Georges Simenon - A Maigret Christmas

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good Maigret stories

This is a good little collection of three Maigret stories set around Christmas. 

For me, the short stories aren't quite as satisfying as a full length novel; brief as they are, the novels allow Simenon to build more of a rounded story and to develop his characters more deeply, which is the real pleasure of the Maigret books.  Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable Christmas read.

David Coward's translation is very good, conveying Simenon's quiet power and Maigret's thoughtful approach, so the stories are an easy and involving read.  I can recommend this to anyone who enjoys Maigret.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Attica Locke - Bluebird, Bluebird

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, insightful thriller

I thought Bluebird, Bluebird was excellent.  I approached it with some trepidation, half expecting it to be grim and turgid, but I found it exciting, readable and very insightful about modern racism in the southern USA.

Darren Williams, a black Texas Ranger investigates two deaths in a small Texas town; one of a black man the second of a white woman.  Attica Locke creates a phenomenally convincing atmosphere of uneasy peace with an ever-present threat from White Supremacists and an expectation among black people of bigoted law enforcement which cannot be trusted.  Her characters are excellently drawn and very believable, although I could have done without Darren's drink problem, suspension from duty and Complicated Personal Life.  The book and his character would have been just as powerful and interesting without such over-used staples of the genre – possibly more so.  Nonetheless, this is a gripping story with plenty of emotional and political meat to it, which kept me completely hooked.  (It has also got me to listen to some of my old Lightnin' Hopkins records again, for which I'm very grateful.)

Locke writes fine, readable prose with very natural dialogue and she throws in some brilliantly evocative observations.  For example, of a black woman whose husband has been killed: "This night had opened a valve past mere grief, had touched a fear that burrowed beneath the skin of any coloured person below the shadow of the Mason-Dixon Line."  The book is peppered with gems like this.

In short, Bluebird, Bluebird is both a fine thriller and a book with important things to say about crucial social issues.  I'll be waiting for the next in the series and can warmly recommend this one.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Dylan Jones - David Bowie: A Life

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Interesting and readable

This is an interesting and enjoyable collection of biographical recollections by people who knew Bowie and by Bowie himself.  Some knew him very well, others less so, but all have something to contribute.

Whether or not you like Dylan Jones (I definitely don't), he is a very capable journalist and has done a very good job here.  He knows the scene he is dealing with and has access to a lot of people that others might struggle to recruit for a book like this, so there are contributions from a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of high profile friends and collaborators of Bowie as well as childhood friends and others not in the public eye.  Jones allows them to speak for themselves (including Bowie's own words), giving their contributions verbatim (although presumably edited) rather than crafting them into a narrative written by a biographer.  I like this approach; others have called it lazy, but I like reading what people actually say rather than reading someone else's (particularly Dylan Jones's) interpretation of it, and it is structured in a way which gives it the coherence of a narrative.

It's a long book, and for me it's one to dip into a bit at a time rather than read straight through.  Some of it is a bit gossipy, but I felt it gave me a pretty rounded picture of the man and his milieu.  I don’t think this is the definitive Bowie biography, but given the nature of the man, I'm not sure there will ever be one.  However, it's an insightful, interesting and readable account of his life, his work and his influence, and I can recommend it.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Minette Walters - The Last Hours

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good story but historically questionable

I enjoyed The Last Hours overall.  Set in Dorset in 1348 at the outbreak of The Black Death, this is a story of the people - mainly bonded serfs - of a single demesne and the effect on them of the disease's devastation of the population elsewhere.  It is a fascinating time to set a story because it was a time of complete social upheaval and change as the old certainties of the feudal system broke down.  Minette Walters gives us a colourful cast of characters and she tells a very good story which kept me interested for the full 550 pages.

My difficulties with the book lay in the thinking and attitudes of these repressed 14^th-Century characters with almost no knowledge of the world beyond their village, who, for example, often espouse very modern social attitudes of equality and respect for all people – ideas which they would have found almost impossible to formulate, let alone articulate.  They also make medical and scientific deductions which eluded the most brilliant of minds until many centuries later – and this at a time when all learning came from ancient authorities like Aristotle and Galen;  the notion of actually observing what was happening and thinking about it was completely alien.  And as for the theological rebellions…  a friend of mine has summed this type of thing up as having "contemporary characters in mediaeval fancy dress," which I think puts it perfectly.

Nonetheless, Walters tells a good, compelling tale in very readable prose so I eventually tried to ignore the anachronistic problems (not always successfully) and just enjoy the story.  It is plainly the beginning of a long saga; I'm not agog for the next episode, but I'll probably read it when it comes out.  Cautiously recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Janet Evanovich - Hardcore Twenty-Four

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great fun

I thoroughly enjoyed Hardcore Twenty-Four.  Janet Evanovich has still got it – which is probably all you need to know, really.

The plot?  Oh, come on! - the plot is bonkers, of course.  It involves a giant boa constrictor and the apparent appearance of zombies in Trenton, among other things. In addition, Grandma Mazur is at the top of her eccentric game, Stephanie totals several cars which are duly replaced by Ranger and she has to choose which of three staggeringly sexy men she is going to sleep with.  (Which as Lula complains, is not fair as "I'm depending on battery-operated devices.")  No surprises there, then, which is just fine by me, because it's very funny and very readable.

After all these years and all these books, Evanovich is still coming up with great dialogue, well-painted (if somewhat implausible) characters and situations which are absurdly comic but just believable enough to make an engaging story.  It's the dry wit which really keeps me reading, though.  Little exchanges like this between Stephanie and Morelli, her cop boyfriend, for example:

"Do you have any leads on this?"

"Not a one," Morelli said.

"Lula thinks it's zombies."

"Okay, so now I have one lead.  Does she have an address for the zombies?"

The whole book is littered with this kind of stuff which kept me smiling and quite often laughing out loud.

It's not Great Literature, but who cares?  I had a great time reading this, and I can recommend it very warmly.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Lynne Truss - The Lunar Cats

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed The Lunar Cats.  Lynne Truss is a very funny writer who has genuine erudition beneath the humour an the combination works well here.  (The Lunar Cats follows on from Cat Out Of Hell, but it works fine as a stand-alone book.)

The set-up is silly but engaging.  There are some cats who are highly intelligent and capable of speech.  Some are plain evil and in league with Beelzebub, others are near immortal and are members of The Lunar Cats, a Learned Society formed in the enlightenment and Truss derives a lot of genuine humour from a bunch of cats conducting themselves like eighteenth-century gentlemen.  The plotis narrated by Alec, a mild-mannered retired librarian who gets caught up in all this.  It is enjoyably silly, involving an evil talking kitten, an evil stolen Tahitian idol, appointments with Beelzebub and so on and the battle by Alec and The Lunar Cats to thwart them.  It is amiable, readable fun.

There is also a good deal here about the voyages of Captain Cook and their subsequent chronicling and publication, which Truss manages to make engaging and very interesting, so there is a solid intellectual core which anchors the absurdity, making it witty rather than just silly.  I found that a very good aspect of the book which left me with a sense of having read something of substance as well as it just being plain funny.

Perhaps this isn't a classic, but it's a very enjoyable and engaging read, underpinned by proper research and learning.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Nicholas Blake - Head of a Traveller

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Well written but flawed

This is the first Nicholas Blake I have read and although I enjoyed aspects of it, I wasn't that keen overall.

Published in 1949, Head Of Traveller sees Nigel Strangeways in his role as a sort of unofficial police consultant called to a beautiful and ancient manor house to help in solving the murder of an unidentified corpse found close by.  It becomes plain that the family there are involved and an intricate puzzle is set involving complex time-lines and possible mistaken identities.

The book began excellently, I thought.  "Nicholas Blake" (i.e. Cecil Day-Lewis) was a fine writer and I enjoyed the style and set-up for the first 50 pages or so. Things did begin to pall a little after that, though.  Despite all the false trails and distractions, I thought the identity of the murderer was fairly plain quite early on, there is a good deal of psychologising which is largely pretty silly and in one case plain offensive, and some of the period attitudes and ignorance, especially toward a dwarf character, were pretty hard to take.

I did finish the book, which has a rather indecisive and unconventional ending, but I found it a bit of a struggle.  I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)