October 2005 Archives

It has taken me a while to finish this one, partly because about three chapters in I knew that I'd read it before. Still at least I was equally sure I couldn't remember the outcome of this instalment of the Kinsey Millhone series - where Kinsey is hired by her long-lost cousin Tasha to find black sheep of a Santa Theresa family whose recently deceased patriarch had made fortune from his quarrying and building materials business. With those key features, it felt rather reminsicent of the one where Kinsey investigates a family crime in a family run business - E is for Evidence, I think.

Anyway - whilst I'm still enjoying Sue Grafton's progress through the alphabet in her telling of Kinsey Millhone's career and personal life, I do get the feeling that these middle ones are a bit filler-like. I wish she'd work out what to do about the family back story, seeing as I know no more about them and their view of Kinsey than I did when they were revealed four books ago.

Buy it: Amazon link

I'm steaming ahead into the middle of the Kinsey Millhone alphabet crime series, and L is for Lawless is a good 'un. Kinsey becomes embroiled in the long overdue aftermath of a 50 year old bank heist, and heads out of California for the first time, and onto the wrong side of the law - not for the first, nor last time I'm sure! I have to say that I guessed the 'solution' about half way through, but then again I like things to tie up neatly, and Sue Grafton always delivers on that.

M and N are sitting on the bedside table, and look certain to usurp White Mughals, which I started on the way back from Yalta, for a little while longer.

Buy it: Amazon link

I chanced upon this in one of Hereford's second hand bookshops (Hay doesn't have them all!!) and took it with me to Yalta, which is in the Crimea where Neal Ascherson's excellent anthropological, historical and politcal account of the Black Sea begins.

As Hazel and I visited the greek ruins at Chersonesus (now a seaside surburb of Sevastopol), the Khan's Palace at Bakchisarai, and the Genoese fortress and Soviet submarine base at Balaclava, and the harbours and hills of Sevastopol, the book offered additional backstory to the excellent information provided by Voyages Jules Verne's local guides.

The book is broader in the context than simply the Crimea; Neal Ascherson considers the majority of the Black Sea coast, and it is a fascinating part of the world, a real melting pot of peoples for millennia, and only in very recent history has it become perceived as a frontier between 'east' and 'west', 'barbarian' and 'civilisation'.

Buy it: Amazon link