[books 2015] John Meaney

9 & 10 Bone Song and Black Blood by John Meaney

I became aware of these books back at my very first BristolCon. John Meaney was on a panel and talked about books he'd written that are noir crime thrillers set in a world where everything is powered by emanations from the bones of the dead in massive reactors.

Hello, that's ticked all my boxes.

While the mysteries and the detective parts were good, overall I found them a bit disappointing.

He throws too much into this world to make it "alien" for the length of the books, that don't really seem to have any function other than to prove how alien and dangerous this world is. Some aspects of it work better than others. At one point there is a throwaway comment about being made to pay a blood price. In a society that is made up of megacities and impersonal bureaucracy, I don't think that would work. (Admittedly, you probably have to specialise academically in societies that have a blood price to come up with that particular niggle).

The pacing is odd - there are parts I couldn't put down interspersed with parts where I wanted to give up, and the characters do things that simply don't make sense at times.

There's one nice touch where the detective goes into his local secondhand book shop and buys a fantasy novel that is clearly based on our world.

I so wanted to love these books, but they fell pretty flat for me.

[books 2015] The Franks

11. The Franks by Edward James

Last year I read The Anglo-Saxon World and, particularly in the early period, it referenced the Franks a lot, which made me realise my knowledge is really rusty.

This is, as far as I can tell, the only single-volume book on the Franks in English, and it's pretty old (1988 - which means I might have even used it as reference in grad school).

The only other book in The Peoples of Europe series I've read is The Norsemen in the Viking Age, and that is technical and really difficult, assuming loads of knowledge in many different areas, so I was braced for difficulty.

This, on the other hand, really is a good basic introduction. I don't think there's much there I didn't know when I was studying the migration age, but it's a good reminder. I find myself looking for something more up to date and in depth, though.