7th December 2024

After Reading a moderately dark novel I decided I needed something light, and so picked this off my shelves where it has been waiting a few months since I finally found it after years of looking.

I may have over-corrected.

This is an absurdist story set in the 66th 1952, where a mad professor has set up a ragtag crew to defend the planet against all sorts of wild threats.

It’s reminiscent of other science fiction novels based on radio series - Hitch-hiker’s and Red Dwarf (with the latter of which it shares a creator) - possibly because of the need to make every second sentence a joke. The characters also feel a bit Red Dwarf, being very simple one line explanations that turn into continuous comedy.

The plot seems surprisingly solid for the vast majority of the book, with even elements that seem throwaway or out of the blue turning out to be building up to something. Spoiler alert though that ultimately what it leads to is a total anticlimax and the feeling that the authors couldn’t be bothered to write a final chapter.

I think overall it was sillier than I was looking for, and although m glad I finally got to it, I’m not going to miss these characters or the world.

read more

30th November 2024

An intriguing new mystery, taking a classic setup with a new twist. We find ourselves meeting Annie, whose great-aunt received a harrowing fortune sixty years ago, and has spend that time documenting everything in her life to solve her own murder.

We get the narrative both from Annie’s modern point of view, and a historical view from her great-aunt’s notes, which is a fascinating way to see all of the suspects in multiple lights. This provides a great range of characters to learn about and investigate, and multiple strands of story to be really engaged with.

The tone was a bit darker than I was expecting from cosy crime, but this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of reading, just meant I needed to look for something lighter to read next.

A very cleverly plotted story, and I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel to find out what the next adventure will contain.

read more

24th November 2024

Book six of St Mary’s - by this point I have thoroughly lost track of everything that’s happened, but fortunately the book does a good job of reminding me of all the important things. I also have no sense of how much time has passed in the series so far, but again I don’t think that really matters.

This time out, Maxwell has been put on light duties and is covering as training officer, and we get to meet her first class of trainee historians as they learn what it’s like to live amongst the chaos of St Mary’s.

it’s a fun adventure, fast paced with a lot going on, balanced with a surprising amount of emotion and brutal tragedy, which is generally how this series goes. I enjoyed the set of new characters and seeing their quirks and interactions, and somehow do always feel that I’ve actually learned something about history along the way.

Good fun, and a nice mental palate cleanser between more serious stories.

read more

24th November 2024

I had been looking out for this first Tom Hindle novel for a while before coming across two copies together in a charity shop. I was imagining it to be the first in the series, but having read it, it seems I was wrong and these are standalone novels.

In this story, we meet an officer on a cross-Atlantic liner who is both unwilling and unwanted as assistant to a Scotland Yard detective who shows up just after a suspicious death aboard. It’s also 1924.

The narrative took me a few chapters to get into, and for a while I was thinking that I might have made a mistake in choosing this. But I was soon hooked and desperate to continue racing through. There is an element of old fashionedness to the narration, feeling like it’s intended to put one in mind of the 1920s, and I wasn’t sure this wasn’t more alienating than scene-setting. In a few places I found myself having to turn back and page and re-read because my eyes had skipped into skimming mode.

At the end though, I was very satisfied with what I’d experienced and found myself thinking about looking out for the next book.

read more

16th November 2024

I’ve put off reading this second book for some years, based on a memory of finding the first a bit of a slog. But my experience her was better than I was expecting.

Things have settled back to a new normal for Teagan and team after the events of the first book, until LA is hit by massive earthquakes, which naturally cause a lot of drama.

This is balanced by it being a massive thriller full of action and violence punctuated by slow bits and clever bits. There’s a lot of time spent in characters’ heads too, which actually makes for quite a varied diet over all.

I found the first half a bit of a struggle still. There are a lot of words it feels in some places that my eyes skim past and I have to force them back to. But after the first 40% maybe, and aided by a bunch of train journeys, I got into the pace of the story and raced through the rest.

Definitely better than I was worrying about, and gives me confidence that when I get around to choosing book three from the shelf, I’ll be okay there too.

read more

10th November 2024

I was a bit concerned going into Alex Pavesi’s second novel - the first had such a clever structure to it and I wasn’t sure how this would avoid feeling like a copy or just becoming a regular novel. But it’s managed with amazing talent to create a really addictive reading experience.

It’s a story of six friends who come together for a weekend in 1999, and write stories about each other murdering other members of the group. But everything is presented together - truth and stories - in a non-chronological order, so the reader has to try to work out step by step what’s real and what’s the stories within the story.

This means that some scenes do end up seeming fairly brutal, but for the most part I just wanted to keep on reading to find out what was actually going on and try to gradually lift the curtain bit by bit.

A properly enjoyable read, but probably one best read fairly quickly to avoid having forgotten details as you go.

read more

10th November 2024

Una McCormack arrives as a Strange New Worlds author in this poignant and entertaining novel set in both season two of the show and as a prequel, giving us backstory about the first meeting of Pike and Chin-Riley.

The story has everything - alien of the week, shining a light on a current issue through a sci-fi lens, showing truth to power, personal growth, use of character backstory, comedy, drama, light, shade, and a ton of references to British things and Star Trek lore.

McCormack has long been my favourite of the Star Trek novelists, and continues this with what might well be another best yet. I was so drawn into the plight of the guest characters, and their society, and how much it says about how we have treated people on our own planet and in our own time. And still manages to make it entertaining and readable at the same time.

Really great, and I can only hope for many more to come.

read more