Everybody loves the Dresden Files. It’s so popular that the 15th book in the series is coming out sometime this year. And I can see why. Jim Butcher certainly knows his craft: story, pacing, characters, all the elements are working together. It’s a fun book. It’s a quick read, never boring. It’s good. Really. I just didn’t love it. You know what I mean? Harry Dresden is everything you could want in a hero, he’s perfectly imperfect. He’s a man with a solid philosophy of what […]
Midsomer Marple & The Dead Religious Guy
Continuing my brain dead decompression from the lengthy Booker challenge finds me reading the 13th instalment of the Agatha Raisin books. At the start of the year, for a brief window, the entire series (apart from the recently published latest instalment, the brilliantly titled Something Borrowed, Someone Dead. I’m going to just go ahead and say the death in that one is wedding related), was just 84p a piece on Kindle. So I bought them all. They are the perfect palate cleansers in between bigger and better […]
I am the Walrus.
You have no frame of reference here, Robyn. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know. . .
The Curious Incident of the Brilliant Book
So it turns out that I have a soft spot for the unconventional amateur sleuth. Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Flavia de Luce, Agatha Raisin, the list goes on. It’s a miracle I haven’t read the Shardlake series, really. One amateur sleuth to which Bauer and her excellent novel owe something of a debt is Christopher Boone. The narrator of Mark Haddon’s groundbreaking Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was never noted as specifically having Asperger’s and was investigating who killed his neighbour’s dog, which […]