Apologies in advance if I am insulting someone’s favourite SEP! Susan Elizabeth Phillips had been recommended to me as someone to read if you loved Jennifer Crusie, and I really love Crusie. (I keep rereading Bet Me, which I should go back and upgrade to a five on my previous reviews. And Manhunting. All the Crusies get reread about every six months. Anyway!) The problem is, I should have read the recommendations more carefully to see that the latter ones are amazing, but the earlier […]
Cleaning up Cthulu
The Laundry Files had been recommended to me as a series before, and this time it was a book shop employee pushing them, so I picked it up. The book took me about two weeks to read. I carried it to and from work, and always found a reason to read something else. (Though the news these days is very distracting..) Normally I read much faster than that! The book is a mix of an old school spy novel (he describes his influences as Len […]
Robin and Strike are way better than Batman and Robin
The third Strike novel starts with the delivery of a leg to Strike’s office, freshly butchered from a young woman. While trying to figure out who sent the leg, Strike and Robin delve into a whodunnit based on trying to track down some enemies from Strike’s past who might have done this. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that this killer is focussed on Robin as much as Strike, and she’s his partner in being under threat as well as trying to solve the […]
An insight into a key player in the Irish banking crisis
The collapse of Anglo, the Maple Ten, the rigging of annual reports to inflate a bank’s assets by 7.2 billion in order to look good to investors, regulators and the stock market – these are all events that I lived through, but can’t say I totally understood when they occurred. I’m not going to summarise the Irish banking crisis, but a short overview might be that when the global economic downturn hit, Ireland suffered badly due to the economy’s over-reliance on construction, complicated massively by […]