If like me you enjoyed Dave Hutchinson’s “Fractured Europe” series (links to my reviews are in the sidebar – or scroll all the way down if you’re reading this on your phone) you will like ‘Cold Water’. It’s set in … Continue reading →
This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a monumental effort by Richard Powers, in both length and scope. It’s a book about trees and people. The two are intertwined against a background of the destruction of the North American forests for timber; … Continue reading →
Nothing to do with Inspector Morse’s sidekick, these three novels are set on the Hebridean island of Lewis, the most northerly of the archipelago. The setting of a small community where everyone knows everyone else is not unusual in crime … Continue reading →
With regret, this is the least satisfactory of the Robert Harris thrillers I have read. Set in Geneva and based on the financial markets’ “flash crash” in May 2010, Harris’s usual comprehensive research allows him to write in detail about … Continue reading →
These are the first three of a six book series of mystery thrillers set in the late 16th century. Elizabeth I is Queen of England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries is still a recent … Continue reading →
Suggested to me by an afficionada of the spy genre, I must admit that this book didn’t impress me at the start; the basis of the story seemed too improbable. But as I got further in it won me over … Continue reading →
The story of Pericles has been told and re-told many time over the centuries, or even millennia. Although the play, generally accepted as written by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, may be the best-known version in the English language there … Continue reading →
Intriguing, imaginative, inventive, impressive. Claire North’s character Harry August and his fellow kalachakra live Groundhog lives rather than Groundhog Days. Unlike we normal ‘linear’ folk their lives are both sequential and repetitive in time. Like the Ouroboros continually swallowing its … Continue reading →
An excellent story in the form of a political crime thriller set in the foothills of Pyrenean Spain towards the end of the 16th century. Carr captures the paranoia of the times with the secular state and the Inquisition both … Continue reading →
The second in the Jackson Lamb series. I felt it lacked a little of the tautness of the first; it ranges over an area wider than the confined London of “Slow Horses“ and the plot requires a bigger stretch of … Continue reading →