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Nov 1, 20221 min read
1026. Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
Bought this as listed for the Booker prize (2016) and in the crime section at Waterstones. It is very good and I can understand the...
Jan 17, 20221 min read
934. Mary Paulson-Ellis - Emily Noble's Disgrace
This is very different, quite difficult and very good. A book about a boarding house in Portabello, Edinburgh, really throughout the 20th...
Sep 17, 20211 min read
895. James Robertson - News Of The Dead
Book of the year, so far. Beautifully written. About a single location – Glen Conach – in the Scottish highlands over several centuries....
May 21, 20211 min read
861. William Boyd - Love Is Blind
Local library now open again, post lockdown, so opportunity to try some books. This was very good – an almost 19th century novel written...
May 17, 20211 min read
860. Deborah Orr - Motherwell
Very good. Quite a difficult book about her childhood in Motherwell, written by a successful and now I think sadly dead journalist in her...
Nov 28, 20201 min read
830. Denise Mina - The Less Dead
I like Denise Mina, with her weird punk hair, and enjoyed her on the TV recently with Frank Skinner on Boswell & Johnson’s tour of...
Jul 29, 20191 min read
700. Lawrence Block - Even The Wicked
I like this writer and hadn’t read one for years, but picked one of which I had no memory, perhaps because it is not that good. Three...
May 16, 20191 min read
683. William McIlvanney - Strange Loyalties
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...
Feb 17, 20191 min read
660. Peter May - I'll Keep You Safe
This was well plotted but really it ran into melodrama. My memory of May’s earlier books is of dense plotting, linguistic challenges...
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...
Apr 1, 20181 min read
582. Kate Atkinson - Emotionally Weird
I have tried, I think, to read this before. It is quite a weird book, a slightly surreal campus novel set in Aberdeen or possibly Dundee...
Jan 2, 20181 min read
564. Shaun Bythell - The Diary Of A Bookseller
Dan gave this to Paddy for Xmas. The author is a 2nd hand bookseller in Wigtown, a small Scottish town in Galloway, not far from...
Sep 22, 20151 min read
339. Kate Atkinson - Emotionally Weird
Couldn’t get on with this at all, despite my enthusiasms above. Maybe I was just enjoying Madrid and Granada too much. Very much a...
Aug 21, 20151 min read
331. Ian Rankin - The Naming Of The Dead
Odd experience, as I expected this to be a re-read, but it must have sat, unread, on my book case for years. Siobhan’s parents have never...
Aug 21, 20141 min read
236. Peter May - Entry Island
Thriller with two parallel time lines; modern day Canada and the Highland land clearances in the mid 19th century. The two plot lines run...
Aug 12, 20141 min read
234. Ian Rankin - Saints Of The Shadow Bible
Our local library is I am sure struggling to survive, so I went in to give it a bit of support. Few decent books though! Anyway another...
Jul 17, 20141 min read
228. Ian Rankin - Set In Darkness
Very good – I have really enjoyed Ian Rankin over the last couple of years; odd because I never used to. Perhaps it was the alcohol. By...
Apr 14, 20141 min read
199. Peter May - The Chessmen
How nice to find a good writer I had never heard of on what I thought was a rather wasted trip (all 200 yards from the door) to the...
Jul 19, 20131 min read
128. Ian Rankin - Standing In Another Man's Grave
Haven’t read any Ian Rankin for ages, but revisited the library on a sunny day and found that Rebus had been resurrected. I am not...
Jan 1, 20131 min read
69. John Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps
Inspired by the chase around Scotland in no.68 ( and struggling a bit with no.70) I Kindled this for nothing. Never read it or any other...