After dipping my toes in the icy waters of the first book in Andrew Cartmel’s Paperback Sleuth series, reading this was like sinking into a comforting warm bath. Back to the lovely mix of characters that are the unnamed Vinyl detective, his girlfriend, Nevada and their friends Tinkler and Clean Head.
Once again they are thrown into danger and mystery in the seedy underworld of classic records with lots of nostalgia in this instalment around eighties raves.
As always there are fun foody facts and cat shenanigans aplenty. I do really like this series.
I really love Andrew Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective series, and when looking at reviews of his latest (Noise Floor) I saw people mentioning this new spin off series about the Paperback Sleuth. Like many of the reviewers, I really didn’t know what to make of this new series. There is a character in the Vinyl Detective series (Tinkler) who is constantly stoned and randy and a bit of a comic foil for the main characters. If you imagine a female version of Tinkler, you get the main character of this new series, Cordelia. Instead of tracking down rare vinyl records, Cordelia deals in expensive rare paperbacks and is not above dodgy or even downright illegal tactics to get them. Her path crosses with our Vinyl Detective heroes at events that sell both old books and old records, which is quite fun. I’m not sure I like Cordelia enough to feel invested in the series yet, but perhaps she will go on a redemptive journey and I’ll warm to her more.
I enjoyed this book – a gothic, spooky, Irish folklore fairy tale with a strong and powerful heroine who has to fight controlling men (and women) family curses and angry creatures to save herself and right her family’s wrongs from the past.
I think I’ll look out for more novels from this author now. (I just added Vigil to my audible wish list – the first in Angela Slatter’s urban fantasy detective series!)
I bought this because I loved A.G. Riddle’s Lost in Time, and because I am fascinated by the world of quantum mechanics (at least, what little I can understand of it) which always seems very sci-fi even in the real world.
I didn’t love this one as much. I liked how is started out, and I quite liked the ending, but the middle was too actiony for my taste – like a sci-fi James Bond movie.
When academic Ty Klein spots a pattern in data from the large hadron collider in CERN he is thrown into a dangerous world of cat and mouse chases across the world and even across parallel worlds. There is some nice story development and some nice character and relationship development, but, like I said, too much action for me.
This is my latest in the buy any Terry Pratchett book that comes up cheaply on kindle or audible scheme. In Making Money, Sir Terry gives his wry and wise and witty commentary on the world of economics while telling a rollicking good tale. What can I say – it’s Terry Pratchett – if you haven’t read it – why not?!
This book was written and set during the covid lockdown period and is a collaborative novel, which means it was written by lots of different people. A lot of big names in the world of literature, in fact, contributed, and the proceeds were to support writers losing money due to lockdown.
The premise is that a woman starts a new job as building supervisor to a New York apartment block during the covid lockdown and every evening the few remaining inhabitants (it’s a topic of much complaining that all the people who could afford it left New York for their county homes when lockdown struck) converge on the rooftop terrace every evening initially to bang pans and clap in support of key workers, but in what develops into a platform for each person to tell their story to the group.
The different stories are written by different authors (we are not told who wrote what) and vary quite a lot in how much they held my interest – some where great, others not so much. One thing that annoyed me was that the stories were supposed to be spoken to the group and some where so not the way anyone would speak when recounting a story and very much the way someone might write a novel.
From other reviews I’ve looked at, it seems the ending divided opinion, but I did like how the novel ended.
What a strange and beautiful book this was. Set in Ukraine in the immediate post Soviet era the book follows Viktor, a wannabe writer who takes a job for a newspaper writing obituaries for (not yet dead) important people.
Viktor lives in a small flat with his penguin (the local zoo was so short of funding it gave away animals to anyone who would take them) and drinks a lot of vodka. The book is funny and touching while also being deeply tragic and bleak and very compelling – I wouldn’t have expected to be so gripped by a book with this description!
I love Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations books, so I was excited by this new series set on a remote island off the North East coast of England. While Crow Investigations in in the Urban Fantasy genre, this series is (I guess..) rural fantasy, in that it has magical realism/supernatural elements, set in a small town island community, giving it a more gentle slow pace befitting the setting. That is not to say that it’s boring, far from it. In this second book in the series, more Island lore is explored, as well as the developing relationship between the island’s two most recently arrived inhabitants. I enjoyed the read and am looking forward to the next book in the series.
Margaret Atwood once again shows her storytelling genius in this darkly comic dystopian romp.
Stan and Charmaine are the ‘everyman’ couple who are forced to live in their car when the American economy takes a nose dive. They are tempted by a new scheme offering them a home and jobs in a enclosed society in return for being prison inmates every other month.
It all seems great to begin with, until they slowly come to understand that their situation is much more dangerous than they first assumed.
The setting is steeped in both retro nostalgia and menacing futuristic (or is it?) technology. I loved the mix of humour, pathos, tension and character development, and I liked the ending and found it satisfying. (I also like the narrators.)
This young adult fantasy adventure feels like a classic, and I did enjoy reading it.
A young boy discovers he is the heir to a family responsibility to protect a portal to a magical world. He gets drawn in to an adventure with a girl from that world and they discover that they must face dangers to save both the magical world and the real world from terrible destruction.
The story is fun and exciting and manages to not be patronising. It had been compared with Tolkien and Pullman, and for me this book is far short of their works, but still good.
Sarah Wray Writer 