I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

The de Luce family have suspended their usual Christmas preparations in order to try to generate some much needed cash, hiring out Buckshaw to a film company. Usually Christmas is the one time of the year that the warring sisters declare a temporary truce for the celebrations but that seems unlikely amongst the uproar of visiting film royalty. It's not long before things start going wrong and most of the population of Bishop's Lacy is camped out in the halls, pretty much snowed in and trapped with a killer at large amongst them. Much as Flavia de Luce loves a good murder to keep her 12 year old deductive skills finely honed, even she has to admit that juggling vital scientific experiments (proving the existence of Father Christmas) at the same time as digging into family history, while making sure the local police are suitably impressed with her cleverness and creating the firework display to end all firework displays, might be a little too much for even her array of skills.
This one is possibly as good as the series debut. Flavia and co just dance off the pages which seem to evaporate under your fingers and into your brain. If you can get it into your reading schedule over the Christmas period then all much the better. Flavia is as fascinating and captivating as ever, straddling the line of cleverness and hopeless naivety and brought to life by Alan Bradley with lots of wit, cheekiness and flashes of surprising depth of feeling. Whether you buy into his somewhat Ealingesque image of 1950s rural England doesn't really matter - it's just too much fun to give a damn.

Elisabeth Sladen

Ninety-nine out of every hundred people reading this book are going to be dyed in the wool Doctor Who fans. Lis knew this quite well. Which is probably one of the reasons the bulk of the book is taken up documenting the short period of her life working on the show. She's giving the target audience what they want. I'm a hardcore Doctor Who fan myself. I love all her insights and observations about the show. But I would also have liked to read more about the real Elisabeth Sladen behind the Sarah Jane Smith parade. There are glimpses of it of course but not enough. Her parent's history is just a short prelude and her childhood rushes by in a confusingly unchronological blur of Elvis posters and tomboy hi-jinx. Her early career on stage and tv bring more structure to the book as the various productions provide a set of hooks to pin her years on. There are some fascinating insights into the many famous faces she worked with or encountered - names like Michael Crawford, Robert Morley and Alan Ayckbourn. Here she also meets her soon to be husband and apparent soul mate Brian Miller . There is a sort of embarrassed reluctance though to let the reader get under the surface of their relationship, whether in defence of their privacy or insecurity about how much personal detail a fan of a tv show would want - I don't know. There is an opinion, probably accurate, expressed by her daughter, that Lis didn't really fully realise just how much she was loved by the fans of the show.
It's no use denying that most fans of the classic show are pretty hard-core nostalgia junkies. I am one of them so I lapped up all the stories about her time on the show. All the stuff about her love hate relationship with Jon Pertwee are priceless, the utter Doctor Who legend that was Barry Letts, Tom Baker, the lovely but tragic Ian Marter. There are also names that she was less impressed with allowing her grumpier aspects to have a bit of page space. Her time on the show comes to an end and the book almost fast forwards to the finish, stopping briefly to describe some of her later involvements on specials and spin-offs, conventions, missed career opportunities, the birth of her daughter and the eventual resurgence of the show that would lead to The Sarah Jane Adventures.
We live in a media age where it seems that not a day can go by without someone familiar passing away but I can honestly say I have never been shocked so badly as the night I found out we'd lost Lis Sladen. This book was completed only at the last and it has been a sad pleasure to hear her voice in my head again.

The White Lioness

After the underwhelming Dogs of Riga I was hoping for a big fat Swedish murder investigation this time. The White Lioness is a far superior animal by far but it's also not entirely that big fat dose of Wallander I wanted. Written just before South Africa would throw away the worst of its horrific identity, Mankell once again writes a book that is so very rooted in the time of its writing - here the early 90s leading up to the eventual free elections in 1994. The first segment of the book is excellent. Wallander is still not quite on an even keel after his ordeal in Latvia. He throws himself into the mystery of a missing woman. A woman with no reason to disappear.
My biggest problem with this book is the way this promising opening is just cut off in mid flow. We turn a page and leave Wallander behind. For a chapter we think. Well maybe two chapters. Any time now. 50 pages. Can't be long now. 80 pages. Please. 100 pages... you've got to be kidding me!!! Don't get me wrong. The narrative here is still excellently written and Mankell gives us a very creditable, though Swedish filtered attempt at showing Afrikaner society through the eyes of de Klerk, the secret service and a shadowy organisation dedicated to preserving apartheid by assassinating Mandela. Is it Wallander meets The Day of the Jackal? Oh very definitely, though the assassins here aren't really in the Jackal's class, though why they decide to train in Sweden is beyond me. Any half decent assassin would probably conduct his preparations in a neighbouring country.
Eventually the action returns back to Sweden and the book starts to burn again. Wallander skips the rails even more spectacularly than usual, which gives Svedberg an opportunity to step out of the shadows thrown by Mankel's previously sketchy characterisation, joining the very small cast of fully drawn players.
From a political standpoint the book has become a bit of curiosity, a set of Swedish tinged views on a long dead social system, separated by a couple of decades from today's contemporary incarnation. As a thriller and a detective story the book does eventually redeem itself, though the way the two threads are woven together could have been much better.

Cop Hater (87th Precinct #1)

This is the first book in Ed McBain's long running police procedural series 87th Precinct. McBain would continue writing the ongoing series for half a century until 2005, the year of his death.
Someone is killing cops with a 45 calibre handgun. Steve Carella and the rest of the precinct have to find the killer before he kills again. Carella and Teddy are unmarried still and between the exhaustive investigation the pair try to snatch enough time together to decide on a date for the wedding.
As with quite a few of his books McBain makes good use of the weather conditions. You can almost feel the heat throughout. The last time I read one of these it was to the other polar extreme, with the city literally freezing in the depth and dark of winter. What really makes 87th Precinct books work though is the to and fro between the cops, the banter, some of it digging into the investigations or just the mix of everyday talk of a bunch of guys doing a day to day job, friendships, rivalries - real dialogue. McBain doesn't let the plot rule him. He takes time to develop characters and aspects of the city that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the central plot line. It's all canvas for big the picture. Don't expect summarised forensic reports either. For example if Carella gets a lab or ballistic report expect to hear it line for line. With this being the first book there's quite a lot of technical and scientific stuff to cover too. Fingerprints - here comes a breakdown of the chemical process that results in finger prints being created. It's just one of those signature elements that makes the series what it is.
Cop Hater isn't going to be the best book in the series but it does serve as a great introduction. The book was adapted for a 1958 movie of the same name starring Robert Loggia in the Carella/Carelli role.

Meany

I would echo another reader's opinion that Peazy Monellon's writing does bring to mind early Stephen King. Meany has that dark playfulness that King was so adept at. A young girl called Jenny and her cohort of brothers and sisters (mostly sisters) are growing up on a farm under the increasingly cruel rule of their dictatorial father. The place is also awash with spooks. For a first book this is pretty well written though at times I felt it did get a little tangled up in the different angles and ideas thrown up by the narrative. One of the farmhands provides confessional interludes that mainly injects frequent doses of foreshadowing into the read. The author doesn't pull any punches with the horror angle, throwing a fairly disturbing scene into the story in the first few chapters. I mostly enjoyed the sequences from the POV of the younger kids; Jenny's first encounter with benevolent spook Emma being one of the highlights. Other bits don't quite work as well; a surreal overly detailed game of Mouse Trap is a pretty audacious inclusion though it pretty much swamps the creepiness and tension with the nostalgia of children's games. It's not a long read, the generously spaced bold typeset makes the pages fly by. Basically a nicely written début.
Review copy from Goodreads giveaway.

The Betrayal of Trust

The sixth book from Susan Hill to feature the inhabitants of Lafferton. The two main characters are siblings Dr Cat Deerbon and top cop DCS Simon Serrailler. The plots and themes explored usually feature the family's ongoing story and topics and situations thrown up by the pair's respective professions; health or lack of it, crime in society - all sensitively addressed in Hill's brilliant prose and her thoughtful insights into human emotions. Crime fiction? Well yeah, but not really comparable to much of the genre's staples and conventions.
In this one flooding in Lafferton has unearthed the bones of a young girl missing for 16 years, a mystery from the past that caused a big splash on the national consciousness. But alongside them are the bones of another young woman whose disappearance contrastingly caused not even a ripple. Serrailler is tasked with the cold case but is hampered by severe budget restrictions and he's just met the love of his life. Cat Deerbon deals with financial problems directing the local hospice, calling on the expertise of a newcomer to the town who is setting up a new care home for Alzheimer sufferers. In her general surgery she is consulted by a woman called Jocelyn with the early symptoms of Motor Neurone Disease, which leads to the thorny subject of assisted suicide. I think Hill tackles the subject as objectively as possible, though of course her characters are more swept along with the emotions of the terrible choices they face. Age, mortality, memory, lives lived and lives cut short, all played out in the setting of a Cathedral town and tied together with the lines of synchronicity within a cold case murder inquiry. I would add the advisory that this one is probably going to have more resonance with older readers or folk who have had their lives touched by terminal illness.

Nameless

The Snatch is a very early Bill Pronzini novel and the very first of his long running Nameless Detective series. And it's a very decent beginning. Pronzini may have been just starting out on his longer form career but he'd already gone some way to developing his skills through his short stories. Don't be fooled by the pedestrian seeming set up to the plot, what looks like a routine kidnapping and ransom soon manages to throw a few curve balls. It's all cleanly written and constructed, playing to its pulp noir influences, the most commendable aspect being the character development of our unconventional hero. He's a very engaging character, a devotee to the pulps himself which engenders a neat homage within homage dynamic that blurs the boundaries between Pronzini himself and his nameless protagonist. Within the first few pages, Nameless has already compared someone to Doc Savage and greater props to the author for allowing an image of Lester Leith, Erle Stanley Gardener's crafty pulp creation, to jolt Nameless from a blue funk onto a hotter trail. Nameless's obsession with the pulps is a major aspect of the series, in this first book it highlights the cracks in his already crumbling and damaged relationship with his current girlfriend. Her judgement being," I want a man. Not a stubborn and self-deluding adolescent trying to live the life of a fictional hero." This isn't just fan fiction though, Pronzini just happens to be a very fine storyteller, mastering the art of hard-boiled dialogue and first person stream of consciousness that wouldn't sit uncomfortably next to the 30's pulp maestros both he and Nameless idolises.

Jacinto's Remnant

Jacinto's Remnant is the second book in the Gears of War series following on directly after the events portrayed in Gears of War 2 the popular Xbox 360 game. The humans of Sera have destroyed their last major stronghold Jacinto in a desperate attempt to flood the underground lair of the Locust. The survivors flee in search of a new refuge, hoping that the monsters from below have been all but wiped out. The book documents the Gears and the civilians of Jacinto scouting for a new island home - an old CoG Naval Base at Vectes. Like the first book it periodically looks back at an earlier historic moment in the conflict. This time it shines a light onto the dark days when Prescott authorises Hammer Strikes to obliterate all but one human enclave on the planet of Sera. The CoG government has come to the conclusion that they are doomed - unless they do the unthinkable. It still seems unthinkable to me, even knowing that saving a few is better than saving none, to press a button and wipe out 99% of your own people seems like the sort of scenario that sits more comfortably among the back story of a computer game, but in a book it has to pass closer scrutiny and even though I love Gears I tend to think ordered societies would be much more likely to go down fighting rather than resort , even in desperation, to such tactics. Mores and attitudes are very much to the fore within these books, with many of the characters, particularly Hoffman and Mataki, struggling to shift perspectives when society shifts to and from a war footing and to and from fighting a completely different and unfathomable monstrous species to fighting their own, sometimes hardly less monstrous and unfathomable.
I get the feeling Traviss really has a soft spot for Hoffman and that some of the careless characterisation from the game doesn't sit well with her. Hoffman's decision to leave Fenix, a decorated war hero, to die in an abandoned prison, overrun with Locust, being the standout bump in the road. Following on from Gears 2 the book also has to deal with the aftermath of Dom Santiago finding his long lost wife and the terrible choice he had to make. It's perhaps the key note emotional event from the sometimes quite thin plotting that the game achieved and Karen Traviss does well in painting a more detailed account of the consequences to Dom and those around him.
For a book standing squarely in the military sci-fi genre there's a severe shortage of actual action, no large Aspho Fields style battles, just some fairly routine skirmishes. It wasn't a problem for me, I enjoyed the post apocalyptic scenario focusing on rebooting society from a bare remnant. Despite the lack of action there's still plenty of drama, spot on characterisation, a sort of cosiness that come from spending time with well loved and time worn Gears and mystery lurking in the dark and the deeps.

Gears of War - Aspho Fields

Karen Traviss does a great job of bringing some Gears of War goodness to those of us who like to relax our trigger fingers once in a while. Traviss admits herself that she's worked on a lot of stuff in her day, tie-ins and the like and that not all of the varied franchises and projects have been particularly worthy. But Gears is different. She thinks it's special. I'm inclined to agree. Working on something you really love rather than it just being the latest meal ticket has really brought out the best in the writer, both in these books and her hands on work with the latest Gears game.
This one tells the untold Story of the battle for Aspho Fields. A battle we've heard about in the game that takes place several years before Emergence Day when the humans of Sera are still locked in a world war over Imulsion that has lasted the best part of a century. At this time they are unaware that another race called the Locust are biding their time beneath their feet, waiting for a good time to pop out and call 'Time' on human Seran history. The Cogs have discovered that the other power block are developing a weapon of mass destruction called The Hammer of Dawn at a research base at Aspho Point. Now at this stage Gears fans will most likely be grumbling that a Gears book without Locust is not something they signed up for. Traviss cleverly frames the pre-Emergence Day sequences with a story set between games 1 and 2, just after the deployment of the Light Mass Bomb. The Cogs are consolidating as best they can and are cautiously hopeful that the worst of the Locust threat has been dealt with. A face from the past in the form of a veteran female Gear called Bernie brings the past back to the surface. Dom Santiago wants to know the full story of the death of his brother Carlos at Aspho Fields. Marcus and Bernie were the only witnesses and neither are keen to talk about it. During an escort mission all the main characters get a chance to reflect and more of the story of the friendship of the brothers and Marcus gets revealed along with a lot of other stuff involving the feud between Hoffman and Fenix. These books can't tell the big story - that is for the games to tell, instead they tell the other stories that the games don't have time or the opportunity to tell. It's very well written with a great feel for the characters. All the dialogue just feels right, so much so that you can't help hearing the voice acted tones from the game; Fenix's tortured gravel, Cole's booming bonhomie, Baird's verbal sniping, Dom's quiet dignity, Hoffman's caricatured parade ground bark. And Traviss's new female characters fit in fine. The military attitudes are very believable. It's infantry soldiering with thoughtful introspection in a world that has become so desperate that the values of humanity are having to be sacrificed. Sure it still knows it's an actioner filled with chunky guys, chunky guns and chunky aliens... getting chunked, but it doesn't mean it has to be empty between the ears.
Even though fans of the game will get the most from this book I'm convinced that folks who enjoy gritty military sci-fi will still enjoy themselves. That was violent, reckless... and necessary! Well done.

Arctic Ghost Story

Michelle Paver's Dark Matter is a chillingly accomplished ghost story that takes place in the dark isolation of a snowbound base-camp of a small but ambitious scientific expedition, as the long dark night of an Arctic Winter sets in. The year is 1937. Unbeknown to the youthful group, their new home already has a black history and a reputation that makes the hardened seamen and trappers of the region reluctant to even speak of it.
Paver's love of the Arctic, first hand knowledge and experience of the region shine through the narrative. When A.C.Doyle wrote classic's like The Captain Of The Polestar, his experiences on Arctic Whalers' fueled the authentic tone and similarly Algernon Blackwood's tales of isolation and fear drew on his extensive trekking through the various wild places. There is an art to writing a good ghost story and one of the absolutes is in the appearance of authenticity. If the reader can't forget that the story is a fiction then the story loses its power. Paver certainly succeeds in that regard. Jack is well realised character, that I had no problem investing my interest in along with his horrific travails.
The narrative is in the form of a journal by the expedition's newest member and here again Paver excels in the form, using a journal's natural economy to provide ambiguity when needed but also to ride closely the mental battle taking place as our faithful scribe Jack details the occurrences. I've read other similar types of story that have been ridiculously large tomes, supposedly the diary of a few weeks stretched out to 700 page monstrosities, as if the narrator could possibly do the work that a professional author would have to chain themselves to the desk to achieve. There is a sort of infectious anxiety that slowly builds as the days slowly advance and the ill-fated expedition goes from one set back to the next. The ambiguity I mentioned has nothing to do with questions of whether the haunting is real or imagined - take it from me - the place is Haunted as Hell, no rather I ascribe it to the visual descriptions of the more visceral episodes. The scenes are painted with as few strokes as possible, so that in true classic style the reader has room to draw on their own nightmare imagery.
You could easily read Dark Matter in one sitting, though I spread it out over four. This is the sort of book you don't see too often these days, indeed you might be fooled into thinking it was written contemporaneously. Recommended.

The God of the Hive

The God of the Hive follows on directly from events in The Language of Bees and is the 10th book to feature Mary Russell. Mary and Sherlock are separated again and on the run. At first assessment you think of Reichenbach, and there are certainly deliberate similarities but the suspense gets left behind too often. Laurie R. King chooses instead to tell a more character driven story, examining Russell's new relationship with the recently discovered granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes. It's easy to forget that the whole business began as a search for the girl's missing mother. King has covered similar ground to this in her Kate Martinelli detective series.
The die hard Sherlockian in me can't read the start of a chapter beginning with the words 'Chief Inspector Lestrade' without at least a slight twitch of my arm muscles (perhaps to punch the air) even if this Lestrade is a younger chip off the original block. A lengthy interlude in the wild woods of northern England takes up a large section of the book, including the introduction of a new character called Goodman. A man with a tortured history of war damaged psychosis, King fancies as an embodiment of the English folklore legend of The Green Man and a similar revisit to another of King's character experiments - see the Martinelli book To Play the Fool. It's this particular Holy Fool who is partly responsible for a funeral so bizarre it might not have looked out of place on an episode of The Prisoner.
The writing is as good as ever but with the plot, thin though it is, sidelined so often the experience isn't quite as compelling as usual. When the plot does finally emerge from the London fog with so few pages remaining I was beginning to think we were going to end as the last book ended with another 'TO BE CONTINUED'. Thankfully that doesn't happen and we are treated belatedly to a proper Reichenbach style finale in the shadow of Big Ben.

Victorian Ghost Stories

Excellent selection of 35 ghost stories from the Victorian age, chronologically compiled here dating from 1852-1908. The stories included have been selected as much for aspects of innovation or for the part they played in influencing stylistic developments within the genre than their actual quality. Though there are some great ghost stories here and barring three or four stories are generally of very good quality.
Along with the stories are a comprehensive list of all ghost story collections published during the half century of years following 1840, full source details for the 35 stories and an introduction by editor Michael Cox.
Highlights for me include:
The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell. It's probably the best written ghost story here with superb characterisation, lush prose and as a ghost story endlessly imitated even today.
An Account Of Some Strange Disturbances In Aungier Street by J.S.Le Fanu. One of his best and the veteran of countless anthologies.
The Open Door by Charlotte Riddell. Not particularly scary but a well written example of its type and introducing a rare detective element.
The Captain of the Pole-star by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Eery arctic tale coloured by Doyle's own experience of life on a steam-whaler.
The Kit-bag by Algernon Blackwood. Only Blackwood could imbue such an innocent inanimate object with such a deep sense of malevolent dread.
The only ones I'd have left out would be:
An Eddy On The Floor by Bernard Capes which although suitably macabre is also a shade too long compared to the other entries and probably the least accessible due to its convoluted syntax.
Miss Jeromette And The Clergyman - a very weak effort by Wilkie Collins.
The Tomb of Sarah by F.G.Loring - Nice story but very much a vampire tale.
Reading these in order shows how the genre developed. It's a genre that in the Victorian era was very much designed to be read aloud at the fireside after dinner and ever associated with mid winter and Christmas. It goes through phases of doomed love triangles, vengeful victims, tragic victims of accident defeating mortality to see their loved ones a final time, portentous warnings, cursed objects and places, spiritualism, tragic reenactments etc.
There will probably never be a definitive collection of ghost stories. The editor could easily have selected 35 alternate stories and still pleased this reader as much. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Little Manfred

In the Imperial War Museum there is a wooden Dachshund. It was carved by a German prisoner of war in the 1940s. This is its story. Well almost. It's a story that captures the spirit of the true story though.
In the summer of 1966, just after England's famous footballing victory against the Germans in the World Cup Final, a young girl, her brother and their dog encounter two men on the beach. One has a story to tell about the girl's mother from when she also was a little girl during the second World War. It's a story about friendship and kindness, both heart warming and tragic that begins with two German friends going to war on the fated German battleship Bismarck. Michael Morpurgo tells a moving and nostalgic story, deeply shadowed by the conflict of nations but brightened by the hope and peaceful humanity of ordinary people. He's aided by Michael Foreman's beautiful sketches, brought to bright summer life by water colour. I'd say this would be ideal for the 8-10 reading age group but really I don't see why this can't be enjoyed by ages of any number. It certainly would be a great starting point for summer projects, perhaps investigating the untold stories of parents from when they were children. As the cover states, "The past is all around us."
There is also an afterword about the history touched on in the story and a short chapter about Michael Foreman's memories of that World Cup... and another dog, this time named Pickles, who saved the day.

Acts of Nature

This is the 5th book featuring Max Freeman. An ex Philadelphia cop who has retired to a remote cabin in the Florida Everglades. Over the last 4 books Max has been getting his life back together after a fateful night when he shot a 12 year old kid at a convenience store hold-up and was badly injured himself. No longer on the force, he spends his days in solitude at his cabin or occasionally doing investigative work for his best friend Billy Manchester.
In this one Max is taking some time out to try to rescue his relationship with local cop Sherry Richards by spending some quality alone time with her out at his cabin. Unfortunately there's a storm coming. A Hurricane rips through the Glades, badly injuring one of the pair. Throw in a gang of opportunistic house-breaking Gladesmen, a couple of ex-military hired guns and an ornery alligator named Wally and you know this is going to all end in blood. By this time I've realised that this one has gone off track. No slow burning mystery with Max grinding away at the rough edges this time. Now I don't mind long running series breaking the formula, but this one just had set-up written all over it. Jonathon King writes great confrontation scenes it has to be said and Max v. the Gladesmen is as sparky as you would expect. I'm not keen on the split point of view though, establishing all the different characters so thoroughly could be described as padding. Contrary to the cover blurb, nobody is being stalked by persons unknown, as everyone's motivations are comprehensively explored with no stalking being part of the agenda. Ok, I can't speak for Wally. The plot is what it is: people coming together in the wrong place at the wrong time - a storm of consequences, you might say. It all being said, King's writing is good, going down like the first cold beer on a hot afternoon and I always enjoy Max's company. King's description of the Glades is, as ever, very good, mindful of the environmental issues and the conflicting forces of the natural world and the nature of mankind. It's just a shame the plot was so thin, considering how much the events in this one are going to impact on the series.

Cleopatra: A life

In 2000 Stacy Schiff won a Pulitzer for her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife of Author Vladimir Nabokov. In this biography she casts her researching skills a little further back in time and tries to pierce the glare and glamour of mythology, push past the propaganda and traverse the abyss of 2000 years of history in search of Cleopatra VII. At hand she has a wealth of sources that might be as daunting as searching for truth buried by two millennia of hyperbole and obscurement. On ancient historians Schiff comments, "They are by modern standards polemicists, apologists, moralists, fabulists, recyclers, cut-and-pasters, hacks."
She sets out as her mission plan, in dealing with so many biased, unsafe testimonies and incomplete evidence, most of which written centuries after the event or destroyed by the censor of the victorious or the ravages of time and environment, to not add to the confusion with her own opinions and supposition but rather, as she puts it, to coral the probabilities. Considering that according to Schiff, Cleopatra VII, "Effectively ceases to exist without a Roman in the room." it is no surprise that this account pretty much begins with the young queen rolling out of that famous travelling sack at the feet of Caesar. History doesn't do childhoods apparently. In many ways the author seems to suggest that Cleopatra and Egypt at that time were synonymous, and in the absence of a clear account of the woman, a detailed portrait of Alexandria and Egyptian society would have to suffice, initially at least. It's with a note of indignation that Schiff bemoans that in an age of accomplished, realistic portraiture there is not a single authoritative bust of Cleopatra. The Romans general opinion of both the woman and her country was:
"A shame to lose,
a risk to conquer,
a headache to govern."
Portraiture aside there is some time spent in supposing why Cicero, that prolific Roman speaker and writer, (Schiff quotes him endlessly in the first half of the book) says so little of Cleopatra during her time in Rome. The second half of the book is dominated by Cleopatra's first meeting with Mark Antony. If there are an almost infinite number of things we don't know for sure about Cleopatra, one thing we do know is that the woman could throw one hell of a party. The lush dinners she held in Tarsus, primarily to court Antony were unimaginably opulent, though Plutarch, our primary source for these overblown nosh-ups, seems to have had a good attempt. So what is the truth behind one of histories most famous and notorious love affairs, Cleopatra and Mark Antony? Was it love? And to what degree? Or was it purely an association based on political and military machinations? Schiff presents the evidence but leaves the question unanswered. Ultimately it is a question that is unanswerable beyond mere opinion or preference. Too much time has passed. Too much Roman propaganda disseminated. Too many myths have accrued. And as history becomes entertainment, from Shakespeare to Elizabeth Taylor, the truth, even were it known, never draws the greatest crowd.
And so to perhaps one of the greatest death-bed scenes of history, though again as an end-game of such notoriety the truth is obscured by the grand stage. After Mark Antony's bloody demise the negotiations between Cleopatra and Octavian and her eventual end, as represented by history, are differentiated by Schiff by mise-en-scene; Plutarch is writing for Puccini; Dio for Wagner. "'The truth of the matter,' Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears,'No one knows.'" Schiff declares that Octavian created the myth of the snake, a bit of propaganda that stuck to the event so indelibly it could never be separated, even in the face of so much contradictory evidence.
The book as a whole is a work of questions unanswered. But they are fascinating unanswered questions. Schiff does the hard and boring part for the reader in collating and presenting the clues, opinions, document and context, advising where necessary of bias, agenda or obscurement and if she doesn't explode all the popular myths, she at least points a spotlight at their unlikelihood.
This review was from an Advance Reading Copy

War Horse

I was drawn to this book after seeing the life-sized horse puppets in the theatrical version of War Horse. Former UK Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo usually has an entire shelf dedicated to him in most British book shops and this one, written nearly 30 years ago is one I can recommend to both children and adults alike. It tells the story of Joey, a half-thoroughbred red bay bought by a drunken farmer to spite another and beloved of the farmer's son. The events of 1913 shatters the pair's brief happiness as Joey is sold into a war of wire, mud and carnage. His first new owner is Captain Nicholls who takes Joey as his cavalry mount. He also meets his loyalest equine friend, a shining black stallion called Topthorn. It's all told from Joey's point of view as he tries to survive the unfathomable conflict and regain the company of his farmboy. Along the way he'll find kindness where he can find it, endure crippling work and health sapping conditions. Although Joey is often in the thick of the chaos the book never dwells closely on the bloody results beyond detailing the casualties and the effects of their loss. It's a quick read, engaging ,moving and a great excuse to get some history into young reader's minds.

Deceiver

Writing a review for the 11th book of a beloved series, nearly two decades in the reading is probably not the most useful thing I could be doing with my time. If you've got to book 10 I doubt you are going to need much prodding from me to pick this one up. But I love this series too much not to want to just tuck the book away and move on without getting a few words about it out of my system. The politics is thick in this one. There's always quite a bit but this one seemed to have more than usual. I'm not much of a political animal so I'm glad Bren, our trusty paidhi, is on hand to keep track of the situation. Like the previous book, instead of the single Bren point of view we also get to see the world from the perspective of the precocious Atevi lordling Cajeiri. He's having a spot of bother with his new bodyguards who are showing no signs of forming manchi with him, that unquantifiable (at least on human terms) Atevi instinct that causes members of their race to form attachments. To their cost humans have confused manchi with the Human understanding of love or friendship, neither of which have any Atevi equivalent. Inter-species linguistic confusions caused the Atevi-Human war not long after the Humans first arrived. Peaceful co-existence was deemed too unstable and prone to further misunderstanding and the human survivors were ceded an island kingdom and a permanent separation from Atevi interaction. With one exception. Bren Cameron. He is the paidhi. A diplomat charged with interpreting all Human-Atevi contact. Things have moved on quite a lot since those early days and Bren is now paidhi-aiji. He's basically gone native, and become so valued by the Atevi high-muck-a-muck's he's been granted his own lordship, land and the loyalty of his own Atevi aishid (currently four Atevi bodyguards). Great characters, thorough world building, Cherryh's brilliant style of prose and restricted point of views make for fascinating and beguiling sci-fi. If you haven't tried a Foreigner book yet, do yourself a favour and go hunt out book one.

The Observations

The heroine, and faithful scribe, of this tale is one Bessy Buckley, or so she introduces herself. She's a young Irish girl, running away from a mother who has ruthlessly exploited her from an early age. She arrives at a ramshackle mansion, somewhere near Edinburgh, where she is taken on as a housemaid by the mistress of the house, Arabella Reid. The 'missus' as she calls her soon has young Bessy confused and bewildered by a succession of seemingly random and mostly pointless requests. And every night she must write an account of the day's events along with her inner thoughts. Despite all this Bessy develops a fierce loyalty for her mistress and then she finds out, by the chance discovery of Arabella's in-progress book 'The Observations', what the object of her devotions is really up to and tellingly what her opinions of Bessy are.
What happens next is best left for the story to tell, but it is a fascinating read that weaves Bessy's dark past, the mysterious fate of her predecessor, Arabella's paragon of all house maids, Nora, and Arabella's own secrets into a startlingly engaging narrative mystery. Bessy is a wonderful character, who colours her tale with the most vivid and sometimes lurid slang and colloquialisms. I'm often put off by such inclusions, though in this case they are pretty much essential to the style and don't distract at all. Though being a native of northern England, where many of the expressions are still in common use or fondly remembered from use by my Grandparents, I could be more immune from irritation than the average reader. Bessy is also not averse to casting ridicule on the people she recounts by exaggerating or over annotating their speech patterns and accents. The more she despises them the more extreme the exaggeration. I think it's no accident that Hector, the sex obsessed Highlander, gets the brunt of it.
The Observations is an excellent début novel. I've read the latest book by Jane Harris, 'Gillespie and I', which appeared some 5 years after 'The Observations' - so if you enjoyed this book I'd recommend you look it up with all due dispatch.

Gillespie and I

I've never been the quickest of readers but this vibrantly written novel, weighing in at 500 plus pages, so engrossed me I devoured it in just 4 days. It seemed so innocent at first, beguiling me with its engagingly described cast of characters.
In 1933 Miss Harriet Baxter sits in her Bloomsbury apartment, tending to her caged finches and writing her memoir of the times she spent with Ned Gillespie over 4 decades earlier, an up and coming young artist, her dear friend, she dubs him, her soul mate even.
At once we are informed that her friend Gillespie and his young family are ill-fated, that the tale will end in tragedy, a tragedy so deep that the young man will destroy his life's work and take his own life. The first half of the book follows Harriet, then a thirty something spinster, as she relocates from London to Glasgow after the death of her Aunt, a woman who had brought her up after the death of her mother. In 1888 Glasgow hosts the first International Exhibition and Harriet decides to rent rooms nearby to take in the spectacle. A chance encounter, amusingly recounted through Harriet's memoir, brings her into the orbit of the Gillespie family, her timely extraction of half a set of dentures from the back of an old lady's throat, who turns out to be Ned's mother, is the first step on the road to what lies ahead. Over several months Harriet becomes almost part of the household, finding opportunity after opportunity to ingratiate herself among them.
Just as we start to get comfortable with the happy set up, Harriet reminds us that there are dark times ahead - a trial even, though what crime is looming and who is to stand accused is left unsaid. Although leisurely, the narrative at no stage bored me. Despite its length I was always either entertained or intrigued. I was fascinated by the complicated family dynamic, the Victorian detail, the depiction of Glasgow and its characters both fictional and historical, and of course, Harriet's colourful and often acerbic observations. It's fairly apparent that Harriet at times does resort to being manipulative, she's prone to bias and there's something quite off-kilter in some of her references to her stepfather and Ned, her so-called soul mate, but I still found myself liking her. The second half of the novel deals with the break down of the Gillespie family and the trial. I hold my hands up and admit I was completely wrong footed by how things progressed. I'll not say any more as I'd be risking straying into spoiler space. Suffice it to say that the conclusion doesn't disappoint.
I would heartily recommend this book as a great summer read, perfect for that sunny afternoon in the garden, though I must warn you that you may not notice the sun on your face, or the pleasant bird song in the trees, or the bees in the Buddleia - not if you sink as deep into Harriet Baxter's world as I did.
This review was from an Advance Reading Copy.

The Man Whom the Trees Loved

David Bittacy and his wife have been happily married for decades. Mr Bittacy has another love though. He loves nature. More specifically he loves trees. So when he discovers an artist who paints portraits of trees in a way that captures their individuality... their personality even, he decides to invite the artist to stay at his home. The two men are kindred spirits, both believing that trees have souls... that God is in the trees. Over a long night gazing at the trees that encroach his garden, with the deep wood close by, the two men venture to put into words a philosophical understanding of nature that frightens and disturbs Mrs Bittacy. Their words cause her to catch a glimpse of wild, potent, sentient impressions of the life that is a forest. It jars her deep religious convictions to the core.
Algernon Blackwood is brilliantly adept at this sort of psychological dance, playing the known world and its belief systems off against the limits of human knowledge and understanding. Blackwood's beautifully rich descriptions of nature, and his deft maintenance of disquiet are excellent. There are few writers, short of Mary Shelley in full Godwinian flow, who could keep that disquiet going while exploring a philosophical idea for over 70 pages and still retain the interest of the reader.These trees are on the hill where my house is built.