I’m still a bit dubious about this extension of a quartet of mysteries that I really enjoyed but probably shouldn’t be any more. This was really good and apart from the fact that there really can’t be that many murders in the Shetlands – something that’s always true of many other mystery series set in non-metropolis places – I have no complaints. I found the characters involved in the mystery here, chiefly three women who met at an English university and came to Shetland to celebrate one of them marrying an islander very believable. There’s a good plot with a good ghost (tiny spoiler: [spoilers removed]). I need to read the rest of this series before I forget what’s going on with the ongoing characters again.

I had some audiobook credits that needed spending in a hurry and this was one of the books I picked out. This is book 17 in the series and it looks like the last one I read in this series was book 10, which was an alarming 16 years ago. I was a bit cheesed off with the series at that point and thought it was going downhill but it felt like it was about time I caught up with Anna and an audiobook seemed like a good way to do that.

Well, it took me an alarmingly long time to work out that what I was listening to was a prequel to the series. For a while I thought that I must have been mistaken about how old Anna was and wondering why she was pretending to be a rookie park ranger in this book. Eventually it all clicked and I enjoyed the story. There’s an awful lot of Anna-in-certain-death-peril here but the escapes weren’t too deus ex machina and it was entertaining.

I guess I still need to catch up with Anna properly some time!

Darren’s library book that I borrowed because he told me it was good. We’ve visited Fountains Abbey and walked around the water gardens in the past and it’s fun to read books that are set in places you know. It’s 1728 (I think) in the book which makes it interesting to look at the map and figure out when the characters are wandering into what will eventually become the National Trust tea rooms. Third in a series, but works perfectly well as a standalone, though I suspect it rather spoils the earlier books. A good read anyhow.

I saw that there was a new book in this series out and was surprised it was up to eight books already. Then I realised I’d managed to miss a book being released so I got hold of this one pronto, and lo it was good. This is turning out to be one of my favourite series. In the beginning I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t see much of Josephine Tey, although I like her Scotland Yard friend Archie perfectly well he’s not the character with his name on the cover. She came more into the foreground as the book advanced. Archie’s investigation of the horrific murder of a man who was buried alive brings him to Cambridge, which is where Josephine’s now living and the women of the city are being terrorised by a rapist. I was really impressed by the portrayal of lots of the background characters, there are lots of good women in here, they get sympathetic treatment and the author did a good job of bringing the 1930s to life in, what seemed to me at least, to be a realistic way. Now I can go and read the new book too!

Definitely a candidate for my book of the year. A fabulous tale that entwines Sam Wyndham’s backstory as a young constable in London (that’s 1905) with his present day (that’s 1922) life as a policeman in India. This book takes us away from Calcutta as Sam’s trying to shake off his opium addiction by retreating to a monastary in the hills for treatment (I think it’s basically enforced cold turkey). I could get hung up on what might be a slightly excessive amount of coincidence in the plot but perhaps I missed something, and I’d rather remember the great amount of character development there is here. I was especially pleased with the delayed, but wonderful, appearance of his sergeant Surendranath Bannerjee. All in all it’s an excellent book, by far the best in a series that I’d already thought was pretty good, and what will stay with me is the feeling of optimism it invokes about the world then (1922) and, maybe, now (2019).

I bought this ages ago and forgot about it until recently. Val McDermid’s an excellent writer and though I prefer her early work to her current output she’s always been great at grounding her books in what seems to me to be real world police work. I feel this book is where she’s decided that all the research she’s done for her fiction might as well make a book of it’s own.

McDermid leads us in an orderly manner through all kinds of crime scene investigation techniques, from things like fingerprints that we’re all aware of, to topics such as forensic archaeology and psychology, and the crawling insects that appear on the cover and peppered over the pages have their part to play as well. She pulls in dozens of true crime cases to illustrate where the techniques have been used successfully, and also includes examples where they’ve failed or been wrongly applied. I’m not really a true crime reader but this was an excellent layperson’s guide to the science of forensic investigations. Easy to read if not always easy to stomach. Suffice to say I won’t be trying to dispose of any bodies after reading this!

I enjoyed this. A different take on a mystery as we move to Lagos and meet the narrator, a nurse called Korede, who is helping her fashion designer sister, Ayoola, dispose of her boyfriend’s body. Gradually, as is given away in the title, we see that this isn’t the first time that Ayoola has been in this situation and we start to doubt her motivation for this murder. The background to the sister’s lives is revealed slowly. The story is full of detail about a city that’s completely alien to me, but peopled with a cast whose actions and motivations are familiar the world over. A good read that’s quick and light, but with a heavy dark heart.

I need to read more Margaret Drabble. This was thoroughly excellent. A kind of ramble about ageing that stretches out from Fran Stubbs, a seventy-something year old retiree-refusenik who works in something to do with care homes. The story takes in her recently bereaved son, an elderly gay couple in the Canary Islands, a friend who lives in a retirement community set up as a mock university college, her housebound ex-husband who she provides with home cooked meals, and numerous other related characters. I want to say they are larger-than-life, but really they aren’t. I can quite believe in all of them and the relationships between them. The characters are all approaching death in different manners, and there’s a theme, from the title, of flood waters rising around them that plays out sometimes in literal as well as metaphorical terms. A thought provoking and enjoyable read, and it probably sounds as if a book about getting inexorably closer to death ought to be depressing but it definitely wasn’t.

This is a book that’s so lauded that I feel guilty for not really enjoying it that much. The beginning felt like I was having a thousand characters dumped on my head and even with the aid of the table in the front of the book I couldn’t keep them straight. Once we got past the childhood part of the book and the characters reached adolescence I started to find it more entertaining rather than a memory exercise. By the end I’d come around to it and might even read the following books, though I think I’d better not leave it too long or I’ll have to do all that learning over again.

I didn’t expect to read this cover to cover as it’s a collection of essays, but they were well written and flowed from one thing to another that they felt like a whole book and kept me turning the pages. The author is way younger than me but I was nodding away with her all the way through as she threw eloquent feminist light on life experience. A lot of the book is auto-biographical which is why it hangs together so well.

I felt the book improved as it went on though I see many other people think the early essays are better. I felt distinctly called-out in the early pages of the book when she disparaged her child-self for using starry night and pastels when writing her first webpages: those are still two of my three stock goto themes (ssssh, rainbows are the third) and I’ve been putting the web together more-or-less professionally for twenty-five years now. And her teenage reality tv experience write-up was so far outside my experience that I didn’t really know what to make of it, though I enjoyed the reflections of the group of contestants on the experience. I thought that her later explorations of rape and other sexual abuse in academia and the bizarre capitalist phenomenon of weddings were the best bits. It was an interesting read and I’ll be looking out for the author in future.