28th February 2026

A good fourth book in the series, introducing a new character and with an exciting adventure for the main character in the mix as well.

It gets pretty dark for what's nominally a book for younger readers, but doesn't tend to focus too much on that aspect as the immediate impact on the characters themselves is the focus.

I didn't feel massively inspired though to return to read the final book in the series any time soon. I think this book was about the right length and the thought of one twice as long isn't super appealling.

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21st February 2026

It's 1952 and shortly after Felix's famous incident with the shark (the one from the books, not the much later version of the same event from the films). We get to follow some of his physical and mental recovery, and his job switch from CIA to private detective, alongside a classic espionage thriller.

It feels a clever balance of three things - modern novel, homage to the Bond novels, and period piece. Particularly at the start there's a few references that feel familiar to Fleming's original style, and similarly later on some of the big set pieces feel very Fleming in scope. Then the adventure proper begins and seems a well done exploration of the time from a 2020s point of view.

The plot is complicated, with a lot of characters and a lot going on. It was tricky in places to keep my head around this, but it felt recognised by the character and author as well, and that helped with recaps and ensuring we could follow along at the right pace.

A good exploration of the character, and an interesting adventure too.

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21st February 2026

It's taken me months and months to get through this book, despite the hype, and despite having bought one of the special editions. I have two contrasting views - one on the story, and one on the reading experience.

The story is great. It's a massively extended version of a short that I'd read before, and explores the Cosmere far into the timeline. As such, there's a lot of references to other worlds previously and not-yet explored, which is both great, but also a bit weird because I feel like I'd have prefered to watch those worlds grow more chronologically to understand them better.

The main characters are really interesting - a solid contrast between Sixth, a trapper, exploring a new place for the first time and seeing things with new eyes, bringing us along for the ride, and Starling, a dragon, trying to look after her really diverse crewmates despite having lost most of her abilities.

The problem I think I had the most though was the form of the special edition - and this is potentially a small silly spoiler if this is the version you've got and not read yet. There's a very clever artistic twist, where after starting out like a normal book, something in the plot triggers the pages to invert, and then for most of the book it's printed in silver ink on black paper. While this looks great at first, it quickly became a nuisance to actually read - the light has to hit the pages at exactly the right angle for the ink to be visible. I think that's the main reason it took me so many months to get to, just the awkwardness of holding such a big, heavy tome at the perfect angle for each page.

So, recommended in the regular edition (assuming it doesn't have the gimmick) for the story.

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21st February 2026

I have mixed feelings abuot this jigsaw-based murder mystery. I've read another of Bennett's novels before, and enjoyed that, but this time felt more brutal and the characters, at least initially, less likable.

It's a well constructed mystery, with lots of suspects, lots of clues, and a result that you can just about get to before the characters.

There's a ton of backstory, almost too much, to uncover amongst the characters, and I felt like it was a little overhwleming and distracting, having to deal with some of the characters and their interactions. This is where the unlikable main character was a problem for me, and I think that's one of the two things that stopped me feeling like I wanted to race through, and I almost decided to give up.

The second is the crimes themselves. I don't generally like seeing from the baddie's point of view, and this book does a fair amount of that. Partly that's interesting because it has a different take to many places I've seen it before, but again it made for a second unlikable character.

I probably wouldn't choose to recommend this one, and I'm put off reading more from the author because of it.

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8th February 2026

This coffee table book covers the three films of the Kelvin Timeline - but mostly it covers the first one, and then less of the latter two.

There's a few pages on each element, from uniforms, to aliens, to sets, and ships. Each section has a small amount of text, with some commentary or insight from the design team. And then lots of images, schematics, paintings, and occasionally photots or screencaptures of the finished product.

While there are a lot of pictures, some of them felt very small, and I found it hard to really take in what the text wanted me to. The image captions weren't always as clear as I would have liked which imag or images they mapped to, and there didn't feel like as much of a narrative between them as perhaps I would have liked.

Some of the drawings had been replicated in a faint blue colour on white pages, which felt an odd choice and made them hard to see in detail - it felt like a better contrast would have helped.

Overall I was left feeling underwhelmed and that it didn't do the job as well as equivalent books from the 1990s.

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8th February 2026

The seventh book is another exciting entry in the series, and moves around the characters with a good frequency - we get long enough to feel like it's not flitting, but not so long we get bored of any particular plotline before shuffling to the next.

And there's a lot happening, we spend time with all the main characters and they are all on their own journeys in this one, in differing parts of the world, and dealing with different problems.

I really enjoyed it, and was almost tempted to go on to book eight straight away. There's things happening now that I don't properly remember from before, which is interesting. The climax of this one though did feel like it came out of nowhere, so I'm not sure if my lack of memory meant I missed some of the hints that it was coming.

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1st February 2026

The third Paperback Sleuth adventures sees Cordellia hired to find the rumoured elusive final book in a series of WW2 thrillers, and once again this leads to people really wanting to kill her.

It's fun and silly and gripping. There's so many characters that we meet who are larger than life, and yet totally fit into this world.

I read the entire book in the course of a 3-hour flight, which felt a bit of a waste of such a good book, but also did the necessary job of keeping me entertained and distracted from the real world.

My only worry is that there are no more announced stories in this world, and I've really loved reading them so far.

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