Posted January 7, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Griffin & Sabine, Nick Bantock
Holy moly, this is lovely. I was urged to get this to do a review on it for Postcrossing (check out my others on the Postcrossing blog!), so it was one of the things I bought with my Christmas gift cards… and I’m glad I did. It’s an epistolary story, showing both the fronts and backs of postcards and — in little pouches, from which you have to pull out actual letters which are handwritten (Sabine) or typewritten (Griffin) — letters sent between Griffin (an artist who creates postcards) and Sabine (an artist who illustrates stamps).
Sabine has been seeing Griffin’s art in her dreams for years, and reaches out to him via a postcard once she finally finds out who he is and how to contact him (through running across his artwork). After just a few postcards are exchanged, she proves to him that she knows his art like no one else can, and they quickly forge a connection despite the physical distance between them. It’s a love story, and a mystery: how are they connected? Why are they connected? What does it mean?
It’s a lovely reading experience; the pouches are a nice gimmick, and they really give you a sense of discovery. I’m not super great with visual detail, but the fronts of the postcards (illustrated by Griffin and Sabine, in the story) and the decorations on envelopes and letters add quite a bit. It’s a very short read, but worthwhile — and that ending! I’ve ordered the next two books.
Rating: 5/5
Tags: book reviews, books, mystery, Nick Bantock, romance, SF/F
Posted December 29, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Spoilt Kill, Mary Kelly
Wow, this book is such a complete downer. It features a divorced private detective who is investigating the theft of intellectual property (special designs for the items produced) at Shentall’s Pottery, who stumbles into a much darker mystery of the death of someone at the firm. It’s both a whodunnit and a who-was-done-in, with a structure that has the body discovered at the start, then a flashback to the investigation of the thefts, and then the aftermath.
It’s difficult to say much about the story without spoilers, but perhaps the least spoilery thing is that the detective falls in love with one of the people he’s investigating. When she finds out the truth, she’s less than pleased — even though she was keeping her own secrets all along, of course. The structure and this “love” story (which comes across as fairly creepy, since he snoops among her things and takes her out places on false pretences) are the story’s pretensions to a literary mode, rather than a paint-by-numbers crime story… but honestly, I prefer the paint-by-numbers. This is undoubtedly better written, but it’s grubby and psychological and slow.
Maybe if I was in it for the kind of story it turns out to be, I’d have enjoyed it more, but it lacks what many of the British Library Crime Classics have. It’s not a ‘cosy’ for me, as many of this series of reissues are; feels way too personal and definitely far too drear. There’s a certain attention to detail, of understanding the industry that she’s writing about, which makes this book stand out… and some of the psychological stuff and the interplay between the detective and the beloved would work better for me in a different context — but I can’t say I enjoyed it.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Mary Kelly, mystery
Posted December 10, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Murder Underground, Mavis Doriel Hay
Searching for something to read on the treadmill — not too demanding, but absorbing enough to sink into for a half hour here and there — I decided a British Library Crime Classic would be a good pick. It’s been a while since I tried Mavis Doriel Hay’s books, so I can’t remember quite how this stacked up, but it was an entertaining enough story. The young people are mostly fun — you can tell they are genuinely good people, even when they’re laughing at their elders or being a little stupid about a police investigation — though I couldn’t entirely tell the difference between Beryl and Betty at times, which got a bit confusing.
Basil, however, was really annoying, oh my gosh. Just stop prevaricating and incriminating yourself and tell the truth, man! And it’s not at all endearing that you lose track of what story you’ve told which person and get into a mess! Gah. He deserved to be in trouble with the police!
In any case, I suspected the murderer early on, though I suspect I have an eye for Golden Age fiction patterns by this point. (And this one fits the pattern to a T; fairly unlikeable person gets killed, unlikeable person did the deed, order is restored at the end…) It worked pretty well, overall, and the clues come together well. Enjoyable!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Mavis Doriel Hay, mystery
Posted November 1, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Death of Mrs Westaway, Ruth Ware
I read something that compared Ruth Ware’s work to Agatha Christie’s, and I can definitely see the influence here. The Death of Mrs Westaway is a bit of a thriller. The main character, Hal, has been working on the pier as a fortune teller since her mother’s death, barely making ends meet, and has taken out an unwise loan to boot. So she’s tempted when she receives a letter informing her that she’s due to receive some money in the will of a Mrs Westaway, her grandmother. It seems like a dream come true, but there’s a catch — her grandmother died a long time ago…
The temptation proves too much: Hal has a lot of skill with cold reading, the art of figuring out what a client thinks and wants from little cues and leading questions. If anyone can pull off pretending to be the real heir, surely it’s Hal… so off she goes, and quickly finds herself folded into the family.
It’s not as simple as all that, of course, and it slowly becomes clear that there’s something else going on. I found the pacing a little bit odd, in retrospect; it takes quite a while to reveal that there is something deeper going on, and that it’s not just going to be a case of mistaken identity. I can’t really say too much about the twists and turns, of course. I did enjoy the fact that Hal’s family are both unpleasant in their own ways, snappish and snobbish, and yet also welcoming and deeply glad to see Hal for the sake of their lost one. It rings true: families can be awful to each other and yet turn around as a united front half a minute later.
I didn’t get deeply absorbed into it, so I wouldn’t say this was a mega-favourite, and I don’t feel called to read more of Ruth Ware’s work — but it was an enjoyable enough reading experience, and I definitely cared enough to finish it rather than write it off. In these distracted days, that’s definitely something!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, mystery, Ruth Ware
Posted November 1, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
Stormhaven, Jordan L. Hawk
The third Whyborne and Griffin book is rather fun! My main issue with the previous books was a sort of general squick about Whyborne’s total lack of self-worth, which translates into a lack of trust in Griffin. I’m pleased to note that that’s a bit better in this book, though I shan’t say too much about it because sssh! Spoilers!
In any case, this book features Griffin facing a number of things about his past. One is his adoptive parents, who are coming on a visit and mustn’t know about his relationship with Whyborne. And another is a doctor at an asylum who has ruled that Griffin’s client’s brother, accused of murdering his uncle, is insane. He happened to do the same for Griffin at the end of his career with the Pinkertons, you see. So Griffin has all that on his plate — and Whyborne is hallucinating about a vast underwater city…
A couple of things didn’t turn out as expected, which is always nice, and Whyborne and Griffin move forward a bit with their relationship and find some more comfort and security with one another, which is lovely. I could always do with more communication (talk! about! your! problems!) — but it was a good step forward, and a believable step in them figuring out their relationship.
So I think my issues with the earlier books are, if not completely shelved, then partially assuaged. (I should emphasise that that’s a very personal nitpick, and not necessarily something that will bother other people.)
Oh, and Christine is still absolutely the best.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, Jordan L. Hawk, mystery, queer fiction, SF/F
Posted October 31, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Proper English, K.J. Charles
Proper English is the story of Pat and Fen, who I previously encountered in Think of England — this book is set before that, but reading them in either order is completely fine, because you don’t need to know much from either book to appreciate the other. It opens with Pat and her brother travelling to a shooting party at a country house, where it transpires that there’s a whole party invited, including their host’s fiancée, Miss Carruth. She turns out to be a sweet but apparently fairly silly girl, rather prone to giggling and girlishness: a pretty stark contrast to Pat, who is a women’s shooting champion, and expects to be treated practically as one of the men.
Most of the rest of the company aren’t nearly that nice, and it quickly becomes apparent something is very wrong, as their host allows his brother-in-law to lord it over everyone and say awful things, while clearly hating that it’s happening. Pat tries to just enjoying the shooting, but quickly finds that Miss Carruth (Fen) is a lot smarter than she likes to let on. Also, Pat is not at all immune to her charms, despite the differences between them. Their friendship and romance is adorable, and they quickly find that they’re not so much opposites as complementary to each other.
Because this is a K.J. Charles novel, of course, that’s not the end of it: in classic country house mystery style, on a miserable rainy day when no one can go out or leave, one of the company is found dead. Pat and Fen are all too aware of all the secrets in the house, one of them being their own, so they decide to figure it out and try to present the police with a fait accompli…
It’s all very fun, exactly as I would expect from K.J. Charles, and I’m a little disappointed I’ve finished it already.
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, K.J. Charles, mystery, queer fiction
Posted October 29, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments
Dead Man in a Ditch, Luke Arnold
Dead Man in a Ditch is very much like the first book in many ways: Fetch gets in over his head, does questionable things because he can be led around by his nose, makes a mess of everything and resolves to do better, with questionable results. I’m amazed by the way these two books have made that work for me, in that I keep reading in the blind desperate hope that somehow he will stop doing the wrong thing. You know he’s not going to, and yet you still really, really hope he will.
Part of that in this book is because there are no great choices, it’s true. But I do have trouble feeling that Fetch is growing, because the whole point of him is that he keeps making the same damn mistake again — that’s been engaging for two books, but could it sustain more? I don’t know if more is planned, and I’d gladly read another book because it’s good pulpy noir-ish fantasy fun, but I’m lacking a certain level of satisfaction.
I could tell you more about the plot, but it really amounts to what I said. Fetch tries to investigate things, like weird accounts of magic that cannot be magic, and it leads into a larger plot that sees his vacillation writ large and messing things up for other people, across a fantasy city after all the magic is gone. (That’s Fetch’s fault, too.) He is just the ultimate loser, in so many ways, and I really do have to reiterate that I completely applaud the way the author still makes me care about him despite that.
So, if there’s another book, I’ll read it for sure; after that, I guess it depends where Fetch’s personality drifts off to next. This keeps sounding like faint praise, but I really enjoyed reading it — I sped through it!
Rating: 4/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Luke Arnold, mystery, SF/F
Posted October 3, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Firebird, Susanna Kearsley
I normally love Susanna Kearsley’s work, in much the same way as I love Mary Stewart’s, but The Firebird didn’t really work for me. I stalled out halfway through, and then eked my way through a couple of hundred pages before I found my way back into it again. Partly it might have been mood, but partly I think it was the structure: The Firebird follows Nicola, in the present, as she searches out the history of an item for a client, and a girl called Anna, in the past — the girl who once was given the item, a firebird, by the Empress Catherine.
I was interested in both the historical fiction and in Nicola figuring out her issues — including her psychic talent, which sits sort of awkwardly next to the grounded reality of the historical plot — but… well, that’s the problem, I think: for me, it sat oddly. The time wasn’t evenly divided between the two, with odd stops and starts of action and then long, long stretches spent with the past.
I don’t mind the past/present juxtaposition in principle, and there are books that pull it off. This one, though, just didn’t come together for me, and I didn’t remember enough about the other books this one is related to in order to be pleased by the cameos and references, either. A bit sad, honestly; I wanted to love it. I think there’s a lot there for other folks, particularly those interested in the Scottish and Russian parts, and there’s a solid romance as well, in both the historical story and the part set in more-or-less the present.
Rating: 2/5
Tags: book reviews, books, historical fiction, mystery, romance, Susanna Kearsley
Posted September 25, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Dorothy L. Sayers
There’s no book in this series that doesn’t have its pleasures, and there is much wittiness and cleverness and warmth in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club… but to me, it isn’t one of the more distinctive of the series. When I think about individual elements, like the way it throws Peter into confusion around potentially betraying one of his own class (a fellow sufferer of shellshock, too), it seems pretty good… but it doesn’t shine for me.
It particularly bothers me that I don’t think Sayers ever really examined her noble hero’s tendency to try and let people take their own way out (i.e. suicide) by warning them or talking them into it. Of course, Peter’s not wrong in the people he accuses, and we know he never really will be because Sayers made him a little too perfect… but if he were real, he could be wrong, and justice would not be served if that happened, and he caused someone to confess and take their own life because they felt backed into a corner.
I think that’s a big part of my unease with this one, and this time I reread it I actually stalled on it for quite a while!
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Dorothy L, mystery, Sayers
Posted September 9, 2020 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments
The Belting Inheritance, Julian Symons
I quite liked a previous book by Julian Symons, and this had quite a similar feel: more literary and polished than some of the other crime novels in the British Library Crime Classics series, which just attempt to be good stories. And another experience has led me to conclude that, well… I don’t really like his work, on balance: I find it has a certain self-conscious feel, a knowledge of its own cleverness, that I find somewhat offputting.
That’s more the case with this one that with The Colour of Murder: the narrator is an older man recounting something that happened when he was just barely an adult, describing his naive young stumblings-about and pretentiousness with an older, more temperate eye… and in the meantime showcasing how very clever he was in some ways (like wordplay and random intuitions to dash across to France). The tone felt fussy and slow as a consequence.
The whole family are pretty unpleasant here, as is traditional, and I didn’t really get majorly involved in the mystery: parts of how it would work out were much more obvious than I think the author would’ve liked! It’s just not that clever, and something about that smarmy narrator (both his young and adult selves) just gets up my nose. Bah.
As a piece of writing, I think it’s well done, pretty well-plotted and structured and so on. The neat sketches of the characters are mostly unkind, but do conjure up people quite vividly… But overall, meh for me.
Rating: 3/5
Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Julian Symons, mystery
