Book 10 in the Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series begins with a grisly discovery of a decapitated man at Bloody Bridge, his head mounted on a spike. The man was Stanley Preston, a wealthy man who owned a plantation in the West Indies. He was also a man who collected mummified heads (what fun), and a lead coffin strap linked to King Charles 1648 was found near his body, indicating he may have been lured to his death with the promise of the head. As […]
Full dark, no stars.
I, like pretty much everyone else in the world, love this series. It is one of the few books I have ever pre-ordered, but my mind is like a sieve, so I was very surprised when it suddenly arrived in my mailbox. Vaughn and Staples’ Volume 7 is dark. This is a dark series – there is always something going wrong for Alana and Marko, but this one felt particularly hopeless. It starts off on a high note – the family is reunited and expanded, […]
Revisiting a classic I had seriously forgotten every aspect of – also, Cannonball
Sara Fielding and Derek Craven have a hell of a “meet-cute”. While researching her future novel in one of the seedier corners of the East End, Sara comes across Craven being held down and attacked by two thugs. They’ve slashed his face open, and she intends only to fire a warning shot from her pistol (which sh obviously keeps in her reticule for defencive purposes), when she instead ends up killing one of the assailants. She discovers that the man whose life she saved is […]
From an embattled son to a genocidal conqueror
In late February, as I was preparing for a work trip to Mongolia, it occurred to me that I knew nothing about the country. I knew nothing about the history or its culture, nothing about its customs or its icons. The only thing I knew was Genghis Khan, and… yea, just his name. That’s it. Luckily, a Pajiban mentioned the Conqueror Series by Conn Iggulden, recommending it as a historical fiction alternative to trawling Wikipedia (which is honestly what I would have done.) I downloaded […]