Heron Carvic - Miss Seeton Series Books 1-3

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Hugely enjoyable

I very much enjoyed the first Miss Seeton book I read and I am coming genuinely to love the series.  They are all very well written and extremely entertaining.

Books featuring a spinster in a small English village who becomes involved in solving crimes don't look very alluring at first glance because they just sound like a lazy Miss Marple rip-off.  They certainly aren't, though; I made the mistake of allowing myself to be put off by this for some time, but when I finally tried one I found it very good.  The first three in the series collected here are all extremely enjoyable and an excellent place to start.

What makes these books stand out from the huge slew of average cosy-crime is the quality of the writing, which is excellent.  The plots are good and involving, but what I enjoy most are the wit of the books and the very fine and beautifully deft characterisations.  Heron Carvic  has a beautiful way of painting recognisable and believable characters with a few neat phrases or lines of dialogue (as do his successors in writing the series, by the way).   Although they are different in many ways, this and the wit of the books put me a little in mind of Edmund Crispin – high praise, but well deserved, I think.  They are hugely enjoyable, and whenever I read a Miss Seeton, I become involved, smile often, laugh sometimes and always look forward to reading some more.

This little passage from quite early in Book 1 (Picture Miss Seeton) may give an idea of what I mean.  A policeman informs the proper, upright Miss Seeton that, "She was a known prostitute."

"Oh, dear," Miss Seeton exclaimed.  "A very hard life; such late hours – and then, of course, the weather.  And so unrewarding, one would imagine."  I loved that; it's humorous but shows so much about Miss Seeton's character in a couple of sentences – and "unrewarding" is a perfect adjective for her to use.

I'm delighted that I was persuaded to try these books, and I would warmly recommend them to anyone who enjoys well-written, witty crime.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Adrian McKinty - Police At The Station...

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent addition to a fine series

I have enjoyed every book in the Sean Duffy series; they have definitely got better as we have gone along and I think this is the best yet.

Here, Duffy is still a DI in Belfast in 1988.  This time, the investigation of the murder of a drug dealer leads him into grave personal danger from powerful enemies in both the IRA and the RUC.  The plot is intriguing and gripping with some very exciting passages, but as ever it is the setting and characters – not least Duffy himself – which make this special. 

McKinty has really developed into a very fine writer; the prose is excellent and Duffy's narrative voice is completely convincing.  The other characters are all very well painted and his portrayal of the mood, politics and complex loyalties of the times seems absolutely real to me.  Duffy's developing personal life is also a major asset (which is by no means always the case in such series) and I found this a gripping, thrilling and very satisfying read.

I can warmly recommend Police At The Station.  This is developing into one of the finest police series of our time, I think, and I'm already looking forward to the next instalment.

Stuart Maconie - The Long Road From Jarrow

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Entertaining, well informed and very insightful

I do like Stuart Maconie's books.  He is a very intelligent, thoughtful observer, he always has interesting things to say about what he observes, he's often very funny and he's always a pleasure to read.

In this book, Maconie retraces the route of the Jarrow Crusade, largely sticking to the original route the marchers followed on each day, exactly 80 years later.  The result is a thoughtful, entertaining and very informative look at exactly what happened in 1936, and at the Britain he finds in 2016.  Maconie is very, very good at just talking to people; he is genuinely interested in them so they tend to open up to him.  He has a definite political stance and a firm view on Brexit, for example, but is keen also to try to understand those who disagree with him.  He also has a delightful willingness to be pleased with what he finds; he will criticise where appropriate, but he approaches places and people in a spirit of looking for things to like about them which is both refreshing and often revealing about his subjects.

Like so many people I had only a vague notion of the Jarrow Crusade: when it was, who took part, the reception it got and so on.   Maconie has put all that right while never being over-earnest about it and his humanity and wit are always apparent.  He has also given me an entertaining and very interesting picture of attitudes in parts of Britain today. 

Most of all, this is a great read.  Don't be put off by the apparently worthy and solemn subject matter; it is honest about the conditions of the marchers and penetrating about political parallels in Britain today, but it's funny, likeable, very readable and, in its way, rather gripping.  Very warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Mark Barry - Classic 60s Music On CD

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent resource

I have enjoyed and benefited from Mark Barry's excellent reviews on Amazon for years so I thought I'd be in safe hands when I bought a couple of his guides to music.  I was right; they are a really good resource as well as an enjoyable read.

Mark has worked in rare recordings for decades so he really knows what he's talking about, as well as having a genuine love of this music. It shows; each album gets a thorough analysis which is a pleasure to read and often an inspiration to go and listen.  There is also detailed and really useful information about which reissue to buy and what is included/missing from various editions.  I find it a pleasure to dip into, and it is threatening to do damage to my bank balance as I fail to resist the temptation to buy some great reissues.

The formatting is OK: there are no live links in the text, but you can access each article via the List of Contents in the Menu and I've got on pretty well.

This is a book to cherish for me. It is thorough, deeply knowledgeable and a very interesting read.  Very warmly recommended.

Daniel Silva - House Of Spies

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable spy novel

I enjoyed House Of Spies but I did have my reservations about it.

There is a lot to enjoy here.  Daniel Silva creates a good story of terrorist atrocities and the subsequent joint operation between the Intelligence Agencies of Israel, Britain, France and the USA to locate and kill the jihadi mastermind behind them, with whom the main protagonist Gabriel Allon and his fellow Israeli agents have a lot of history.  The detail and careful plotting hang together well, there is a convincing picture of the jockeying for position between the Agencies and the characters are pretty well painted.  The later parts of the book are very exciting in places and it's a very decent read a lot of the time.

I did think that some of the storytelling was a bit clunky.  I'm all for detail and careful scene-setting for realism, but a little tightening up might have helped things along in the early stages.  Silva isn't shy of a cliché, either, and stale usages like "thick as thieves", "fight tooth and nail,"  people talking  about "our little subterfuge"  and so on crop up often enough to intrude. 

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book overall and I can recommend it as a decent read – especially for a day on the beach or the like.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Tom Benson, Sahar Wayne - Albert Einstein

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A very basic biography

This little biography is OK as far as it goes – but that isn't really very far, I'm afraid.

The book is very brief, so the information in it is commendably concise and reasonably well presented.  There are some nice photos and a few illustrations to explain things like the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, although I'm not sure how much clearer they would make matters to a non-scientific reader. 

The prose is very flat and reads like a list of events rather than a story or any sort of analysis; that's OK if you just want a sort of longish encyclopaedia article, but not so good for the general reader.  It seems plain in a few places that English isn't the writer's first language.  For example, talking about Einstein's parents' opposition to his marriage, we read that eventually "his father fell ill with death and consented."  This kind of thing doesn't intrude too much, but it's not great to read.

Don't look to this for any real explanation of Einstein's physics.  His big ideas in Relativity are mentioned, of course, and they're given a bit of an outline, but there isn't enough here for anyone new to the ideas to learn much about them.

Really what you get in this bite-sized book is a chronology of the basic events in Einstein's life with little analysis or depth to the science.  It's an OK read but not a fluent one, so it may do if you just need a bit of basic biographical information.  For anything more than that you will need to try Abaham Pais's book or one of the other excellent biographies already published. 

Mark Barry - Overlooked Albums 1955-1979

Rating: 5

Review:
An excellent guide

I have enjoyed and benefited from Mark Barry's excellent reviews on Amazon for years so I thought I'd be in safe hands with this – and I was right.  It's a really good resource as well as an enjoyable read.

Mark has worked in rare recordings for decades so he really knows what he's talking about, as well as having a genuine love of this music.  It shows; each album gets a thorough analysis which is a pleasure to read and often an inspiration to go and listen.  I'm pleased to say that quite a lot of these albums are in my collection (although my wife isn't quite so enthusiastic about the number of old LPs in the place) and just a day or two after buying this book I've already been sent back to several of them with great pleasure – and with bemusement that I haven't listened to them for so long.  There is also detailed and really useful information about which issue to buy and what is included/missing from various editions.

Naturally, in a book of this magnitude, covering the best part of 400 albums, Mark's opinions and taste don't always coincide with mine; I regard I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight by Richard and Linda Thompson and Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, among quite a few others, as genuine Classic Albums rather than overlooked ones, for example.  But that's only natural; I agree with the great majority of what he says, and even where I don't it's interesting and stimulating. 

The formatting is OK: you can access each article via the List of Contents in the Menu, but there are no live links in the text.  The titles in the Contents are long, so it's not always easy to se what's going on in the Menu list, but I've got on pretty well.  I understand that Mark is working on the formatting to improve this.

Nonetheless, this is a book to cherish for me.  I can see it sending me off to listen to an awful lot of music I've never heard or haven't listened to for years (and also trying to smuggle more purchases past my wife).  Very warmly recommended.

Matt Haig - How To Stop Time

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I loved How To Stop Time.  I hadn't read Matt Haig before so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was completely engrossed; I found it entertaining, gripping, funny and touching and it has left me with lasting impressions and a lot to think about.

The premise sounds rather well-worn and dodgy; Tom Hazard was born in the late 16^th century but has a condition which means he ages very slowly, so that by the present day his body is in its early 40s.  The first thing to say is that this is emphatically *not* yet another book about what it might mean to be undead; it is a book about what it means to be alive.  It's a cracking story, beautifully told.  We get stories of Tom's life from the time of Shakespeare, of 1920s Paris and so on, interwoven with the present day when he has become a history teacher in a London comprehensive school, close to where he had a dearly-loved wife and daughter 400 years ago.  Haig manages this brilliantly and also introduces a tense plot involving a society of people like him which may go to extremes to protect its members.

Tom has an ordinary life in many ways, but experiences far more of it than normal.  We see the struggle to decide on a life's course, the pain of loss as those he loves die and the persecution of the "different," for example, and there are well-nuanced questions about what it means to live well; should we choose hedonism and self-preservation, or humanity, love and engagement with others, along with the pain it brings?  There is real richness here, and I marked lots of passages which I liked – far too many to quote here.  The whole thing is thoughtful and very touching in places but with a lovely sprinkling of wit and wry comments which made me smile (and actually laugh in some places) without ever interfering with the story or the serious points being made.  I love the way he writes about love, the way he writes about history, the way he writes about music…and so on, and so on.

It is unusual for me to gush quite so much about a book, but I did think this was exceptionally good. I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Christopher Wilson - The Zoo

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable, Insightful and engaging

I thought The Zoo was very good.  It's a sharp and original observation of the brutality, self-delusion, self-centredness and self-regard of dictators and their entourage which is intelligent, at times rather funny and at others utterly horrifying.

Set in Moscow in 1953, a 12-year-old Yuri finds himself in the dying Stalin's inner circle as a food-taster.  Yuri had a serious accident as a child which damaged his brain.  This has left him still highly intelligent but with a naïve directness and inquisitiveness, and a face which leads people, even strangers, to confide in him.  People often also believe him to be an "idiot boy" and forget his presence, so he hears a great deal which is not intended for other ears. 

The story is narrated by Yuri and we see Stalin, Beria, Khrushchev and others through his eyes.  It is a clever device, showing their monstrous behaviour in a new but no less horrifying light.  We also get comments like this from the innocent Yuri, when a friend tells him that his uncle "got twelve years for doing precisely absolutely nothing at all.  Zilch,  Zero.

But that's Life.  You don’t know what to believe for the best.  Because, everyone knows, for *nothing* you only get nine."

I found Yuri's voice very convincing (although once or twice he does use slightly more poetic and advanced language than seems appropriate for his character) and the whole thing extremely engaging and readable.  It's a fine satire which more than one current world leader would do well to take note of, as well as being a rather touching story as I became more and more engaged with Yuri and his understanding deepens of what is really happening.  It's a very good read which will stay with me and which left me with plenty to think about.  Warmly recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Maile Meloy - Do Not Become Alarmed

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull and unconvincing

I'm afraid I didn't get on with this book at all  It is billed as  heart-racing story, but I simply found it unengaging and rather dull.

As the publisher's synopsis reveals, two wealthy and successful American families go on a Christmas cruise to Central America, where their children become separated from the adults.  It takes about 75 pages to get to this point, and those pages are filled with details of characters' lives and their activities on the cruise which I found unconvincing, pretty boring and not very well-written.  I'm afraid things don't improve much once the plot finally kicks in.  I just didn't find the story very plausible and I thought the characters were rather thin and in some cases a bit stereotypic.  I slogged dutifully on to the end, but I rather wish I hadn't bothered because the book didn't engage me in any way.

I'm sorry to be so critical, but that's the truth of it.  Others may well enjoy this more than I did, but I really can't recommend it.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)