Charming story!

I bought the whole series of these books, after thoroughly enjoying the tv adaptation of the first book a few months ago. This first book, the only one I have read so far, was also equally as enjoyable. The heroine of the story, Precious Ramotswe is a very likeable person that you could imagine would be very warm hearted and understanding if she was real! You very easily could imagine her being the sort of person you would like to tell your troubles to! She is strong minded, yet gentle and caring, and her agency solves the mysteries in a very individual way.
Granted, it is not your typical crime novel, in fact, I think crime has little to do with it at all and the events are just a way for the story to move forward. This is a story about people and human relationships. It is slow-paced and gentle, giving you time to reflect and think about the wonderful images of Africa being conjured up. The pace is very reflective of the way of life there and Precious Ramotswe's attitude.
This isn't the book to read if you are expecting a gripping crime novel or a"who-dunnit". For a start, the"crimes" that Precious Ramotswe's detective agency undertakes to solve, are mostly that of cheating husbands and stolen cars, not murderers and serial killers.
In places it is funny and quick witted in a simple and to the point manner. A charming tale reflecting the importance of friendships and listening in a world that can sometimes throw unexpected things in your path.
The only reason I gave it 4 stars as opposed to 5, is because I think putting it under the"crime" category is slightly misleading.

Kisscut

This was the first of this authors books I read. I will not be bothering to read anymore. The main character is one dimensional. The story lacks suspense throughout and the storyline itself is, in my opinion, ridiculous. This is just another poorly written and conceived crime novel by a very mediocre American crime writer. Do not waste your money and time on this book.

Unexpectedly good

This is one book I read for just trying a new writer. It turned out to be very good and though rough there is good policework. I am confused as to try another by the same author but most probably I shall eventually. Though bigger than most thrillers, the pace gets faster as you move on and you get more involved. When I started it, I thought I might not complete it, what a cliche', but its not, and there is alot of sense in the sequence of events. Its more American style with moving events rather than Brittish with character analysis.Sometimes you just need one or the other type, so its style is definite and you can choose.

Better than Blood Brothers

This book is the second in the sign of seven Trilogy. In the first part of the trilogy, we met the three boys, Fox, Gabe and Cal who inadvertently awoke an ancient evil that terrorises the town once every seven years. In this instalment, we meet Fox and Layla. Fox's fight with the evil that skims the edges of the Hollow is more personal - and heartbreaking as a result.The tension in this book is cranked up a notch, as the stakes being played for are threateningly real. The malevolent forces seem stronger this time around, and you get the feeling that in book three, the characters might have a front row seat to the apocalypse.

You won't be disappointed with this book, but am looking towards book 3, since Gage has some serious issues that he needs to deal with.

Nothing like the film is going to be...

This is a rather strange collection of short stories by Ian Fleming which have been gathered together for the first time here. Some of them barely feature Bond at all and none of those that have been the titles of films bear any resemblance to those films. Many of the stories have appeared before in the collection"For your eyes only" so may be familiar already. It is reported that Fleming used the short story formula as a means of gaining commisions to magazines and based many of the stories on personal experience with many of the characters recognisable friends (or enemies) of the author. Well whether or not that is the case the stories themselves are of varying standard and the title"track" is an interesting one in itself but they appear to be hurried affairs and don't add to Fleming's legacy as I don't believe he was comfortable writing short stories. It has also been said that these stories owe much to the Ashenden series by Somerset-Maugham but for me they don't hold a candle to those ones. So all in all a fair collection but not a patch on the novels.

Kernick's long awaited third book does not disappoint.

This is Kernick's third book, and he is back on familar territory. The dark and murky (more on that later) side of the London crime scene. Having read his first two books, I had been looking forward to the publication of The Crime Trade perhaps a little too much. Despite the anticipation, I have to say, that Kernick has come up with another winner.
Stegs Jenner's wife gives him a hard time. His superiors in the Police do as well, but he takes these knocks and comes back fighting. Of course he needs a bit of help from the odd drink, and occasional recreational narcotic, but this all adds to the realism. Sherlock Holmes is a long time dead !
In one section, I was laughing out loud on the Tube, before 7am, at the poor sod's predicament, such is Kernick's ability with dark humour and characterisation.
Some of Kernick's others characters are superb. The aptly named 'grass' Trevor Murk, will sicken you. The menacing"Strangleman" Grant, will make you look behind you even more on a dark night. These and more add to what is a highly recommmended dip ino the dark side of London's crime trade. With some excellent twists, and a carefully constructed story, this is one of the best books I have read this year. Highly recommended.

Another Clear Winner for the Author

Clive Cussler was born in 1931 and grew up in Alhambra, California. He attended Pasadena City College before joining the Air Force. He went on to a successful advertising career, winning many national honours for his copywriting. He has also explored the deserts of the American Southwest in search of lost gold mines, dived in isolated lakes in the Rocky Mountains looking for lost aircraft and hunted under the sea for shipwrecks of historic significance, discovering and identifying more than sixty. He is married with three children, and divides his time between Colorado and Arizona. His credentials as a best selling author cannot be doubted and he has a large `stable' of best selling adventure novels.

Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon, a well disguised combat shop have barely escaped from a mission on the Congo River. Not in a hurry to commit is men to anything else for a while when the radio operator intercepts a mayday call from a boat under fire off the African coast. Much as he would like to ignore the Mayday, no seaman with an ounce of self-respect can ignore such a call. Cabrillo takes the appropriate action and saves the beautiful Sloane Macintyre.

Sloane is looking for a long lost sunken ship that could hold a fortune in diamonds. But what intrigues Cabrillo most of all is her story about a mad fisherman who claims to have been attacked in the same area by giant metal snakes . . .

not as good as the first

I enjoyed the first book and was really looking forward to the next in the series. I was really disappointed, I found most of it was a re-hash of the first and to be honest I wish Gretchen would hurry up and get rid of him to put us out of his misery!!.. For me there was no tension, no pace and it just fell flat.
Unfortunately, it looks like the third could just be a repeat and that would be a real shame - some characters I feel are not meant to be a series - a one off is enough and I felt that Ms Cain had done herself an injustice by rushing out a poor sequel to an excellent first book.

Good read, disappointing ending

If you enjoy japanese fiction or crime novels you'll enjoy this. It has a very good plot and good characters. Don't be put off by the names, you get used to them surprisingly quickly. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, but thought the ending was a bit weak.

Another wild ride from Andy McDermott

I love this book even more than the first one!

On top of their jobs, Nina and Eddie have personal problems to sort out. What couple doesn't face that? However, for the rest of us sorting out our problems and getting the job done doesn't involve chasing crazily all over the world, being shot at and solving deathly riddles!

Andy McDermott opens up the throttle on just about every conceivable mode of transport in this story and the pace is super-fast from the start to the finish. I guess I'll just have to re-read his books in other languages until the next one comes out.

Good but not the best

This latest installment from Val McDermid was eagerly anticipated. However, I found that unlike all her other books, I didn't race through it as I usually do. There simply wasn't that anticipation and suspense of whodunnit? for me.
Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy it, and I liked certain aspects of it, such as the look at Tony Hill's past and how Val used topical crimes. She's still a darn good storyteller though so I'm not too disappointed.
However I felt that there we didn't get to 'know' the serial killer very well. There was no insight into his mind at all and all felt a bit rushed at the end.
Perhaps what I'm missing is the blood and gore?! There was none here, and none of Val's usual intricately woven plot.
I won't be reading it again, but Val left lots of loose ends so will defiantely be looking forward to the next one!

Well worth reading

Whenever I pick up a Lee Child book I know I'm in for a great ride of a story and this did not disappoint. Yes, you can spot the twist and you know how it's going to end but still I couldn't put it down. Fantastic and highly recommended.

I'm confused

1st Gripe. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I guessed what was going on about half way through. I'm not sure if that's intentional. But I'm not happy about it. Why such an obvious plot?

2nd Gripe. Not enough about food! I love the local seafood of which most of the books have several helpings. This one hardly had two.

3rd Gripe. Montalbano is getting a little old. And recently he's been going on about it a lot more. I wish he'd settle down with Livia.

A below average story, pleasantly told

Quite easy to read... despite the underlying topic relating to renaissance art history, which I know very little about, I think it is described in such a way that does not alienate philistines like me and I actually feel educated in such things now.

Having just undertaken a research based project, I can also empathise in the lead character a little.

If I sat back to think about the plot though, I probably wouldn't have much to write home about as it is 'struggling for friends' to be honest.

After a quarter of the way through, I predicted how it would unfold, desperately wanting to be wrong... Alas, any surprises I had were minor and instantly forgettable.

Just to save anyone else wasting their time:

He goes to Italy, gets laid a few times, discovers the hidden meaning behind a garden is a confession of murder, solves a recent murder of Emilio (which was always pointing at being his brother - yawn!), gets in a bit of a scrape as a result of his endeavours trying to out the killer, just before going home to get a first in his degree and live happily ever after... Oh yeah and gets the girl in the end!

Despite my nonchalance, I quite enjoyed the escapism which the book provides. We have had very warm weather this last week and it is easy to imagine kicking about in hotter climates, being young again!

I would prefer something a little less pleasant with more gorey twists and unexpected turns for my next read though!

It's About Plot

I've read most of the Inspector Banks series and enjoyed them. What you've got to understand about Peter Robinson is that he is an expert in plot. I don't read his books expecting brilliant characterisation or dazzling dialogue. All of us who read his books know that his characters are pretty flat and the dialogue is, at times, embarrassingly bad. However, you cannot deny that the guy can write a great mystery: they usually begin with a murder and then he gradually gives the reader a little bit more information in each chapter; not too much at once so that the reader keeps turning the pages in search of the next clue, almost as if you are trying to solve the crime before Banks does. 'Friend of the Devil' is, therefore, in keeping with Peter Robinson's established format: he writes a perfectly plotted crime thriller.

A Generally Good Book

This book, like many of the previous books by Ian Rankin, focuses on Detective Inspector John Rebus, an alcoholic policeman who lives and works in Edinburgh. When the series started Rebus was a detective sergent. As the series progresses Rebus gets older (and, like many older people, stroppier and more opinionated). This book focuses on the 10 days before his retirement.


This book sees a Russian poet-cum-exile-cum-emigre seemingly killed in the street in the city center, after a night on the tiles. Rebus, and his sidekick D.S. Siobhan Clark, investigate the circumstances of his death. Was it a mugging gone wrong, or something more serious?

The entirety of the book is spent trying to discover whether or not the character was killed in a mugging. Rankin uses the real life death of Alexander Litvenenko in London as a tool to keep you guessing as long as possible about the real motive in this book. The attempt at balance works for a while, but if you've read mysteries you'll know whether the use of these real life events is relevant after about 70% of the book is read.

The book is probably the most linear thriller that I've read by Rankin in years. It has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, and has fewer asides about Scotland and the Scottish than I've seen in ages. This makes the central story flow better, but if you like your Rebus books with"colateral colour," you might not enjoy it as much as you enjoy some other books that Rankin has written recently.

In short, if I were made to sum up this book in one sentence, this is a generally book which continues the improvement in the series that we have seen over the last few books in the series. It is much better than The Falls and Resurrection Men.

Hit and Miss

I have read all the novels in this series and I was really expecting terrific things from this latest Dalziel and Pascoe. The last book, in which Dalziel is blown up by a terrorist bomb was one of the finest books by Hill for a very long time and I really had hoped he had gotten back into his stride. I confess to being sorely disappointed by this effort.

It picks up where the last book left off, with Dalziel recovering in a convalescent home in a fictional seaside resort of Sandytown. The book is written from several narrative viewpoints and I really think that this is one of the things that lets it down. Hill inhabits Dalziel and Pascoe like a comfortable coat, but his ability to switch voices doesn't seem well tuned here. Much of the first part of the book is taken up with the e-mail correspondence of a young woman who is a newly trained clinical psychologist, talking to her sister about her stay in Sandytown. I found it impossible to believe that a) Charley was a woman and b) that Charley was a trained anything. The lack of spelling, punctuation and attention to grammar coupled with improbable linguistic usage and ridiculously long descriptive passages just did not work at all and left me irritated beyond belief. Nobody writes e-mails like these, except in books.

The other thing is that this is a very long book with a ridiculously complex plot and I found that the pudding was rather over egged. Nothing really happens for a good two hundred pages and then at the end everything is sewn up in about fifty pages. It was unbalanced, unwieldy and a real trial to read. I persevere with Hill because when he is good he is almost unbeatable at modern crime fiction, but when he is bad he is execrable. Sadly this is one of the bad ones. To be read only if you are a die hard fan and want to find out more about the long term plot arcs of the series. Otherwise, as a stand alone crime novel I would say it is a poor read and a waste of valuable time and money.

The Ninth Inspector Montalbano Mystery - La Luna di Carta - The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Montalbano wakes this time not by his inner alarm clock but from one he now sets each night to wake him prompt each morning. His usual slapstick routine of starting the day had fallen by the wayside, irrelevant random thoughts had been plaguing his mind, with a touch of forgetfulness, tiredness and that feeling of age had suddenly creep upon him.

Within ten minutes of being at the station Montalbano is confronted by Signorina. Michela Pardo who cannot locate her brother Angelo, he may have been forty-two but had been missing for some forty eight hours and would always call when away. After a few questions and being won over by Michela's deep, violet lake eyes he was willing to check out her brother's apartment. Montalbano stumbles into a gruesome situation on Angelo's terrace, a man shot at point blank range in the face presented in a rather lewd position.

As things begin to unfold Angelo Pardo the victim was certainly appearing to be no saint. A former doctor struck off the Medical Association ten years earlier after indecent relations with a female patient. Montalbano also had suspicions and doubts about Angelo's job as a medical/pharmaceutical `Informer' and the wealth that seemed to go with it, not only was he lacking a bank account, the money had instead been spent on lavish expensive gifts for his mistress. Then there was Angelo's computer, three files protected by passwords and within secret codes were used! What for? Threatening letters had been found but a strongbox Angelo kept was missing. Montalbano sized up possible motives female entanglements or shady influence in the medical profession with plenty of suspects past and present to go with both, or was it something else? While Montalbano's faithful team cracked codes and follow all other leads including a political one, Montalbano on the other hand was looking for trouble and decided his line of enquiry, presence was best felt with the ladies.

Andrea Camilleri has done wonders with the character Inspector Salvo Montalbano over the years, always in hot water with female trouble, his moods dark, aging but not lacking in sophistication and charm it just melts right off the pages. In this book Montalbano wits become changellened against the leading ladies Michela Pardo and Elena Sclafani but its Montalbano inner thoughts about these two which adds to the comedy. His team follow him as he leadeth them into temptation; always using his unorthodox route to get an answer, meanwhile the description of a chaotic police station always cracks me with a smile. The whole series has a timeless feel, for any thinking of starting to read they clearly deserve to be read from the beginning.

Camilleri has written a wonderful Montalbano Mystery series, this book is the ninth in the series and again he doesn't disappoint. All Montalbano mysteries start in comedy but end in horror or melodrama but its all done with lots of human interest in every plot. This novel I found to start slower than others but it soon picked up pace and again the ending was a gem with its darker twists. What I love about this whole series would be the characterisation and language the usage of dialogue in conversation, directness, it's all been kept real with sharp dry wit and ironic comedy moments, the sly comments on Italian life and culture keeps things amusing and interesting. A big also for me is the passion for great flavoured foods, all the dishes in these books are mouth-watering and endless, described so vividly you can almost taste them.

This is also where I bring in my special thank you to poet Stephen Sartarelli who has translated each book smoothly and clearly managing to keep its humour throughout and for the informative notes given at the back on wording, I would also say notes are always advised to be read before reading the novels.

Another thoroughly enjoyable read in the series.

Andrea Bowhill