watching and waiting

Books read, March

The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.
Strange buildings, Uketsu
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.
Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda.
A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman.
Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)
He who whispers, John Dickson Carr.
Temple, Matthew Reilly.B
lood over Bright Haven, ML Wang.
The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba.


The Listerdale Mystery, Agatha Christie.
Witness for the prosecution, Agatha Christie.

These are both short story collections and they overlap, which I hadn’t realised, so probably a book & a half in total. I like the one with the policeman confronting a serial poisoner, the one with a woman pretending to be a serial poisoner to escape her murderous husband and, for a change, Wireless, in which a relative is deceived into thinking their dead husband will soon return (contains no poison). I do prefer her novels but she can do a suitably creepy atmosphere well.

Strange buildings, Uketsu

The narrator brings the stories (and floorplans) of eleven strange buildings to his architect friend; initially these all appear unrelated, but as the book goes on, increasingly disturbing connections become apparent. This was not quite as satisfyingly bonkers as Strange Pictures, but better as a story than Strange Houses, and there are some genuinely unnerving moments.

Cat companions Maruru and Hachi v5, Yuri Sonoda. Now living in the shelter with a bunch of other strays, Maruru and Hachi discover that some of the shelter cats are allowed into a cat cafe set-up with contact with the public. I will read this if one of my children brings home a volume but the characters aren’t enough for me to seek any more out.

A parade of horribles, Matt Dinniman. I’m on his Patreon so I get these early; I read chapter by chapter for the first 25 or so and then waited until the end. I liked it a lot. Not the most of all his books, but a lot. He was in town last Friday for an author talk/signing that I went to, which was entertaining. The increasing commercialisation of the series and various tie-ins is getting a bit much, though (I say, while I wonder whether I should sell my now highly collectable self-published editions of books 4 through 7).

Common goal, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Tough guy, Rachel Reid (re-read)
Role model, Rachel Reid (re-read)

I was wondering why I couldn’t remember anything about Common Goal, and rapidly discovered it’s because it’s age-gap (25 & 40), a trope I dislike, between two characters who manage to be both irritating and bland, with a structure that doesn’t work, and the only tension is “I’m so old/young, how could he possibly have feelings for meeeeee”, urgh. I re-read the other two as well (Tough Guy - burly hockey enforcer Ryan (anxiety, erectile dysfunction) falls for androgynous musician Fabian, Role Model - Troy is kicked out of his hockey team after publicly believing the (many) women accusing his former teammate and best friend of rape, ends up with Ilya’s up-and-coming Canadian hockey team and falls for Harris, the openly gay social media person who likes bringing puppies to work). They’re better but still not great and basically the main enjoyment I get out of them is having Ilya show up every so often and organise everyone else's lives (and his increasingly gay team) for them.

He who whispers, John Dickson Carr. A detective author I have never read before! American, but this starts very firmly in England, in the immediate aftermath of WWII (how immediate? Published in 1946) and the war is a heavy presence. It starts at the dinner of a murder club, but the guest is late and the members are missing, and when the few people there do hear the story, it’s an apparently impossible crime involving a mysterious woman - good? Evil? Human? - whom, it turns out, has just been offered a job by one of the people listening to the story. Good on atmosphere and on tension, there’s a murder method in here that is genuinely terrifying, and the final chase sequence is great. I am less convinced by the detective but will certainly give this author another go.

Temple, Matthew Reilly. Linguistics professor Race is collected by US military investigating the disappearance of a mysterious manuscript that, it turns out, will reveal the location of a chunk of thyrium 261, an extra-solar substance that can fuel a super weapon that will destroy the Earth itself. There’s a parallel narrative with a Spanish monk who is appalled and repelled by the Spanish atrocities against the Incans, who is involved in the original concealment of the object and who wrote up all his notes about it, and because we’re in South America the bad guys are Nazis. I liked a number of the set pieces and I liked the monk’s story, but Race himself is pretty thin as a character and I can see why Reilly, who originally said he’d make this a series, didn’t go back to it.

Blood over Bright Haven, ML Wang. Sciona is determined to be the first woman accepted as a High Mage in the industrial utopia of Tiran, with its apparently limitless power that shields it against the horrific Blight, a deadly magical attack that shreds people, animals, and plants alike. Thomil is a Kwen, from one of the tribes who lived outside the barrier, forced to shelter in Tiran when almost everyone else he knew was destroyed by Blight; disregarded and persecuted, like the rest of the Kwen, he is a cleaner who is assigned to Sciona as her assistant as a cruel joke on both of them. Readable dark academia/dark fantasy where the twist is pretty much apparent from the set-up (gosh, where could the mages be sourcing their power from?) and it is not subtle on misogyny or colonialism (both bad, in case you were wondering). It also has the sort of world building it is hard not to poke at (no one ever leaves the city. My note for this book says “where farms?”). I do really like Carra (Thomil’s niece/adopted daughter), who manages to knock Sciona out of some of her comfortable assumptions, and I thought the ending was interesting but didn’t entirely work.

The village beyond the mist ,Sachiko Kashiwaba. Lina heads to a mysterious village for her summer holiday on her father’s instructions; she stays at an odd boarding house run by an irritable landlady who sends Lina to work at the shops on Absurd Avenue (the village’s only street) to pay for her board. Episodic light fantasy - I liked the parrot, who hoards the bookshop’s copy of Robinson Crusoe - that is lacking in bite. Marketed as inspiring Spirited Away, although there seems to be some argument about that and it may be more that Miyazaki was considering adapting it before deciding on the movie himself; there are some similar character types.