Adventures in the Mouse House

40. Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

I'm a huge fan of The Anubis Gates, The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Declare. Parts of Earthquake Weather fell a bit flat for me so I haven't been keeping up with Powers' output.

This is a time-travelling espionage tale following a father and daughter in California in 1987. The dad's grandmother dies, and it turns out she was Einstein's daughter and that she had a time machine that Einstein invented in her shed (as you do). Mossad are after it, using remote viewing - something that all sides attempted during the Cold War. So are a more shadowy organisation using even more dubious magical means (lots of human sacrifice).

I sailed through the first 3/4 of this book. Not entirely sure why - it's not the characters, who, with the exception of the little girl, are all pretty awful human beings and most of them are functional alcoholics (it goes with the territory of messing with supernatural stuff) - but anyway, it's good page-turning trashy adventure.

Struggled a bit with the last quarter, for equally mysterious reasons. All of the reviews on Amazon say that the book is too long, and I have to agree. It's not one where you can pinpoint a long passage that should have been excised, but there are definitely too many episodes with the various spy outfits which, individually, move the plot on, but add up to getting repetitive.

Not even close to Powers' best work, and couldn't be further away from Declare, his other weird shit spy story (that has more in common with The Anubis Gates etc), but worth while. Frustrating, though, because trimmed down a bit it could have been excellent.

8. The White Lioness by Henning Mankel

Another one from the Wallander series about the adventures of a small-town Swedish detective. Although the style is very similar to Firewall, I liked this book a lot more. It's stretching credibility a bit that in both books I've read a crime in rural Sweden is tied into something much bigger and international, but this is what makes it interesting. In this case the assassination of Nelson Mandela (this is 1992) is being organised from a farmhouse outside Ystad. Wallander and his detective chums are as gloomy as ever, but quite a lot of this book is based in South Africa, focusing on both the criminals and the South African investigation. The suspense is tight right up to the very end.

Probably only one for people who like detective novels, but pretty good for what it is.

9. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

This month's Bibliogoths selection. Still one of my favourite adventure stories ever, but apparently I'm in the minority.

So I've finally finished the big pile of library books I took out in December, which means I can get stuck into my own pile, and finally tackle the books that techbint has lent me.