Reviews

‘Footfall is as engaging as it gets. Cassandra James is . . . a terrific character, beautifully honed from seemingly staid academic to feisty heroine . . . a truly breathtaking read.’

- TANGLED WEB

Crime-writer Leigh Russell is my guest

Posted on Nov 30, 2015 in Blood Axe, DI Ian Peterson, Leigh Russell | 2 Comments

It’s a pleasure to welcome Leigh to my blog today. I thoroughly enjoyed her new novel, Blood Axe, and found myself slowing down so that I didn’t get to the end – and the solution – too quickly. We know from the beginning that the killer has adopted the persona of a Viking warrior intent on pillage […]

Two thirds of the way through my book moratorium

It is two months today since I began my book-buying moratorium – and I am still going strong. It was most difficult at the beginning, when I was trying to break the habit. There was a danger that I just would buy more DVDs instead – they too are so cheap in charity shops – […]

I’m a little bit in love with . . .

. . . Stellan Skarsgård – or, should I say, John River, the leading character in River. This BBC crime drama, scripted by Abi Morgan, has been perhaps the stand-out show of the year for me, even I wasn’t totally convinced at the beginning. A policeman who sees dead people? How was this going to work? Hadn’t we […]

Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs

Last week I visited this exhibition at the British Museum. It covers a period of twelve centuries from 30 BC, when Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, to AD 1171 and tells the story of the shift from the traditional worship of many gods to the monotheism. When Constantine was converted to Christianity, Christianity […]

Two new crime novels

A few post ago I wrote about reducing my TBR pile by culling those novels that I decided not to read. Well, here are a couple that made the cut. I read both on my e-reader, where unread books were also accumulating: fatally easy to buy them and just as easy to forget you’ve got them. I’m […]

Spectre

Posted on Nov 6, 2015 in Daniel Craig, James Bond, Spectre | 2 Comments

One thing about having children later in life: no danger of settling into a comfortable middle-age (or even old age, come to that). I find myself doing things I otherwise wouldn’t dream of doing. Thus it was last Saturday that I found myself settling into my seat at the Odeon Sheffield next to my teenage daughter […]

I am buying books in my sleep

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have decided to abstain from buying books for three months. I began on the 24th September and I have been more or less faithful to my vow (I’ve bought a book at a book launch and a friend’s newly published poetry collection – I wanted to support her […]

Reykjavik Nights

Posted on Oct 31, 2015 in Arnaldur Indridason, Reykjavik Nights | No Comments

In my last blog I wrote about discarding crime novels. Here is one that survived the cull. In fact Arnaldur Indridason is one of my favourite writers and I had been saving his latest. I won’t be recycling it via the charity shop either. Reykjavik Nights (2015) takes us back to the very beginning of Erlendur’s […]

How to reduce a TBR pile

Posted on Oct 23, 2015 in TBR pile | 4 Comments

Now that I am not buying books, I’m taking a good look at the books I’ve got and deciding which ones I really do want to read and which ones I’m going to get rid of. There are two categories that deserve special scrutiny: books from goody bags at conferences and books from charity shops. […]

Thriller-writer James Grady is my guest

Every day the young James Grady, apprentice journalist and college senior on a fellowship in Washington, walked past a white stucco townhouse, the headquarters of the American Historical Association. He never saw anyone go in or out. One day the thought struck him, ‘what if that building were a CIA front and one day someone went out […]