nocto's reviews
1270 reviews

A Change of Circumstance by Susan Hill

3.0

I feel like it's been a while since I've read one of this series. Four years in fact (this is one reason why I like to keep records). But it looks as if I'm up to date now. Which is both pleasing and disappointing. 

The series hangs less around Simon Serrailler with every book. I find his sister and her family far more interesting characters to return to and now his sister's married his boss he feels all a bit irrelevant, though the boss is even less interesting. I'm ever bemused by the author's decision to make Simon and Cat two-thirds of a set of triplets and then never have the third triplet feature in the series. Possibly I'm forgetting something, and I know there are series-adjacent novellas (or possibly short stories) that I haven't read so maybe Ivo turns up there. I should probably check them out for completeness sometime. The 'Change of Circumstance' title seems though to be the author trying to get Simon out of the boring rut he's driven himself into and to metamorphosise him, perhaps, into a slightly different character, though I thought the way he was going about it was both very in character and not really very nice all at the same time. 

Anyway, so much for the family saga, the plot here concerns county lines drugs gangs who use young children as drug runners. There were some good characters featured here, and I'd have liked some of them to have had more time on the page, but some details just didn't seem to add up and that spoilt the ending of the book a bit. Basically it felt like there was a lot of character and not a great deal of plot. Which is fine really, and I enjoyed the read, and I'm presuming that there will be more in the series and I'll enjoy them too but I won't be rushing out to read them either.

The Echo Chamber by John Boyne

2.0

I've read two of John Boyne's books in the past year and they were both very different and I loved them both, so I was happy to dive into this one that I found at the library. I wasn't even put off the fact that Ian Rankin shouts it out on the cover as "The funniest book I've read in ages" despite the fact that I have a history of not really getting on with funny books. 

And I wish I had been put off because I've spent ages reading this and it wasn't worth it. Partly the age I've taken to read it is down to other stuff going on in my life that hasn't left much reading time, but if it had been a more engaging book I would have found the time to read it. The book is all about how social media makes people act terribly but the problem was that I just hated most of the characters and found them awful, not just their social media personas. 

The story revolves around a family where parents are a BBC TV presenter and a novelist and they have three children in their teens and twenties. The parents and the daughter were all presented in ways that made me have no sympathy for the situations they got themselves into; and I realised I needed to empathise with the characters at least somewhat to find things funny. Mostly I just found things dumb and excruciating to read about. I found the eldest son the most likeable character, he was the only one who was aware of his mental health issues. And I could empathise more with the younger son - who might have been the only one doing anything definitively criminal - than just about anyone else. But neither of those were really that funny, and the social media angle didn't really apply to either of them, they were just more interesting characters who seemed to have a bit more depth. On the whole I just read on hoping something better was coming.

There are several twists in the end of the story and one of them was really well set up and enjoyable, but it wasn't enough to carry the rest of the book. I'd best go back to steering clear of comic fiction I think!

Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris

5.0

The title refers to the city of [Salisbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury) and though Wikipedia only has three rivers mentioned I don't doubt the other two are there somewhere. But also to the five lives that we delve into through the book. Five characters who each tell their own story and then exit. So it's a little like a collection of short stories but the links are pretty strong. We see most of the characters return from a different point of view. 

It's super well written and easy to read; it really drew me in. Whilst each character had their own distinct voice the changeovers weren't jarring. I think this was because the sense of place is very strong, you're reading a story about a city that happens to be told through a handful of people.

I had a quick look to see what other books the author had written now, this one pretty much had 'bright young thing' written on it but it was also published a few years back. It looks like Norris mostly writes plays and that makes sense with this story, it's several characters interacting on the stage of the city. But anyway, he's written several more books since and I'll be on the lookout for them.

The Brutal Tide: The Isles of Scilly Mysteries: 6 by Kate Rhodes

3.5

There are two threads in this episode of the Ben Kitto series set on the Scilly Isles. I like that one of them is someone catching up with Ben from his past as an undercover police officer in London. I'm not really bothered by the 'how many murders can we have within a small island community?' thing but it is nice to see an author nodding to the fact that sometimes the crimes arrive in paradise from elsewhere. But the other thread of the book is the discovery of a skeleton during building work that looks a lot like it did originate on the island in the not so distant past.

I liked the way the first thread unfolded, mostly away from the Scilly Isles, and I never felt the resolution of it was a foregone conclusion. The problem with spending so much time on that thread was that the story on the island didn't feel as fleshed out as it could have been to me. I wanted to know more about the characters involved with that. The pieces went together well but it felt like the puzzle was solved before I'd really got to grips with the story. There were lots of characters who didn't get much page time.

A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley

3.5

I wasn't expecting to find a Jane Smiley book in the crime section of the library, though I'm not really sure why as I feel like she's such an accomplished author that she could probably turn her hand to any genre. And this is a very fun kind of a crime novel. It's 1851 and Eliza is taken to California by her abusive husband. Fortunately for her he gets himself into a fatal fight in a bar and leaves her alone. Prostitution turns out to be a much safer business than that kind of marriage. Well mostly. 

There are occasional girls going missing from the town but no one really cares except for Eliza and her friend Jean who ape Edgar Allan Poe and investigate, the obvious place to start is with their clients.

I enjoyed this for a different look at a different time, and seeing it through the eyes of the women who were a minority and mostly invisible. I'm kind of trusting Smiley that their their experience of prostitution as a run of the mill career is reasonable and I don't know whether I'm right to do so. 

I read it because I'd previously enjoyed the author but this isn't an example of her best work. Despite the dark theme it's a lot lighter than I was expecting and if you'd stuck an anonymous cosy crime author name on the cover I'm not really sure the quality would have leapt out at you.  I enjoyed the main characters and their story and it was a fun read but in the end something felt a bit lacking. Perhaps it just didn't conform to the stereotype I was expecting but I don't know if the problem was the stereotype or not.

The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths

fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I did not realise when I started reading this that Elly Griffiths intended to end the Ruth Galloway series here. But the way the characters were acting together with the 'Last' bit in the title meant that I cottoned on to it whilst I was reading. 

The ongoing soap opera style story line between the main characters gets to move on. Although I've certainly been coming back for more I really think this should have happened a few books back. Had it been dragged out too much longer I think I'd have chucked the series in at some point; there's only so much lack of resolution I can take. And if Griffiths does write more then it'll be fresher for things having been changed up a bit. 

And for all the ongoing background story there's a reasonably decent mystery in here as well. It's appropriate that it concerns a twenty year old disappearance of an archeology student and makes sense that Cathbad was involved in the past as well as in the present. It felt like there were lots of threads tying themselves together from different books in here. I think I probably missed a lot of the threads but I like that long time readers and re-readers are being rewarded. 

Apparently Griffiths has bowed to her fans and said that Ruth will return but I'm actually really pleased with how this book went down and wouldn't mind it being the end of the series at all.

The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle by Anna Shechtman

emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.0

This book is subtitled "Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle" which explains why Darren bought it for me for the birthday as by my count there are at least four Kirsty-will-like-this buzzwords in that ("Inheriting" is the only one that I'd take a pass on really). This is all about the American kind of crossword puzzles rather than British cryptics. I've always dismissed American puzzles as being far more about interlocking increasingly weird terms rather than interesting clues but this book tells me that I've underestimated them and at some point I should look again as there is definitely a lot more going on in some of them, I think I've probably only come across the American version of the UK's "quick crossword" with no riddle or intrigue to it at all and haven't looked further.

Muddled up (and I mean that in the nice sense) with the stories of various women who made American crosswords what they are is the authors own experience as a young crossword compiler and a lot about how this interacts with her experience of being ill with anorexia. At first I found the eating disorder parts a bit hard to take and they also seemed entirely separate to the main thrust of the book. But after a while it all starts to make sense, they're not separate threads but ones that tangle and intertwine. And I think anyone who has ever struggled with feeling they need to attain some kind of perfection (which is probably a lot of us female and male) will find a lot of familiar stories that we tell ourselves in here. 

I now understand more not just about American crosswords, or about anorexia, a disease I've never really understood before, but about myself too. Some parts of the book are better than others but overall it's definitely an interesting read.

White Horse by Joss Stirling

adventurous funny mysterious

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This is the followup to Black River and this time Jess is investigating a young woman whose mother is concerned that she’s entered a cult and gone incommunicado. Coincidentally Inspector Leo George, also from the first book, is investigating the death of another young woman who was wearing one of the cult’s robes when she died on the White Horse at Uffington. There’s a good scenic backdrop to this one.

Like the first book it’s a well written interesting plot. I really like the characters, not just the central ones but a lot of the peripheral ones were very believable as well. I didn’t have any trouble believing in the kind of cult portrayed here, like Jess I found a lot of what the cult were after quite refreshing and could see why the various different personalities here went in for it.

Though the cover of the books only bill these as the “Jess Bridges” mystery series I think it’s going to be “Bridges and George” all the way, and that is fine by me - though that’s possibly shortchanging Michael Harrison who is also involved in both books and I can’t imagine he is going away any time soon either. We find out a lot more about Leo in this book. And it ends on the kind of cliffhanger that I swear you never used to find in books but happens more and more nowadays as you get hooked into reading the next in the series. I don’t mind since I was coming back for more anyway.

Prime Suspects: The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations by Andrew Granville, Jennifer Granville

challenging informative mysterious slow-paced

4.0

Subtitled “The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations” this is a murder mystery like none I’ve ever read before, and it’s fair to say that I’ve read quite a few. I don’t normally look in the graphic novel section of the library but Darren does and brought me this as it was mathsy. I think he expected me to reject it for the maths being too simple, and it’s definitely not! It’s a walk through the connections between prime numbers and permutations that starts with explaining what each of those are, so it’s pretty accessible, but it keeps going, up and up and up.

Though I trained as a mathematician there are days when I feel like I’ve forgotten more than I knew, and a lot of the stuff here is stuff I never knew properly to start with. At university I dived into the applied and computational side of maths and it’s only years later that I feel I missed out on a lot of pure maths. You certainly don’t need to understand every last thing going on in the maths to enjoy the story here, I didn’t keep up with all of it. There’s an appendix that covers the mathematical content in a more usual written format, and that made me nostalgic for my time reading research papers. The appendix also points out a lot of the hidden treasures or Easter eggs in the story, little things happening in the background that have meaning, so it’s worth a read even if you don’t really want the maths explained any more.

I think the story itself is reasonably entertaining even if you just treated the maths components like some kind of weird fantasy woven around a murder mystery but I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone who really wasn’t interested in maths. If you’ve any interest at all though it’s worth a read.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

emotional reflective sad

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I picked this up in a shiny new paperback copy thinking it was a new Anne Tyler; well it was a brand new copy at the library of a new printing of a 1981 book. Which is fine by me1. We start the book with Pearl Tull who is a dying old lady in 1979. Now that’s long enough ago that there’s now plenty of historical fiction written set around then, and it’s funny how a contemporary view of 1979 from 1981 isn’t quite the same as one that’s being written about in 2024. There’s no looking back sentimentally through rose tinted glasses, no random mentions of tech that doesn’t exist yet but might do one day and definitely no anachronous words or gadgets. Just an old lady with her family of three children gathering around her and then we go back in time to see her life, starting with when she meets her husband and merging into the children’s stories as they too grow up.

It’s a pretty straightforward format, but the story is anything but. It’s a tale of people who don’t get what they want, except sometimes they do and then maybe it isn’t what they want. And in one particularly memorable part of the story someone else gets what they want and no one is really happy but what can you do except live with it. The characters felt very real to me, often not because they are the kind of people you’d want to be friends or family with, but because probably you know you already are friends and/or family with people who have things in common with these people. There are disjoint parts of people’s lives that don’t add up, except they do in real life, and so it is in this book. There’s nothing totally weird in this book but a lot of it seems strange when written as fiction.

There’s plenty more Anne Tyler I haven’t read yet and I’m looking forward to getting through it all eventually.

Footnotes
one minor niggle, this has obviously been scanned and re-typeset at some point and several “rn”s (that’s R N) have turned into “m”s (that’s M); I do wish publishers would check for that common error. ↩