June 2011 Archives

Murder mystery and supernatural goings on in southern France - another blockbuster read from Kate Mosse.

Two good female leads, with parallel stories - jeune Parisienne Léonie Vernier's fin de siècle coming of age, and American musician and writer, Meredith Martin who follows in her footsteps over 100 years later during the course of her research into both Claude Debussy's life and her own family history.

The paperback edition I read had readers' notes at the end. So now I'm going to have to find out who the two characters are that overlap from Labyrinth.

Amazon.co.uk link: Sepulchre - Kate Mosse

Another wonderful novel from Salley Vickers, spent in the company of Violet Hetherington and her fellow passengers on a transatlantic cruise. Wherein we discover that still waters run deep.

If you like Anita Brookner, you'll like this. And vice versa. And you'll learn the idiomatic origins of a number of familiar phrases.

Amazon.co.uk link: Dancing Backwards - Salley Vickers

Quite how Kate Atkinson gets inside Isobel's head I've not idea: we follow fantastic flights of fancy, terrible trains of thought. En route Kate Atkinson provides the Fairfax family history, teenage love-from-afar, social and sexual reinvention, ad hoc time-shifts, incest and death. Lots of it.

Amazon.co.uk link: Human Croquet - Kate Atkinson

A great idea, but patchily delivered. I ended most of the very short chapters feeling we'd only discovered a few bare facts.

Maybe that's the point.

Impossible Journeys - Mathew Lyons

A young man remembers meeting two "pirates" in the woods behind his childhood home, and begins to wonder whether they really were looking for buried treasure.... Detective Cheney Phillips points him in Kinsey's direction.

The scenario and setting seemed so familiar I thought I might have already read U is for Undertow. But no - it must have been a Bosch.

Along with the main murder mystery, we also learn more about Kinsey's recently reappeared family and events surrounding her early years as an orphan.

Amazon.co.uk link: U is for Undertow - Sue Grafton