Some books I read in May and June

The last two months have been incredibly hectic, with two stints of work travel (including one overseas trip), a very heavy workload, and some very significant family milestones. While I haven't stopped reading (of course, when do I ever?), I have read less than is my usual wont, and I haven't been writing up very extensive notes.

In lieu of trying to play catch-up with longer reviews, I thought I'd do one post here that gives a shorter look at some of the books I've read and enjoyed over this eight weeks. While these are hardly deep dives, hopefully they give some taste of the books and what I liked about each of them! I have excluded the books I didn't like much, as well as the one book I am saving for a proper review (Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear). I'll go category-based to divide them up.

Mysteries

This was a really enjoyable historical mystery, embedded in a location and historical moment that I, as an Australian, have heard of, but knew little about (the era of Indian indentured servitude in Fiji on sugar plantations, combined with the movement of Indian police officers around the then-British Empire). Sergeant Akal Singh is a great protagonist, and the cast of what looks set to be recurring characters are also engaging. 

The puzzle wasn't very profound, but the story moved along briskly and the writing, while plain, was clear and accessible. I especially enjoyed learning more about the colonial era in Fiji within an engaging and entertaining story. 

I will certainly seek out further books in the series as they arrive! 7.5/10

This was really fun, and I loved the setting (Temple Court in London) and the protagonist (dry, socially inept but brilliant KC, Gabriel Ward). Having the case-within-a-case was effectively done, and the characters were well established. 

I love a legal mystery, and the weird romanticism of lawyers' precincts, and the first half the twentieth century (this book is set in 1901) is my favourite era for mystery fiction, so it worked for me on all levels. 

I did guess the solutions to both cases well before the end, so I wouldn't describe it as the twistiest puzzle of all time, but I nonetheless thoroughly enjoyed it and will seek out the sequel soon.  8.5/10

I read this one as I have just finished watching the tv show of the first two books in the series (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders) and thoroughly enjoyed them, and didn't want to wait for the third book to be filmed to catch the story!

In short, it was terrific. Horowitz's writing style is quite plain and direct, but in a mystery novel, that works extremely well - it's Agatha Christie rather than Dorothy Sayers, focusing on vivid characters and briskly moving puzzle plots as opposed to literary flourishes and elliptical description. The book-within-a-book metafictional device, which can be quite tricky, is carried off beautifully (I was unsurprised to learn that Horowitz himself wrote the scripts for the tv show, because the show also absolutely nails it).

Atticus Pünd is one of my favourite examples of a two-layers-deep fictional detective (perhaps intentionally, I think he has shades of Christie's two-layers-down detective- her novelist character / author insert, Ariadne Oliver's, fictonal Finnish detective Sven Hjerson). I also really enjoy editor Susan Ryeland, the "actual" protagonist - what's not to like about a middle-aged woman being competent, clever and also human?

I will say nothing about either of the two plots or their solution, except that in this one, I thought the book-within-a-book plot was much cleverer than the real-world plot (whereas in Moonflower Murders, I thought the opposite, and it was level pegging in Magpie Murders, although my husband and I were high-fiving ourselves because we each spotted one clue that, put together, let us guess the identity of the killer at the end of episode 4, way earlier than we usually manage it!)

Probably my only critique would be the post-denouement ending to the book. It felt like it tied things off in too neat of a bow, and was tonally out of sync with the rest of the work. That said, I read it as Horowitz drawing a final line under this series / character and wanting to give Susan Ryeland a happy ending, which is fair enough. (I also would baulk at killing my darlings if I were a novelist!) 8.5/10

Contemporary and Historical

This book is another entry in the "counter-superhero" fictional trend that is quite popular at the moment, telling the story from the perspective of a villain's henchperson. Like a lot of this kind of fiction, it dabbles its toes in exploration of the nature of good, evil and ambiguity, and the grey space in which real human action tends to fall. It also has some trenchant things to say about workplaces and worker exploitation, which I did very much enjoy.

It was quite an odd reading experience for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it while I was with it, I was deeply engaged and propelled to finish it, I thought it was playing with some interesting ideas ... but almost the minute I finished, all impact just evaporated from my brain. Since finishing it, I haven't thought about it once and don't feel like the ideas are novel enough to induce me to ever re-read it. It was genuinely a fun read, but also weirdly ephemeral, for me at any rate. 

That's not a criticism btw, books that don't linger also have their time and value! It's just a summation of how I felt. 7/10

This was one of few Brooks novels I had yet to read, and I loved it, as I thought I would. 

It tells the story of Eyam, a small village in Derbyshire that was hit by plague in 1665/66 during once of the many recurring waves of the disease in Europe from the medieval period onwards. Eyam was a real place, and their self-imposed year-long quarantine really happened, but the historical material for understanding what that was actually like is sparse. From the limited bones of what we know and the stores of own vast empathy, imagination and talent, Brooks has created a version of it - told from the point of view of protagonist narrator Anna Frith, a serving woman and young widow, who is at the heart of the action.

The book is both as beautiful and as heart-rending as you might think, based on the remise, but Brooks, as always, handles the emotional beats with sensitivity and a lightness of touch that actually enhances the impact. The story was compelling, contemplative, and moving, and did not shy away from the ugliness of human behaviour in crisis, while also showing the power of helpers.

I did feel the ending was a little too neat, and had one twist that wasn't actually a twist, but overall, this was a powerful work of literature that will stay with me a long time. 8.5/10

Non-Fiction

I really enjoyed this one. It's a detailed look at the chemistry and action of 14 poisons, framed through the lens of murder methods employed by the grande dame of Golden Age crime writing, the incomparable Agatha Christie.

The pattern is very straightforward:

1. introduce the poison and the Christie work/s in which it appears

2. go through the history of the poison's discovery or creation and refinement

3. detail the chemistry and the biological effects of the poison

4. outline some real-life cases in which it was used

5. come back to Christie to consider how accurately she used it in fiction

This is a really effective and accessible way to organise the material. I found the history of each poison, and the real-life cases, absolutely fascinating; the biochemistry got a little dense at times (to me as a non-scientist!). but you can't fault the thoroughness. Of course, as a Christie devotee, I was also very much a fan of the careful and specific linking to the stories, and Harkup's analysis of how well Christie represented the action and plausibility of the poison (in most cases, to an extremely high degree - Christie's own background as a dispenser in a pharmacy was clearly employed to good use in her fiction).

I think I'll come back to this again as I continue my Christie novel re-reading project - it will add an extra zing to the poisoning stories for sure! 8/10

I absolutely loved this book, and had every good intention of doing a proper review of it, but ... life, y'know.

To give an idea of what it's about, here's part of the blurb: "A spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface." 

That's accurate, but also inadequate to capture the depth and breadth of this work, which is as much an engrossing sociological history of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the displacement of the fantastically wealthy Eastern European oligarchs and crime lords, and London's embroilment with them, as it is the story of one misguided boy and the grieving family searching for answers. 

It's meticulously sourced and compellingly written. I recommend it to contemporary history-lovers as well as puzzle-crime enthusiasts. 9/10