Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

ISBN: 9780553824698

Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of tell-tale signs. There are twelve things to look for.No one who has worked in law enforcement will ever forget them. New York City. The subway, two o'clock in the morning. Jack Reacher studies his fellow passengers. Four are okay. The fifth is not.

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket

ISBN: 9781405249539

Description
The three Baudelaire children encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune and cold porridge for breakfast. Then again, why trouble yourself with the unfortunate resolutions?

Reviewed on 12th February 2012
The title actually does say it all. When three siblings are orphaned, they are sent to live with an evil distant relative who wants nothing more than to steal their inheritance.

As an adult, this is a very quick read, but for children I can see each chapter being a perfect length for a bedtime story - but only if they are mature enough to cope with the disaster that befalls the characters at every turn.

Snickett has a captivating writing style - informal and entertaining despite the unfortunate nature of the subject matter. He doesn't shy away from introducing new vocabulary and makes learning new words into part of the joke. In a couple of places he breaks the fourth wall, which felt a bit odd to me as it didn't happen early on and broke the flow a little, but otherwise I felt the narrative was very good.

I'm not sure whether I will be bothering to pick up books two to thirteen though. I think it's very much a book for children to enjoy and even as a younger adult it all seemed a little depressing and, dare I say it, silly.

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Thunderball by Ian Fleming

ISBN: 9780141187594

Description
Blofeld holds the world to ransom, having hatched a staggeringly audacious plot to steal British atomic weapons. The book that introduced the most imitated and parodied of all the Bond villains, Thunderball also has one of Fleming's most deranged plots and a spectacularly described Caribbean setting.

Reviewed on 12th February 2012
Of all the James Bond books, this one feels the most cinematic, though I do wonder whether my knowledge that the novel is based on an idea for a film influences me in feeling this. When two British atomic weapons go missing, M puts everyone on alert, and sends Bond on a mission to the Bahamas to track them down.

Thunderball seems to be different from the earlier books. Bond feels slightly less rough around the edges - he's mellowed perhaps? His over-opinionated ways are much lessened, and he comes across even as slightly vulnerable. The other characters are the opposite. Whereas before there was in depth background about Goldfinger, Rosa Klebb, Dr No and so on, in this book Largo seems to be nothing more than a puppet. Blofeld gets the rich detailed treatment in an early chapter, but is promptly ignored from then on, making Bond's battle with Largo feel rather perfunctory and impersonal.

The detail of the settings is also sparser than before. In earlier books the reader is treated to long descriptions about the different winds, visits to Harlem, casinos, cars and so on, all of which are missing from this book. Instead, the focus seems to be on action and actual investigation - it would be fair to say this is almost the first novel in which Bond has actually had to do some proper spying. It is written as if for the screen and not the page.

I would go as far as to say that the opening is probably my favourite section of the book. This is the part in which Bond is himself and has his usual foibles. It's the part that gives Blofeld such a brilliant background - setting up an ambitious idea on Fleming's part to have an enemy that could feature in several novels.

Overall though I'm afraid I didn't find it to be at the better end of the series, lacking the unique elements that characterise Bond's earlier outings. It's certainly not bad though, just perhaps more in line with a run-of-the-mill thriller.

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Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie

ISBN: 9780007120710

Description
Beautiful young Elinor Carlisle stood serenely in the dock, accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard, her rival in love. The evidence was damning: only Elinor had the motive, the opportunity and the means to administer the fatal poison. Yet, inside the hostile courtroom, only one man still presumed Elinor was innocent until proven guilty: Hercule Poirot was all that stood between Elinor and the gallows.

Reviewed on 8th February 2012
In 'Sad Cypress' Hercule Poirot is hired on behalf of an accused murderer in an attempt to get her off the charges, despite all the evidence saying that she's guilty.

I found it quite a quick read, and enjoyable, though I'm afraid I didn't spot the solution before it was unveiled for me. The set of characters are the usual, but the country house setting , although present, is at least utilised slightly differently.

The characters are a good, rounded set and it's nice to see a lot of the story from one of their point-of-view rather than coming in with Poirot or Hastings (who is absent from this story). This allowed Christie to blend genres a bit and add a little romance to the story.

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The Innocent Man by John Grisham

ISBN: 9780099493570

Description
When Ron Williamson signed with the Oakland A baseball team, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. In 1982, a cocktail waitress was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron and his friend Dennis. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jaihouse snitches and convicts. Ron Williamson was sent to Death Row.

Reviewed on 6th February 2012
John Grisham's first foray into non-fiction has me torn. It is clearly a good book, a lot of work has gone into it, and it makes a very important point about the quality of a judicial system that can allow such miscarriages of justice to occur. However I'm not convinced that it made for a good read.

The book tells the tale of Ron Williamson - every word of which is true - who was arrested after two local police officers decided that he must have committed the murder despite the lack of evidence and without bothering to follow up any real leads.

It is a shocking tale, and does nothing to bolster my current lack of trust in any foreign legal system, particularly one with such an obvious lack of checks and balances. The treatment that Ron gets is awful and it is absolutely right that Grisham has chosen to use his popularity as a fiction author to highlight the problems.

However, it's not always an engaging read. The first two thirds move quite slowly, with a lot of repetition, which partly comes across like a lawyer trying to reiterate a point to a jury. Perhaps that's the point, but to my usual style of fast reading it felt a bit like lazy editing. The style is quite dry and clinical, and I found it hard to gain an emotional connection with the people portrayed.

The nature of the events makes the book hard to read as well. It's not an easy tale to take in, and knowing where it was going made it more difficult. At times I wanted to take out my anger at some of the people portrayed on the book itself. It was hard to motivate myself to keep reading because of this.

However I'm glad I've read it - it even makes some of Grisham's fictional works seem far more believable. Perhaps it is one that everyone should read - after all, anyone could be picked to serve on a jury, and need their eyes opened to the possibility of such travesties.

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Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb

ISBN: 9789780006488

Description
Fifteen years have passed and events are about to sweep Fitz out of his quiet backwater life and into the main political current again. Persecution of the Witted has become rampant throughout the Six Duchies despite Queen Kettricken's effort to damp it. The Witted themselves have begun to strike back. So when 15 year old Prince Dutiful disappears, is it only because he is nervous about his betrothal ceremony to an Outislander princess, or has he been taken hostage by the Witted?

Reviewed on 2nd February 2012
The first book in Robin Hobb's third trilogy set in the 'Realm of the Elderlings' returns to the setting of the first trilogy and the first-person narration from Fitz, who is called suddenly out of retirement for a new quest.

Hobb masterfully draws the reader back into her world so that it seems you have hardly been away. The fifteen years that have passed since Assassin's Quest are described to the reader incredibly well in a long piece of exposition that is cleverly framed into part of the story and doesn't feel at all out of place. Similarly the reminders of what's happened so far, and asides for those who haven't read the earlier novels, don't feel at all clunky as they do in some other authors' works.

While the plot is new, it draws upon a number of themes from the earlier books, including some threads that I didn't even realise had been left dangling, and feels a very natural continuation. Similarly, the characters have lost none of their appeal and while older, don't seem much changed.

Hobb's style is very honest and approachable, and I almost feel she could make the most difficult of concepts clear and simple to understand, and enjoyable to read. It's an excellent continuation and also an excellent new start, which I stormed through in three days. I look forward to finding out where the story goes next.

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Empire State by Colin Bateman

ISBN: 9780006498025

Description
It's bad enough having a name like Nathan Jones - unless you're a Supremes fan, which Nathan isn't - but when his girlfriend leaves him (for a drag queen) and he gets mugged, then handcuffed to a bed and cut up in a misunderstanding with an S&M hooker, it looks as if things can't get any worse for this exile in the Big Apple. But they can.

Reviewed on 29th January 2012
This is the second of Bateman's novels which I have read, and I must confess I feel pretty much the same way as I did about the first. While it's an interesting set-up and the characters occasionally show promise, I just wasn't able to connect with the novel and found I had to force myself to keep going through the second half.

Nathan Jones is a Northern Irish immigrant into the USA, and has a bit of a temper problem. When his girlfriend leaves him, he's left with just his security guard job at the Empire State Building, and a whole range of implausible coincidences that bundle on top of him.

I'm quite surprised by how I feel about the book, because Bateman's work is in many ways similar to that of Christopher Brookmyre, whose novels (Scottish instead of Northern Irish) are also of the slightly black-comic crime genre, but Bateman's plots and characters just don't seem to fit together quite so well.

In this book, the plot didn't seem to connect particularly well - there was too much going on, particularly some which was just complete distraction, and one element in particular cropped up very suddenly with no warning to provide a quick deus ex machina and extend the story by a few extra chapters. The humour was quite faintly sketched in over what is really quite a tragic tale, and the variety of sexual acts surprisingly frequent.

Overall, I'm afraid it's not a book I can recommend, which is a shame because it was recommended to me. I'll stick to Brookmyre in the future and try to resist the allure of some of Bateman's other tempting titles.

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Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben

ISBN: 9781409116967

Description
Investigator and sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big-time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend, a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead, the deal starts to go sour. Suddenly Myron is plunged into a baffling mystery of sex and blackmail. Trying to unravel the truth about a family's tragedy, a woman's secret and a man's lies, Myron is up against the dark side of his business - where image and talent make you rich, but the truth can get you killed.

Reviewed on 25th January 2012
Harlan Coben's first Myron Bollitar novel is a mixed bag. When american footballer Christian Steele gets a message from his girlfriend - who disappeared 18 months earlier - he recruits his sports agent to try to track her down. This summary is the basis of my initial scepticism about the book - the character just didn't seem to fit the plot, and that element remains to be satisfactorily explained.

The beginning of the book is weak, which put me off - after each of the first few chapters I was seriously doubting whether I could bring myself to continue reading. The characters were ill-defined, cocky, and the narrative informally, almost colloquially phrased. But it did get better, mostly through the application of the plot, because the above criticisms remained throughout.

The story, although dubious in places, is what drove me to keep reading, and possibly just because I wanted to find out what was going on. Unlike a classic crime novel, there's very little by way of clues - indeed the first half felt more like a treasure hunt, going from one contact to another, picking up the next name, and carrying on, without feeling as if much was being learnt. Eventually though some clues start to come to light, and the reader is just about able to figure things out in time.

The writing style is awkward though - it's too casual, with the narrator making observations that seem better suited to put with a character. There were also places where two pages got stuck together and it was surprising how far I could read on before realising that it was a completely different scene I had jumped into the middle of. The characters are larger-than-life and I found them hard to relate to - particularly the protagonist - and his reactions to situations are unbelievable to an extreme, it's almost like he's a child who doesn't understand what's going on around him.

Finally, there are a number of scenes that appear without much justification except to titillate. I found them unnecessarily intrusive and they didn't contribute to the characters or plot. Overall, I enjoyed the book for the plot, and I imagine I will try to read further into the series, which I've been told has its ups and downs, and hope that they become slightly more bearable.

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Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

ISBN: 9781408703748

Description
Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues - this book chronicles the rollercoaster life and searing intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.

Reviewed on 23rd January 2012
I must begin by confessing to being a fan of Steve Jobs and the products that his company has produced - I carry at least one with me everywhere. that is the background to how I am approaching this book. I'm not usually one for reading biographies, particularly one as huge on the shelf as this (though it's actually only around 600 pages), but was given this one as a Christmas present so felt I had to read it.

I really enjoyed it. Isaacson gives just the right amount of detail - there was no point in the book that I felt it needed more, and he manages to put across a lot of his subject's emotion and personality in a book that could only come from the extensive range of interviews he's performed with Jobs and those who knew him throughout his life. The amount of work that has gone into the book really shows through and makes me appreciate the book even more.

Each chapter deals with a different theme from his life, which sometimes means things aren't quite in chronological order, but nothing feels out of place - it's quite a surprise that someone's life can be chopped into chapters so elegantly. It's made very clear that Jobs' demanded that he not have any influence over the text, and there are places where it is tactfully critical of his nature, but in being so it only serves to make the book feel more truthful and a better representation of who Jobs was.

Reading the final third of the book did feel quite emotional, possibly because I can relate to some of the things Jobs was going through, but probably more likely due to the skill of the writer to intertwine the negatives around the many positives that Jobs had in his final decade at Apple. As I've said, I really enjoyed reading this book, and would certainly recommend it as one of the best biographies I've experienced.

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Piccadilly Jim by P. G. Wodehouse

ISBN: 9780099513889

Description
It takes a lot of effort for Jimmy Crocker to become Piccadilly Jim - nights on the town roistering, headlines in the gossip columns, a string of broken hearts and breaches of promise. Eventually he becomes rather good at it and manages to go to pieces with his eyes open. But no sooner has Jimmy cut a wild swathe through fashionable London than his terrifying Aunt Nesta decides he must mend his ways. He then falls in love with the girl he has hurt most of all, and after that things get complicated.

Reviewed on 18th January 2012
Piccadilly Jim is the first stand-alone novel by PG Wodehouse that I've read, and has impressed me a lot. Despite being set, and written, almost 100 years ago, the plot remains very approachable and the characters believable if a little dated.

When Jimmy Crocker's circumstances force him to have to impersonate himself, things can only get more confusing for him as he attempts to woo a beautiful redhead. Despite the complexity of the plot that rivals Shakespeare for characters pretending to be others, the narrative is easy for the reader to follow, though explaining the humour to someone who hasn't read the book will just tie you up in knots.

The book is set partly in London but mostly in New York, and Wodehouse manages to draw a vivid picture of the charactes who reside in each. It is certainly from the characters rather than the situations that the real humour flows, and Jimmy's suave lines are particularly memorable.

I'm amazed at how well this book has survived the test of time, and am certainly going to read more of Wodehouse's output off the back of it.

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