The Cold Dish

Walt Longmire is the Sheriff of Absaroka county in Wyoming beneath the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains. He's marking time until his retirement, mourning the loss of his wife while he drinks himself to sleep each night in front of a tv with a speciality for static in a half built cabin.
When the body of Cody Pritchard is found, seemingly shot by an antique rifle, Walt has to shake off his doldrums to discover the killer. Because Cody Pritchard was one of four boys who raped a young Cheyenne girl and then got off almost unpunished. With most of the population of the county in the suspect frame, including Walt's best friend and most of his colleagues this wasn't the retirement run he was looking for.
I'm definitely going to be checking out the rest of this series. Absaroka is, according to Walt, one of the places people plan all their life to retire to... and then pack up for Florida after feeling the bite of their winter. The cast is largely of a certain vintage with Walt himself being a big guy with a long history behind him. The sense that the characters have all lived a life with plenty of stories to be told is one of the constants throughout the narrative with the author (Craig Johnson) filling us in with Walt's wry wit and self deprecating voice as the plot pushes forward. The natural and sometimes treacherous beauty of the region mixed with both real and fictional local history, Cheyenne culture and spirituality makes for a very palatable tasty feast of a crime novel.
I knew nothing of the tv series when I first picked this up but I'll probably have to add Longmire to my to watch list.

The Necropolis Railway

Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway introduces the character of Jim Stringer onto the Edwardian mystery stage. Stringer starts out as a fairly wet behind the ears young bloke fresh out of Baytown (that's Robin Hood's Bay to us tourists). He's dead set on making a life and a career for himself on his beloved railways. His head is full of the romance of the railways, the rose coloured ideal straight out of the Boy's Own Paper or his revered Railway Magazine. His first job as a porter at the sleepy little station at Grosmont is a severe disappointment, being both the completely wrong career line  with no prospect of crossing over to engine driver, and seemingly no more exciting duties than primping the flowers or cleaning out the khazies. One day he meets a mysterious stranger who promises to get him onto the right track among the bustle and prospect of London, cleaning the engines that ply the funeral run from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery . Before long he's summoned down south to begin his new life but all is not quite as it seems. He steps into the shoes of a predecessor who was very likely murdered. Suspects abound and his life is made doubly difficult by being labelled a company spy by his workmates. With most of his dreams shattered Jim tries to unravel the mystery before he ends up as dead the last bloke, while trying to woo the girl of his dreams (his landlady).
Andrew Martin's writing is crammed packed with period detail and the day to day minutiae of the railways, colourful characters, a complicated mystery that doesn't seem to want to lie down with the other corpses and a coming of age character piece. The obvious glamour of steam engines clashes with the harsher realities of Edwardian London. It's probably not going to be everybody's cup of tea and some of the vernacular is probably going to annoy some folks but if you love anything to do with steam locomotives, Edwardian England and mystery stories you just might enjoy it as much as I did.

British Robin

Camera Critters

Ok so it isn't Christmas yet but Robins just make me think of that time of year, so when rustling up a quick ditty to accompany this picture I couldn't avoid mentioning Christmas.


On turned earth,
or handy perch,
a garden friend
til end of year.
A flash of red,
an evening song,
the poster boy
for Christmas cheer.

                    Michael Finn

The Magistrates of Hell

You wait 15 years for a new vampire laced James Asher book and then two come along almost at once with Magistrates of Hell following on neatly from last year's Blood Maidens. Retired spy James Asher sails to China in 1912 to investigate the discovery of a body very like the mutated vampires he encountered in St Petersberg. Accompanied by his wife and Dr Solomon Karlebach, Asher bases his investigation within the cosmopolitan confines of the Legation Quarter in Peking under the blind of a purely academic interest in philology and folklore. Keeping an even lower profile is Asher's ancient Spanish vampire ally Don Simon Ysidro. Usually these books have Ysidro treading on the territorial toes of the local nest of urban vampires but China's vampires are something different. Incredibly ancient and not altogether sane they mostly remain aloof and hard to pin down. With Ysidro hampered by their elusiveness, Asher has to rely more on his human allies, the Van Helsing like vampire hunter Karlebach and the Japanese Samurai Count Mizukami. Asher and the Count actually make quite a dynamic pairing out in the wilds among the swarming rabid rats and equally the double dealings and murder within the city and the Legation. Barbara Hambly dishes up a more b-movie action based script than usual but it remains faithful to the series tone, is well researched and  maintains the levels of threat and anxiety common to Hambly books.  As ever Hambly know how to entertain.

Sparrowhawk Close

Camera Critters

Our neck of the woods sees quite a bit of sparrowhawk activity. There always seems to be one lurking about, checking out our little birds. And the not so little birds. We've seen them take out wood pigeons on the front lawn and magpies on the back field. These guy really do punch above their weight. Unfortunately they still haven't worked out what glass is. We've seen many a sparrowhawk fly straight into our windows front and back. Mostly it's the juveniles though not always. Sometimes they are killed instantly. Sometimes they are just stunned. And sometimes they do themselves an injury. This chap didn't have an audience for his mishap so I can't be sure what happened but when we got him some professional help it seems his wing was damaged.

Anvil Gate

The third book in the Gears of War series by Karen Traviss follows on directly from events at the end of the last book Jacinto's Remnant and is still building up to the finale of the video game Gears of War 3. Delta Squad and remaining Cog Forces have settled alongside the inhabitants of a sheltered naval outpost at Vectes. They maintain an uneasy truce with a group of Indie refugees who hold a valuable source of Imulsion. The two sides struggle to bury an enmity that burned for generations during the Pendulum Wars. Bands of Stranded pirates nibble at the order that both sides crave. And if that wasn't enough, boats are going missing or found bereft of crew, mysterious holes punched through the hull.
For all you lovers of Damon Baird (there must be someone out there...don't all holler at once) you'll love this one as Traviss has a good go at poking around in Baird's uber-cynical smarty pants noggin.
Possibly less effective are the flashbacks featuring a young Adam Phoenix pining over lost reliquaries while fighting in an urban hell of war theatre. In the same timeline a young Hoffman commands the defence of Anvil Gate and resorts to questionable though pragmatic tactics that will haunt him forever. I did love the story of Bai Tak, the Pesanga volunteer with his team of grinning machete wielding hill men. You'll remember him from the Aspho Fields flashbacks in book one.  The main timeline moves along a bit more with the CoG learning how to combat Lambent and that data disc from Gears 3 finally turns up to wallop an even bigger wedge between Hoffman and Prescott.As ever the characterisation is superb, with great dialogue alongside more introspective examinations of the main players and the effects of war on human morality.   Oh and there's a fair bit of backs to the wall Gear on Glowie action... and with Lambent involved that means plenty BOOOOOM!!!!  Enjoyable stuff.

Hard-Hearted

A beautiful woman lies in the middle of the road stabbed through the heart, an eighteenth-century book clutched in her hand and  wrapped in a bloodstained hand-stitched silk shawl.
Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle is soon on the scene, making a welcome fourth outing in David Barrie's intricate Parisian and decidedly noirish detective series.
 In the past the novels have been characterised by  Franck having to immerse himself in a specialised aspect of Parisian society that he knows absolutely nothing about. Previously he's had to become an unlikely student in the rarefied worlds of lingerie connoisseurs, luxury perfumers and elite ballet dancers but in Hard-Hearted the author breaks the formula.Which is a good thing considering the main suspects are deeply imbedded in the world of high finance. Franck's very deliberate refusal to engage or try to decipher the mechanics of the trading machinations going on is the source of some of the more humourous exchanges. A scene where Sylvie boils it all down for him in a room wallpapered with diagrams is a standout.
In contrast the other area that Franck's investigation leads is one of academia, specifically French eighteenth-century literature and even more specifically the ancient book found in the victim's hand; The Tales of Madame de Villeneuve, Volume one. It's the first part of a story that would eventually be rehashed and made famous by another writer and renamed Beauty and the Beast. David Barrie gets lots of mileage thematically and philosophically from some of the symbolism that can be drawn from the ancient fairy tale, weaving them through his plot, the characters and even perhaps Paris itself, as Franck's investigation, in between the posh frocks and lavish soirees, takes him to the city's seamier side. 
I like Franck. He's got a wry sense of humour, he's very easy to relate to and best of all he's ever present in the narrative. He's still a man without much in the way of history though, beyond his previous employment fighting eco-terrorists, so it was a bit of a shock to finally meet his father, though the youth of Franck Guerin remains heavily veiled. 
With everyone scrambling to be the one who discovers the next big euro-noir these days you could do worse than give Franck Guerin a try. They also have the benefit of not being fed through the literary tea strainer of translation as they 're written in English. And they keep on getting better as the author hones his style. I look forward to the next one.