Happy Wednesday everyone. As you know now I was on holiday for nearly the last two weeks, so it seems only fair that this week’s Recommendsday is a round up of some of the books that I read on my sunlounger. You will be hearing about some of the others too, but here are the ones that don’t obviously fit in with something else that I have planned or that I thought I ought to report back on,
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman
This is the fifth Thursday Murder Club mystery, and I would have read this last holiday if the last holiday hadn’t started (inconveniently) the week before it was released. Now I know that I don’t usually review later books in series because: spoilers, but we left the gang at a moment where things had changed at the end of the last book and I wanted to report back in on what the mood of the next book was. Now this is going to be slightly euphimistic (for spoiler based reasons) but I think the theme of this book for the core gang in many ways is recovery. But there’s also a really good heisty-murder mystery plot going on that keeps you entertained. I read more bits of this than I should have done out loud to Him Indoors (it’s a wonder he puts up with me) and it also made me teary eyed a couple of times. I continue to be in awe of Richard Osman – he comes up with great plots and interesting characters and knows exactly what he’s doing with how he writes his books to make them appeal to the widest possible audience, fully aware that for some (lots?) of people reading them they may be one of a very few books that person reads each year. That said if he makes many (any?) more in jokes about the casting of the movie version of the first book I might revise my opinion.
Murder on the Bernina Express by J G Colgan
This is a much less enthusiastic review I’m afraid, but I’m putting it in here because I read this after having recommended (ish) Colgan’s Christmas novel back in December. This is a murder mystery thriller set on a train travelling Switzerland on the eve of the Munich Conference of 1938. While the train is stopped on a famous viaduct (for weather reasons) a man on board is murdered. The murderer can only be someone on board, but the Swiss police can’t get to the train. And so the investigation is conducted remotely – with the train’s conductor (and eventually some of the passengers) enlisted to help. This is a great premise, and I think there’s a good plot in there. But it’s really let down by continuity issues, contractions and poor editing and proof reading and feels like it was published in a rush to try and follow up on that first book. In my review of that I said that it was readable but didn’t stick the landing, this is less good than that – I found myself having to go back and read sections more than once because I thought I had missed a piece of information or because something didn’t make sense. I think there is still potential here but the author really needs to take a bit more time over the process and do at least one more editing pass before they put things out – I’m not sure if I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt to read another one after this one, which is a shame because I think there is promise there.
Betrayal by Tom Bower
Last holiday I read Andrew Lownie’s Entitled, so this holiday I bought this year’s “big” royal book and to be honest it was a bit of a disappointment. I get that Meghan and Harry are a couple that seem to inspire strong reactions and so perhaps the writers just cater to one side or the other but that’s not what I want. I want something that feels at least like it’s trying to be even handed and came to a conclusion after doing the research (rather than finding the data that backs the author’s hypothesis up) but maybe I’ve just read Gaudy Night and it’s discussion about sound and unsound scholarship too much and this is popular non fiction. That said, the Lownie felt more rigorous than this for sure and it’s a similar market. But perhaps the principals on both sides of this are so entrenched that as an author your sources are either one side or the other and that’s it. I remain convinced that at some point there will be a good book about this whole saga though.
That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 