Holly Farrell - The Kew Gardener's Guide To Growing Hrerbs

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good

I’m very impressed with this book. It is authoritative, beautifully illustrated and extremely useful.

Pretty well everything you’d want to know about growing and using herbs is here. Holly Farrell’s text is readable and refreshingly free of waffle, so it’s accessible and tells you what you need to know concisely and clearly. There are some very interesting ideas for growing and using herbs, as well as all the necessary info about each individual herb.

It’s very nicely presented, with lovely photographs and some very beautiful botanical illustrations. (I can’t find any mention of who they’re by, but they look rather like Ehret’s 18^th Century illustrations to me.)

In short, this is a very useful, readable and attractive book. Warmly recommended.

 (My thanks to White Lion for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Robert Olen Butler - The Hot Country

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull

The Hot Country is set during the American occupation of Veracruz, Mexico in the months preceding the First World War. Christopher Marlowe Cobb is a US journalist who becomes involved in trying to uncover some sinister German activity among Mexican revolutionaries. This is a very interesting time of which I was keen to learn more and the book is written with an obvious (sometimes a little over-obvious) depth of knowledge. Robert Olen Butler creates a fine sense of the time and place, but I’m afraid I became very bored and eventually gave up after about 200 pages.

The problem is that the whole thing reads rather like a history book set as an exercise in Fine Writing. It is very, very slow; I don’t mind that of itself, but there is an air of self-indulgence in the long, crafted descriptions and the digressions, which are many. The first part of the book is heavily laced with a lot of irrelevant, tedious and sometimes downright pretentious stuff about his mother and his childhood, for example. The story develops very slowly among this and a wealth of very lengthy description and exposition. Just as a tiny example, when Cobb is on a Mexican train:

“I slept, fitfully, awaking to undifferentiated blackness out the window and to the sound of snoring and dream murmurings in Spanish and to the smell of cigarette smoke and pulque and to the smell of old sweat and the Mexicans’ heavy cover-up of soap and perfume, manufactured smells of lilac and rose and jasmine, and I woke to an ache in the side of my neck from the sleeping angle of my head and the ache in my butt and in my back from the rush-work seat.”

This is very good in its way, but when every tiny thing like dozing and waking up on a train is given this wealth of description it really does get a bit much. The final straw for me was when Cobb was drinking with a mercenary in bandit country, trying to determine what is going on and as he takes a sip we get several pages of Proustian recollections of the childhood smell of liquorice. Enough.

This was not for me, in the end. It’s beautifully written but I found it self-indulgent and dull.

Dashiell Hammett - Red Harvest

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Still brilliant

It’s at least 30 years since I first read Red Harvest and I’m very glad I went back to it. Hammett was a very fine writer and this is one of his best.

During the Prohibition Era, the narrator works for the Continental Detective Agency (and is known as “The Continental Op”) who is employed by a rich newspaper editor in the fictional Personville to clean up the vice and corruption in the city. There are four gangs plus a corrupt Chief Of Police and others whom the Continantal Op effectively sets against each other, with a resulting “war” and a huge body count.

The story isn’t wholly plausible, to be honest, but it is a good picture of the corruption that Hammett wanted to expose at the time, it’s superbly told and very involving. He is dryly witty, while plainly burning with anger at corruption and injustice and creates some very well-drawn characters, most notably Dinah Brand, whose presence makes the book worthwhile in itself. Hammett’s style is a real pleasure; he is sharp, unfussy and perceptive – and a huge pleasure after some of the over-long, overblown modern thrillers I have read. The writing is very spare – we never even learn the narrator's name, never mind any Complicated Personal Life. (Hurrah!) I read this paragraph and almost laughed with relief:

"We frisked the dead man's desk and dug up nothing in any way informative. I went up against the girls on the switchboard, and learned nothing. I put in an hour's work on messengers, city editors, and the like, and my pumping brought up nothing. The dead man, as his secretary said, had been good at keeping his affairs to himself."

In a lot of the books I've read recently, that would have taken 50 pages at least, complete with a number of irrelevant, thinly drawn characters, a lot of internal agonising and psychologising by the narrator, etc, etc.

Red Harvest is now 90 years old, but has aged very well indeed. Very warmly recommended.

Dervla McTiernan - The Scholar

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Rather run-of-the-mill

I find myself out of step with the majority of reviewers because I didn’t think The Scholar was all that good. I had expected something above the average for this very over-populated genre, but I’m afraid I didn’t really get it.

This is the second in Dervla McTiernan’s series; I hadn’t read the first, but it works fine as a stand-alone novel. Cormac Reilly is a Garda sergeant in Galway who investigates the death of a young woman near the university. The investigation soon becomes embroiled in dealing with a rich, powerful family and the political machinations which that involves...and it all seemed terribly familiar, somehow. I had worked out what was going on a very long time before the apparently brilliant Reilly did and the police’s sheer obtuseness was very frustrating, as were the clichés of the genre as they mounted up – the Personal Involvement of the investigating officer who, needless to say, is taken off the case...and so on, and so on.

I also found McTiernan’s writing style quite hard to get on with. There are far too many points of view in the narrative which meant that it lacked focus for me. I got very little sense of place, despite an interesting location in Galway. Dialogue was slightly stilted in that way that doesn’t quite ring true as real conversation and she will insist on telling us what she has already shown us; as a small example, having been told important new information, “Cormac nodded slowly, thinking it through.” I realised that he’s thinking it through, thanks – that’s why you’ve told us that he’s nodding slowly; I don’t need everything clumsily explained in case I haven’t got it. There’s a lot of unnecessary detail which bogs the story down, like when a character borrows a flatmate’s bike without permission; she finds his keys “where he had left them, as always on the kitchen counter. He cycled to college sometimes. That way he could have a drink or three in the afternoon and cycle home. He stored the bike in the basement of the apartment building, but he was obsessive about locking the thing up, so she would need his keys.” We really don’t need all that extraneous stuff to tell us that she takes his keys to unlock the bike in the basement. This happens a lot; I felt like I was being treated like a slightly slow-witted eight-year-old much of the time.

So, I rather trudged through The Scholar and found it a bit of a chore in the end. Plenty of others have enjoyed it very much, but personally I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Sphere for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Holly Watt - To The Lions

Rating: 2/5

Review:
hard going

In the end I’m afraid I found To The Lions pretty hard going. Holly Watt is a fine investigative journalist, but doesn’t really manage to make the transition from journalism to fiction.

It begins very well as Casey (an investigative journalist) overhears something very disturbing while in a nightclub following another story and decides to follow it up. Watt is excellent in her descriptions of the process of investigative journalism and I was very involved as the process began. However, other aspects of the book were far less successful and, sadly, crammed with cliché both in the story and often in the prose – something I would expect an experienced journalist to avoid like the plague. :o) Things began to go wrong for me when Casey’s love interest becomes involved, which I found thoroughly unconvincing both in content and description. At around the same time, the book starts to get bogged down in worthy journalistic exposition. Watt makes very serious and important points...but she doesn’t really do it as a novelist and it doesn’t make good reading.

I found myself less and less involved. I wasn’t convinced by any aspect of the storytelling and found the style increasingly off-putting. It’s a pity after a promising start, but this one wasn’t for me.

(My thanks to Raven Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Adam Foulds - Dream Sequence

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Hmmm...

I’m a bit ambivalent this book. It has good things about it but in the end I didn’t think it amounted to much.

Dream Sequence is the story (although the description “story” might be pushing it a bit) of Henry, a successful English TV actor hoping to be about to make it big in films and Kristin, a comfortably wealthy, drifting divorcée in the USA who once exchanged a word or two with Henry in passing at an airport and has now become obsessed with him, believing their love to be decreed by fate. We get separate accounts of their lives for the great bulk of the book as Henry goes about the business of being an actor and Kristin sets out for London to try to meet him.

Depending on your point of view it’s either full of beautifully observed detail which brings rich pictures of the characters, or a great deal of Fine Writing for its own sake which doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know. I’m in the second camp, I’m afraid; to me, it seemed an awful lot of very little, exquisitely described. It was good enough to finish and things do take an unsettling turn right at the end, but I don’t really feel any better off for having read it. Adam Foulds does write beautifully much of the time, but even that gives way to a mannered style in places. He does like to hammer us with staccato nouns and adjectives; for example, I found these two sequential sentences a bit much: “He needed change, music, air. The flat was modern, built in the nineties, clean, spare, hard.” And then a couple of pages later (of Docklands), “Its appearance was anonymous, modular, global, financial.” Enough, already!

To be fair, much of it is perfectly readable; it’s just that I kept wondering why I was bothering to read it. Others may disagree, but for me this has far more style than style than substance (and the cynic in me is therefore rather expecting it to be nominated for the Booker Prize). Personally, I can’t really recommend it.

Elly Griffiths - The Stone Circle

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I had heard good things about the Ruth Galloway series; this is the first I have read and I’m afraid I didn’t get on well with it. Ruth is a forensic archaeologist in North Norfolk, which provides interesting possibilities as a body is discovered in an archaeological dig site, but these were swamped for me by the sheer weight of extraneous material about complex relationships between a very large number of characters, musings on all sorts of other topics, some slightly tedious stereotypes and some pretty dodgy dialogue.

To be fair, part of my problem may be joining the series at this late stage, but it is part of the skill of a writer to make books accessible to new readers. I found The Stone Circle almost wholly inaccessible; there were far too many characters, far too much extraneous stuff, and not nearly enough focus on plot and structure. Elly Griffiths does generate a very good sense of place and her central characters are quite well painted, but the dialogue is often quite stilted and at times plain clunky. For example, two seasoned police officers have this exchange after Dr Galloway provides some hope that there is information about an absolutely critical part of the investigation:

‘Good old Ruth,’ says Clough. They have been listening on hands-free because Judy is driving. ‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘If we can find out where [spoiler name] was originally buried, that’ll be a great help.’

“Good old Ruth” is clumsy and wholly out of character for Clough. And as for Judy informing him that what they both know to be vital information “will be a great help”… It really won’t do.

It's not a terrible book, but at about half way I gave up. I really wasn’t very interested in much of it and got very fed up with faintly familiar names cropping up and constantly thinking things like, "Hang on – who was Shona again? Is she married Cathbad? Oh, no – that's...er... So is she married to another character at all, or am I thinking of someone else?" etc. I'm usually quite good at keeping track of characters, but there are so many of them and so much interconnectedness built up from previous stories that I felt a bit lost some of the time. A writer should be able to remind us subtly who is who, especially when there are so many characters; Griffiths doesn’t and for me it wasn’t really worth the effort.

So, I’m out of step with the great majority of reviewers, I’m afraid. They loved it, so don’t let me put you off, but this really isn’t for me.

(My thanks to Quercus for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Tim Dorsey - No Sunscreen For The Dead

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Fantastically entertaining

I loved No Sunscreen For The Dead. It is bonkers, extremely funny and actually rather an exciting story.

This is the 22nd Serge Storms book. If you don’t know Serge, he’s not easy to explain. He lives in Florida and is a manic collector of trivia who has crazes, during which he discovers scumbags behaving despicably and dispatches them in ways which have an ingenious poetic justice and which are wholly deplorable and extremely entertaining. This time, Serge is manically pursuing an oral history project among residents of a retirement village. He and his hilariously drugged-up sidekick Coleman discover that unscrupulous salesmen are preying on the residents...with extremely amusing and satisfying results for the reader (who really ought to disapprove, but hell – they deserve it) but not for the scumbags. Alongside this is a rather intriguing espionage story which began in 1970 and which eventually impacts on the present day joyous mayhem of Serge’s activities.

It’s just a joy. I laughed out loud regularly, Tim Dorsey writes superbly, with especially brilliant dialogue, he constructs and paces his story extremely well and there’s a lot a lot of genuinely interesting and amusing detail about all sorts of aspects of Florida. I read the whole thing with complete delight and can recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)