David Jackson - A Tapping At My Door

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Slightly clichéd and silly, but enjoyable

This is a very decent police thriller.  It has a lot of the clichés of the genre, but it's well written and quite gripping.

This is the first in a series set in Liverpool starring Detective Sergeant Nathan Cody.  Cody is – wait for it – a man with a traumatic past with which he is struggling to come to terms and he's an unorthodox but successful officer who is a member of the Major Incident Team.  In the first few pages an old flame (the Real Love Of His Life, of course, but now engaged to another) joins the squad, so we get romantic tensions…and so on.  The plot is driven by a vicious serial killer with an unusual MO who is (of course) Sending A Message To The Police, and builds to a Cornered Killer Climax In An Iconic Location.  It's hardly fresh and original, then – but it's actually rather well done, and if you don't mind dodging the clichés as they fly at you and can suspend disbelief from a reasonable height it's an enjoyable read.

David Jackson creates decent characters and Cody is an engaging, flawed protagonist. He also generates a pretty good sense of place in Liverpool, he structures the plot well and he is good at drip-feeding hints which build to a big reveal (about Cody's past, for example) to keep the reader hooked.  His prose is generally in short, staccato sentences, often in short staccato paragraphs which keep the pace moving well. This will give you a flavour:

" And now she's back.  On his team.  They're going to have to work together, in close proximity.

But she's right.  It was a long time ago.  They've both moved on.  They are different people now.  It really won't be an issue."

Obviously, I wouldn't *dream* of revealing whether or not it becomes an issue, but I'm sure you get the idea.

It's very readable stuff, even if it's not exactly profound or original. I did think "oh, please!" at pretty regular intervals, but I still enjoyed it and was gripped by it.  It would make a good beach read and I'll probably read the next in the series, so I can recommend it.

Andrew Taylor - The Anatomy of Ghosts

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent book

I thought this was an outstandingly good book. Rather to my shame I hadn't come across Andrew Taylor before and picked this up because it was recommended on Radio 4 as one of the best crime novels of 2010. They were right, and I will certainly be reading more of Andrew Taylor's books.

The plot has been well summarised in other reviews here so I won't go into it again, but it is involving, exciting and very well paced. I found that for at least the last couple of hundred pages I was completely gripped and very grumpy about anything which interrupted my reading. The characters are well drawn and I found the whole premise of the book interesting and psychologically perceptive. Taylor's writing is really good - unaffected, literate and a pleasure to read. He conjures the late 18th Century period excellently with the use of very authentic dialogue and modern narration with the occasional period phrase - "the carriage slowed to a footpace," for example - which is very effective. The writing reminded me a little of Patrick O'Brian, which is very high praise indeed.

In short, this is a beautifully written, convincingly set and gripping crime novel which is far more than just a thriller. It's a real find for me and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Toni Jordan - Fall Girl

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable light comedy

This enjoyable book seemed rather like an episode of Hustle written by Richard Curtis - which is just fine by me. It is an amusing light comedy which I thoroughly enjoyed in a throwaway kind of way.

The central character is Della, who is single and attractive. She and her family are lifelong professional con-artists in Melbourne, Australia and she is engaged on a sting involving a single, attractive millionaire. It's not hard to guess what is going to happen between them, and I also found other parts of the plot rather transparent although I still enjoyed the twists of the who's-fooling-who convolutions. The writing is crisp, the dialogue is snappy and it rattles along very nicely so you can just relax and enjoy the ride. It does get a bit bogged down in moralizing and sentimentality in places but is engaging and pacy enough for this not to matter.

This isn't profound literature nor keep-you-up-late suspense stuff - and nor does it pretend to be. It is very good at what it does, which makes it a very entertaining light read. Recommended.

Stuart Maconie - Adventures on the High Teas

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and insightful

I enjoyed this book very much. It is partly a Bryson-like trip to various places which might in some way be linked to "Middle England" and partly an attempt to analyse what "Middle England" might actually mean. I think Stuart Maconie makes a very good job of both aspects.

What I like most about the book is Maconie's willingness to be pleased with things rather than carp and look for fault. A DJ and rock journalist who, in his own words, "grew up on a council estate in a grimy Lancashire cotton town" might be expected to sneer at comfortable, largely southern middle-class people and places, but he never does. He loves much of England and Englishness in all its forms and talks of Middle England's quiet virtues far more than its actual or supposed faults. When he does criticise he makes a careful case and never resorts to stereotype or lazy generalisation. Toward the end of the book he says, "When I think of Middle England I think of tolerance and kindness. So it irks me that the phrase has become a byword for sour prejudice and insularity." He makes a good case for this throughout the book and I found it very endearing that he often and quite sincerely uses the word "sweet" to describe things.

Some reviewers here found Maconie's references to literature and music to be facile and smug. I have to disagree - I thought they were very acutely chosen to illustrate his points and seemed to me to come from a man who has a deep and genuine love of the books and writers he quotes. (He does need to brush up considerably on the work of Sir Isaac Newton, mind you.) The prose is extremely readable, and the book is often amusing and sometimes rather moving. I found it an insightful, interesting and enjoyable read and warmly recommend it.

Urban Waite - The Terror of Living

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Gripping and well written

I didn't like the title of this book much and almost allowed it to put me off, but I am very glad I didn't. I thought it was very good - well written, extremely exciting, thoughtful and morally complex. It is a story of a drug-smuggling run intercepted and its consequences for those involved, directly and indirectly, on all sides. Set in the far North-West of the USA, the landscape is beautifully evoked and provides a great backdrop for a thrilling story.

The writing is excellent: the style of short, unemotional sentences describing sometimes very exciting or horrific scenes was extremely effective. The narrative is in brief sections and switches between different parts of the action as the story unfolds. This can be a very difficult trick to pull off, but I thought it was very well done here and it kept me reading well after I should have gone to sleep. The characters are well drawn with a very deft, light touch and are generally believable. I did think that the back-story of the Deputy's father was somewhat implausible and unnecessary and the moral compass it provided was somewhat dubious, but it scarcely interfered with the story and others may feel differently about it.

In short, this is a very gripping, unusually well-written thriller and is warmly recommended.

Doug Johnstone - Smokeheads

Rating: 3/5

Review:
OK but unsatisfying

Smokeheads is the story of four middle-aged friends who take a brief trip to the small Scottish island of Islay to sample the world-famous whiskies made there. A slight sense of menace and impending doom and a somewhat clunkily-placed reference to Deliverance give the reader a pretty good idea of what is to come, and I won't spoil the book by giving away any more of the plot. It is a well-written book which eventually turned into an exciting story, but I thought it was ultimately lacking in anything enduring.

The narrative is prefaced with a page of heart-pounding action from later in the book to hook our attention. Just as well, from my point of view because the opening was rather slow and introduces us to the characters who are pretty much a stock group of disparate stereotypes - particularly the obnoxiously cocky and flash millionaire fund manager. As the publishers put it "events spiral out of control" and the middle section is exciting and gripping, but in the end I thought it added up to very little. In particular, I found the thinly-drawn characters, and especially the lack of any development of the one enigmatic and promising character, very disappointing.

The book has a good build-up of atmosphere and is rather interesting about whisky itself. There is a lot of well-described action, pursuit and sickening violence which certainly kept me reading, but in the end I didn't think it amounted to much and I found it very unsatisfying in lots of ways, so I can't give it more than three stars.

Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit of a struggle

This is  the first of Deborah Levy's books I have read.  I can see that it is very well written and I can also see that it is exploring important human themes of alienation, identity, the relationship between mother and daughter and so on.  In spite of all that, though, I found it hard going in the end.

The whole book has a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory quality about it.  It is narrated in the first person by Sophie, who has taken her mother to a clinic in Almeria to try to cure her mysterious illnesses.  Sophie is an intelligent, thoughtful observer who has degrees in anthropology, but whose stultifying relationship with her mother (among other things) means that she has never put these skills to full use.  Rather as we did in Tom McCarthy's Satin Island, we have a detached, almost alienated anthropologist as narrator and, like her, we're often unsure of what is really going on. 

It was well enough done to keep me rather gripped by the atmosphere for about half its length, but I'm afraid after that I really began to get a bit fed up.  It's better than Satin Island (which I thoroughly disliked), but does suffer from some similar problems for me.  I don't insist on likeable characters or a strong plot and I'm happy to wrestle with a difficult narrative and to be left guessing at things.  However, at some point, I do need a little something to hold onto, and being left grasping at symbols, elusive ideas and atmosphere almost throughout, I really felt pretty lost.  It certainly has a powerfully haunting, stifling feel about it, and Sophie (and her mother) are convincing and memorable characters, but as a novel…hmm.

I suspect that quite a few people will like this more than I do, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this on the shortlists of some major awards this year (particularly after Satin Island made the 2015 Booker shortlist) because it is so well written.  It does have undoubted merits, but I can't honestly recommend it as a rewarding book.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)

Mick Herron - Real Tigers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A great read

I thought Real Tigers was excellent.  It is the third in Mick Herron's Slough House series.  It's the first I've read, and it works as a stand alone novel, but there is history and spoilers for the first two books, so it might be best to read them first.  Nevertheless, this was hugely enjoyable: exciting, funny and very gripping, making it one of the best spy novels I've read for quite a while.

The plot is complex with plenty of surprises so I won't give any spoilers, but it's extremely well done and very gripping.  What makes this special, though, is its characters and its dialogue.  Slough House is where MI5 sends its agents who have messed up in some way, and they're an engaging bunch of misfits, presided over by the magnificently appalling Lamb who is a terrific creation.  This group, plus a fine cast of other characters provide a superb, seedy, treacherous setting.   Using this, Herron strikes an excellent balance between comedy and real thriller so that I laughed out loud several times, and also became very gripped by the whole thing.

I have already got the first two books in the series lined up and am looking forward to them enormously.  This is a really great read, and I hope the series has a long, glorious future ahead of it.  Very warmly recommended.

Matthew Dunn - Spartan

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Poorly written and unconvincing

I do not like to be too critical, especially of first novels, but I'm afraid I thought this was very disappointing. The biographical details make it plain that the author was a skilled and successful MI6 officer. Sadly, he is not a skilled author and Spartan is clunkily-written, full of absurd characters doing implausible things and in the end tedious, over-long and forgettable.

The protagonist is Will Cochrane, supposedly MI6's sole ultra-secret super-spy, the "only one of his generation to have survived the brutal training," who is given a mission to prevent an Iranian intelligence officer from launching a devastating attack on the West. In an attempt to create a modern-day James Bond, the author seems to have created a fantasy of someone he would like to have been, and it's just ludicrous, I'm afraid. For example, Cochrane is shot three times in the stomach, has a bit of basic surgery, goes sraight back to work and a few days later is scaling the outside of a three-storey building without so much as a twinge. He is, we keep being told, utterly deadly and completely ruthless but also stunningly kind-hearted, empathetic and noble. His handsomeness goes without saying. And so on. And, naturally, the mission becomes highly personal in oh-so-many ways. Now, I am all in favour of slightly silly spy stories (I enjoy Spooks very much, for example, so my credentials in this area are pretty good) but there really are limits and this exceeds all of them.

The prose and storytelling are horribly clunky, and much of the dialogue is simply dreadful. People spend a lot of time telling each other things they already know in stilted language, or saying things like "I need you to do what you do best and what no-one else is capable of. This will be your toughest and most critical mission. You must succeed despite the odds against your doing so," and "I fear what effect this will have on your already ruthless psyche." (Did I mention that he's ruthless?) There's an awful lot of this sort of terrible dialogue. The narrative is a little better written but it's still stilted, implausible and prone to cliché. For example, people smile while their eyes remain cold and penetrating, and at one point Will observes someone and in that one glance he "saw the man's humour, his deviousness, his business-sharp intellect, and his wisdom. He also saw hope and sorrow in the man's eyes." Well, of course he did - who wouldn't? The book is full of this sort of stuff. And as for the potential lovers expressing the powerful chemisry between them with lines like "You have hesitation in your eyes. Are you wary of my intentions toward you now?" "No, because I can control any such intentions"...

Enough. I am sorry to be so critical, but I genuinely think this is a very poor book. The publishers claim that it is "nerve-shredding and stunningly authentic." It isn't. If you want a book on a similar theme which fits that description try Gerald Seymour's A Deniable Death instead

Peter Gardos - Fever At Dawn

Rating: 2/5

Review: 
Not for me

This is a difficult review for me to write.  A story inspired by the author's parents' real meeting in the aftermath of the Holocaust ought to be a moving and uplifting account of the triumph of the human spirit, and it seems churlish to criticise a book with such subject matter, but the truth is I don't think it's very well done.  As a result, I found it turgid and a slog to get through.

I wanted to like the book, but I didn't.  I'm afraid that I found the prose rather clumsy and the characters both somewhat unbelievable and faintly irritating.  It's basically a RomCom in a very serious setting (although there is a good deal of "comedy" too – none of which I found very funny), and it didn't engage me at all. 

Peter Gardos' family history obviously gives him the right to tell such a story, and I am reluctant to be critical of it or him.  All I can say is that some members of my own family survived of the Holocaust and others died in the Camps, so perhaps I have the right not to like it.  I'm afraid I don't and, unlike many others, I can't recommend it.

Carys Bray - The Museum Of You

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable, engaging and thoughful

I thought this was an excellent book.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be very well written, engaging and with some important things to say.

The Museum Of You is a novel of character, told in the third person from the point of view of two characters: Clover Quinn, a twelve-year-old girl who lives with her father Darren in a small town outside Liverpool, and Darren himself, an ordinary, flawed but thoroughly decent man who is a bus driver and tries his very best to bring Clover up well.  Clover's mother, Becky, died soon after she was born, and we get very penetrating insights into their characters as Clover spends a summer holiday at home sorting through the unsorted mementos and detritus of her mother's life and creating the museum of the title to try to understand who she was.

That's it, really.  There isn’t a lot of action, but there is a very involving story as the truth about her mother's death slowly emerges.  It's beautifully done, with excellently painted, utterly believable characters with their flaws and foibles, and a very shrewd understanding of how people deal with (or fail to deal with) loss and grief.  It is gentle and compassionate but also very acute in its observations, and deals mainly with kindness in its different, sometimes misplaced forms.  I also found it full of quiet but rather brilliant insights, like Darren recalling the happy year after he and Becky first moved into their house: "He wishes he could remember more of the year that followed.  But contentment lacks specifics, it's easily swallowed and effortlessly stomached."

The writing is unfussy and very readable, and it creates an excellent atmosphere both of Clover's growing up and of Darren's struggle and anxiety to do the right thing  by her.  Her ear for dialogue is spot-on and other characters are well drawn and often amusing - like Mrs Mackerel, the neighbour with her constant malapropisms - and I found the book piercingly touching in places, too. 

In short, this is a very good book which is a pleasure to read, which I found very involving and which will stay with me for a long time.  Warmly recommended.

Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Not one of Tyler's best

Like a lot of other people, I think this is good, but not one of Anne Tyler's best novels.  It's superbly written – it's Anne Tyler, so of course it is - but I'm not sure quite how much it added up to in the end.

There's not a lot in the way of plot.  It's a story of a Baltimore family which is described as "unremarkable," and of their characters, interactions, rivalries and bonds – all of which is rather what you expect from a Tyler novel.  And, as always, it's written in superb, poised and evocative prose with some very acute observations.  However, I felt this time that there was rather more prose than observation, and I didn't really find the brilliant depth of characterisation which is so often Tyler's hallmark, and no-one with the utterly recognisable and memorable presence of, say, Rebecca Davitch in Back When We Were Grownups.

In short, if you like Anne Tyler then you'll almost certainly like this, but I doubt whether you'll find it one of her most memorable books.  A slightly qualified recommendation.

Jane Casey - The Reckoning

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very enjoyable thriller

I enjoyed this book very much. Jane Casey writes very well and is creating what I think will be an enduring series of books starring her heroine PC Maeve Kerrigan.

Here, Kerrigan is part pf a team hunting a serial killer, which is by now a rather tired idea, but Casey's plot takes a couple of unexpected and interesting turns and it felt refreshingly original in places. It's all reasonably plausible, the plot hangs together well and the motives of the various criminals seem believable. Kerrigan is an imperfect but very engaging protagonist and the characters are well-drawn. Her first-person narrative is extremely well written in unpretentious and very readable prose and one of the great strengths of this book is the ease with which the writing carries you along.

There are a couple of flaws. The book could have done with a bit of editing here and there - a wholly unnecessary stalking sub-plot and a very lengthy description of another, completely irrelevant case, for example - and the switch to another voice for a couple of chapters felt rather clumsy and intrusive. However, these are minor niggles; I became very gripped by the book, thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it warmly.

Charlie Williams - One Dead Hen

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Horribly amusing

I enjoyed this book, the first of Charlie Williams's that I have read. As other reviewers have said, not everyone will agree, but if you share its sense of humour as I did then it is a very amusing read.

The story is set in the grim fictional town of Mangel and narrated in a Midlands-ish dialect by the main protagonist, Royston Blake. Blake is stupid, deluded, bigoted, astonishingly foul-mouthed and very violent. The story is rather bleak, there are some pretty gross scenes and the whole thing sounds horrible, depressing and the sort of thing I would normally hate. However, Williams manages to create real humour from all this, and I found myself chuckling regularly and also smiling appreciatively at the genuine satire. I found the narrative voice extremely convincing in spite of its squalor and absurdity. Do be aware that the f- and c- words are very liberally used; I thought this entirely consistent with Blake's character and the effect was sometimes very funny, but if you're likely to find this offensive (and a good many people will) then don't read this book.

I thought this was well-written, amusing and quite satirically insightful, but it certainly won't be for everyone.

Belinda Bauer - Finders Keepers

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable - if disbelief is suspended

I found this an easy-to-read and quite enjoyable thriller, although it does have some pretty serious flaws. Belinda Bauer writes well on the whole: she structures and paces her story well, creates some believable characters and managed to grip me in spite of my reservations. I thought the central two police officers were well-drawn and the story of teenage first love was believable and very touching. I agree with some other reviewers here that there are some horribly forced similes and the odd out-of-place word or phrase, but there were few enough not to spoil it for me and in general I found Bauer's prose enjoyable to read.

I have to say that I found the kidnapper's motivation simply absurd. I can't say more without giving away too much, but as a reason for committing multiple major crimes it's just silly. Bauer also creates an unconvincing unscrupulous journalist for the sole purpose of having a go at the press and eventually being able to humiliate her in revenge, which was an unnecessary and annoying distraction. I found the mental state of Jonas Holly (the village policeman) pretty implausible, too, and then there's the absurdity of the appearance of yet *another* probable mass murderer in a tiny Exmoor village. Midsomer's per capita crime rate looks realistic by comparison.

However, I found that I did enjoy the book and became quite gripped by it - largely, I think, because Bauer created characters I cared about and I wanted to find out what happened to them. It has little of the originality and depth of Blacklands, but if you are prepared to suspend disbelief from a pretty great height I can recommend it as a readable, largely brain-off thriller.

John Andrew Denny (Ed.) - Through Corridors of Light

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent anthology

I think this is an excellent anthology. It is subtitled "Poems of Consolation in Time of Illness," which gives only a partial idea of is contents. There is great consolation to be found here, certainly, but also cries of agony and despair, contemplation of death and so on which go far beyond mere consolation.

The book has an excellent mixture of poems which are very familiar, ones which are rather less well-known and those which are very obscure and in a very few cases, included in a book for the first time. The book does what I think a good anthology should: it provides the text of some of well-loved poems, reminds me of poems and poets which may have slipped to the back of my mind, and introduced me to work I didn't know - some of which is excellent.

I am a little less happy about a couple of aspects of the presentation. Some poems are in italic type and some in Roman, apparently randomly, which I found a little distracting. Also, each double page carries a line-drawing of a flower, a bird, a shell or similar. They are rather nice drawings, but I prefer a poem to stand on its own with its form uncluttered and its words unadorned. These are personal preferences, though. The poems are what really matter and they are excellent.

All royalties from this book go to ME Research UK, which does make me inclined to be well-disposed toward it. Nonetheless, I genuinely think that this is a very well-chosen and well-constructed anthology and I recommend it very warmly to anyone with an interest in poetry as well as to those living with illness - either their own or that of someone they love.

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, if flawed, account of quantum theory

Any attempt to explain Quantum Theory is likely to be tough going unless it's so facile as to be pretty well worthless, and parts of this book will be very tough going for anyone with little background in physics or maths. Cox and Forshaw treat the subject and their readers with respect in that they do not fudge issues nor duck important ideas and problems, which means that some pretty serious brainwork is required to follow what they are saying.

I thought some parts of this book were excellent and other parts not so good. The explanations of such things as the Quantum Measurement Problem and the Epilogue on the Death of Stars, for example, are in the excellent category. Much less good was the explanation of phase and quantum interference by constant reference to "clocks," which I found clumsy and unhelpful (although others may disagree). This is quite a serious flaw, as it permeates much of the book. However, the style is readable and the treatment of the subject quite rigorous for a "popular" book, so overall I found it an incisive account of the state of Quantum Theory in late 2011

There is a reasonable amount of mathematics in the book, although most is explained in a way that should be comprehensible to those with only a little background in the subject. It is badly hindered, though, by a number of unnecessary errors which really should have been eliminated in proof reading. For example, a footnote on p67 asserts that... "a microgramme...is a millionth of a kilogramme." More seriously, in the otherwise excellent Epilogue in which the authors take us gently and expertly through a rather complex mathematical process, several errors in the text will make the argument almost impossible for anyone with little maths to follow. Examples include "rho" rather than "rho-bar" on p234, and "r-squared" rather than plain "r" on p235 and there are others. It just isn't good enough in a book like this, and I hope this will be corrected in future editions.

Flaws aside, I would recommend this to anyone who isn't afraid to get stuck into a bit of roughly A Level standard algebra and reasoning and who wants a proper account of where quantum physics stands and what it may mean. It's a generally readable and enjoyable intellectual adventure.

Charles Frazier - Nightwoods

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A little self-indulgent?
 
I'm afraid I found this book quite a struggle. It is exceptionally well written with lovely, unfussy and evocative prose and the whole thing is extremely atmospheric, but something about it just failed to engage me. It is very slow in pace, which I normally don't mind at all in a well written book, but for me this began to feel just a bit self-conscious and self-indulgent.

It's a decent story and the period and location of an isolated Appalachian lodge are beautifully evoked. Many people have enjoyed it hugely and I am quite prepared to accept that the fault here lies with me rather than the book so don't let me put you off, but for me it just didn't quite work.

Kate Rhodes - Cross Bones Yard

Rating 4/5

Review:
A decent, if formulaic thriller

I thought this was a competently written and quite enjoyable thriller. It has its faults but kept me reading and I enjoyed it overall.

Crossbones Yard introduces a new protagonist, Alison Quentin - a young, strong and independent clinical psychologist, with a difficult psychological history of her own and a brother who suffers from mental illness and drug addiction. She reluctantly agrees to assist the police in an investigation of a serial killer who is copying the modus operandi of a convicted couple who strongly resemble Fred and Rosemary West. It's familiar stuff but there are exciting moments and sufficient interest to keep me reading.

I did have my reservations about the book, mainly due to its clichés and stereotypes. The men are almost universally either obnoxious or complete pillocks or both. (Although in fairness I found the female characters generally well drawn and I found both Alice's mother and her friend Lola very believable.) Alice is attracted to a brooding and offensive but sexy and darkly handsome officer on the case. Needless to say she is herself threatened by the serial killer (yes, another serial killer) who locks women into tiny spaces before finally killing them. I wouldn't dream of giving away plot details, but after we had been reminded of this again and again along with the sixth or seventh clunky reference to Alice's claustrophobia I began muttering "OK, OK I *get* it," under my breath rather a lot. There were several important things which a moron in a hurry would have spotted but which an intelligent psychologist and several experienced police officers contrived not to notice. And so on.

However, Rhodes's writing carried me along easily enough and in the end I found myself just nodding to the clichés as they went by, suspending disbelief and rather enjoying it. It's not an enduring classic of the genre but it is entertaining enough and I can recommend it as an enjoyable read.

Richard Francis - The Old Spring

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable book

This is an enjoyable book.  It is a novel about the people who run and go into an ordinary pub in a small West Country town on a single wet autumn day. They're a very well drawn and believable crowd, and although not much actually happens in the way of events, their lives and their characters kept me interested and sometimes very amused. The character studies are quite penetrating and subtle and their interactions well done and I ended up feeling involved with them and genuinely caring what happened to many of them, which is always a good sign.

The book is very well written in an unpretentious and straightforward style, and I found it an easy and enjoyable read all round. I think that it may be a book which divides opinion, and it certainly won't appeal to anyone who expects a fast-paced plot and plenty of incident. Things do happen, but they are the stuff of everyday life and the furthest anyone goes from the pub is to the local hospital to visit a pub regular there. Nevertheless, I found it all quite absorbing and I would recommend The Old Spring as a thoughtful, amusing and well-written book.

Helen Simonson - The Summer Before The War

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable novel

This is a very good book in many ways; it is generally well written with some finely-drawn characters and is genuinely moving in places, but I did have some reservations about it.

The story is set in 1914.  Beatrice Nash is a young, unmarried woman whose inheritance is held in trust by a stultifyingly "proper" aunt, but who manages to secure a teaching position in Rye, a small Sussex town.  The story is of her experiences and those of others in the town as the country moves toward the start of the First World War and during the first few months of the War.

Helen Simonson creates some excellent characters, and manages to make her points about the subjugated position of women and other unjust social attitudes very well.  In Beatrice Nash she creates an intelligent woman with a mind of her own and who is also a believable character of the time.  There is some comedy with strong echoes of Mapp and Lucia – but also a fine portrait of how such petty, self-aggrandizing attitudes can cause terrible human damage.  I very much enjoyed the scarcely-disguised Henry James character, and there is also a lovely Austen-esque love story and some very good passages about the War itself.  Simonson manages to do all this with charm, truth and pathos without ever becoming twee or over-sentimental.

Like many people, I loved major Pettigrew's Last Stand, not least because Helen Simonson's language and setting were pitch-perfect.   Here, she doesn't do quite so well, and in a book so based on manners and the spoken and unspoken ideas of her characters I did find it a bit disconcerting.  Very prim, meticulously-spoken characters say things like "I'll be right there" or "I'll be fine," and the odd Americanism creeps in, like "railroad."  These are modern usages which have no place in Rye in 1914 and it did throw me out of the story somewhat.  I also thought the book was rather too long and could have done with a slightly firmer editorial hand in tightening the narrative.

Reservations aside, though, this is a very enjoyable, readable book with some fine portraits and insights into the meaning of courage, kindness, integrity and fulfilment and I can recommend it.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)

Gregg Hurwitz - Orphan X

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, slightly silly action thriller

Orphan X is a load of utterly preposterous old hokum, and I rather liked it.

It's pretty much a by-numbers action thriller with lots of the tropes and clichés of the genre well in evidence.  A secret, deniable Government programme takes orphans at an early age and trains them to be deadly agents and assassins, and our protagonist, Evan Smoak, needless to say, the "best of the best."   He is trained by a tough but wise surrogate father who is hard and deadly but, needless to say, reads Homer and Churchill's History Of The English Speaking Peoples.  Evan has "left the program" and now does pro-bono work – i.e. he acts as a superhero, helping people in impossible situations and killing Bad Guys.  However, needless to say, Evan's morals are tested, he meets a single mother and her son and, needless to say, Emotions Begin To Intrude as Family Values begin to emerge.  He also, needless to say, ends up in a kill-or-be-killed conflict with the other Best Of The Best.  I'm sure you get the picture.

The thing is, it's well done.  It may be cliché-d nonsense, but it's decently written, quite gripping, well structured and with plenty of action sequences – all scripted exactly as though they were movie scenes, which I'm sure Gregg Hurwittz wants them to be made into.  There's also a lot of Top-Gear-For-Killers geekery about equipment - and who knew that vodka could be such a specialist interest?  Or that it could be so boring to read about?  All this means that Evan Smoak is a cross between James Bond and Batman and that's how the book reads.  As an entertaining diversion it works pretty well (although the Climactic Confrontation goes on far too long and becomes quite staggeringly silly) as long as you don't try to apply logic to it – like asking where he gets the money for all this astoundingly expensive, apparently disposable equipment, cars, properties and so on.

I can recommend this as a decent, if rather mindless, action thriller.  It's the start of a series and even though I quite enjoyed the book, I suspect that one is quite enough for me and I won't be bothering with any more.