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| 1803781920
| 9781803781921
| B0CYM7JBZ4
| 4.38
| 53
| unknown
| Jun 25, 2024
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I was hooked by the premise of this story. I still am. I love the idea of LAPD homicide detectives having to get their heads around the existence of d
I was hooked by the premise of this story. I still am. I love the idea of LAPD homicide detectives having to get their heads around the existence of demons. Unfortunately, by the end of the twelth chapter, 22% through the book, I was still at the point where the two newly partnered detectives were scratching their heads and asking, "Do you think there's something odd about a murder where someone gets their head ripped off but has no other injuries?" Well, duh! So far, apart from an offstage growl in the first, slightly cheesy chapter, there hasn't been a demon in sight. What there has been is a slow, sometimes painfully slow, set up on the backgrounds of both of the detectives and how they came to work together. That might have been fine with if there'd been a little more foreshadowing of the woo woo stuff and if the chapters had been better written. Overall, I thought the story had potential. Some of the banter/verbal aggression between the cops works well. I liked the grim but believable dark humour. The pace felt so slow that if I'd been watching a movie I'd have fast-forwarded to the interesting stuff. The main reason I'm setting this aside is that the style of writing doesn't work for me. The characters all sound the same when they talk. The prose is utilitarian but not sparse. It gets the job done but it sounds like a student padding a report with bigger words to give it more authority. It made me sigh when it should have made me shiver and it wasn't holding my attention. If it the story gets made into a movie, I'd watch it. If someone edits it down to a short story, I'd give it a try. I just can't make it through 347 pages of this style of writing. ...more |
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1
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Jun 27, 2024
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Jun 28, 2024
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Jun 25, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250332575
| 9781250332578
| unknown
| 3.29
| 6,745
| Feb 06, 2024
| Feb 06, 2024
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Abandoned at 33% I had high hopes for 'Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead'. I loved the gothic sound of the title. It spoke to me of irredeemable sin Abandoned at 33% I had high hopes for 'Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead'. I loved the gothic sound of the title. It spoke to me of irredeemable sin and deep guilt. I liked the idea of the story being told through the eyes of a Brit making her living on the US East Coast because it offered so much scope for cultural dissonance, especially when the English-middle-class-girl-made-good is engaged to a New-York-one-per-center. I also liked that this debut novel drew on the experience of the author, at least in terms of settings, so, in addition to a good plot and a lot of tension, I was hoping for relatable characters, an insider view of both the work and academic environments and a strong sense of place. I actually got everything that I hoped for. The main character, Charlotte (Charlie) Colbert is riven by guilt. The level of disdain that Charlie's soon-to-be mother-in-law feels for Charlie could freeze the planet and the novel delivers an insider's view and a strong sense of place. So why did I set this novel aside at 33%? I was overwhelmed by Charlie's anxiety. The story is told as a first-person account from Charlie's point of view, albeit with a dual 'Now' and 'Then' timeline. Being inside Charlotte's head was stressful. Her anxiety was constant. I could see that I was supposed to empathise with Charlie and feel sorrow for the way that anxiety was crippling her but that wasn't how I felt. I didn't like Charlie. She saw her new, 'Now', life as something that she's earned through hard work and she feels aggrieved (although not surprised) that the life she's created is being put at risk by a lie she told a decade earlier. The problem I had was that her 'Now' life seemed to me to be an invention, a comforting pretence designed to distract her from the harm her lies did a decade earlier. Of course, I don't need to like the main character of a story to enjoy a book but I do need to be able to live in her head if she's the one telling the story. I found that I couldn't do that. 'Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead' was an intense well-told story but it was too unremitting for me and there was nothing to compensate me for putting up with the stress. I didn't like Charlie and, by the time I was a third of the way through the book and still had nothing but vague hints about who did what to whom and why in the notorious 'Scarlet Christmas' that is the source of Charlie's guilt, I found I didn't care enough to hang around and find out. What I wanted more than anyhing else was to get Charlie's anxious, self-deceiving, guilty voice out of my head. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the things that led me to abandon this book are exactly the things that will make it irresistible to fans of psychological thrillers. Take a listen to the audiobook except below and make your own mind up. https://soundcloud.com/macaudio-2/eve... ...more |
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1
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May 03, 2024
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May 10, 2024
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Apr 26, 2024
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Audiobook
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| 9781773059938
| 3.59
| 720
| Apr 19, 2022
| Apr 19, 2022
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None
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1
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May 07, 2024
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May 20, 2024
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Apr 23, 2024
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Audiobook
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| B004GNFMLO
| 3.34
| 780
| Dec 01, 2010
| Dec 17, 2010
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'Smallworld' is original, fast-paced and brimming with chaotic energy. It's funny not in a laugh-out-loud way but in an "Oh look - satire - how drole!
'Smallworld' is original, fast-paced and brimming with chaotic energy. It's funny not in a laugh-out-loud way but in an "Oh look - satire - how drole!" kind of way. It creates an absurd but almost plausible small (tiny) world and populates it with and extended family of Cult survivors, an intelligent and lethal Made Thing that looks like a devil and an Anchorite who seems to have been an interstellar dictator before he became a hermit. Oh, and goats. Lots of goats. And an ass. The small world then gets visited by various people who either do bizarre and violent things or have bizarre and violent things done to them or both. At first, I was stunned into silence by the energy and originality of the story. Then I began to smile at how clever it was. Then, not very long after that, I became bored. There was nothing for me to engage with. None of these people felt real. The ideas were bright as fireworks but how long can you watch a firework display and keep going "Oooh!" and "Aaah!" with any sincerity? I knew I couldn't manage 385 pages of "My but this satire is as dry as bone, isn't it?" so I'm setting it aside at the 18% mark. ...more |
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1
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Apr 07, 2024
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Apr 13, 2024
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Apr 07, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B0BSVGW5DC
| unknown
| 4.38
| 1,968
| Aug 03, 2023
| Aug 03, 2023
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Abandoned at 25%. I love the idea behind this book: misanthrope whose murder has been disguised as a suicide hangs around as a ghost seeking vengeance Abandoned at 25%. I love the idea behind this book: misanthrope whose murder has been disguised as a suicide hangs around as a ghost seeking vengeance that she can only achieve by talking to the one woman who can see and hear her, a neighbour she has always disliked. I think this would make great television. The novel has lots of funny lines and the scenario is fresh and full of possiblities. So why did I abandon this at 25%? I think my mistake was in taking the audiobook version. It's narrated by the author. I think engaging a professional narrator would have been a better choice. Maz Evans reads with gusto but she gabbles at times and constantly rushes the text rather than let it settle. She also doesn't differentiate the voices of the two main characters as well as I would expect a professional narrator to. Maybe it was the narration but it seemed to me that the story had no variation in pace or in the type of humour. I don't think that stand-up vitriol can be sustained across an entire novel. This is a debut adult novel from a successful children's author. Maybe I needed to stick with the book for longer to discover its strengths. Maybe I should have just swapped to the ebook version. These days, I seem to have less and less patience with maybes. ...more |
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1
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Mar 15, 2024
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Mar 16, 2024
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Mar 16, 2024
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Audible Audio
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| 1662511299
| 9781662511295
| B0C34DZ5PZ
| 4.27
| 2,032
| Mar 01, 2024
| Apr 01, 2024
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I think a lot of people will like this book and follow the series but it's not for me. 'A Long Time Dead' has a good plot populated by lots of interest I think a lot of people will like this book and follow the series but it's not for me. 'A Long Time Dead' has a good plot populated by lots of interesting and believable women. The exposition was smooth, with information being disclosed not just by following DI Holler and her team but through what I learned following other characters. I liked the way this invited me to put the pieces together for myself and sometimes gave me the feeling that I was ahead of Holler and her team. I also liked that the police are shown as competent and collaborative, avoiding the cliché of the lone Detective working hard and still getting grief from their less-than-competent boss. The police procedures and the atmosphere in the team felt real to me. I liked that most of the people who move the plot forward are women and that the women are very different from one another. The story is set in Liverpool but I didn't feel any strong connection to the place or its people. The place names were right but other than that, this could have been in Manchester. The writing is light and confident.The individual scenes, like the first killing and the one with the grave digger, are vivid, dramatic and memorable. So why have I set it aside at 20%? My problem was that I felt I was getting a camera-eye view of the events and the characters that never took me beneath the surface to deal with things a camera wouldn't catch. I know that this style works well for many people. It reminds me of some of Ann Cleeves' novels and, like those novels, I'd be happy to watch this as a TV programme but I wasn't getting enough traction to keep me engaged with it as a novel. ...more |
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1
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Mar 20, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 04, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| unknown
| 4.03
| 6,270
| 1990
| unknown
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I was so impressed when I re-read the first Falco book, 'The Silver Pigs', that I decided to re-read the next book in the series, 'Shadows In Bronze'
I was so impressed when I re-read the first Falco book, 'The Silver Pigs', that I decided to re-read the next book in the series, 'Shadows In Bronze' immediately. I'd read the book before, thirtyish years ago, but, unlike 'The Silver Pigs' I couldn't remember any of the details. In retrospect, I should have taken that as a warning. I dived in with enthusiasm and enjoyed the opening scenes, which were vivid and crisp and full of action. My only frustration was that Gordon Griffin had been chosen as the narrator. He's a good narrator but, to me, he seemed too old and too officer-class to voice Falco. I much preferred Christian Rodska who gave Falco a finely judged working-class swagger tinged with humour. The book started to flag pretty much as soon as Falco left Rome. It's hard to describe someone spending nine days hanging around a temple with only a goat for company and still keep things interesting. Falco briefly returned to Rome, although nothing much happened there and then headed out, slowly, to Naples, using his friend Petro and his family as cover. Again, nothing much happened. By now I was four and a half hours into a fifteen-hour audiobook and I realised that I was bored and disappointed The plot and the people were meandering. There was a large cast of characters but I didn't get to know much about any of them. There was no tension at all, even though Falco is being hunted by a killer and has placed Petro's family in the firing line. Helena Justina barely appears in the first third of the book and her absence left a hole that Falco and his goat couldn't fill. Falco's humour runs thin when he spends so much time alone. It didn't help that Gordon Griffith didn't seem to be able to make the humour work very well. At 466 pages, 'Shadows In Bronze' is over 30% longer than 'The Silver Pigs' and the story seems to have spread out to fill the available space. I think it would have benefitted from being edited down by a hundred pages or so. I decided to set the book aside. I'll give it a few weeks and then try again with 'Venus In Copper', it's set in Rome and is only 366 pages, so I have hopes of a return to form. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 06, 2024
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Mar 10, 2024
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Mar 03, 2024
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Audiobook
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| B0CKTQ2GNV
| 3.91
| 2,125
| Oct 24, 2023
| Oct 24, 2023
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I can't remember the last time I set a book aside at the five per cent mark. I've listened to the (short) prologue, one point of view from the ex-wife
I can't remember the last time I set a book aside at the five per cent mark. I've listened to the (short) prologue, one point of view from the ex-wife and one point of view from the new wife and that's enough to let me know that this book isn't for me. I already know that I'm not going to empathise with either woman but that's not why I'm setting the novel aside. It's the writing that's getting to me. The interior monologues from the women sound not like a person's thought but like position papers summarising their respective histories and the expectations and concerns about the upcoming weekend. I don't feel that I've met the characters. I feel like I've been given a briefing on who they are so that I can play a murder mystery game. The audiobook gives each woman a narrator, which is just as well as their language and speech patterns are so close that I wouldn't have known who was speaking. Then there are small annoyances like have the phrase 'the oncoming snow' repeated often enough for me to notice it in such a short piece of text. I know I'm just going to get more critical of the prose as the book goes on and that I won't be able to sit back and pretend I'm playing Cluedo, so I'm setting this aside and counting it as a buying error on my part. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 19, 2024
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Apr 19, 2024
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Mar 01, 2024
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Audible Audio
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| 1668635372
| 9781668635377
| unknown
| 4.07
| 13,953
| Jan 08, 2024
| Jan 08, 2024
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did not like it
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I'm setting this aside at 39%. My disappointment is starting to mutate into a level of annoyance that's preventing me from engaging with the book. I'm
I'm setting this aside at 39%. My disappointment is starting to mutate into a level of annoyance that's preventing me from engaging with the book. I'm not willing to spend another five hours on it. I knew 'Holmes, Margaret and Poe' was a bit of a gamble but I bought the book because I liked the concept. If it worked, it would give me a whole new series to follow and if it turned out to be a graphic novel in prose, well, it might still be a smile. As it turned out, I'm not smiling. I wouldn't finish a graphic novel with this quality of storytelling. The book was disappointing from the start. The writing had a bare-bones, first-draft feel. It did just enough to carry the plot but not enough to stimulate my imagination. The characterisation was minimal and simplistic. The signs of wealth and sophistication were juvenile and unconvincing. I started to lose sympathy with the story when I was told that the sophisticated, handsome, charismatic Poe dressed hid bed with black silk sheets (how 1970s teen boy fantasy is that?) and that the woman who has woken up in his bed is impressed by Poe's expertise in pressing and pouring coffee from a French Press. How does that count as expertise and why would a woman who is a prominent lawyer in New York be impressed by it? Then there was the inconsistent image I got of Marple. Other characters assess Marple as young and attractive but she describes herself as 'an old lady in the corner'. What was that about? The plot initially had a breathless pace and a level of implausibility that reminded me of an early episode of 'Scorpion'. I almost set the book aside then. I stuck with it because the plot branched off into multiple cases simultaneously and I hoped to get hooked by the mysteries. I was also curious about who these three people really were and how they'd come to be working together. I was encouraged when the client in one case was an obnoxious, narcissistic, billionaire with no taste (imagine that). I liked that Marple assessed him as 'disgust at first sight'. The billionaire never became anything more than a lazily drawn stereotype. The increasingly caustic encounters between him and the team served mostly to make the team look like cocky juveniles. It seemed to me that the storytelling wasn't able to support simultaneous mysteries being investigated. The narrative felt thin and chaotic. The characters of Holmes, Marple and Poe did develop a little but not enough to make them interesting. Individually and collectively they felt like plot devices rather than people. Then I started to notice how the women in the book were always described as if through eyes of a hormonal teenage boy. Nope, I wasn't smiling any more. I no longer cared what the backstory was. I felt as though I'd been sold characters who didn't live up to the expectations set by their names. After a little over three hours, this was a book that I was glad to set aside. Probably the best part of the book was the narration. I liked the use of multiple narrators, I'd have liked it more if the narrator playing Marple had voiced all of Marple's dialogue. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample. https://soundcloud.com/penguin-books/... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 16, 2024
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Feb 17, 2024
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Feb 06, 2024
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Audiobook
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| 1662507593
| 9781662507595
| B0C958T71V
| 3.70
| 17,243
| Feb 06, 2024
| Feb 01, 2024
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I enjoyed Amina Akhtar's 'Kismet', a clever, witty gothic thriller that kept me turning the pages, so I was keen to try 'Almost Surely Dead', especial
I enjoyed Amina Akhtar's 'Kismet', a clever, witty gothic thriller that kept me turning the pages, so I was keen to try 'Almost Surely Dead', especially as it was described as a psychological thriller with some supernatural elements. The opening scene, which was an attempt on the life of the main character, Dunia Ahmed, was beautifully done: immediately immersive, exciting, tense and intriguing. If this opening had been a series pilot, I'd have signed up to binge-watch the next three episodes immediately. I liked the interweaving of the story of five-year-old Dunia with the Dunia in her thirties timeline. The 'voice' given to young Dunia was engaging and the events, filtered through the perceptions of a child, were intriguing. Initially, I thought the addition of a present-day podcast taking a retrospective view of the events being described in the older Dunia story was a good way of increasing the tension by planting doubt and foreshadowing. Personally, I dislike true crime podcasts and this podcasting pair reminded of all the reasons I don't listen to them. For the first third of the book, things were going reasonably well. There'd been a second attempt on Dunia's life, she was surrounded by people who were hard to trust and everything I learned about her childhood suggested that I'd be bumping into the supernatural or at least the very strange, pretty soon. By the halfway mark, things were going less well. For me, the tension dissipated. I should have been turning pages more eagerly than I was. Partly, that was because I wasn't invested in the grown-up version of Dunia. There didn't seem to be much about her to hold onto. She was passive, dependent and insecure. That matched well with her backstory but it didn't make me cheer her on. Shortly before I abandoned the book, Dunia was taking self-defence classes and telling herself she was a survivor, not a victim. But I didn't believe her. Maybe, in the second half of the book, she comes into her power and takes control of her life but I wasn't sure that I'd believe that either. The podcast also started to irritate me. To me, it felt like a tease that was interrupting the story and slowing it down. The effect on me was to lower the tension in the story. I hesitated to set the book aside when I had less than half of it to go. I'd have liked to have found out if was right in my guesses about what was going on and who the bad guys were but I found that I didn't care enough about what happened to Dunia to stick around and find out. This is a book with a lot of potential and your reading experience may be different than mine. If you read it and enjoy it, please share your thoughts here or send me a link to your review. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2024
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Feb 10, 2024
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Jan 04, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1409197239
| 9781409197232
| 1409197239
| 3.82
| 368
| unknown
| Jul 08, 2021
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2024
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May 20, 2024
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Dec 22, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B09FN1SDN4
| unknown
| 3.83
| 5,738
| Oct 26, 2021
| Oct 26, 2021
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 12, 2023
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Nov 12, 2023
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Oct 31, 2023
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Audible Audio
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| B08QJHD97F
| 3.84
| 103,256
| Aug 03, 2021
| Aug 03, 2021
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It's a tribute to Ashley Winston's storytelling ability that it's taken me to the halfway mark to decide to set this novel aside. The characters are we It's a tribute to Ashley Winston's storytelling ability that it's taken me to the halfway mark to decide to set this novel aside. The characters are well-drawn. The plot has enough twists to propel the story forward and keep the curiosity engaged. The way the two timelines (Now and Then) are spliced together keeps the Now dominant and lets the Then be endlessly unexpected. Some of the scenes are dramatic in a very cinematic way, like the scene in the Frat House basement. So why am I setting the novel aside halfway through? Because the people are execrable and I don't want to spend any more time with them. My curiosity is still engaged. I don't know who the murderer is. I have a suspicion, which is probably wrong, but if the price of knowing the answer is to spend another 160+ pages with these folks contaminating my imagination, then it's too high. Given that I also set aside 'Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead', I'm starting to wonder if I'm not cut out for Dark Academia novels. So why did I make it so far through the book? I liked the start of the book. The the-gang-meets-for-the-first-time scene, set on the campus lawn, was very nicely done with everyone introduced smoothly, clearly and plausibly. Ashley WInstead captured the dynamic of a nostalgia-in-the-making-fantasy being constructed realtime, fed by a deep longing and absorbed eagerly like rain after a drought. It was an act of collaborative self-deception that she made seem both beautiful and doomed and which filled me with hope for the book. By the time I was a third of the way through, I was ready to set the book aside. I had no sympathy for the main character's mania for being seen as successful by the shallow, entitled rich frat boys and sorority girls at the we-exist-to-perpetuate-privilege school she went to. I couldn't bring myself to care about them or their secrets. I was ready to leave. Then Ashley WInstead cranked up the plot and darkened the atmostphere and my attention snapped back. We'd left the glittering party behind and were in the grotty basement of a Frat House and the brother of the girl who was murdered ten years is saying that he has evidence that one of the golden group gathered to celebrate how successful they all are, is the murderer. My curiosity rose on its hindlegs and demanded that I stick around for a while. Even as the twists and turns of the plot leashed my curiosity and dragged me along, my dislike for the main character continued to grow. She's shallow, malicious, mendacious and callous. And yet… I can see why she's those things. She can see why she's those things. Yet she can't stop. Or she tells herself she can't. That's compelling and repulsive at the same time. The people around her seemed just as bad and just as lost and yet I could muster no sympathy for them. It seemed to me that Ashley Winstead was leading me on an exploration of sin as it was defined in my Catholic education: actions, omissions and thoughts that destroy grace, erode goodness, and kill the soul. At the halfway mark, after more secrets had been revealed and more suspects implicated and the main character had come up with a new plan that was likely to power the next act of the story, I realised that I had a decision to make: should I see where the new plan took me or should I leave these people behind? I decided to leave these unhappy eroded souls behind and read something else. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 29, 2024
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Jun 14, 2024
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Oct 28, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1547611545
| 9781547611546
| 1547611545
| 3.60
| 16,987
| Jun 20, 2023
| Jun 20, 2023
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I picked this up because I loved the cover, the title and the concept. The opening was strong: dramatic, surprising and fun and I figured that I'd set
I picked this up because I loved the cover, the title and the concept. The opening was strong: dramatic, surprising and fun and I figured that I'd settle in for a fun, fast tripe-twisting read. And that's what it felt like for the first third of the book. The scene was painted with deft economy. The humour and the dialogue worked. I loved that one of the characters kept quoting "The Rules Of Horror", lore culled from decades of Horror Movies, qw q guide to what to do and not do as things got more and more weird. I started to lose interest about the halfway mark. The initial trigger was that the pace of the story slowed down. It was nothing terrible and was It mostly done to accommodate the arrival of fresh characters and to set up the new situation Charity faces when her boss gives her new instructions. Unfortunately, the reduction in pace highlighted just how plot-driven the story was. When the plot stalled, everything stalled. I noticed that there was no character development going on. Charity grabbed my attention from the first page. She was easy to like. Yet, halfway through the book, I knew very little about her and had only a surface view of what she was feeling. About the same time, I started to struggle with Charity's reactions. Charity comes across as smart and quick thinking so I found it hard to accept that it never even occurred to her that some of her team may have gone missing rather than having simply left with no notice. The use of the present tense didn't help. It was fine at the start of the book when there was a lot going in. It pulled me into the story quickly and gave the action a sense of immediacy, but it's hard to sustain and it gives a very limited view of what's going on. I realised that I was starting to skim and that the book had become too Scooby Doo for me, albeit with an updated and more inclusive cast of characters, I know that I wasn't the target demographic for this book when I started it but I'd hoped to be carried through by its exuberance. It almost worked but I'd rather set the book aside than skim it. ...more |
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1
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Oct 21, 2023
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Nov 18, 2023
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Oct 02, 2023
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0593645839
| 9780593645833
| 0593645839
| 3.92
| 5,371
| May 30, 2023
| May 30, 2023
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The Agatha's' was one of my best reads of 2023 so I pre-ordered the sequel, 'The Night In Question' in the hopes of continuing the experience that I g
The Agatha's' was one of my best reads of 2023 so I pre-ordered the sequel, 'The Night In Question' in the hopes of continuing the experience that I got from reading the first book. By the time I was twenty-five per cent through the book, I realised that I wasn't going to get the exceptional read that I was looking for. The writing and the narration are still good. As before, the carefully crafted differentiation between the voices, thought processes and expectations of Iris and Alice make the book richer. So why did I set it aside? The basic premise of the book didn't grab me. Maybe it's just me but the whole spooky castle from which a 1940s movie star fell to her death felt too contrived. It put me at a distance from the young people in the present-day timeline. I also bumped into the typical second-book problems: not enough was new and what was familiar had changed into something less exciting. In the first book, the relationship between Alice and Iris was emerging and was often at risk. In this book they're friends, (well mostly) and that took the edge off things. I also didn't like that the idiot detective from the first book remains as stupid and intractable as ever. For me, this turned him into a comic book character. Perhaps I've become a less patient reader this year, standing as I am in the shadow of a mountain of books that I want to read but while I'm sure that if I'd finished the book I'd have been giving it a 'perfectly satisfactory' three-star rating, I didn't want to spend the hours it was going to take to get there. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 13, 2024
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Aug 11, 2023
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Hardcover
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| B07Z435W8C
| unknown
| 3.66
| 2,097
| Sep 17, 2018
| Oct 17, 2019
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I bought 'Little Siberia' (2018) with great enthusiasm after having enjoyed Antti Tuomainen's previous dark comedy, 'Palm Beach Finland' (2017). To my I bought 'Little Siberia' (2018) with great enthusiasm after having enjoyed Antti Tuomainen's previous dark comedy, 'Palm Beach Finland' (2017). To my surprise, I'm setting it aside at the 29% mark because the book is going to places that I don't want to visit and I'm increasingly feeling like a passenger who has gotten on the wrong train. I was expecting dark, quirky, distinctly Finnish humour. That may be exactly what I got but if it is, then the 'Finnish humour' has flown over my head. 'Little Siberia' strikes me as more angry than funny. It's definitely quirky but in a way that feels pathological rather than amusing. The main character is a Pastor but he's very far from a serene man of God bringing peace and hope to his community. He's a man consumed by jealousy and doubt who is giving way to rage and violence. Given what has been done to him, I can see what pushed him into these reactions but that doesn't mean I have any sympathy with him. The story is told mostly from within the Pastor's head, showing me how he flips from rationalising and justifying his reactions, to being consumed by them, to knowing that what he is doing is wrong but that he's going to do it anyway. The storyi is well told. It's dark and quirky and distinctively Finnish but I have the sense that I failing to connect with an important part of the book, that there's a nuance that I'm missing, so I'm watching a 3D movie without the glasses that would let me see what the director intended. I'm sure the problem is my expectations rather than the attributes of the book but I'm setting it aside anyway. I'm not done with Antti Tuomainen. I'm planning on reading 'The Rabbit Factor' (2020), the first book in his trilogy, next year. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 22, 2023
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Nov 22, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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Audible Audio
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| 0751564893
| B072JHBT4V
| 3.81
| 39,701
| Mar 08, 2018
| Mar 08, 2018
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 30, 2024
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Jul 05, 2024
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Jun 24, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B07D2BYD53
| 3.89
| 1,709
| Jun 15, 2015
| Apr 23, 2019
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I picked up 'The Missing Corpse' to read while I spent a few days in Brittany. It was my first visit with Commissaire Dupin and it will be my last. I
I picked up 'The Missing Corpse' to read while I spent a few days in Brittany. It was my first visit with Commissaire Dupin and it will be my last. I found myself having the same reaction to this book that I was having to the endless offers of Moules, Oysters, Shrimps and other 'fruits of the sea' that the local restaurants present me with: I can see that people love them but they're not to my taste. The 'Brittany Mystery Series' is sold as a cosy crime series featuring an eccentric Commissaire and has plots that make full use of the Breton culture. I can see that 'The Missing Corpse' delivers on all of those promises but it does it in a way that doesn't work for me. The cosy part works. At the 40% mark where I abandoned the book, two men have been murdered, one of them very violently (the corpse of the other man was still missing when I stopped reading, so I don't know how he died.) but the violence all happened off stage and there is no emotional investment in either of the dead men. Their deaths and the disappearance of one of the corpses are simply elements of an intriguing puzzle that Commissaire Dupin has to solve. Much of the success of the novel depends on how the reader feels about Commissaire Dupin. If you can see him as an eccentric but passionate and intuitive man with a talent for unearthing the truth, then this book would probably work for you. Unfortunately, I see him as an annoying, undisciplined, emotionally erratic man who follows no methodology, makes very inefficient use of the teams working for him and solves cases by blundering around until he bumps into the solution. I can see he's meant to be charming, maybe even amusing and I know I shouldn't be grinding my teeth as he wanders around aimlessly following his instincts rather than the evidence. I don't dislike the man. He's well-intentioned. He's loyal to his people. He's endlessly curious, He's also very tiring to spend any time with. The novel delivered a lot of information about Brittany and Breton culture. I found some of it quite interesting, especially as I'm in the middle of this culture at the moment. The style in which this information was delivered didn't work for me. Dupin romanticises Bretons the way some American film directors romanticise the Irish. To me, it feels patronising. Dupin is not a Breton but the members of his team are. He draws on their knowledge of the local culture and history but at the same time is amused by their passions and disdains their beliefs. Jean-Luc Bannalec sells a version of Brittany that could have 'Tourist Board Approved' stamped across it but doesn't speak to any of the problems and issues that Brittany faces within France. I felt like I was getting the tourist T-shirt and Postcard version of Brittany rather than what I actually see around me. What finally lead me to abandon the book was a lecture on the oyster industry that extended over several pages. I'm sure it was providing information that will turn out to be central to the mystery but it was done clumsily. Jean-Luc Bannalec tried to make it less static by giving Dupin the data from two people rather than one and by trying to lighten the load by inviting me to be amused at how passionate one of Dupin's team was about the industry and his knowledge of it but that didn't help. It just reminded me how irritating Dupin was. So, Commissaire Dupin and I are parting ways and I'll never know why the corpse went missing or if they found it again. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jun 28, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1527237214
| 9781527237216
| 1527237214
| 4.16
| 436
| Feb 14, 2019
| Oct 2020
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Why did I buy 'Judas The Hero'? Well, the publisher's summary said "If you like Rivers of London, the Dresden Files and the Kings Watch, you will like
Why did I buy 'Judas The Hero'? Well, the publisher's summary said "If you like Rivers of London, the Dresden Files and the Kings Watch, you will like this", the reviews on GoodReads were mostly four or five stars, and the phrase 'DCI Judas Iscariot' hooked me. Why did I abandon it at 20%? Mostly it was because of the writing. Some of the scenes were vividly written and pulled me into them completely, especially the ones where there was some action going on, but then the tone would change into the passive voice when the exposition of the plot or the backstory of a character was needed and all the colour leached out of the text. Then there were the proofreading errors - missing words that had to be guessed at to make sense of a paragraph and misspellings that shouldn't have made it past the final edit. They distracted me like a scratch on a vinyl record. These were compounded by occasional glaring inconsistencies. For example, in the space of a few paragraphs, I was told that this team of ex-apostles working for John The Baptist are scary because they're unkillable immortals and then I was told that they follow their crazy leader's orders because disagreeing with him could be fatal. How can both of those things be true? The first chapter read like the text version of a graphic novel. I could image the image of the U-Boat on the water at dawn: all the dramatic straight lines, presented in a sharply contrasting palette, heavy on blacks and reds and dark blues but with the orange of a sunrise and the yellow of a dingy for contrast. Unfortunately, the same chapter also characterised the Germans in World War II using the same simplistic clichés I remember from 1970s comic books. The plot was original and I wanted to be convinced but little things nagged at me. For example, I liked the idea of the Second Fall in the Twenty-First Century, with more angels being kicked out of Heaven but I couldn't see why they'd all want to come to live in England and especially in London. It was when I met Judas Iscariot that I finally set the book aside. He's the character the whole series hangs on and I found him unconvincing. Most of that was because the writing felt mechanical - like the bones of a first draft - a pencil sketch that needs colour to bring it to life - but some of it was because I couldn't see in this man someone who had lived for more than two millennia and whose mind was first formed in Judea during the Roman occupation. I know that the things that spoil this book for me won't spoil it for others and I can see that there's a lot of fun to be had with this series if you can relax and roll with it. I'm just too much of a pedant for that. I guess that's my loss. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 10, 2023
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Apr 12, 2023
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Apr 10, 2023
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Paperback
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| 9781250907103
| 4.07
| 19,792
| Oct 05, 2015
| Apr 11, 2023
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Abandoned at 15% 'Wonderland' sounded like the perfect fit for the Creepy Carnivals square in Halloween Bingo. A serial killer in an amusement park - c Abandoned at 15% 'Wonderland' sounded like the perfect fit for the Creepy Carnivals square in Halloween Bingo. A serial killer in an amusement park - could it be more on target? I listened to the opening chapter and thought, 'Yeah, this has the potential to be Jaws in an amusement park with the Chief of Police trying to keep the Park open the way the mayor in Jaws wanted the beaches kept open.' Then I made a tactical error. I set the book aside for a little while because it wasn't convenient to listen to an audiobook. In the interim, I read three ebooks for Halloween Bingo, all of which were four-star or five-star reads. The problem with consuming a rich diet of well-crafted prose is that when I pick up something where the prose is lazy and clichéd, I grimace, the way that I do when I move from a cafetière of freshly ground coffee to the hot brown stuff pushed out by a vending machine. When I continued with 'Wonderland' today, I kept getting distracted by the lazy prose and the clichéd characterisations and lost interest in the story. What do I mean by lazy prose? The kind where not a single word surprises me, where I know what's coming in every paragraph and where I'm never once tempted to highlight a phrase or a passage because it captured both an idea and my imagination. Today, the prose dropped below that level to the, 'How did this get past a re-read of the first draft?' Here's an example. "Their eyes met at the same instant." How can their eyes meet any other way? Then there was the lazy use of sex as a shortcut to characterisation. First, I had an extended scene with a thirty-seven-year-old manager lusting after a seventeen-year-old boy whom she was interviewing for a job, who got so excited that, as soon as the interview was over, she had to lock her office door and masturbate while calling his name. What's the problem with that? Firstly, I don't believe it. Secondly, the presentation of the manager was one-dimensional. She's shown only as a sexual predator addicted to sex with men half her age. That's a little unfair, there was also just a suggestion that she'd lost her own 'innocence' (not my choice of word) and hope in the world because of something that her uncle did when she was a teenager. I took this as another clichéd shortcut to characterisation. Then I sat through a scene where I head-hopped between the woman who will lead the investigation into the serial killer and the man who will represent the amusement park as they silently expressed their surprise at how attractive eachfound the other, even more attractive than they'd foumd them to be when they'd met as strangers in a bar the night before, gotten drunk and then had sex, followed by the woman, who'd given a false name, sneaking away in the early hours. It seemed contrived to me. It was also clumsily executed. After an hour of listening, I realised that I had no patience for characters drawn in crayon and words that had been flung on the page with little thought and less editing. I don't normally abandon a book after only listening to 15% of it but this was definitely a case of "Life's too short for reading poorly written books." ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 07, 2023
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Sep 12, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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Audiobook
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Jun 25, 2024
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Apr 26, 2024
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did not like it
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Feb 17, 2024
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Feb 06, 2024
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| 3.70
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Feb 10, 2024
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Oct 28, 2023
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Oct 02, 2023
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Aug 11, 2023
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Nov 22, 2023
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Jul 15, 2023
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Jul 05, 2024
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Jun 24, 2023
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Jun 28, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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| 4.16
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Apr 12, 2023
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Apr 10, 2023
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| 4.07
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Sep 12, 2023
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Apr 05, 2023
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