I quite enjoyed this cosy murder mystery. The main protagonist Dr Nell Ward (who turns out to actually be Lady Eleanor Somebody Something, but to her credit she plays this down and tries to live like a normal person) who is an expert in bat ecology, is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up being framed for murder. She has to investigate to try to clear her name and jolly capers ensue. There is a slightly annoying love trilogy thing going on with her and her colleague and one of the police officers, which looks like it will continue through the series. If the next book comes up cheap on kindle I’ll probably buy it, but I wasn’t gripped enough to go out of my way to read on.
My son recommended this book to me, and since I have read and enjoyed several books by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I bought it and gave it a go. It’s set in a future where humans have pretty much destroyed the planet through both climate change and war and have sent out ark ships of sleeping people into deep space. Ahead of these ships were sent terraforming ships to find suitable planets and kick start life there, including incorporating a nano virus which would speed up the evolution of intelligence in primates, so that there would at least be the survival of human like beings even if the actual remnants of humanity didn’t make it.
For some reason, it wasn’t primates but arachnids that became infected with the nano virus, so the planet where the last living (or possibly the last living) humans eventually arrived was run by a civilisation of giant intelligent spiders.
There were lots of misunderstandings and miscommunications and fighting ensued. It turns out to be the first in a trilogy/series, and I’m not sure I liked it enough to be bothered continuing with it. I think I’m just not enough of a fan of this type of world building hard sci-fi with fighting and politics etc. I thought it was intelligently written though, and I did like the way spider civilizations differed from our idea of how things should be.
This is not the kind of book I normally read, and I didn’t know much about it when I started to listen, but actually I found it on the whole really fun and interesting to listen to, largely, perhaps, due to the fabulous main narrator who really brought the character of Margaret Small to life – like I was listening to a one woman play monologue thingy.
The ‘vanishing’ of Margaret, was when she was taken from her grandmother (who was raising her) aged 7 and put into an asylum (home for the mentally/physically disabled) and given no education and very little human kindness and kept locked up until well into adulthood.
Margaret narrates the story from when she has been released from the home and now has a wonderful carer/social worker who looks out for her with such love and fun, looking back over her life and experiences.
There is a mystery element when Margaret starts getting notes and gifts from an mysterious source who just signs them as ‘C’, and the reveal about who is sending them is nice and satisfying.
Like my previous Book Group read (The Coast Road by Alan Murrin), this novel is set in Ireland around times of political change that effect the lives of women. In The Coast Road it was legalising divorce, and in this book, the amendment to the law in question was to do with abortion – recognising the mother’s life on the same level as that of the foetus.
The book follows the stories of three women – Delores, coming of age during the time of the nascent Women’s lib movement, her daughter, Nell who is soon to become a mother with her pregnant wife but has to come to terms with the traumatic events in her teenaged years and Martina, who is Nell’s mentor in a religious women’s group that she attended as a teen who has traumatic events from her own past to deal with.
The writing is really beautiful and accomplished, and I listened to the audiobook and thought the narrator was fabulous too. The story jumps about in time a bit, between the three main characters and different stages in their lives, and I did get a bit confused at times, especially early on before I’d figured out who is who and their relationships to each other.
Lots of themes are explored from sexuality, motherhood, female friendships, mother daughter relationships, religion, and guilt and forgiveness. Although I didn’t completely related to everything about the characters, I found points of contact and relatability in them all and I was quite gripped at times. If I had to compare this book to The Coast Road, I’d maybe say that this one was a little less light (and dare I say, a little less fun to read?!) but still worthy and certainly thought provoking.
Firstly, apologies for the terrible picture – for some reason I couldn’t find a jpeg copy on the internet to grab, so I tried taking a photo off my computer screen with my phone, and it turned out rubbish. Soz.
Well, I’m generally a big fan of Sarah Painter’s books, I love both the Crow investigations series and the Unholy Island series, but… Beneath The Water was really not my cup of tea.
It’s kind of a romance, (think Beauty and the Beast where the beast is a poor little rich boy, Jamie, who is obsessed with weird health fads and beauty is a fragile female, Stella, on the rebound from a bad break-up) set a remote part of Scotland. Stella moves into the ‘big house’ when she gets a job as a personal assistant to the reclusive and unpopular Jamie. They find some old letters from a previous inhabitant of the house and are strangely invested in what happened to the letter writer. It was alright, but it didn’t have any magical realism and I didn’t completely believe the motivation of the characters and their choices. Ah well.
Vera is a little old widowed Chinese lady living in San Francisco’s China Town with one grown up son. When she finds a dead body in her tea shop one morning, even though the police decide he died of natural causes, Vera is determined that he was murdered and she is going to find out who did it.
She sets about building a small group of suspects, and even though she is only befriending them in an attempt to solve the ‘murder’ she ends up helping them all to sort out their lives and grow as people.
It was a little contrived (but then what fiction isn’t?) and I did very much enjoy the listen.
I didn’t love the first book in Andrew Cartmel’s Paperback Sleuth series, because I found the main character, Cordelia, too annoying, which was disappointing, because I’m a big fan of the Vinyl Detective series.
Well, I’m happy to say that I enjoyed the second book in the series much more. There’s a lot less potty humour, and the plot was interesting – Cordelia was engaged to track down valuable books stolen from a yoga studio, which she did, but as well as books going missing, people were being killed and there were several attempts to murder Cordelia as she unravelled what was actually going on.
Although I still feel more attached to the group of characters in the Vinyl Detective books, I am now quite looking forward to the next instalment of the Paperback Sleuth.
What a great book! Smallhope and Pennyroyal have been characters in several of Jodi Taylor’s Time Police and St Mary’s books, but this novel is a stand alone story of them and their lives. I was full of what Jodi Taylor does best, which is to inject so much real feeling and pathos, and genuine laugh out loud humour into exciting and complex plots to keep the reader laughing, crying and glued to their seats (or bed, or bath, or back of the bus or wherever you are doing your reading/listening). I loved it.
I love this series by Sarah Painter. It is gentler than the Crow Investigations books (although I love them too!) and is set in the same ‘universe’ with occasional overlap of characters.
The tidal island acts as a kind of gateway between the supernatural world and the mundane world, and although visitors can come for day trips, or even overnight stays, no one can stay on the island for more than two nights unless they are specifically selected to fulfil a role in the island community.
Luke Taylor (who runs the Island’s bookshop, and is the love interest of Esme the ward witch) has been looking for his missing twin brother for years. When he finally shows up, he should be elated, and he is, but all is not what it seems and the biggest danger yet faces the island, its inhabitants, and even the whole world.
The unholy island stories are full of myth and legend and wisdom and lovely characters. This is becoming one of my favourite series to read.
For me it’s a bit hit and miss whether I’ll like this kind of murder mystery thriller novel, and this one was very much a hit (no wonder it won all kinds of awards!).
The two main protagonists, the policeman, Chief Walker, or ‘Walk’, who has lived in the same small town all his life and is very invested in all the players in the mystery, and the daughter of the murder victim, Duchess Day Radley, are both brilliantly written with such depth and interesting fleshed out characters. Duchess is feisty and bold, but also noble and optimistic, whereas Walk, though also noble and well meaning, is clouded with guilt and regret from his past.
The mystery was complex enough to keep me guessing and I saw some but not all of the twists (I’ve said before that I think that’s the ideal outcome – I can feel clever that I worked some of it out, but not annoyed that nothing surprised me) and I felt genuinely invested in the characters and moved by what happened to them.
I liked the narrator as well (even though some of the reviewers on audible didn’t) I thought he brought the words to life in a believable way and had a nice voice.
Sarah Wray Writer 