Miscellany – April 2008

Hmm, it's been a very eventful month. Somewhere in all the fireworks, I found plenty of time to read.

1. Lincoln Child's Deep Storm is another one of his odd stand-alone thrillers. The last two, Utopia and Death Match were about an amusement park and a matchmaking service, respectively. This one is about... well, it begins on an oil rig. The plot quickly escalates, with a lot of tension as you try to figure out what genre this is and what the conclusion might possibly be. Excellent read.

2. I also gorged on G M Ford. The Seattle-based author is pretty prolific, but I'd not read his stuff prior to Event One. And then, I read Fury and got hooked. Ford's protagonist is journalist Frank Corso, who is really the epitome of curiosity of the cat-killing type. He writes about killers and other people, and often mixes the two. Black River followed, and then the chilling A Blind Eye. Red Tide smacked a bit of post-9/11 mass-destruction hysteria, but it was effective stuff. I finished with the fifth book in the Corso series, No Man's Land. That last one wasn't as good as its predecessors.

3. Jeff Lindsay's Dexter In The Dark is the third in the series featuring the police blood-spatter expert who is secretly a psychopath (and good at not being one). It begins to move into metaphysics of the F Paul Wilson type, which is not necessarily a good thing. But Lindsay's Dexter is a creepily likeable psychopath whose main aim in life is killing non-socialised psychopaths, so that's all good. I think.

4. I finally got hold of Harry Turtledove's In At The Death, the fourth and final book of his Settling Accounts sequence and the tenth (!!) book in the overall alternate-history series in which the US Civil War was never fully resolved. It is a good way to tie up loose ends. But his long long long narratives are painful to the mind.

5. Liz Williams's second installment in the story of humanity's bioengineered interstellar offspring is out. Bloodmind is a worthy sequel to Darkland. I realise that the overall tone here reminds me of that in Tepper's The True Game — there's an isolated bunch of post-human superhumans with deadly urges and a convoluted past.

6. Andrea Camilleri's The Paper Moon is a typically wry take on Sicilian police work and good food (although, I must say that the food takes an unusually low profile in this episode). It is the ninth book in the series, with every one a complete winner. Translator Stephen Sartarelli and his footnotes are clever and erudite, without taking anything away from the humour and humanity. Everyone should read Camilleri. He is that good.

That's it for now! I calculate my average reading input these days at about 350-400 pages a day, work and light reading combined. So I should be updating more.