Tag: technology

em.thompson, Elliefant’s Graveyard: The Curious Case of the Throatslit Man (Eccentric Directions 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213902172-elliefant-s-graveyard?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6giyOM58ED&rank=1

Rookie PC Heather Prendergast and her ‘guv’ are on their way to give bad tidings to a relative. DI Cummings, as is usual in these stories, is terrible at detecting and unwilling to grant his smarter underling a voice.
It’s a run-down shop along Holloway Road, and it appears the bereaved widow ain’t so bereaved as all that. Ruby Fantoni gives them a good lashing of colourful dialect, until she snuffs it, too. Daughter Ellie, a wiz at repairing broken appliances, is devastated. She drives her repair van to the Fantonis’ native Huddersford, planning to end it all. But then, she meets a quirky family who needs her help.
Prendergast of the Yard is cleverer than her boss gives her credit for, and she decides to solve it on her own—the Curious Case of the Throatslit Man and his Tumblestairs Wife. She, too, travels to Huddersford, where she uncovers a web of corruption and all sorts of wackiness.
Prendergast has quite a ‘mouth’ on her, and her sassy dialogue with her boss, with service people and suspects, is hilarious. Even the way she goes about investigating the crime is funny. She purports to being a cookery journalist researching a piece on Sicilian gnocchi smuggling. We almost lose track of the murder investigation amongst all the silliness, but we pick it back up toward the end.
Thompson has a distinctive writing style, very creative with vocabulary. He makes mashups of metaphors and legends like ‘try, try again like Spiderman the Bruce’. He takes verbs and makes them into adverbs, nouns are turned into verbs ‘coupdegrassed’, ‘marmaladed pride’, ‘longmarried sufferance’, ‘houdinied’, ‘bruiseyfruit and festerveg’ and ‘shrivelcuts’ of meat.
A desk is ‘overflowing with in-trays, out-trays, pending-trays, tea-trays, post-it notes, forget-it notes, f***-it notes and this-high stacks of paperwork’. ‘Hippopotomonstroseqipidaliophobia’ is apparently the fear of long words, and in case you’re wondering, is equilettered (hey, I can invent words, too) to ‘supercalifragilificexpialidocious’.
I normally say that this sort of cleverness should be done sparingly. Too many gorgeous metaphors and complicated adjectives can become ‘purple prose’, which, however artful, is not pleasant reading. Here, the humorous word gymnastics has become the thing itself. Sort of Alice in Wonderland, but more quippy than trippy. Sort of Hitchhiker’s Guide, but more pun-cracky than wacky.
The result of all this inventive word-play is a lot of humour, at the same time telling a madcap story with a twisty plot. Funniest book I’ve read in a long while.
The hardback format features adorable/beautiful full-colour drawings and collages.

Wendy Johnson, The Traitor’s Son (MadeGlobal Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208871994-the-traitor-s-son?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8uwQnrRbQ5&rank=1

Beautiful Wars of the Roses bio-pic of Richard III as good guy

Richard Plantagenet, later to be crowned the IIIrd, grows up in Baynard’s Castle. His brother Edward sees three suns in the sky, portents of a York victory.
Fleeing Marguerite, the Red Queen, he and his brother George are sent to safety in the Low countries. He is driven by a desire to disprove the Red Queen’s slander that his father was a traitor.
When Edward is crowned, everything changes—titles, palaces, ceremonies, servants, gifts. Yet new jealousies fester among the brothers York. Everyone is up in arms over the secret marriage to the Lancastrian widow Elizabeth Wydeville, yet Richard feels a surprising empathy. Edward’s court is ‘blighted by the stink of treason’.
Entrusted to his cousin Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, he forms a bond, but his loyalties are tested. Will he support his royal brother or his cousin, later to be nicknamed the Kingmaker?
This novel contains some beautiful time and place appropriate metaphors—his parting with Warwick is ‘as final as the raising of a drawbridge’. He remembers his father’s last embrace, ‘a sweep of heavy wool, breathing scents of oily leather’.
Maligned by Shakespeare and by the Tudors, we tend to think of Richard III as a hunchbacked monster. Johnson’s Richard is honest, filial and eager to please as a child, struggles to keep his spinal condition secret as a youth and is utterly loyal to his brother king. Indeed, Johnson was one of the leading lights in the movement to rehabilitate Richard which culminated in finding his skeleton underneath a Leicester carpark in 2012.
A wealth of information on the noble Yorks and Lancasters is available; Johnson adds subtlety and a personal touch, full of drama, free of info-dump. For all our familiarity with this history, Johnson’s puts personalities and emotions into the picture. The characters are sympathetic, especially Richard, and the mediaeval lifestyle well painted.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

R. Frederick Gridley, Been There, Done That, Got the Scars (2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221912914-been-there-done-that-got-the-scars?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Ea1ru0fSBT&rank=1

Amusing real-life anecdotes about boating, diving and piloting experiences

This is a collection of amusing short stories and anecdotes that really happened. They are based on the author’s experience as a boating enthusiast, diving expert, pilot, parachutist and electronics engineer, both military and civilian.
Story titles like ‘Sideways at 70mph’, ‘Buckingham Oops’ and ‘Acetylene and Condoms’ give a bit of the flavour.
Every story rewards you with some clever or adorable punchline ending.
Not being a boater myself, some of the details were Greek to me (e.g. ‘5 miles off the 130 radial from page field’) but if you’re a pilot or boater these tales will ring true.
If you’re ever in any similar situations, you could learn something here, too. You learn ‘Tree Landings 101’, for example, and how to make emergency equipment out of condoms.
The tone is light, colloquial, a bit cynical, nevertheless maintaining a consistent youthful enthusiasm for life and its vicissitudes. The joy of the experience really comes through. The pace is non-stop as Fred gets himself in and out of sometimes life-threatening scrapes. But even if you don’t find potentially life-threatening situations amusing yourself, you can get a kick out of these stories.

Sharon Broome, The Sentinel Athlete Conspiracy (Inspiring Publishers 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221872204-the-sentinel-athlete-conspiracy?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=g9FeFyqMDR&rank=1

High-octane scientific thriller

Michael’s jeep blasts through the security gate at a private airstrip in Morocco. Two jeeps are after him, and they have automatic rifles. Bullets are flying, clinking off the planes in the hangar, big explosion, and Michael is burned to a crisp.
The man watching the drone video says, ‘Get me another list of top athletes.’
One year later, in Brisbane, top archer Carmen is in a bad car accident. The man in the Armani suit says, ‘It’s done.’ Five other top athletes across the world have had equally devastating accidents.
The International Sports and Wellness Centre in Morocco seems to offer miraculous recovery and retraining rates, but Dr. Andrew Christian’s ‘Sentinel Serum’ may be more than a miracle drug. Just what is behind the ‘Restricted Access’ door? Dr. Christian is a dastardly mad-scientist villain with evil plans for world domination.
The action and the violence ramps up very quickly, as Carmen and the other athletes are roped into a nefarious conspiracy. The CIA is involved, too. They must thwart the doctor’s plans to make it out alive.
Biochemical engineering provides a thrilling subject matter. It opens with a bang and quickly escalates to high-octane, super-violent action, with scarcely a moment to sleep or eat lunch, hardly a moment to breathe.
The fate of ‘the Facility’ as well as the athletes’ lives are in the balance in a heart-throbbing ticking-time-bomb (literally) plot. The science bits seem (to me, at least, not being a biochemical engineer) to have been pains-takingly researched. I kept saying, ‘OMG’ as I read.
Contains some pretty gory injuries and pretty shocking violence. Would make a fantastic James-Bond-Bruce-Willis-style Hollywood action movie.

Jeffrey Marshall, Undetected (Dog Ear Publishing 2019)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52123874-undetected?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=sZjHmdYn4h&rank=2

Suzy is on the run, hiding out in a downscale motel in Nashville (hey, I’m Susie from Nashville. I think I know that motel), on her way to Little Rock. She’s recently buried her husband Avery, whom she killed. Now, she is married to Dean, Alex’s dad.
Alex has trouble communicating with his teenage son Jason—not so much his daughter Jennifer.
Alicia and her husband are getting a divorce. Brian is walking out of her life just like her mother Tina did 21 years ago. Her daughter Alison is defending her friend Suri against racist trolls on Facebook. ‘It must have been hard for you not to be able to talk to your mother like this,’ she says.
Jennifer’s leg is badly hurt in a hockey game, and Suzy’s reaction to this tragedy is bizarre.
Then one day in New York, Dean and Suzy are having lunch at the Ritz, and a woman comes up and calls Suzy ‘Tina’.
Sally in Little Rock has kept up an email correspondence with Tina since they were 16, since the day Tina broke her tibia being chased by her drunken father.
Alex and Jason help Dean clear out some boxes in the garage. They find an old obit which sets Alex on a mission to uncover his step-mother Suzy’s secrets. Alex meets another stepson, who admits he and his siblings grew up ‘like mushrooms, kept in the dark’.
There’s a sense that this sort of thing could happen to any family. Time separates people, and you don’t always get the chance to check up on everyone. In this case, led by Alex, this family starts to put their heads together and figure out what’s going on.
There is admirable attention to verisimilitude when it comes to the process of changing identities, murders going undetected, etc. I think it might have been more exciting if we’d had some kind of ticking timebomb. There’s a good build up of suspense, though, a drip feed of new information as each member of the family adds their own bit to the puzzle.
Except for the prologue/chapter 1, which lets us know Suzy killed her husband Avery, it takes a few chapters to figure out what the book is going to be about. The snake on the (absolutely gorgeous) cover is a hint. By Chapter 11 we understand that it’s a mystery around Suzy’s identity or her past. The ending is not what you expect.

J. D. Davies, The Cursed Shore (Canelo Adventure 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208903170-the-cursed-shore?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hympTarn5j&rank=1

Privateers, naval battles and the French Revolution—a story of huge scope

This is a story of huge scope—the international and class relations between revolutionaries and bourgeoisie involved in the failed Quiberon expedition of 1795.
Lord Wilden is summoned by the PM William Pitt. Would my lord favour an invasion of France to back the beleaguered royalists? His Majesty at Kew Palace is keen.
Leonore Kermovant, having sent her husband to the guillotine, awaits at Château de Brechelean the return of the Vicomte, his brother Philippe. Despite her political leanings, she takes in a wounded Chouan royalist officer Georges Cozanet.
Wilden is ashamed to find his crewmen are more seaworthy than him, and that is what wins the sailors’ respect.
Philippe accepts captaincy of a privateer. He conflicts with the son of the ship’s owner, Heinrich fils, over his orders concerning a crewman Marcus Drever. A sealed letter from Heinrich père reveals a new mission, promising double pay, which the matelots vote to accept. The new mission takes Philippe to a remote island west of the Orkneys, sailing under the false colours of his birthplace, the new United States of America.
But it seems the Heinrichs haven’t told the whole truth, and the mission ends unpredictably. Furthermore, Philippe finds in that remote place the man who murdered his Russian wife and child.
Wilden enters Quiberon Bay aboard the captured Pomone, but squabbling in the ranks between the counter-revolutionary émigrés and the Breton Chouans leads to failure.
The author’s expert knowledge on the 17th century navy informs his historical fiction. And yet it is the people who shine in this story. Their personalities, and their cultural assumptions about class, rank, revolution, are beautifully drawn. Even the ships have individuality. Many of the characters are historical, and the fictional ones are drawn from historical persons.
Will appeal to fans of Hornblower and Poldark.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Mike Berry, Turn, Turn, Turn (The Conrad Press 2021)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58968868-turn-turn-turn

The saga of a neighbourhood in Melbourne as it survives two world wars

Back home now in Melbourne, Jim thinks everyone around him on Ross Street are ‘idiots’. He’s been through hell in Flanders; he’s an absolute wreck from his POW experience.
Ted and Betty and their daughter Patty are at Number 24. The Mattingleys are moving in, Viv, Bob and son Brian.
Then Ricky from across the street, on his motorbike, saves little Patty, but another girl Becky is kidnapped. The neighbourhood just isn’t the same after that.
Later, Brian finds something that may be a clue to the kidnapping. ‘A shiver pass[es] over the street.’
The Great Depression hits. ‘The bright promises of a new decade faded quickly.’
But there are some glimmers of happiness.
This is more or less a family saga, the story of a neighbourhood rather than just one family, and we’re not really sure which family or individual is the protagonist, though it’s mostly Betty, Ted and Patty. I was expecting a follow-up on the case of the kidnapping, but it falls quietly into the background while we examine all the neighbourhood gossip as the seasons turn, turn, turn.
Something momentous is about to happen. The world goes through Hitler and then Pearl Harbor. WWII eats into the lives and psyches of Ross Street as WWI had done. The men seem to be ‘running, running to whatever will keep [them] from remembering’.
The trauma of war on the lives of people and their families is a major theme. Over three generations, complex events in the world affect these three families in ways they cannot possibly anticipate. People’s trauma from the war plays out in their peacetime lives.
It’s worth noting the last line of the song from which this novel takes its title: ‘A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late’.

Rajes Bala, Journey to Jaffna (The Conrad Press 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220711322-journey-to-jaffna?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=bHbxauRwO2&rank=2

Happily married Tamil immigrant Param is travelling to see his family in Sri Lanka, after a 12-year absence. He is the eldest son, and as such will be required to perform the last rites for his dying father. Param is estranged from his father, who refused to accept his marriage to Englishwoman Mary.
But there is ‘someone else’ in Sri Lanka whom Param dreads meeting, his former girlfriend Karthiga, whom his father forbade him to marry because she was from a lower class. He had promised to return to her after graduating from a London university until Mary found out she was pregnant with their daughter Meera.
Param’s struggle will be familiar to many immigrants. While still holding onto the values of the home world, his new world faces him with different challenges and possibilities.
He meets on the plane the modern-minded Liz, and a forced landing in Tbilisi throws them together, opening new worlds for Param. He struggles to reconcile his newly changed life with his duty to his family.
The feared reunion with Karthiga brings home to Param just how much his people suffered during the persecution of the Tamils in the 1970s. He feels guilty for breaking his promise to her, guilty for doing nothing to save her.
After his father’s funeral, Param is determined to do his duty by his sisters but finds that his attitudes toward their marriage prospects are different from his parents’ more traditional Hindu ones. In post-pogrom Sri Lanka, the sisters’ attitudes are different, too.
The three women—Mary, Karthiga and Liz—represent different things to Param, and he is emotionally pulled to and fro. Each of these world-views affects him differently, and Bala paints his psychological journey beautifully.
For me, Param is kind of an Everyman, and his summer vacation provides a cautionary tale. He is no philanderer—a thoroughly good guy—but he coasts through life, not making any decisions, not having any opinions, just letting things happen, until a remarkable experience changes him.
Will his indecision mean he misses his chance at life?
This book is a must-read for Diaspora Tamils and will be enjoyed by non-Tamils. Immigrants from all cultures will identify with Param’s journey.

Charles Cordell, The Keys of Hell and Death  (Myrmidon Books 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210234361-the-keys-of-hell-and-death?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_26

5 July 1643, 5 pm. The Parliamentary cause is in peril. The Earl of Essex is in retreat. In the north, the King’s Army; his Catholic queen Henrietta Maria marches south. Another Royalist force is on its way to Oxford.
Francis Reeve and his half-brother Ralph, from Book 1, are fighting on opposing sides.
The multiple viewpoints take some work to follow, but whichever side they were on, they faced hardship and fear. The huge cast enables a minute-by-minute reportage, where we see the battles from all angles.
I was much impressed by the authenticity of the religious thought which was so characteristic of this conflict, and it’s rich with pertinent biblical references. People of the time must certainly have felt that the End of Days was upon them. The men wad their muskets with pages torn from prayerbooks. Reading from the Bible about Abimelech, the women of Bristol offer their bodies and their children as human shields, rather than to surrender the city to the ‘accursed Cavaliers’.
The first few chapters set the scene for the battles, and the huge cast of characters is introduced. Once the battle begins, it is non-stop excitement. We hear the trumpets and the drums and the screams of horses, feel the heat of the battle, the pain, fear, death, and lice, the do-or-die determination and the fierce partisanship of each participant group.
Phenomenal attention to historical accuracy, so much so that it’s hard to call this fiction, if it weren’t that it’s very much a story, full of passion, and not a dry history book. Most of the characters are taken from history.
The author was a career soldier himself and participates in (and probably directs) historic battle reenactments; he really knows his stuff. We learn absolutely everything about 17th century weaponry and warfare.
In the very heat of the battle, the point of view goes back and forth one paragraph at a time—Francis, Ralph, Francis, Ralph—very effective!
This is three weeks of the English Civil War, from the Battle of Lansdown Hill 5 July to the Storming of Bristol 26 July 1643. War is hell; there’s no happy ending whichever side you’re on. Any Royalist victories have been largely pyrrhic. The king’s forces are in such poor shape it encourages a final victory for Parliament.

Orlando Pearson, The Redacted Sherlock Holmes Vol VIII  (MX Publishing 2023)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215075825-the-redacted-sherlock-holmes—volume-8

Continues the recounting of Sherlock cases, emulating the original Victorian style

This book, 8^th in the series, follows on from Arthur Conan-Doyle’s stories about the famous fictional Baker Street detective by revealing ‘what happened next’.

In six new cases, as reported by Dr Watson, we learn some things we had always wondered about: why Moriarty was ‘the Napolean of crime’; what happened before Holmes and Watson met; what happened to Holmes’ fiancée Agatha; and just what was the nature of Watson’s war injury.

Holmes rescues aristocratic sinners from blackmail, cracks codes, saves royal families from potential assassination, lays ingenious traps for ne’er-do-wells, undertakes tricky espionage missions during WWII and calculates cricket batting averages. As is common with many fictional detectives, a seemingly random comment or an incidental observation often sparks his immense intellect.

To the enjoyment of modern readers, the writer emulates the wordy Victorian elegance of Conan-Doyle, though the style is less stilted. It also features a similar understated, self-deprecating, very British humour. An adorable example: French président Félix Faure, who died ‘in the embrace of his mistress’, was said to have ‘struggle[d] with the fourth line of the Marseillaise’ (the one about raising the flag).

Often the cases and their solutions are so understated you almost have to read it twice. The fictional narrator decries ‘sensationalism’. The point is not so much the solution to the case but the very Holmesian way Holmes handles it. He says things like, ‘by Jove’ and ‘this is quite a three-pipe problem’. They smoke cigars and ‘have elevenses’. Character is everything. Watson, Lestrade, Mycroft and Mrs Hudson are also great characters.

Readers will also find pleasure in discovering by Google searches that many of the odd details such as the Prince of Wales’ fauteuil des voluptés are taken from history.

Some familiarity with Holmes’ past cases will help but is not essential. An easy read, perfect for bedtime or beach.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.