Adventures in the Mouse House

50. Beloved Poison by ES Thomson

I heard about this in the Guardian. It's shortlisted for a Scottish crime fiction award (the McIlvanney). The rest of the contenders are the usual suspects, but, as a historical novel, this caught my interest. Not enough to buy it, obviously, that's what libraries are for.

It's set in a crumbling hospital that used to be a monastery in 1850s London which is being shut down to make way for a railway station. Everything we learn about the place leads the reader to believe this is no bad thing.

The narrator is Jem Flockhart, the hospital's apothecary, who is a woman living as a man because there has been a Flockhart as the apothecary at St Saviour's for generations and her father had no sons. A lot of readers have complained that this is a cliche (I went on to Goodreads and immediately needed to shower.) Look, assholes, there's three choices to deal with women as protagonists in historical novels and apparently they all make people bitch. Either you don't use women, and that's just not acceptable to a lot of modern readers. Or you have women as women, and the sexists masquerading as sticklers for historical accuracy shout you down. Or you can use the cross dressing trope (and, interestingly, more evidence is coming to light that this actually happened a lot more than has been previously thought) and get accused of being a cliche. Representation matters, people, so STFU if that's the worst criticism you can come up with.

Interestingly, as the novel goes on it becomes more obvious that Jem and his/her father haven't been fooling many people but they've all gone along with it.

Jem becomes friends with a young architect sent to supervise the demolition works. They find six tiny coffins hidden in a disused chapel (more than a little reminiscent of the real-life mystery of the six miniature coffins found in Scotland which has been used as a basis for many a modern book). They start to investigate and people start dying.

I had a mixed reaction to this book. Thomson has a PhD in the history of medicine so that part is spot on. She captures the Victorian era reasonably well. It falls short of pitching you right into the era as the Shardlake books do to the Tudor era, but those books are my benchmark. She makes an overly heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. However, the literal and figurative claustrophobia of the hospital environment is unsettling and there was enough going on that I wanted to find out what happened next.

Overall, not bad for a first book. However, it's supposed to be the first in a series and while I think it was a good stand-alone book, I didn't find anything about it a good basis for a series. Not convinced I will be following up.

38. Heartbreaker by Tania Carver

Tania Carver is actually a large man from the North East of England who also writes as Martin Waites. I was unaware of his/their work until he did a reading from one of the Tania books at BristolCon recently. I was intrigued (he described the Tania books as occupying the same space in British publishing as Karin Slaughter does in the US, and I do like Karin Slaughter).

This is a recent book in the series, which follows the exploits of a husband and wife team - he's a police detective, she's a psychologist. In this one their marriage is falling apart and he makes a lot of bad decisions. She works out a lot.

It's pretty generic violent-crime stuff (but it's not as graphic or even pornographic about violence as Karin Slaughter at all). Which is to say that I still read it in a very short period of time - nothing particularly to write home about, but very much delivers what it sets out to. It was above averagely plotted, though - I was pretty sure who the killer was early on, but enough red herrings are thrown into the mix to keep you doubting right till the end.

31. The Secret Place by Tana French

Tana French writes straight up crime fiction set in and around Dublin. Her first book, Into the Woods, is a real page-turner, and the second, The Likeness, is one of the most painfully suspenseful things I've ever read. Everything since, while still good, has been a disappointment in comparison.

In this (newish) one, a detective in the cold cases unit is given some new information about a murder that took place on the grounds of an expensive girls' school the previous year. He's desperate to get onto the murder squad and so volunteers to go to the school to conduct some interviews with the lead detective from the original investigation (who is now an outcast). They have one day to get the kids to talk & work out what happened.

It's still not as good as the first two books but was definitely better than average with well observed characters and perfectly paced.

20. A Time of Torment by John Connolly

The latest Charlie Parker thriller. A solid addition to the series, but not one of the best. The usual stuff - Charlie gets pulled into an investigation that centres around a creepy reclusive rural community, only this time it's based in West Virginia rather than Maine. All the usual supporting cast are around.

I did charge through it because I always wanted to know what happened next, but it doesn't have the magic that some of the books in this series do.

8. Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin

I got this from the library because the last few instalments in the series have been a bit average (ie everything since Exit Music).

Rebus has been made to retire (again) but he's back as a consultant. Malcolm Fox (the anti-Rebus) is still on the force, a bit surplus to requirements. A retired judge is murdered, and a very similar attempt is made on Big Ger Cafferty's (formerly Edinburgh's premier gangster) life. The big players from Glasgow's organised crime world are in Edinburgh and under surveillance. Is it all connected?

I don't know what happened, but Rankin is back on form here. There's an awful lot going on and he's really playing with making the reader wonder what's relevant and what's a red herring. There is less of Rebus doing Drunken Stupid Shit. Malcolm Fox gets beat up. A lot.

Couldn't put it down.

Wow, I am spectacularly bad at this. Once again I had a lot of thoughts at the time but have undoubtedly forgotten everything I wanted to say.

55. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Or That Book What Won All the Awards This Year.

It's space opera, which is really not my thing unless it's by Iain M Banks or Ken Macleod. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy the world building. I didn't find the use of all-female pronouns as distracting as I feared, and I totally get what Leckie is doing there. For me, however, that wasn't the most interesting thing about the society described - it's a massive culture on a Culture-level scale but built on class and family and clientage. That was interesting as in theory it shouldn't work at that scale. Also the use of dead bodies as vessels for an AI was interesting, as was the AIs' development of personality.

Having said that I didn't care much about the plot (big honking space gun, whoopee), the scene where the two main characters fall off a bridge is a treat; really visceral. Ow.

I'm not going to run out and buy the sequels but will probably grab them at the library at some point.

56. The Girl With All the Gifts by MR Carey

ie Mike Carey, author of Lucifer, Hellblazer, the Felix Castor novels etc.

This one is hard to talk about without massively spoilering, but it's fair to say that it is a zombie apocalypse story that is very tender and human but violent and horrific at the same time. The ending is predictable on one level but with the most wonderful twist.

I can't recommend this highly enough, it is beautiful.

57. Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600 by Karen Vieira Powers

I thought this was going to be academic and difficult, but it is a very good basic introduction to how women's roles changed in the Aztec and Inca empires after the Spanish conquest, and then goes on to discuss the roles of Spanish and mixed race women in Latin America. I knew most of the introductory part about women's roles in the Aztec and Inca worlds; the rest was new to me. It's clearly told and really, really depressing. It left me wanting to know more, but there are not a lot of English-language sources and my Spanish is a long way from being up to that.

58. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

December's book club book.

I expected to hate this because I don't play video games, but it's a pretty good ripping yarn about a disenfranchised youth in a distopian near-future playing a video game to become the richest person in the world, and then to save his life. It is oddly paced and so there are parts I ripped through and parts that dragged, but a good waste of a few hours.

It probably didn't help that I figured out where the first part of the puzzle would be found because I knew that ludus means game as well as school and was waiting for the character to catch up.

59. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

The BBC were making a big thing out of their production over Christmas, and I hadn't read the book since I was about 13, so I grabbed one. It takes about 4 hours to read. The characters are cutout stereotypes but the plotting and tension are first rate. Good fun.

So far I've only watched the first part of the adaptation. It's pretty good but the changes made have all been completely unnecessary, and it looks like there are more, and stupider, changes in the concluding two parts.

60. The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343 by RR Davies

This is all a bit High Middle Ages to be in my comfort zone. I meant to read it when it came out over a decade ago and I came across it in the library recently. It's the write-up of a series of lectures so it is more a collection of essays than a comprehensive narrative of how the English put their stamp on the rest of the British Isles - culturally as well as politically. Also why, unlike other European countries as they expanded and cohered in this period, why Wales, Scotland and Ireland remained culturally, linguistically and politically separate. My interest is in the north of England which, at the time of the Norman conquest, was not necessarily destined to be part of England (or Scotland) at all.

Recommended, if this is Your Thing. It's a reasonably easy read for the non-specialist but with good notes if you wish to follow anything up.

28. A Song of Shadows by John Connolly

In the last book in the series, the protagonist Charlie Parker was shot and nearly killed. Now he is recovering and has taken a cottage in an even more remote part of Maine.

He's embroiled in trouble and murder straight away, as you might expect.

Not the best book in the series, but not the worst either. A real page-turner, and once again Parker isn't in a lot of it, due to his reduced physical abilities. There are hints applied with a sledgehammer that Connolly is looking to tie up the series and that all will be revealed in the not too distant future. In the meantime, Parker finally finds out who is behind the fact that he always manages to not only stay out of jail but also keep his PI licence, but not why.

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.

1. Dissolution by CJ Sansom

One of the books in this series was dramatised on BBC radio not long ago and it Did Not Suck. Last time I was in the library the first and second volumes were sitting on the shelf, so I thought I'd give it a go.

These are set in the reign of Henry VIII and the detective is a lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. Initially he is a agent of Thomas Cromwell in setting about the dissolution of the monasteries, but I understand that changes later in the series.

Shardlake and his assistant are sent to a monastery on the Sussex coast to investigate the murder of the previous commissioner who had bee sent by Cromwell to evaluate whether the monastery is corrupt enough to be shut down. They get snowed in, and further deaths occur.

So far, so standard. The puzzle is a good one (the crime was obviously committed by someone within the monastery, but who has a sword sharp enough and the skill to behead someone?), though.

I'm often wary of historical detective stories, but this really is a cut above the rest. It made me understand, in a way no reading of history books has, the feeling of living under the reign of terror (and that is really what Henry VIII's reign was). Shardlake himself means well, but is often hard to sympathise with as he is a hard-line Protestant reformer and his ideology sometimes gets in the way of his humanity and his sense. But only sometimes. The monks are all complex characters. Sansom really effectively shows the many ways people feel about reform, that there is no one way "Tudor people" thought.

An excellent surprise to start the year with.

31. Enemies at Home by Lindsey Davis

This is the second in Davis's follow up series to the massively popular Falco books (of which I've only read half) featuring Falco's adopted daughter, who has taken over his informing business.

Flavia Albia is called in to investigate the murder of a newly wed couple. Their slaves were at risk of being blamed and fled to sanctuary at the Temple of Ceres, which is all a bit of an embarrassment for the Powers That Be, so she is asked to bring the matter to a speedy conclusion.

It's a competently plotted and quite convoluted mystery, but it's mostly a series of digressions while Albia muses on the nature of family, of household, of slavery and how it cane take away humanity, but shouldn't. (Found on the streets of Londinium as a teenager and brought back to Rome as part of Falco's family, she sees things from a lot of different angles).

And the epilogue is - odd. I'm not quite sure where (if anywhere, I might be over-thinking this) Davis is going with it.

I liked it. Not as much as I like the actual Falco books, but it's good.