Tag: book reviews

Review – Remarkably Bright Creatures

Posted August 12, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Remarkably Bright Creatures

Remarkably Bright Creatures

by Shelby Van Pelt

Genres: General, Mystery
Pages: 362
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors - until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late...

Although I found Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures in the SF/F section of Waterstones, I think people picking it up with that kind of perspective are quite likely to be disappointed. Sure, one of the protagonists is an octopus, who solves a long-standing mystery, but… it doesn’t really reckon with what that might mean, how an octopus might really think and communicate. Marcellus sounds like a human, and in many ways acts like one (the author being constrained mostly by the fact that the octopus doesn’t have a voice).

Really, it’s much more literary fiction, following a couple of main characters: the octopus, an old lady who lost her son mysteriously, and a deadbeat as he gets dumped and decides to try to find his unknown father, on the grounds he should be able to extort something out of him in order to fix his own shitty life.

It comes together fairly predictably, right down to the character who actually says something about “remarkably bright creatures”, and relies pretty heavily on coincidence. I was sort of curious about how it’d all turn out, but it just didn’t feel like my genre, or like it was really about the incredibly cool concept of an octopus solving a mystery.

In the end, a solid not-for-me.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel

Posted August 11, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel

The Nobleman's Guide to Seducing A Scoundrel

by KJ Charles

Genres: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 400
Series: The Doomsday Books #2
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Major Rufus d'Aumesty has unexpectedly become the Earl of Oxney, master of a remote Norman manor on the edge of the infamous Romney Marsh. There he's beset on all sides, his position contested both by his greedy uncle and by Luke Doomsday, son of a notorious smuggling clan.

The earl and the smuggler should be natural enemies, but cocksure, enragingly competent Luke is a trained secretary and expert schemer-exactly the sort of man Rufus needs by his side. Before long, Luke becomes an unexpected ally...and the lover Rufus had never hoped to find.

But Luke came to Stone Manor with an ulterior motive, one he's desperate to keep hidden even from the lord he can't resist. As the lies accumulate and family secrets threaten to destroy everything they hold dear, master and man find themselves forced to decide whose side they're really on... and what they're willing to do for love.

A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel is a delight, as usual with KJ Charles’ work. Some years have passed since the previous book, The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, and Luke Doomsday is all grown up and embarking on some scheme of his own. Meanwhile Lord Oxney died, and the new Lord Oxney was raised as a draper’s son and went for a soldier, and Oxney’s family had no idea about the existence of such an heir. Into the tangle go our leads, Rufus and Luke, and of course if they’d communicate properly the story would get resolved far too fast.

Rufus is a delight. He has too much of a temper, of course, and allows himself to explode at people — some of whom richly deserve it, others who don’t (though to his credit he tries very hard not to explode in that case, and to apologise when he’s done wrong).

Luke is a lot less straightforward. Profoundly scarred, inside and out, he doesn’t much trust people and he doesn’t have much of a place in the world (except for in Sir Gareth’s household, where he grew up after his father’s death). He’s pretty amoral by most standards, but he does have his own deeply-felt convictions, once he’s willing to listen to them.

It was lovely to revisit Joss and Gareth a little, through other eyes, and lovely as well to enjoy Luke and Rufus’ story, and get some closure on other characters’ stories from the first book. I did stall a bit in the middle, because I could tell something was about to Go Down, and I wasn’t interested yet. The story obligingly waited for me, and then I tore through it to the end.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Trent’s Last Case

Posted August 9, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Trent’s Last Case

Trent's Last Case

by E.C. Bentley

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 224
Series: Philip Trent #1
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong.

Trent’s Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth as they probe ever deeper in search of a solution to a mystery filled with odd, mysterious twists and turns.

Called by Agatha Christie "one of the best detective stories ever written," Trent's Last Case delights with its flesh-and-blood characters, its naturalness and easy humor, and its style, which, as Dorothy Sayers has noted, "ranges from a vividly coloured rhetoric to a delicate and ironical literary fancy."

I was very curious to read E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, knowing that Dorothy L. Sayers greatly admired it. It’s definitely more in Sayers’ line than, say, Christie’s or Marsh’s, with a detective character who shares some DNA with Sayers’ Wimsey. He’s not quite as clearly characterised as Peter begins to be, and his piffle isn’t quite as outrageous, but he’s a definite precursor.

That said, the pacing feels really slow, and I found Trent a mite less charming. It’s always uncomfortable when a private detective character withholds information from the police, and that thread of the story (Trent’s interactions with Murch) swiftly disappeared in a way that felt outright odd, even if Trent decided not to share his info. The police are just letting you run around all over the place, are they? And you’re the only one who thought about fingerprints? And you’re going to keep quiet when you’re fairly certain about a murderer? Hmmm.

The other way in which this is like Sayers’ work is that the detective has a love story, and as in Strong Poison, it’s pretty intimately tied up with the mystery plot. It’s resolved within the book, though, rather than being something that develops well over time.

Overall, I did enjoy reading this; there are some bits of scene-setting and characterisation that feel really vivid, and the mystery is fun once we get somewhere with it. I’d read more of Bentley’s work.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dominion vol 2: The Sandman

Posted August 8, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Dominion vol 2: The Sandman

Dominion: The Sandman

by Thomas Fenton, Jamal Igle, Steven Cummings

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Mystery
Pages: 50
Series: Dominion #2
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

A gripping supernatural thriller of biblical proportions...quite literally. When detective Jason Ash arrives on the scene of a particularly strange murder in the suburbs of New Orleans, little does he know that he is about to take on the case of a lifetime. As dead people begin to come back to life, revealing that they hail from a realm where angels fight for power, it becomes clear that an epic battle between good and evil is at play, one threatening the very future of humanity.

The second volume of Thomas Fenton’s Dominion, The Sandman, still has the weird page numbering issue I mentioned with my review of the first volume: some places say 150 pages (ish), while Amazon says 50. The version I read said 50. That said, it picked up from the first volume in a way that made sense, and it doesn’t feel like I’m missing any story, so I guess it’s a weirdness in page-numbering on the Amazon files (or just bad numbering from other places).

The second volume has Jason Ash discovering a little bit more about what’s happened to him, finding that he can read the script of angels, getting unexpected offers of help, and finding himself to be apparently psychic (at least, when he needs to be). It continues to be fairly predictable in its story beats.

It was surprising to me how swiftly the various abduction sub plots are wrapped up, and yet I’m really not sure how Jason’s story can be wrapped up satisfactorily with just one more volume of this length. I guess that remains to be seen; I remain curious enough to continue.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Standard Deviations

Posted August 5, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Standard Deviations

Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways To Lie With Statistics

by Gary Smith

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Did you know that having a messy room will make you racist? Or that human beings possess the ability to postpone death until after important ceremonial occasions? Or that people live three to five years longer if they have positive initials, like ACE?

All of these 'facts' have been argued with a straight face by researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, 'If you torture data long enough, it will confess.' Lying with statistics is a time-honoured con.

In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful deductions and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves.

Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations is basically a primer on how to notice when data is being manipulated in some way. Some of it is obvious (omitting zero from a graph’s axes can obliterate scale; reporting only some of the data from an experiment means likely the effect disappears when using the full data; p = 0.05 still means the result is a coincidence 5% of the time), and some of it less so — though to some extent I likely find it familiar/obvious because some grounding in statistics is required to study biology and especially infectious diseases.

For me, the book was far longer than it needed to be, with some principles repeated in multiple places (even without counting the final summing-up chapter). I can imagine that others would find multiple examples and reinforcement of the ideas helpful, though.

Overall, it felt surprisingly dated for a book published in 2014. I think that’s down to the examples used, and some difficult-to-put-one’s-finger-on attitude on the part of the author — it feels like you could mention sexism, racism, etc, etc, and he’d go look at the data with his initial starting point being “you’re wrong”. That may be unfair, it’s a very personal reaction to not-very-much actual evidence.

And admittedly, he got my back up immediately by opining on cephalopod intelligence in a way that demonstrated he clearly didn’t know the first thing about cephalopod intelligence. Stay in your lane and write about what you understand, Mr Smith.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Threading the Labyrinth

Posted August 4, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Threading the Labyrinth

Threading the Labyrinth

by Tiffani Angus

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 357
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.

What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.

Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter plane from World War Two; the figures she sees in the corner of her eye.

A beautiful testament to the power of memory and space, Threading the Labyrinth tells the stories of those who loved this garden across the centuries, and how those lives still touch us today.

Tiffani Angus’ Threading the Labyrinth seemed like a promising choice: the idea of “garden fantasy” sounds fascinating, especially for someone who thrived on The Secret Garden rereads as a child (even if I am not really an outdoorsy person, not even as outdoorsy as the back garden). Overall, though, it just didn’t come together for me as it skipped and slipped through time, jumbling characters together and echoing them here, there and everywhere. At one point toward the end of the story the sections got really short, almost like the author ran out of patience with filling things out.

There were some lovely descriptions, and scenes which revealed character beautifully or were intriguingly mysterious. At other times, I almost couldn’t tell what was going on. In the end I found myself having difficulty not just skim-reading, because I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Ultimately, not one for me, I think. Perhaps a little more patience with it is rewarding for some, but for me it just didn’t work out.

Rating: 1/5

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Review – The Brutish Museums

Posted August 2, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Brutish Museums

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

by Dan Hicks

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museum, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.

It’s difficult for me to evaluate Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums, since it’s not really my field and at times he gets quite technical and academic. It feels like the audience for this isn’t really clear: is it those who visit museums? Is it activists? It doesn’t quite feel like it’s other curators… As a result, that makes it a bit of an uneven read.

I’d been hoping for more detail about the actual Benin bronzes and how they’ve been displayed and discussed, but really this is about the wrong that’s been done — it could be about any kind of object displayed in a museum, it’s just an exemplar of a particularly egregious episode of looting, slaughter, and display of spoils.

It’s an interesting read, though it’s hard to know what to do with the information. It’s definitely a viewpoint worthy of thought, though: those who visit museums can be helping to perpetuate harm.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Love Everlasting, vol 1

Posted August 1, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Love Everlasting, vol 1

Love Everlasting

by Matt Hollingsworth, Tom King, Elsa Charretier

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 136
Series: Love Everlasting #1
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Joan Peterson discovers that she is trapped in an endless, terrifying cycle of"romance" -- a problem to be solved, a man to marry -- and everytime she falls in love she's torn from her world and thrust into another tear-soaked tale.

I really loved the art in volume one of Tom King and Elsa Charretier’s Love Everlasting. It’s stylised and expressive, with well-differentiated characters and designs. It’s a fun race through a bunch of different styles of love story, with the main character Joan Peterson always dying just as soon as she’s declared her love for someone.

The fact that Joan — and a weird masked cowboy — are the only constants does mean that there’s not really much character-building, especially as Joan herself isn’t really exactly the same in every single scenario. The concept is the most interesting thing there, rather than the character (though Joan’s approach to her problems is, ah, entertaining).

By the end, it’s getting a touch too repetitive without any explanation, but it’s a really fun concept, and I am itching to know a bit more. I hope the second volume will explore the plot stuff from the fifth issue and deepen the story a bit.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Tour de Force

Posted July 29, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tour de Force

Tour de Force

by Christianna Brand

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 272
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Inspector Cockrill’s dull vacation is jolted by a Mediterranean murder. From the moment he steps on the plane, Inspector Cockrill loathes his fellow travelers. They are typical tour group bores: the dullards of England whom he had hoped to escape by going to Italy. He gives up on the trip immediately, burying his nose in a mystery novel to ensure that no one tries to become his friend. But not long after the group makes landfall at the craggy isle of San Juan el Pirata, a murder demands his attention. The body of a woman is found laid out carefully on her bed, blood pooled around her and fingers wrapped around the dagger that took her life. The corrupt local police force, impatient to find a killer, names Cockrill chief suspect. To escape the Italian hangman, the detective must find out who would go on vacation to kill a stranger.

Christianna Brand’s Tour de Force was her final novel featuring Inspector Cockrill, and it features Cockie on an actual holiday! Naturally, it’s going to turn into a busman’s holiday, and you know that from the start: you’re just left to guess at exactly how the tensions are going to rupture and who exactly will die. It’s a fairly typical collection of characters: someone’s in love with someone’s husband, someone’s a fortune hunter, someone’s an old spinster, someone’s a detective…

I think my problem with Christianna Brand is that there’s something so deeply cynical about her writing. I always compare her with E.C.R. Lorac, where I think sometimes Lorac tends the other way too much (but that’s much more pleasant to read). It feels like everyone in Brand’s work has ulterior motives, and she doesn’t seem to have liked other women very much. Leo Rodd’s a cheat and deeply bitter due to his disability, but it’s Vanda Lane, Helen Rodd, Miss Trapp and Louvaine Barker that have their weaknesses and foibles truly exposed. Not that Brand had a great deal of sympathy for the men either, but the nature of their flaws feel different, and the spotlight less cruel.

In the end, as well, Cockrill’s simply not that great a detective here, and his blindness is just frustrating — and because of a pretty face? Meh.

I always want to like Brand’s work a lot more than I do, but here we are.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – The Hands of the Emperor

Posted July 28, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – The Hands of the Emperor

The Hands of the Emperor

by Victoria Goddard

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 899
Series: Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

An impulsive word can start a war. A timely word can stop one. A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god. He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person. He has never once touched his lord. He has never called him by name. He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy. The acceptance upends the world.

Belatedly posting a book I read in 2022, and apparently never cross-posted the review of here!

I really loved The Hands of the Emperor. It’s a huge book in which not a lot actually happens, but it’s full of hope and heart, with a central relationship of love and respect that had me riveted. I was recommended it as “imagine The Goblin Emperor from Csevet’s point of view”, and that’s sort of fair — except that you have to imagine that Csevet has Maia’s drive for reform and for goodness.

Cliopher is the Last Emperor’s secretary, and has been slowly pushing a revolutionary agenda for the world now that the Fall (a magical event you mostly learn about through its personal effects on Cliopher and somewhat on the others) has changed everything. He has opinions and morals informed by his Islander background, and these influence his place at court, how people see him, and the fact that he finally decides to reach out to the Emperor as a person and offer to take him on holiday.

From that unfolds one of the book’s major themes: the Emperor Artorin’s need for freedom, his past before he became Emperor, and his growing reliance on Cliopher to change things and help him find freedom by finding his heir.

Cliopher is in some ways a bit too capable, a bit too perfect, and there are so many scenes of people getting their comeuppance because they weren’t kind to Cliopher, or didn’t understand his work and his morals, etc, etc. But it’s enjoyable every time, and it’s especially enjoyable because Artorin decides he must make other people see and respect Cliopher. The friendship between them is lovely.

It’s a long read, but one which I savoured completely. I’m looking forward to reading the other novels and novellas in this world, and my only complaint is that it stopped too soon and we didn’t get to see whether Tor retires to live with Cliopher, Conju, Rhodin, etc. There are so many scenes I loved that I couldn’t talk about them all, and several which I reread again immediately because I wanted to feel it all again right away.

I haven’t talked about a quarter of what there is to discover in this book, but that’s OK. You can go and discover it for yourself.

Rating: 5/5

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