![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemadamMrs Malory and a Time to Die, Hazel Holt
Laura’s Summer Ballet, Linda Smith (CP)
The Rising of the Larks, Cris Johnson (CP)
King Charles III, Robert Hardman
The Whitstable Pearl Mystery, Julie Wassmer
Betjeman, A N Wilson
Death at Wentwater Court, Carola Dunn
The Winter Garden Mystery, Carola Dunn.
The Diary of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell
Deadly Game, Michael Caine. Abandoned
The Dog Park Detectives, Blake Mara. Abandoned
Requiem for a Mezzo, Carola Dunn
Currently reading: Occupational Hazards, Rory Stewart
Having read all my Mrs Malory books, I turned to a re-read of Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple series for bedtime. I’ve read a lot of the books but haven’t caught up with them all. They are set just after the First World War. Daisy’s brother was killed in the war and her father died soon after, leaving the family home to a distant cousin. Her fiancé, an ambulance driver, was also killed in the war. She can’t face living with her mother in the Dower House and is determined to be independent. She shares a house with her friend Lucy, a successful photographer and works at first as a stenographer, which she hates. Then, she’s commissioned by an up-market magazine to write articles about country houses. Obviously, being an Hon. helps and once she starts this new job, she just can’t help discovering bodies. You really need to read these in order so you can follow the development of the relationship between The Hon. Daisy Dalrymple and Alec Fletcher, her ‘scrumptious’ but middle-class Detective Chief Inspector, who is widowed with a nice daughter and a difficult mother.
If you read King Charles III hoping to find out something you didn’t already know about the King, you’d be doomed to disappointment. What you get is detail piled upon detail: the late Queen’s death; her funeral; the 1953 coronation; the 2023 coronation. Some of this is quite interesting but it doesn’t really make up a biography, which the title leads you to expect. If there’s one message from this book, it’s how much the country has changed (largely for the better, IMO) in the seventy years between the two coronations. Out with coronets and in with kind hearts. I finished the book with an even greater admiration for Queen Camilla than I had before.
I read the first story in Julie Wassmer’s Whitstable series and enjoyed it very much. I liked all the detail about Whitstable, even though I can’t eat seafood. ‘Now a major TV series’ but on Acorn, which I don’t have.
I know I’m behind everybody else in reading The Diary of a Bookseller but I got round to it at last. I almost always like books written in diary form and at first I enjoyed this. Wigtown sounds such a nice place and I loved the staff (especially nutty Nicky) and the regulars in the shop like Mr Deacon, old-fashioned enough to ask for books to be ordered for him and ‘the tattooed pagan’ who brings in walking sticks he’s made, to be sold for book credits.
About three quarters of the way through, I got tired of the constant complaints about Amazon. Yes, the book trade has changed forever. We miss second hand bookshops and book fairs. But it’s no good thinking you can turn back the clock thirty years and make everything the way it was before. As for hating Kindles and e-books, where would I put the 600 books I have on mine when there are books everywhere already? Mr Bythell famously took his shotgun to a Kindle and mounted it in the shop like a trophy. I was also sorry to find that he’s a Scots Nat supporter. He redeemed himself slightly by saying that Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening is one of his favourite poems; he determines to learn it and does. I’ve often had the same thought myself but I find I know all the lines but don’t always get them in the right order.
Celebrity novels! Rob Rinder’s was good; Michael Caine’s – isn’t. At a council tip in Stepney, two workers find a box dumped there. Thinking it suspicious, they phone in to the local nick. A short time later, they’ve been beaten senseless and the box has disappeared. Cue full alert of emergency services, spooks, the lot. Yet it’s left to experienced copper Harry Taylor and his sergeant, Iris, to do the footwork to find out what’s happened to it. Since the box may contain the makings of a nuclear bomb, this is a big ask, leading them into very murky and dangerous places, up against ruthless enemies.
The book reads like the script for a film starring a much younger Michael Caine. It’s too long, with flashbacks into Harry’s and Iris’s past lives and unnecessarily long interviews. Before I was half way through, I decided I didn’t care which villain, or maybe the cops, got control of the box and I certainly didn’t want to read about more decapitations. Too violent for me and I abandoned it. There is a sub-Fleming touch to this highly derivative book, in the use of brand names. Harry drives an impractical Jaguar XJ6. If a gun is mentioned, so will the make and model be. The Dassault Falcon 10X is ‘the finest private jet money can buy.’ And a top criminal mastermind holed up on a private island off Barbados? Per-lease!
The Dog Park Detectives is so bad, I’m not wasting my time explaining why I think so. Although I gave up on Michael Caine, his book is *much* better written. I wonder if Blake Mara really exists.
Edit: I've just discovered it's a pseudonym for Mara Timon.
Laura’s Summer Ballet, Linda Smith (CP)
The Rising of the Larks, Cris Johnson (CP)
King Charles III, Robert Hardman
The Whitstable Pearl Mystery, Julie Wassmer
Betjeman, A N Wilson
Death at Wentwater Court, Carola Dunn
The Winter Garden Mystery, Carola Dunn.
The Diary of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell
Deadly Game, Michael Caine. Abandoned
The Dog Park Detectives, Blake Mara. Abandoned
Requiem for a Mezzo, Carola Dunn
Currently reading: Occupational Hazards, Rory Stewart
Having read all my Mrs Malory books, I turned to a re-read of Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple series for bedtime. I’ve read a lot of the books but haven’t caught up with them all. They are set just after the First World War. Daisy’s brother was killed in the war and her father died soon after, leaving the family home to a distant cousin. Her fiancé, an ambulance driver, was also killed in the war. She can’t face living with her mother in the Dower House and is determined to be independent. She shares a house with her friend Lucy, a successful photographer and works at first as a stenographer, which she hates. Then, she’s commissioned by an up-market magazine to write articles about country houses. Obviously, being an Hon. helps and once she starts this new job, she just can’t help discovering bodies. You really need to read these in order so you can follow the development of the relationship between The Hon. Daisy Dalrymple and Alec Fletcher, her ‘scrumptious’ but middle-class Detective Chief Inspector, who is widowed with a nice daughter and a difficult mother.
If you read King Charles III hoping to find out something you didn’t already know about the King, you’d be doomed to disappointment. What you get is detail piled upon detail: the late Queen’s death; her funeral; the 1953 coronation; the 2023 coronation. Some of this is quite interesting but it doesn’t really make up a biography, which the title leads you to expect. If there’s one message from this book, it’s how much the country has changed (largely for the better, IMO) in the seventy years between the two coronations. Out with coronets and in with kind hearts. I finished the book with an even greater admiration for Queen Camilla than I had before.
I read the first story in Julie Wassmer’s Whitstable series and enjoyed it very much. I liked all the detail about Whitstable, even though I can’t eat seafood. ‘Now a major TV series’ but on Acorn, which I don’t have.
I know I’m behind everybody else in reading The Diary of a Bookseller but I got round to it at last. I almost always like books written in diary form and at first I enjoyed this. Wigtown sounds such a nice place and I loved the staff (especially nutty Nicky) and the regulars in the shop like Mr Deacon, old-fashioned enough to ask for books to be ordered for him and ‘the tattooed pagan’ who brings in walking sticks he’s made, to be sold for book credits.
About three quarters of the way through, I got tired of the constant complaints about Amazon. Yes, the book trade has changed forever. We miss second hand bookshops and book fairs. But it’s no good thinking you can turn back the clock thirty years and make everything the way it was before. As for hating Kindles and e-books, where would I put the 600 books I have on mine when there are books everywhere already? Mr Bythell famously took his shotgun to a Kindle and mounted it in the shop like a trophy. I was also sorry to find that he’s a Scots Nat supporter. He redeemed himself slightly by saying that Auden’s As I Walked Out One Evening is one of his favourite poems; he determines to learn it and does. I’ve often had the same thought myself but I find I know all the lines but don’t always get them in the right order.
Celebrity novels! Rob Rinder’s was good; Michael Caine’s – isn’t. At a council tip in Stepney, two workers find a box dumped there. Thinking it suspicious, they phone in to the local nick. A short time later, they’ve been beaten senseless and the box has disappeared. Cue full alert of emergency services, spooks, the lot. Yet it’s left to experienced copper Harry Taylor and his sergeant, Iris, to do the footwork to find out what’s happened to it. Since the box may contain the makings of a nuclear bomb, this is a big ask, leading them into very murky and dangerous places, up against ruthless enemies.
The book reads like the script for a film starring a much younger Michael Caine. It’s too long, with flashbacks into Harry’s and Iris’s past lives and unnecessarily long interviews. Before I was half way through, I decided I didn’t care which villain, or maybe the cops, got control of the box and I certainly didn’t want to read about more decapitations. Too violent for me and I abandoned it. There is a sub-Fleming touch to this highly derivative book, in the use of brand names. Harry drives an impractical Jaguar XJ6. If a gun is mentioned, so will the make and model be. The Dassault Falcon 10X is ‘the finest private jet money can buy.’ And a top criminal mastermind holed up on a private island off Barbados? Per-lease!
The Dog Park Detectives is so bad, I’m not wasting my time explaining why I think so. Although I gave up on Michael Caine, his book is *much* better written. I wonder if Blake Mara really exists.
Edit: I've just discovered it's a pseudonym for Mara Timon.
