Fatal Tree
A virtuoso feat of writing, but maybe not much else? Set in 18th century London, written in an (I assume) genuine working class London...
Oct 29, 20161 min read
440 - John Burdett - Bangkok Tattoo
Never hear of this guy, but found him on a ‘Best Crime Thriller’ website. Opaque, at least to me; an English lawyer, he has written a...
Jun 15, 20161 min read
314. Émile Zola - Claude's Confession
Zola’s first published novel, a bildungsroman about a young man who shares a garret in Paris with a working girl, and cannot decide...
Nov 27, 20151 min read
357. Émile Zola - Nana
Didn’t plan to read another Zola, but finished no.356 unexpectedly in bed and needed something else to read. Zola is a terribly prolix...
Sep 15, 20151 min read
337. Kate Atkinson - Started Early, Took My Dog
The last (I think) of the Brodie books. I found this the least enjoyable. It was somehow too dense and lacked the lightness of touch of...
Jun 15, 20151 min read
313. Natsuo Kirino - Grotesque
Misleadingly packaged as a thriller (which it isn’t) this is the strangest book I've read on holiday. A very weird Japanese novel about...
Jul 11, 20141 min read
227. William Faulkner - Sanctuary
Found the plot very hard to follow, but probably no more so the ‘The Sound and the Fury' (no.220), although that was billed as difficult....
Jul 5, 20131 min read
125. Gunnar Staalesen - The Writing On The Wall
A bit of Scandinavian crime pushed in the UK heavily a couple of years ago following the Wallander boom. OK-ish as a story, middle-class...
Apr 5, 20131 min read
95. Graham Greene - The Honorary Consul
Despite my mixed response to Greene in this text, I found this one, bent and out of shape from having been read and it appears dropped in...
Feb 12, 20131 min read
78. Arnaldur Indridason - Voices
Much better than no.76, more like no.75. This guy is quite good; original plotting, three quite interesting cops, especially Erlendur,...