Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius novel)

Michael Gideon and his partner Sirius, a German shepherd, are the entire staff of the LAPD Special Cases Unit, handling bizarre and hard to categorise crimes. That's why they get the call when a homeless man reports the murder of an angel by persons unknown in a silent, black car.

So, I'm going to be honest here, I was misled by the blurb into thinking this would be an occult mystery, and I think I may not have appreciated it as a crime/conspiracy novel as much as I might have done had I not been waiting for the other shoe to levitate. As it is, whatever the truth of the initial crime - and by the end of the novel it still isn't clear - this isn't a book about an angel being murdered, but about shady business practices and the corrupt rich.

It's an odd sort of detective novel. The original crime may not even exist and a second crime goes unsolved and may not have been a crime, while the denouement features the resolution of a murder not committed until the book is almost over. There is also an arc plot from the first book, which I haven't read; my bad.

It's not a bad book, although I suspect a doggier reader would get more from it than me.

Two Months of Kindle Unlimited

I have now pretty much concluded my time with Kindle Unlimited. It's not a bad concept - access to a collection of titles for £7.99 a month, including several with unabridged audio accompaniment - but although I am primarily a Kindle-based reader now, I've opted not to continue for several reasons.

1) Cost: At present, I can get by on £7.99 a month or less on books. In particular, I can get books, ebooks and audiobooks from the library.

2) Choice: The range is limited and I already have most of the really good stuff in paper format. I've read some right old tosh as part of my subscription.

3) Alternatives: In addition to the library option, as a Prime subscriber it turns out I already get one free book a month from a selection of pre-publication titles. That should keep me in random interest for a while at least.

4) It's Christmas: I'll probably have at least some books for Christmas, so an ebook sub will be wasted.

5) Flexibility: I can always pick it up again for a month or so if I fancy working through something specific.

Nostrum and Emaculum

Wrapping up my Kindle Unlimited experiment, I conclude Roberto Calas' Scourge trilogy with Nostrum and Emaculum, in text rather than audiobook format.

Nostrum picks up two days after the end of The Scourge, as Sir Edward Dallingridge decides that faith and prayer and patience aren't working to heal his plagued wife and sets off in search of the alchemist who is rumoured to have found a cure. Reunited with Tristan and joined by the sassy nun Beliscensia, he seeks out the island fortress where the alchemist works, hunts a dragon, is captured several times and continues to be menaced by his nemesis Sir Gerald and to experience greatly varied success in the employment of hand cannons.

Emaculum sees Sir Edward, cure in hand, struggling to return to St Edmund's Bury through the increasingly splintered jurisdictions of the many mad kings of the new England (one of whom is the actual mad king of England.) With the cure in hand he has a chance to save Elizabeth, but the Virgin Mary and St Giles have trials yet in store for their apparent favourite, now sworn to be the champion of the plagued, defender of those who can yet be cured of their malady.

As in The Scourge, Calas merges his zombie horror with a loving recreation of the approximate history of the period as it might have played out given the rise of a zombie plague in the wake of the Black Death. He keeps the source of the plague (god, the devil, ground up saints' bones) uncertain, and likewise the means of repelling them (holy relics, lichens and lepers) are never explored in anachronistic terms. The focus is on Sir Edward and his increasingly obsessive quest to save his wife or to die with her.

Sir Edward is brutal and Sir Tristan, his closest ally, seems almost inordinately pleased each time he manages to spike an enemy with the plague tincture. On the other hand it was a violent age, and their enemies are almost monstrous, which kind of makes them seem okay by comparison.

The Scourge trilogy is a decent historical zombie romp. It's more or less my first - at least in written form - although I'm sure the kindle store is full of the bloody things by now. It is thus my benchmark for the subgenre moving forward.