29th March 2026

I enjoyed Curtis' previous two books so picked this up without really thinking about it. It feels quite different - being a fantasy story rather than science fiction, and I don't think I enjoyed it as much (although given I do read a lot of fantasy, I'm not sure the genre can really be credited with that).

It's the story of two young women from very different backgrounds, both coincidentally on a similar quest, though for very different reasons.

I read a lot of the book in one go on a flight, and this felt a good way to tackle it. I think my experience suffered from more fragmented reading once back home and that made it feel slower paced.

I can see that Curtis' next book is a sort-of sequel, and I'm not sure if I'll read that, or wait and see if she returns to science fiction.

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29th March 2026

The Rector is back, and there's a period drama being shot on location at the manor house, with many of the familiar locals helping out with the crew or as supporting artists. And of course, because this is a murder mystery, there's a murder.

It's a nice twist on the series, bringing some fresh faces into the location while also making the most of the regulars. The ongoing story feels comfortable and develops, and the new story provides a good mystery.

That said, the timeline seems to flow weirdly. Most of the book takes place on a single day, but then at the end we seem to skip through several days quite rapidly and if anything the end feels rushed, despite me taking longer to read it.

A nice entertaining read though and a series that I hope to keep coming back to.

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7th March 2026

The third book in Rob Rinder's series about the fictional junior barrister Adam Green sees him assigned a variety of cases, including a protestor who is accused of murder, and a soldier who is accused of a different murder.

I continue to enjoy the narratives, including the character's relationship with his mother, and with his female colleague whose interest in him he seems entirely unaware of, which adds much needed comedy to offset the potentially quite bleak aspects of the plot.

In this book, I'm not sure I understand how the various aspects of the plot are meant to gel together - it felt like two separate stories happening in parallel, almost as if neither idea really worked as a whole novel... but I was expecting some sort of overlap or thematic reflection between the two that never really transpired.

I'm not sure how I feel now about continuing with the fourth book - it might be that the enjoyment level isn't quite high enough.

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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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1st February 2026

I don't remember how this book ended up on my wish list. I don't remember where I bought it from. I felt nervous going in. But I really loved it.

Two adult siblings attempt to Christmas with the rest of their chaotic family, but find a time machine in the middle of the night and transport themselves back to 1984 and really mess up the timeline.

It's a great idea. The writing feels a bit rougher than normal books that I read - it has a very informal tone, and has the feel of not having been through quite the same amount of editing. And yet somehow for once this doesn't actually detract at all.

I read most of the book on a 3-hour flight, and it felt exactly the right sort of tone and pace for this. Really fun, engaging, and distracting.

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1st February 2026

The second of Natasha Pulley's books that I've read and wildly different from the first in terms of setting, and yet really similar in tone.

This is the story of Thaniel, a civil servant and telegraphist in 19th Century London, as he's caught up in significant events for the Japanese and Irish communities.

It's a complex blend of historical fiction and fantasy, with exotic clockwork, timey-wimeyness, and a range of really interesting characters with rich and varied backgrounds.

I found it incredibly readable and am both delighted and slightly wary of having discovered that there are sequels.

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17th January 2026

I was a bit dubious going in after not enjoying Hindle's previous murder mystery as much as I had hoped, but luckily I was wrong and this one's great fun.

It's New Year's Eve, and a murder mystery party has been organised to try to drum up some business from the dilapidated local hotel - but everyone's got a challenging life at the moment and are looking for ways to solve it... which may or may not include killing off one of the players.

It's a really clever little classic mystery, with a solid cast of characters with proper backgrounds, connections, and unresolved histories. I liked the various point of view characters, and that we got to spend time in several heads, not just one. The more contemporary setting was nice but didn't detract from a story that feels pretty timeless.

I did manage to spot the conclusion coming, but I don't think that's a negative at all - the perfect mystery is the one the reader solves just before the characters.

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17th January 2026

This prequel to the first book in the series gives some extra background to how the situation at the start came about. This confusingly makes it chronologically the middle book of the series, but as far as I can tell they can be read in any order and still work.

However my memory of the first book, after just two years, is too hazy to really understand all the context and how it fits in - whether there are overlapping characters or settings, or whether it's just serving to set the scene for the world.

As a standalone, I think it struggles a bit. Part of the beauty of the main books of the series is the depth and the detail and the amount of slow steady worldbuilding that can happen, and deep relationships that the reader can develop with the characters over the course of a thousand pages. This skips all that and feels shallow by comparison.

This book is split into two halves called Before and After. Which makes sense from the perspective of most of the plot. But one thread only appears in the Before half and isn't followed up on in the After, which felt very weird and like a forgotten or pointless bit of plot. Perhaps had I better memory of the original novel it would fit more comfortably, but as I read it came across as a mistake.

Ultimately I suppose I'm mostly disapointed that this wasn't a big main book in the series, and didn't deliver the level of enjoyment I was hoping for.

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10th January 2026

Deep into the Chronicles of St Mary's now, we find Max preganant and heading toward having to stop jumping back to witness historical events in contemporary time. As always, chaos ensues.

I found this book incredibly readable. It's funny and action-packed and the narrative flows at the perfect rate to hold my interest.

Yes it's silly, and nobody's thinking about fancy pants awards, but it's entertaining and ultimately that's what I'm looking for in storytelling.

I can't quite believe how much fun these books are, and I'm wondering why I don't pick up the next one sooner each time.

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3rd January 2026

I a run-of-the-mill 1992 adventure, the Hardys repeatedly visit New York after one of their friends buys a counterfeit baseball card, and the whole world acts as if this is the biggest possible crime that anyone could ever commit.

There's possibly the most peril of the entire series - every chapter seems to see the brothers knocked out, locked up, dropped on, or otherwise endangered leading to massive cliffhanger fatigue.

Educational, perhaps, but not the most engaging.

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