Reading Roundup - October-November 2016

"Revenge is a dish best served unexpectedly and from a distance - like a thrown trifle."
- Francis Hardinge, Twilight Robbery

Eventually they're going to try to film
this(1), and it's going to be... interesting.

I've already reviewed the dead tree edition of Anciliary Justice, the critically acclaimed, multi-award(2) winning and - most importantly - really rather good first installment of the Imperial Radch trilogy, but given that I'm planning to swing by the rest of the series at last, I figured I'd refresh my memory of the starting point and revisit the lonely quest of Breq, last ancillary 'corpse soldier' of the long-destroyed warship Justice of Toren, to bring justice to the manifold Emperor of the Radch, a vast, interplanetary empire with its noble houses arrayed in a complex system of patronage and no concept of gender (represented by the nearly-universal use of feminine pronouns, save where Breq is talking to extra-Radch barbarians in their own language.)

I'm glad I did. It is, as I say, a very good book, and interesting for more reasons than the pronoun quirk. The Radch is a fascinating mix of science fiction feudalism and corporate hegemony (the houses are clearly aristocratic, but their power base and interests largely commercial,) and the narrative transcends a simple revenge tale with its complex and existential political dimension. There are, I note on my second visit, a lot of odd coincidences, although I do wonder if that isn't a deliberate hint of something bigger. The reading, by Adjoa Andoh, is excellent.

Promises, promises...

Twelve Kings, also known as Twelve Kings in Sharakai(3), is another tale of long-deferred revenge. Ceda (pronounced Chay-dah) is secretly the pit fighter known as the White Wolf, double-secretly a courier of dubious goods, and triple-secretly working a long - oh, so long - game to bring down the twelve immortal Kings who rule the city of Sharakai with an even dozen iron fists, not because they are deathless tyrants whose daughters form a cadre of bloody protectors called the Blade Maidens, nor because their once-human servants take a tithe of the population every once in a while, but because they killed her mother and called her rude names. Meanwhile a group of freedom fighters/terrorists are also gunning for the Kings, although notably they have even less plan than Ceda for dealing with the fact that they are unkillable.

There's a lot of good stuff in Twelve Kings, but as a novel it falters on the fact that Ceda is neither a particularly likable protagonist, nor especially competent. She's clearly supposed to be a tough, non-nonsense gal who goes for what she wants and gets things done, except that it takes her most of the book to achieve anything. Also, if you want to sell your heroine as sexually liberated, I personally would avoid mentioning that her twenty-plus years older sex partner first met her as a child anywhere near the actual sex scene (if you absolutely have to have her shagging someone who met her when she was a child and they were in their thirties.) Her machinations are often clumsy, and her 'complicated' relationship with her not-brother Emre gets tedious every time it shades towards romance.  It's also highly notable that absolutely no-one seems remotely interested in the fact that a group of immortals place any importance on succession.

It's the literary equivalent of a beautifully shot film with an exotic location and decent cast - in this case the reading by Sarah Combes - but only a so-so script. On the other hand, props for a setting that is markedly different from stock, and an ambitious scope.

In America, Fly Trap. I have no idea
why.

I was what they call these days an early adopter when it comes to Frances Hardinge, reviewing her first three novels and moderating an online Q&A with this up-and-coming Oxford-based author with her wry turn of phrase and strong hat game in my previous life as a teacher and semi-pro reviewer of children's books. Alas, when that life ended, I sort of fell out of touch with the children's and young adult book game, and I've got fearfully behind, which is doubly embarrassing as about half of my friends game - or used to game - with her and I once met her while she was dressed as a duck.

Twilight Robbery is a first for Hardinge; her first sequel, specifically a follow-up to her debut novel Fly By Night. It follows Mosca Mye, her homicidal goose companion Saracen and n'er do well for hire Eponymous Clent as they seek to prevent a kidnapping and, in the process, escape from a potential warzone through the city of Toll, which is actually two cities; not in the manner of Ankh-Morpork or Budapest, nor yet of Besel and Ul Quoma in The City and the City, but by dividing up the city between day and night. Toll by Day is a good town of good people, charging massive tolls to enter the city and equally massive tolls to leave, while Toll by Night is a squalid den of thieves. Every Twilight, the city transforms from one to the other, and it's a poor lookout for those whose name indicates that they were born under the protection of a night-time patron Beloved (and one of the things I love about this book - spoilers, this is a positive review - is that it's so hard to explain one thing without the others, so organically do the elements of world-building fit together.)

Full of twists and turns, reversals of fortune and exquisite turns of phrase, Twilight Robbery confirms that, while one-offs may be her preferred mode, Hardinge can go back to the well(4) and not find it brackish. Mosca remains a superb mix of spiky and kind-hearted, and if Saracen spends most of the novel being little more than quietly disgruntled, an excellent double-conspiracy plot more than makes up for a lack of goose maulings.

I dead tree'd this one, courtesy of the local library, less because I didn't want to own it than because I like to seize on whatever I can find to show support for the local library since, you know, it's a local library.

I want to know, what in this book could
you not have written alone?

Kindle First is a mixed bag, and I mean really mixed. Not like a bag of mixed nuts, because maybe you don't like almonds but you do like walnuts, but they're all nuts (and probably not peanuts due to allergies.) No, it's a mixed bag like Bertie Bots' Every Flavour Beans; sure, there's all your favourites in there, but by definition there's earwax and the bile taste when you throw up in your mouth as well. Ocean of Storms is not the bile taste; it's more the bland, cardboardy tang of bad crsipbread.

EMP from the moon, aliens, desperate mission, sabotage, exploding love interest, manly-yet-intelligent-and-sensitive hero, sacrifice, cover up, corporate shenanigans, conspiracy, revelation, time travel! That is a lot of things for a book to include while yet and at the same time being incredibly predictable. It also has a posh British character written by someone with even less experience with what posh British people sound like than me, lapsing often into US vernacular, and the rest of the time talking like Archie Leach in Leverage despite being only about forty.

Being a Kindle First option I read this one on Kindle, and I'm happy not to have shelled out the three quid for the Audible upgrade.

Jinni in the US original.

Finally for this month, The Golem and the Djinni is a historical urban fantasy. A golem, created to be an ideal wife, is widowed en route to America and taken in by a New York rabbi. At the same time, a djinni is released form centuries of captivity and becomes an apprentice tinsmith in the city's Little Syria district. Dubbed Chava, the golem seeks to live a modest and blameless life, while the djinni, given the name Ahmad, embraces impulse and spontaneity and believes himself removed from any consequence. When they meet they find commonality in their non-human condition and bound nature - she is driven to fulfill the needs she senses around her, while he is held in human form by an iron cuff - but are pushed apart by violence before being reunited to face a common enemy.

The really striking thing about The Golem and the Djinni is that it is a beautifully written book, powerfully evoking 19th century New York, but that the magical nature of the protagonists has so little bearing until very late in the slow-paced narrative, and that in the end neither effects a great deal of agency over the outcome of the story. I don't know what I was expecting from the novel, but while I have no regrets of the twenty hours listening to George Guidall's evocative reading it certainly wasn't this. If you like your urban fantasy leisurely and contemplative, this is one for you.

(1) It has in fact been optioned for television. Leckie announced on her blog that the producers were positive on approaching a series full of dark-skinned, ungendered, polytheists, but that was two years ago and I cynically doubt it will make it past pre-production without introducing a simmering love-hate sexual tension between a busty, blonde Breq ('she redefined the role with her audition') and a ruggedly handsome Seivarden.
(2) Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus.
(3) In case you confused it with Twelve Kings in Sheboygan.
(4) The metaphorical well; I'm unconvinced that a sequel to Verdigris Deep would work at all.

My Dark Life

Today I went into town and got a book signed by Mr Ben 'Remembrance of the Daleks' Aaronovich.

Also selfie <==

The weird thing is that both Ben and a couple who were there for the signing asked if we'd met before at other signings or cons. Apparently I have a more socially-outgoing, but still nerdy doppelganger.

I was also told that I totally ought to go to a con, so maybe that can be my New Year's Resolution: To visit a localish convention, social anxiety be damned.

Reading Roundup - September 2016

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine is a steampunky alchemical fantasy, set in a world in which the dominant global power is the Great Library of Alexandria. Popular technology is largely Victorian, while the great institutions of the world - most notably the Library itself - have access to high speed trains and sophisticated automata, much of it based on the Library's monopoly on the practice of Alchemy. The Library also seeks to assert ownership over all original works, allowing access to books through blanks, alchemical Kindles able to download any book from the Library through their pages.

Jess Brightwell is a London lad, born into a family of book smugglers who deal in rare original manuscripts. Lacking the mercenary zeal for the business, his father buys him a place on the Library's apprentice course, hoping to place a family member in a position of advantage. Along with his cohort and under the firm hand of Scholar Wolfe, he undergoes the harsh and competitive process of training and selection, but before graduation, the pupils and their teacher are all plunged into a life and death struggle, not just against those who would destroy the Library's power, but against the Library itself.

Subject of many rave reviews, Ink and Bone has a slow start, and suffers somewhat from placing its narrative focus on Jess, whose vacillation makes him perhaps understandable, but also one of the less compelling and likable of the students. In addition, one of the major twists at the end of the book is not only cruel, but predictable, and as much as I hoped it might be averted, cast something of a pall over the pacier second half of the story. I'm also not sure how I felt about the seeming assertion that burning books is better than letting the Library monopolise them. Still, I might go for the next in the sequence, and Ben Allen provides a lively narration.

Book Two of Charlie Fletcher's Oversight series, The Paradox, returns us to a London in the care of the Free Company of the London Oversight, the group who police the boundary between the mundane and the magical like Pilgrim's heavily-armed younger brothers and sisters. Despite the recent recruitment of Charlie Piefinch and Lucy Harker, the Oversight is still in a parlous state, especially with Jack Sharpe and Sara Falk still lost in the mirrors. As the two young recruits enter training, Sharpe and Falk seek for each other, avoid the sinister John Dee and the hungry wights of the mirror realms, and eventually come upon the secret behind the near-destruction of the Oversight. Meanwhile, other forces are moving, other Free Companies and freelancers are hunting. The Sluagh are looking for a way to be free of the ancient bane of iron, the Citizen schemes, and the House of Templebane is seeking its revenge.

The Paradox suffer a bit from middle volume sag, and a lot of its time is spent moving from beginning to end, rather than doing its own thing. Lucy Harker also comes off badly, her understandable reluctance to trust or be tied down unfortunately mutating into an unlikable selfish streak. The other characters are more balanced between strengths and flaws, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the book is raised by the Sluagh chieftain who tells the Smith that the Oversight is supposed to protect the border, but only ever do so in one direction, allowing the mundane to bind the old world in iron. This is never really followed up, but hopefully will be returned to in book 3.

Charlie Fletcher is not as good a reader as Simon Prebble, but neither is he as bad as many Audible reviews make out.

My final September book - I've been getting back into audio plays in a big way - is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, one of the leading works of the modern Chinese SF scene. Set through the Cultural Revolution, it is an alien invasion story in which no aliens actually invade, instead somehow manipulating the universe in such a way as to convince scientists that physics does not work, driving several to suicide and aiming to paralyse human progress in preparation for the actual invasion in about four hundred years time.

Translator Ken Liu and narrator Luke Daniels convert the text into one redolent with familiar idiom, and while the details of the Cultural Revolution may be surprising to western readers/listeners, as they were to me, the production as a whole eschews the lure of oriental exoticism and lets the speculative fiction speak for itself. As with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet there is a section which takes the narrative viewpoint away to the alien world of Trisolaris which, for my money, is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to have seen more of that background explored through the Three Body game, but I kind of understand the choice. It's definitely worth a read, and quite different to anything else I've read.

Reading Roundup - August 2016

The Scar is the second of China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, named on my copy as the New Crobuzon series, and although the action of The Scar leaves the outskirts of the city itself in the prologue and never goes back, it does loom large in the thoughts of our protagonist throughout. Belis Coldwyn is an author and linguist, and as an ex-lover of Perdido Street Station's Isaac, unreasonably high on the government's to do list. She jumps on a ship to the colonies, but when that ship is intercepted by the forces of the floating city of Armada she is caught up in something vaster than she could have imagined. Some in the floating city have an audacious plan to tether an extradimensional leviathan and so make their way to the ruins of an ancient Empire and plunder their unimaginable power.

As with Perdido Street Station, the scope of The Scar is colossal. Geographically it far exceeds its predecessor, although the bulk of the action is restricted to Armada itself. The rough and gritty thaumpunk dystopia of Bas-Lag opens out from the claustrophobic glory of New Crobuzon through the eyes of Belis and a handful of other viewpoint characters, all of whom play key roles in the plot without any of them being major players, even when they think that they might be, as it rambles towards what is more of an end than a conclusion. The Scar is very much about the journey, rather than the destination.

Damian Lynch provides a radically different voice to Jonathon Oliver, and at first I did find this a bit distracting. Ultimately, however, he brings his own energy to the reading.

Sleeping Giants is the debut novel from author Sylvain Neuvel, and takes the form of a series of statements and interviews with the personnel of a highly secret project, recorded by the programme's enigmatic and ludicrously well-connected backer. The statements reveal the discovery of the pieces of a giant, alien mech functioning on an utterly unknown level of science, the underhanded and even illegal steps taken to secure it in US control and the intricate web of contingency plans and conspiracy used to bring it into the open.

While only touched on briefly, the mech's origins hint at future conflict with an ancient empire long-since withdrawn from Earth along with the planet's eleven other protectors, and the novel is pitched as Volume 1 of The Themis Files. I confess, I'm not rushing for the next one. While the multi-voice recording was excellent - I am hugely in favour of multi-voice recordings in general and this one had a talented cast on its side - I was not quite taken enough with the characters to truly get into the story, and given the archival approach I felt that it might have benefited from taking a broader view and including outside perspectives on the programme and the appearance of the robot on the world stage.

Not remotely a debut novel for prolific military scifi writer Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle is the first in a series set in a world in which the ordinary people are caught between the mutually antagonistic influences of the two Great Guilds, the Mechanics and the Mages. The Mechanics create the devices on which society runs and insist on their exclusive right, indeed ability, to provide and maintain them, while the Mages manipulate reality by embracing a philosophy which insists that nothing is actually real. Neither have much time for the Commons.

When Mari and Alain, prodigies of the Mechanics and the Mages respectively, are thrown together by circumstances it at first seems to be nothing more than your average star-crossed love affair, but even as their feelings challenge their Guild teachings and their experiences reveal the internal corruption and contradictions of their masters, Alain becomes aware that Mari is a figure of prophecy fated to stand against a great Storm that threatens to tear the world apart. To defeat it, however, she needs to overthrow the established order of both Guilds and rally them in common cause with the ordinary people of Dematr, a level of change that neither Guild will allow, even if the alternative is destruction.

Also dragons.

MacLeod Andrews provides a good reading, although I did hear 'Alain' as 'Elaine' to start with. Overall, The Dragons of Dorcastle has an involving story and an interesting set-up, but personally I could have done with less romance. It doesn't feel like Campbell's strong suit, and narratively it primarily serves to provide a reason for the two leads not to discuss the vital prophecy in a timely and useful fashion.

Finally this month - this feels thin. I'm sure there must be something else I'm missing, although in my defence, The Scar is fucking immense - is Hamlet's Hit Points. One of my rare non-fiction reads, in this book rock star games designer Robin D. Laws uses a system of beat analysis to break down the fluctuation of hope and fear in the dramatic and procedural plots of three famous narratives, in order to provide exemplars for games masters to consider when pacing their own offerings. In addition to providing an interesting and innovative reading on three well-worn texts - Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca - and providing some interesting examples of technique for the storyteller or game writer, Laws discerns some under-discussed elements of the works involved, such as a eakness in Hamlet's supposed tragic flaws or the Freudian subtext of No. It's a genuinely fascinating approach and one I shall likely be applying to my future storytelling.

Reading roundup - July 2016

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the debut novel from Becky Chambers, and one of the first novels to be part-funded by Kickstarter. It's essentially a road story, as the crew of the 'tunneling ship' Wayfarer make their way slowly across the galaxy in order to undertake an ambitious contract to create a new sublayer tunnel to link the territory of a formerly xenophobic race at the galactic core to the heart of civilised space. The ship and her crew of (mostly) likable weirdos meander from planet to planet, exploring philosophical issues and species distinctions, being assaulted by pirates, visiting markets, getting arrested and attending the occasional fancy party en route to their destination.

It has just enough technical crunch to feel satisfyingly real, but the real story is about the characters and their journey, so much so that hands down the weakest part of the novel is when the viewpoint temporarily leaves the crew of the wanderer to expand a little on the xenophobic race and their internal politics. While strongly informing the denouement, this interlude feels decidedly strange in comparison to the main narrative, and I don't think that the denouement would have suffered from the actions of the race being largely unexplained, the snippets of prior information enough for the reader to interpolate. Despite this, however, the novel as a whole is excellent, and a rare example of an epic quest with no great cause at stake; just a crew with a job to do.

Chambers is definitely an author to watch for. Audible reader Patricia Rodriguez brings a great range of performance to the characters, and captures the heart of the story.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interplanetary Insurance Agent is basically the furthest from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet it is possible to get while still operating within the same vague genre, medium and language. Written by Larry Correia and performed by Adam Baldwin (both of whom are also characters within the story,) it's either a scathing satire of the kind of two-fisted, macho, tech-porn action adventure that is almost impossible to distinguish from its own parodies, or the genuine article. I suspect the latter. It's a diverting listen at a mere two hours long, and Baldwin performs it with genuine gusto, but it doesn't really inspire me to seek out Correia's longer fiction. I can't escape the feeling that it would just be exhausting, and that I would just be increasingly desperate for some kind of satire to kick in and relieve the monotony.

Snakewood is another debut, this time from Barry-born games writer Adrian Selby. A fantasy offering in the subgenre I call 'White Company' (which is to say, definitely not the Black Company, guv,) it tells the story of the golden years and decline of the mercenary company known as Kailen's Twenty, and the assassination of its members a decade later. Recounted through a series of journals, letters and confessions recorded by the son of one of the last survivors of the company, the narrative begins at the end, and gradually unfolds the names and nature of the company's hunters, and the manner of the aging soldiers' deaths. It's big twist is a little too telegraphed by simple logic, although there is a second part to it that is harder to see coming.

The strength of the novel is its unique world, in which the flash of wizardly magic is replaced by a form of herbal alchemy. A class of warrior-brewers called the druda provide fightbrews which transform mere men into superhuman engines of battle, poisons in pastes for their blades and aerosolised form to be released from their arrow, and antidotes to be soaked into their armour or applied to their wounds, radically transforming war from a purely military contest to a clash of skill between their druda. The base elements of these concoctions - known collectively as 'plant' - are worth more than gold, and the recipe books of the druda are carefully guarded secrets. Interestingly, some reviewers have contested the right of a novel with 'no magic' to be considered fantasy, but not only is Snakewood clearly set in a secondary world, but to suggest that the druda craft is not magical is frankly ludicrous. If there were any doubt, Selby himself describes it as the world's magic system on his blog.

Where the reader's mileage may vary is in the characters. Well-drawn and convincing, they are nonetheless appalling bastards, pretty much to a man (or woman,) and anyone who prefers to have a side to root for may be in for a frustrating read. The best of the characters are violent junkies, and perhaps the only biting distinction is that only one side is explicitly involved in rape. Do not expect to like these characters, and if listening to the audiobook, try not to be lulled by the reassuring accent, reminiscent of Sean Bean at his most sincere, which marks Joe Jameson's interpretation of Kailen.

In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You began life as a four-volume serial novel called 'The Black Room'. It tells the story of Charlie Wilkes, an easy going chap who does some dodgy ket at a mate's flat and wakes up inside the head of a neurotic ex-web designer named Minnie Cooper. As he struggles to convince her that he is not just the roaring spectre of mental collapse, he slowly realises that Minnie lives in a different world; not his reality, but a parallel one.

It gradually becomes clear that there in every world there is a Charlie and a Minnie, and that more often than not, they end up together. The Minnie in this Charlie's world turns out to have died tragically of a suspected overdose, and so despite his own growing feelings for the Minnie whose head he enters, he agrees to be her invisible wingman on a date with her world's Charlie, whom he calls Chuck. Which is the point at which a fairly fluffy sci-fi romance turns into a horror story, as Chuck reveals a terrifying dark secret that threatens Charlie, Minnie and countless other versions of their predestined happiness.

Luke Smitherd reads his own novel, and as with Jeremy Smith's performance in The Ables, it's clear that he's not done this much, with his delivery becoming markedly more assured and fluid in the later parts of the novel. By turns weird, sweet and appalling, In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You is a unique and intriguing novel, and in a crowded marketplace, that's not nothing.

Of course, I came to Lev Grossman's The Magicians through the current TV adaptation. Like the series, the novel focuses on the progress of Quentin Coldwater, a disaffected youth who is unexpectedly admitted to a secret magical university. Unlike the series, the book casts Quentin as an undergraduate and follows him through years of study before things really start happening. It also casts his former best friend Julia into the wilderness for most of the novel, her story running concurrently, but in the follow-up novel, The Magician King.

The Magicians is basically about Quentin and his inability to ever be happy. He learns that he can do magic, finds a beautiful girlfriend with whom he connects on a deep, emotional level, has the freedom to do whatever he wants and ultimately finds a way to travel to Filory, the magical land of the books he has obsessed over since childhood (a sort of Narnia with the serial numbers filed off,) and still isn't happy, and I'm going to be honest, I wanted to slap book-Quentin even more than I wanted to slap series-Quentin. This is because, far more so than the series, the book is about the modern inability to embrace happiness, the obsession with the something else that will make your life make sense and be perfect, rather than about magicians having adventures. A common rallying cry for fans of the series is Hogwarts + Sex = Brakebills, but the equation is a lot more complex. Hogwarts + Sex - Cosmic Validation + Cosmic Horror - High Jinx + Alcohol + Bitterness - Neat Resolution = Brakebills. Mark Bramhall even reads the audiobook as if it were a particularly grim life story of Charles Foster Kane.

Just One Damned Thing After Another is the first novel in the Chronicles of St Mary's, by Jodi Taylor (not the porn star, thanks Google.) The titular St Mary's is a historical research institute with access to time travel, who shoot cunningly disguised portacabins back through history to observe and record, before returning to manufacture convincing supporting 'research' for delivery to the equally fictional Thirsk University. Like The Doomsday Book, this is a time travel novel with a female protagonist, although Dr Madeline 'Max' Maxwell is a far cry from Kivrin. She's a hard-drinking gal with some serious problems with authority, but the prospect of actual time travel is enough to convince her to apply herself to the grueling training regime and to put up with her less appealing colleagues.

There's a lot to like in this novel, although it's not without its problems. It's not hugely long, but a lot happens and there isn't really one dominant plot thread. The book feels like it ends a couple of times, before getting up and going on. In fact, it feels most of all like a series of linked short stories, rather than a single narrative, and character attitudes and motivations sometimes seem to spin on a dime. It is also one of the first books I've read in a while to feature the once-ubiquitous uncomfortably graphic sex scene apparently thrown in for its own sake.

Zara Ramm works hard to bring the broad cast of characters to life, but overall this is a fun jaunt rather than a life-changing grand tour.

Finally, The Scorch Trials is the second volume in the Maze Runner series, and follows Thomas and the Gladers after their escape from the Maze, as they are tasked with crossing a punishing desert called the Scorch to reach a Safe Zone. WICKED, the group responsible for these tests, subject the group to a series of horrific encounters, and also put them up against 'Group B', a number of female survivors from another maze. The psychological aspect of the trials is ramped up, with each survivor being assigned a role and environmental messages then undermining those roles. Thomas also begins to remember his past, before the Maze, and that he might be responsible for some of what they are going through.

I got this one from the library, because I've not been sufficiently impressed by the franchise to want to sink money into it, and this volume did not change my mind. An awful lot of it feels like the weirdness of the trials is weird for the sake of being weird, rather than having a serious purpose. I guess the Flare is a brain infection, so maybe inducing multiple emotional traumas serves a purpose, but it still feels arbitary, and as of the end of this installment the absolute control WICKED imposes on everything makes the story of our plucky rebels feel more than a little bit futile. Also, Theresa - the female lead of the first book - does not get a good showing here, basically being set up to betray Thomas, either by choice or because she is coerced by WICKED.

Reading Roundup - June 2016 redux

So, I missed a couple of books in my last roundup, and have added a couple more since.

A Face Like Glass comes from the reliably offbeat Francis Hardinge, who never fails to impress, or to challenge generic assumptions. This is perhaps her most conceptual novel to date, the City and the City of her canon, taking place in the vast and apparently unmappable underground city of Caverna, where thousands toil to create 'true delicacies', foods and wines and perfumes that beguile the senses, manipulate the mind and transform reality. The other notable feature of Caverna is that its denizens are expressionless until they are taught to form one or more faces.

Into this world comes Neverfell, a foundling with the titular 'face like glass', her every emotion displayed clearly on her features. Escaping from her concealed childhood with a master cheesemaker, she stumbles into a Byzantine web of political intrigue woven by the powerful court and the near-omnipotent Grand Steward, whose left and right brains sleep alternately and pursue differing and increasingly antagonistic policies. The world and characters of Caverna are in many ways a picture of a thinly sketched, high concept dystopia, but in Hardinge's hands their artificiality is explicit and important, informed by and supporting a regime in which cruelty contents itself with the contentment of a slave caste restricted to a single Face and so unable to look anything but content, reinforced by mind-controlling perfumes and wines, and intrinsically and increasingly fragile. Neverfell occupies the space of the superspecialsnowflake by virtue of not being a superspecialsnowflake, but rather than only ordinary girl in a storm of artfully maintained perfection.

Alys, the debut novel from celebrity YouTube nerd Kiri Callaghan is rather less unique in its world, drawing most of its material at least from earlier works. It tells the story of a small town girl whose GBF kills himself, unable to cope with the life of the only gay in the middle American village. As she herself flees her oppressive life, she finds herself dragged into a twisted version of Wonderland which borders on the Shakespearean Forest of Arden, and where a young prince has been displaced by creatures out of nightmares; quite possibly her nightmares.

On the surface, Alys reads like an Alice in Wonderland/Midsummer Night's Dream crossover fanfic (I'm not judging, I've written far worse,) but it has plenty of its own ideas on the nature of dreaming which make the borrowed elements slip into place. It's a quick read as well, at only I don't know how many pages because Kindle has stolen that as a benchmark, but it isn't long. It purports to be part of the Terra Mirum Chronicles, of which there are no other parts as yet, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for them.

Like both of the above, K. Eason's Enemy is an inventive take on a stock genre. Set in a fantasy realm dominated by a great empire, it follows a renegade, an exile and a soldier who stumble onto a planned coup d'etat. Its twists are that the empire is controlled by the matriarchal, once-subterranean Dvergir, and that some time in the recent past they conducted a purge to rid the empire not merely of religion, but of gods. The coup is planned not by humans, but by the most powerful of the old gods, who wants her power and position back. Set in a cold, harsh climate, the book has a cold, hard feel to it, especially in the depictions of a spirit world that is not exactly welcoming to mortal mystics who wander there.

The narrative strictly follows its three main protagonists, thief/physician/magician Snowdenaelikk, mysterious foreigner and probable shaman Veiko, and straight-laced legion scout Dekkla, as they struggle against conspiracy, murder, spirit quests, the terrors of unbridled god magic and the apparent impossibility of them ever trusting one another enough to truly work together against a lethally organised foe that the empire itself would rather not admit exists.

With this one, I went with the audiobook for convenience, voiced with a range of slightly random seeming accents by Faye Adele, and the switch was well worth it. The writing style is fairly unique, hopping out of third person for first person interjections, as if of the viewpoint character's thoughts - about 60% of which include the expletive chain 'fuck and damn' - and this is well served by an involved narrator.


Also set in a bleak, unwelcoming world, Ready Player One tells of a world in which most of humanity chooses to retreat from a shitty, decaying reality into the virtual world of an immersive, multiuser simulation called the Oasis. Created by a now deceased billionaire, the Oasis is a free-to-access haven from a world on the verge of collapse, and also holds the key to a potentially better world. On his death, the creator, James Halliday, set a challenge: The first person to find and complete a set of challenges and find an Easter egg hidden in the Oasis will inherit his vast fortune and control of the Oasis source code.

The narrator of the book is Wade Watts, an orphaned high school kid and Gunter (short for 'egg hunter',) who stumbles on the first key to the puzzle and finds himself embroiled in a literal life or death struggle against Innovative Online Industries, a soulless multinational corporation determined to take over and monetise the Oasis. Together with the other successful Gunters, whom he knows only through their online avatars (he himself goes by Parzival in the Oasis,) Wade must find a way to defeat IOI before the Oasis becomes a rich man's playground.

Celebrity supernerd and former maligned boy genius Wil Wheaton brings a certain mix of pathos and gravitas to the voice of Parzival (and I find it hard to hate a novel that drops a nod to Wolfram von Eschenbach,) and the book balances its mix of over the top action, 80s pop culture references and existential crisis well. It's an imperfect novel in that it never really confronts the question of whether a virtual world can be an adequate, or even healthy alternative to actual reality, but it's a pacy, fun thriller with just enough edge of peril.

Reading Roundup - April-June 2016

It's time for another reading roundup, as I quickly review the books I've read or listened to lately.

Part 2 of Tad Williams' epic 'Sorrow, Memory and Thorn' trilogy, Stone of Farewell, was kind of jarring for me as a kid, shifting book 1's child-principals - especially Simon and Miriamele - into young adult mode with what seems almost indecent suddenness, and there's a fair degree of the sex given that my impression of Book 1 was that they were about thirteen. In retrospect, they're older, it's just that they're both kind of spoiled and childish teenagers in their own way in The Dragonbone Chair, while here they are forced to grow up fast. There's a lot in here that is pretty stock quest fantasy, but it did a lot to at least reshape the mould at the time. I remember the third book - To Green Angel Tower - receiving one of the first favourable newspaper reviews I'd ever seen of a work of fantasy. The greatest strength of the book is also one I think I failed to appreciate as a young reader, to whit the depiction of a mundane and reasonable feudal empire being overtaken by magic, myth and insanity. It's interesting from a more mature perspective to see the degree of genre-blindness in characters who belong in a respectable mediaeval chronicle when not being forced to deal with bloody elves.

Like The Dragonbone Chair, this was read by Audible regular Andrew Wincott with characteristic gravitas.

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a gritty, thaumpunk scientific romance and a sprawling, Gormenghastly epic of intertwining plot threads and prose that occasionally forays into sweeping and ornate forms worthy of a star or two from Stella Gibbons. In narrative scope it is somewhat akin to Stone of Farewell, although set in a more confined geography and far, far more aggressively opposed to any sense of conventional fantasy. Mieville creates a dense and layered world of ancient mysteries, steampunk technology and rigorously analysed magic, of part-animal humanoids akin to the images of Egyptian gods and half-machine 'remades', of corrupt civil servants and exotically-armed murder-hobos hell-bent on 'gold and experience'. Into a city on the brink of either revolution or eternal tyranny comes a horrifying apex predator, capable of overwhelming the most powerful of opponents, and petty graft, scientific curiosity and dodgy associations combine to turn a city on its head and the life of one particular scientist and his friends inside out.

This audiobook is excellently read by prolific narrator Jonathan Oliver. Increasingly I find the Audible stable of readers to be a boon; not that I choose by reader, but with a few notable exceptions that I don't get on with, it does tend to mean they'll have someone good to do it.

Un Lun Dun is probably a less technically excellent example of Mieville's craft than Perdido Street Station, and having been written with a much younger readership in mind notably lacks much of the sex, violence and sheer unpleasantness of the earlier book. It begins as a (relatively) straightforward tale of two girls, one special and the other not so special. Zanna is the Shawzy, the prophecied hero of UnLondun who will save the abcity from the depredations of the Smog. Deeba is her sidekick; possibly the clever one, or the funny one, no-one is that bothered, at least until the Shwazy spectacularly fails to save the day. Faced with corrupt officials, nefarious schemes and the single-minded faith of most UnLonduners in obvious heroes, Deeba sets out to convince a city that they are wrong before her own life forgets her.

In its way, Un Lun Dun is as ground-breaking as Perdido Street Station, challenging the hell out of the preconceptions of young adult quest fiction with its offbeat, technofantastical secondary world, failed prophecy and 'wrong' hero. The reading by Karen Cass is overall good, although there is just something in the performance that can't seem to close a chapter.

Childhood's End was pretty groundbreaking at the time, although it's been long enough that it no longer feels it.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's classic tale of quiet invasion and parapsychological evolution in the wake of the recent TV adaptation, which sought to focus on fewer characters for clarity, and succeeded mostly in making the whole thing vastly more sensational by compressing the expansive timeline of the novel to about twenty years. I had previously only read the short story 'Guardian Angel', on which the first part of the novel is based.

It's hard to come at the novel these days without noticing how old-fashioned, even reactionary the future it envisions is. One of the characters is essentially polyamorous, but with no indication that his wife - whose life even in the Golden Age of mankind is as a mother and housewife - wishes for anything more than a stable marriage. The absence of mobile phones is always telling (see also Doomsday Book below) and the horror of the anti-Overlord characters that in the 'Golden Age' there are dozens of channels and people watch up to three hours of television per day makes me blush.

Greg Wagland's reading is good, but ultimately there is no getting away from the fact that this is a novel of its era. In many ways, the most fascinating part in this day and age is the foreword, featuring the ageing Clarke's reflections on his early work and assumptions.

Demigods and Magicians collects the three short stories which cross over between Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles settings (which also take place in the same world as the Gods of Asgard series, because Riordan is not a man afraid to ask for the plural of pantheon.)

I've already read (and reviewed) 'The Son of Sobek' and 'The Staff of Serapis'. 'The Crown of Ptolemy' wraps up the crossover with the insane, less-dead-than-he-ought-to-be magician Setne attempting to consume the power of all gods and become himself a singular, all-powerful deity. With his mix of Egyptian and Greek magic granting him the ability to consume any power thrown at him from either pantheon, it is up to our heroes - Percy and Annabeth, and Sadie and Carter Kane - to find a way to cross the streams of their respective powers and thwart him.

I read this one the old fashioned way, and from the library no less. Kicking it old school.

'The Crown of Ptolemy' feeds naturally into the beginning of Riordan's new series, 'The Trials of Apollo'. In The Hidden Oracle the Sun God falls, powerless and mortal, into the heart of New York and becomes the slave of feral demigod Meg. As he struggles to reach the relative safety of Camp Half-Blood and to understand why his father has opted to take away not only his divine powers, but his strength, looks, clear-skin and washboard abs, he becomes caught up the attempt of another group of mortals to gain divinity, this time by controlling all of the world's Oracles and thus fate itself. While seemingly less threatening than Titans or Giants, these new enemies have a power and menace all their own, and may in fact have manipulated all of the preceding events in order to facilitate their own selfish designs.

Robbie Daymond is another good reader, and as with previous Riordan novels helps me to get into the correct American milieu for the writing.

While I've been on my current Riordan kick, I also looked to the library for Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods and Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes. These are secondary works in which Percy narrates the stories of classical mythology in all their gruesome glory and his characteristic irreverent manner. More than just a money-making spinoff, they form a useful pair of companion volumes for a series which gets pretty damned into it sometimes on its mythology, and a decent primer on the canon for anyone old enough to recognise Percy's anachronistic insertions for what they are. Importantly, they don't romanticise the material in the way that a lot of authors do when recounting these much loved tales of bloodshed, parricide, infanticide, patriarchal attitudes, questionably consensual relations and gruesome mutilation.

A modern time travel classic, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is set in a near-future Oxford where the Faculty of History operates an extensive time travel programme, sending historians to periods considered 'safe' in order to conduct field research. Taking advantage of the absence of the Head of History, Mediaeval plan to send a researcher to the middle ages for the first time, a period previously rated unsafe. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not she is safe in the fourteenth century soon pales as a terrible influenza epidemic sweeps the city, starting with the technician who operated the 'drop'.

Doomsday Book is notable for featuring a female time traveler, and is widely hailed as a classic of the genre. This historical sections are extremely well done, and the theory of time travel is well-developed enough for in-universe discussion, without being precise enough for strict debunking. On the other hand, the near-futurism is damned strange. Despite time travel and the near-elimination of disease, it's very much the 1990s still, with most if not all of the problems in the modern parts of the plot down to the absence of mobile phones, email and virtual networking. It is also quite noticeably an outsider's - specifically an American's - Oxford, with colleges operating their own academic facilities and staff, and archaeological research conflated with history (rather than operating in a separate academic division.) 

While dramatically apt, Jenny Sterlin's narration is perhaps a little too dry for the book's humour, mostly coming into its own in the more somber late sections of the novel.

Finally for this roundup, The Ables is a novel about preteen disabled superheroes learning to overcome their disabilities through cooperation and taking on a messianic cult. It is also, and this has not hurt the sales figures at all, written by Jeremy Scott, the voice of the popular Cinema Sins YouTube videos. The audiobook is also read by Scott, and that was a fascinating experience, as you can almost hear him learning to narrate as the book goes on. It's subdivided into - I think from memory - four books, and continuity references make me suspect it was written with some intent to be released serially as four separate parts. Throughout part one the reading is in the same quickfire delivery as Cinema Sins; so much so that I expected a ding at the end of every sentence. Further on, however, Scott's storytelling style became more relaxed and naturalistic, bending more to the dramatic needs of the story.

The Ables is a great idea, and a good novel. It's not perfect, in part because Scott is not able to get entirely into the perspective of a blind boy (I think; hell if I know what a blind boy's actual perspective is.) It also fails the Bechdel test hard, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, d'uh; on the other, it's a book about a twelve year old boy, and twelve is often a very gender divided time. On the gripping hand, it's a book about a twelve year old boy with superpowers, and if we can get behind supergeniuses and telekinetics, we can surely manage to imagine a world in which one or more girls can be part of the gang without fear of an uncontrollable cootie epidemic.

Still, all in all it's not a bad book, and an impressive first effort for someone whose comfort zone is pure snark.

Necronomicon, The Long Utopia and Steelheart

Necronomicon is a compilation of readings of various stories by HP Lovecraft. There no particular theme to the collection, which encompasses most of the classics ('The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Shadow out of Time' et al, although not 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), but the resulting collection is 21 hours of very well read Lovecraftian horror, and like many first person narratives, Lovecraftian horror benefits greatly from a good reader.

The absence of 'At the Mountains of Madness' is the greatest omission, presumably because it's chunky enough to be published on its own. Other than that, the main problem with this and other Audible short story collections is the lack of any easily accessible indexing. If I wanted to go back and relisten to 'The Horror at Red Hook', I'd have to take pot luck.

--

The fourth book in the Long Earth sequence, The Long Utopia shares with its predecessors a combination of intricate world-building and faintly half-arsed plotting aimed more at making a philosophical point than servicing a conventional narrative. Each book jumps ahead five to ten years and seems to spend most of its bulk catching us up on what's happened in the interim rather than moving the story forward in any meaningful sense. The multitude of viewpoints also serves to distance the reader instead of increasing involvement, and the whole thing ends up rather dry. It feels that the series as a whole would have been better served by either abandoning conventional narrative altogether to create a pseudohistory, or more rigorously enmeshing the cosmological musings with the story of a specific set of characters.

It's rare that I have a serious complaint about Audible readings, and I have nothing but respect for Michael Fenton Stevens as an actor, but honestly the fact that so much of the book is set in America - and that Fenton Stevens range encompasses few, if any, convincing American accents - makes the choice of a British reader frankly baffling.

--

The nature of its own purpose and identity is not one that Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart shares. Sanderson's superhero deconstruction, the first of a series - The Reckoners - set in a world in which superhumans have appeared and proven to be universally megalomaniacs who despise ordinary humans and lesser 'Epics' for their weakness, is unabashed dark fantasy. In the city of Newcago - formerly Chicago - the word of Steelheart is law and humanity lives as an underclass in the transformed remnants of their old world. The Reckoners are the ones who fight back, humans who hunt Epics, and newcomer David thinks that they should be setting their sights on bigger game.

Steelheart is a pacy adventure, as well as a deconstructionist musing on the nature of absolute power. It's not a breathtaking work of existential genius, but it would be surprised if anyone expected it to be, and that is to its credit.

The Dark is Rising

For years I thought that circle on
my sister's copy was a stain.

Having recently suffered a self-inflicted viewing of the film known in the States as The Seeker, I decided I owed myself a return to the source: Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising'. I first encountered this in a semi-dramatised reading that I borrowed from Fleet public library on cassette (I would make a joke about how the current generation basically don't know what cassettes are, if I weren't so concerned that the next won't know what a public library is,) and then borrowed the book and the rest of the series from my sister. Consequently, I have always viewed this as the first book in the Dark is Rising sequence, and while this is accurate in terms of neither internal chronology nor publication order, it is kind of true, in that prior to its writing, Cooper had no thought of a sequence, while after she had a complete plan for the other three books and the final page pre-written*.

As he turns 11, Will Stanton learns that he is an Old One, a being not merely human and the inheritor of great power and wisdom. As the last of the Old Ones to be born he completes the circle and is destined to seek the six Signs of the Light, which together hold the power to drive back the rising Dark and preserve the world for a little while longer. As Christmas passes and the cold, dark days take hold, the power of the Dark waxes, and only steadfast courage will carry Will through.

'The Dark is Rising' is the antithesis of more recent YA fantasy. Largely unconcerned with - but not heedless of - the trials of adolescence, it is built upon the lyrical flow of folklore and not on the dynamic beats of adventure fiction. Will's virtues are essentially passive - endurance, courage, and ultimately patience - and much of the story follows a course long set in which Will seems almost incidental, but this is not because he is irrelevant, but because Will and his story are but part of a greater tapestry.

I mean, seriously? Did the prop master get bored of
mandalas?

I love 'The Dark is Rising', both the book and the wider sequence, which is one of the reasons I hated the film so much (the other being that it's rubbish.) I am however grateful to The Seeker for giving me the impetus to go back and re-read an old favourite.

* And all respect due to JK Rowling, it's way better than the epilogue of Harry Potter.

Reading - A Review

I've been a little slack of late on keeping this blog updated, in part because there have been so many entries needed on my media blog (thank you, rich television season) and I find snarky TV reviews more fun than book reviews a lot of the time. Books - including audiobooks; especially audiobooks, since it takes longer to read a book aloud than to read it to yourself - require more investment of time and concentration, so I tend to try to only read good ones, and I kind of prefer reviewing bad things.

But, so you know I've not given up completely, here's a bit of a digest on recent reads/listens (in no particular order):

'Harmony Black' by Craig Schaeffer (Kindle)

'Harmony Black' follows the titular FBI agent, part of a double-secret counter-supernatural task force and a practicing witch, as she revisits her home town to tackle a horror from her childhood.

Black began life as a one-off antagonist to anti-villain Daniel Faust in a series I admit I haven't read. I picked up this, the first book in the series, via Kindle First and it proved one of the better picks from that programme (mentioning no The Gemini Effect.) Harmony Black is a breath of fresh air, a hunter of gribblies who maintains a solid professional attitude, even in the face of the thing that killed her father, and resists all inclination to swoon at dodgy allies of convenience or masterful vampire dipshits. Not that I've been burned before, you understand. The book pushed some buttons - the central plot revolves around the Bogeyman, a monster that leaps out of cupboards and abducts children who are never seen again - but managed not to be too horrid, and the central interplay between Black and her partner, half-possessed shitkicker Jessie, is a lot more fun than if Jessie were a smooth-talking warlock or sexy elf.

'Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits' by David Wong (Kindle)

Zoey Ashe is a regular gal with just the one distinguishing feature (or two if you count a peerless flare with the espresso machine): Her absentee dad is a multimillionaire of the kind who has become so successful that the word 'criminal' just sort of falls away. And then he dies, and Zoey learns that she is the key to his fortune, his only heir, and the target of superhuman killers hired by a megalomaniacal criminal showboater named Molech.

The first non-John novel by David Wong ('John Dies at the End' and 'This Book is Full of Spiders (Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It') takes a little getting into - bluntly, the casual slacker narrative voice is a little less effective when the book lacks a first person casual slacker narrator - but from about a third of the way in accelerates its pace into a funny, fast-paced, and at times surprisingly hard-edged techno-thriller about the gap between possibility and application, the nature of villainy and heroism (and the degree to which society and the wider world care about the difference,) the callousness of social media, and the danger of vast technological power falling into the hands of an infantile prick with a bad case of testosterone poisoning.

'The New Frontier' (Kindle)

Thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, I got a shit tonne of vouchers for getting my Christmas presents delivered no-rush (and all of the presents on time, I'm glad to say) which I blew on both volumes of Darwyn Cooke and Dave Stewart's electrum-age DC do-over.

Covering the transition from golden age to silver through the story of a giant, living island seeking to extinguish all life on Earth, 'The New Frontier' ropes in more characters than an Avengers movie, from members of the Justice League to the Challengers of the Unknown, presenting them as far as possible in their original character rather than updated to a common time period. The result is a lot of fun, with a surprising amount of dramatic punch.

You know you've made it as a fantasy
author when they give you a mono-
chrome reprint.

'The Dragonbone Chair' by Tad Williams (Audible)

Simon is a scullion at the King's court in the Hayholt, until the kindly old court physician, Dr Morgenes, takes him on as apprentice. This is an appointment which, together with Simon's native curiosity and adventurous spirit, will catapult him into the heart of deadly politics, black treachery and evil, ancient magics.

The first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a bit of a blast from my personal past. I first read the series as a teenager, and going back to them my first impression is that I didn't notice at the time what a whining dick Simon is for the first half of the book. Such is the nature of the beast, I suppose, and he does get a bit better. On rereading, I also found myself wondering at some of the politics and economics of the thing, and how High King Elias can be so shockingly poor at domestic economy and yet manage such vast feats of military logistics. Surely there must be some crossover of those skill sets?

Regardless, 'The Dragonbone Chair' manages good epic, and for all that he starts out a bit whiny, Simon does demonstrate definite character growth across the course of the novel. With decent writing, a large cast, an epic scale and a fair degree of character mortality, it's interesting to wonder if HBO might be considering it for when Game of Thrones wraps up.

'Blood of Olympus' by Rick Riordan (Audible)

The seven heroes of prophecy continue on to face the Giants at Athens, but it will all be for nothing if the Greek and Roman demigods can not come together and heal the rift between the two faces of their divine parents. Reyna and Nico are rushing the Athena Parthenos to Camp Half-Blood, but teddy bear killer Octavian is determined to crush the Greeks once and for all.

Thanks in part to my girlfriend Hanna, I've been on a bit of a Rick Riordan kick lately (she started to catch up on me, so I hurried to finish Heroes of Olympus, which I have now done; yay!) He writes a cracking adventure yarn full of action and thrills and goofy jokes, and from time to time gets some serious dramatic punch; often from reminding you how young some of these characters are (in particular, the borderline diabolical Octavian is, what? Fourteen?) I also appreciate the fact that, despite all of his viewpoint characters basically feeling that the Gods are bastards, he manages to present them as a compelling mix of genuine cosmic good and mythological dickbags, with solid - if somewhat obscure - reasons for all that they do.

At the end of the book, Annabeth drops in that she has an uncle and a cousin in Boston that her dad doesn't talk to much. It turns out the cousin's name is Magnus, and coincidentally my next book is called...

'Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer' by Rick Riordan (Audible)

Done with the Classics (not really; he has a series about a mortalised Apollo coming out soon,) Riordan is starting in on the Norse. Seriously, between him and Neil Gaiman there is basically nothing for the rest of us to work with. In the first book of the series, we meet Annabeth's cousin Magnus, and he dies. No, seriously, like in chapter three, since to differentiate the series only some of Magnus' abilities come from being half-god; the rest come from him being one of the Einherjar, the dead warriors of Asgard.

One of the nice things about this is that it lets Riordan use more of a range of characters. Magnus is a homeless kid from Boston, and joins a team of warriors including a thousand year old Viking with a doctorate, an Irish girl who - and I quote - tried to defuse a car bomb with her face - and a black soldier from the Civil War with a mad on for seizing hills. For his first adventure, he's the outsider, forced to go rogue with a dwarf, an elf and his Muslim Valkyrie (which sounds crazy, but I think it's good to see more inclusion in what has traditionally - and probably unfairly - been characterised as the very whitest of afterlives.

Also adventure (rollicking), humour (goofy) and punch (dramatic). Check, check and check.

'Career of Evil' by Robert Galbraith (Audible)

Success is a two-edged sword. On one edge, a fractional reduction in the struggle to make ends meet in the PI game; on the other, everyone wants a piece of you. There's a killer on the loose, he's gunning for Cormoran Strike, and he's planning to go through Robin to get to him.

The third Cormoran Strike novel is the first I've listened to. It helps a lot in this instance, because I have real trouble visualising Cormoran's Cornish accent. (Similarly, the American readers in the Rick Riordan books help me with the voices.) It's a creepy, claustrophobic novel, partly recounted from the killer's twisted perspective and somewhat reminiscent of some of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels. The shifting relationships between Robin, her fiance and Strike are a little less satisfying, mostly because I don't want to see Robin and Strike together (that ship does not appeal to me,) but her fiance is a 24-carat prick. I don't think this is about poor writing; it's intentional, it just doesn't entirely work for me.

'The Tales of Max Carados' by Ernest Bramah

My last entry is a bit of a cheat. It's actually the first two stories in a longer collection, offered as a free sample by Audible. Carrados, a contemporary of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine is a consulting detective whose schtick is that he is blind, but utilises his other senses and his intellect, all honed to as keen a razor's edge as Holmes's, to aid the police and museum authorities (his particular thing is antiquities forgery and smuggling) in solving crimes. It's interesting, but suffers from the absence of an in-story Watson in my opinion.