nocto

Stephen Booth, who wasn't at all bad to start with, is going from strength to strength. This is one of the best mysteries that I've read for quite some time.

It's the dead of winter in Derbyshire's E-Division and DS Fry and DC Cooper have more than enough to deal with on top of the snow and ice without a Canadian girl investigating a second world war air crash on their patch too. Fry is dismissive but Cooper gets drawn into the historical mystery. I've got a definite penchant for mysteries that are set in the present day but delve into happenings in the past and this one is wonderful stuff. I would also have never expected a Peak District story to be full of so much interesting Polish culture but Booth brings all kinds of fascinating elements into his story.

The two central police characters are developing nicely through the series, they've definitely moved on from where they were in the first couple of books and I'm looking forward to following them into the future. Diane Fry is losing her rough edges and it seems Derbyshire is becoming more a home and less of an escape for her. Ben Cooper is breaking away from his family and building more of a life for himself. The changes in these people are gradual rather than sudden and this makes them highly believable.

More of the same please!

Purchased on 15th November 2002.

I've been looking around for this series for a long time. The early books in the series seem to be in permanent out-of-print-ness so I gave up on the idea of collecting them and plumped for the library.

This book introduces to Charlie Priest, DI in the Yorkshire town of Heckley. Heckley is has to be somewhere around here (where here is Huddersfield) but I can't quite pinpoint its fictional roots, I get tied up in references to the A61 to Leeds, the Rochdale Road and the Bradford Road and when a car chase passes B and Q I get all excited. Sad, isn't it.

Two things I liked especially about this book were: firstly, the fact that it takes place over quite a lengthy timespan which makes a change from most detective fiction where cases get wrapped up in a few days and secondly, the fact that the detectives work on a number of cases at the same time that tangle together rather than an all out murder enquiry for instance. I thought these elements made an interesting book really engaging.

I have one of the latest books in this series Chill Factor scheduled for a bookgroup discussion in January so I'm not going to get to read in series order but I am likely to read the whole of this series which comes highly recommended by reading friends of mine.

Borrowed.

I've heard from other people who've read this that it's not a patch on Siler's earlier works Iced and Easy Money and to a point I'd agree. What I am pleased with in this book is that Siler hasn't carried on writing the same book time after time but has branched out into something different.

Siler's first two books both featured strong female characters with criminal pasts and were told (as far as I remember) fron one point of view. Though the protagonists were different from each other if Siler had written another character who could be summed up in the same way she may have been on her way to "Dick Francis syndrome". (I always feel that Dick Francis writes essentially the same lead character in every book, the background and specialisations change but the character seems to be the same ethical being every time. I enjoy reading Francis all the same but he's not the writer that he could be.)

In this book there are three main characters who share the lead. Kevin is a journalist, he's been sacked from MSNBC for concocting a fraudulent story and he gets interested in the death of his friend Carl Greene who told him that he had a big story for him. The second lead is Lucy, Carl's widow, and the third a young burglar, Darcy, who is trying to go straight. Darcy is very much Siler's trademark character though there are aspects of Lucy which fit too. Overall I think the inclusion of three leads does the book, and Siler's career, much good though the plot itself here isn't as interesting as in the other books.

Purchased on 15th November 2002.

I didn't think this was quite as good as the later books in the series that I began with but definitely well worth going back for. Nell has just returned from a spell in Holloway for chucking a brick through the window of 10 Downing Street (I'd guess that that is covered in another book) when Mrs Pankhurst sends her off to investigate a legacy of fifty thousand pounds that has been left to the Women's Social and Political Union (aka the suffragettes). The money has been left to them by a high class prostitute who has suicided and Nell thinks everything is not as straightforward as it looks (and lets face it that's not very straightforward to start with).

Most of the story takes place in Biarritz on the French Riveria but I didn't think that the setting came quite to life.. Once again though the characters were excellent and I enjoyed seeing more of Bobbie Fieldfare, a bit of a firecracker in the suffragettes arsenal who took a brief role in A Perfect Daughter. I'm impressed that Linscott includes some defiantly anti-feminist characters among the women as well as the men in these books. It all adds up to an interesting picture of life before the first world war and as I think I've mentioned before I get the feeling that Linscott gets historical accuracy into these books without pushing research down the readers throat. This is rapidly becoming one of my favourite series.

Borrowed.

I'm back at the beginning of the Saz Martin series finding out where Saz started (avoiding her Enterprise Allowance officer mainly). If my memory serves me correctly the storytelling here is similar to that in Beneath the Blonde which I read years back. Saz's story is interspersed with another story told in the first person that relates to what Saz is investigating but we only discover how exactly it relates as the book unfolds. The dual viewpoint means that the reader is ahead of Saz in the investigation and I think this works pretty well. It removes the possibility of over the top suspense whilst keeping the mystery.

Purchased on 15th November 2002.

First off, I was never even interested in boo.com and secondly, the fact that you can make money out of writing a book of your financial disasters amused me loads when I first saw it and I let the library shell out the £7.99 for this book. I wasn't interested in boo because I'm both completely uninterested in the fashion brands it was pushing and I'm also the kind of person who responds to hype by ignoring it's source. Also this book ends abruptly at the moment boo call in the liquidators so I have no idea whether Ernst Malmsten, one of boo's co-founders was hoping that this book would be a money spinner.

Malmsten has two co-authors credited on the cover of this book but it's all written in the first person and I came away from the book really disliking him. He's frank about his dislikes and confrontations and fallings out with his staff and company co-founders and there are only a handful of people in the book who can be happy with the way Malmsten portrays them. He tries to be sympathetic and blame himself for mis-hirings and bad decisions but I never got thr feeling he was serious. Although he acknowledges that mistakes were made I don't get the feeling that he really believes that anything was his fault and that he blames his investors for not funding him to infinity.

As a techie person the parts of the book that stand out for me are those concerned with the implementation of the boo website. It was intended to be a ground breaking piece of design and e-commerce and failed to deliver either. I can see that there is far more to running a retail site than software and that the boo team had to concentrate on logistics and suppliers (actually I was really surprised by the difficulty they had persuading old fashioned clothing suppliers to deal with them at all) but they seemed for the most part to expect a complex and innovative site to appear from almost nowhere.

I didn't realise that boo had three founders, as well as Malmsten who took the CEO role in the company and Kajsa Leander who was mostly in charge of marketing and design I think there was a man called Patrik Hedelin who was brought in to handle finances but got pretty much squeezed out as the sums involved in those finances got too big for him to hamdle. My feeling is that the team really needed to contain a strong technical person and someone with a handle on the retail industry in order for boo to have got their ideas right before they burnt up a fortune.

I'm afraid I laughed out loud at finding that this page is all that remains of boo on the web today. Perhaps if they'd started off with a site this simple the company would still be here today.

It is quite a sad story since you know it's going to end in disaster but it's hard to find anyone to feel sad for. The founders always knew that it could end in tears, the senior management earnt enough and learnt enough that they are probably all doing very nicely for themselves by now and the investors all knew what kind of risk they were taking. I guess it's the rank and file staff who were encouraged to think boo 24/7 that I feel the most sympathy for and I expect that they are still waiting for their paycheques.

Malmsten's insistence upon creating a 24/7 fast living and hard drinking culture for boo was one of the things I liked least about the book. Having given up his private life in the name of entrepreneurship he seemed to believe everyone around him should do the same to further his vision. I think that annoyed me even more than his constant whinging that everything would be ok if the investors would just pony up another measley $20 million.

In summary, it's an interesting and compelling book but I wouldn't class it under enjoyable. It's more like rubbernecking to see the accident on the other carriageway.

Borrowed.