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This book follows one of Burley's standard formats, with a flashback prologue showing the reader a motive for a crime, then showing the crime that first brings Wycliffe into the story, and following the process of solving the crime. Here the motive is the vicious bullying of a young teenager on a school trip, and the crime is the separate murders of two young women. At first there appears to be no link between the two murders, but as Wycliffe digs into their past, he starts to find connections. Connections that lead him to a motive, other potential victims, and a race to find the killer. It's not difficult for the reader to work out who the killer is, but the point of the story is to follow along as Wycliffe pieces together the fragments of information that might lead him to the next victim before the killer. It's an entertaining read with some interesting character sketches, although be warned that the prologue could be triggery for bullying victims.
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at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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In the year 1345, an alien spacecraft lands in the small English village of Ansby, expecting an easy defeat of the local primitives. Unfortunately for them, the local primitives are preparing to go on Crusade, and their reaction to having one of their number burned where he stands is a disciplined military reaction. That discipline and the aliens' surprise results in the English capturing the ship. Unfortunately for the English, the last alien survivor manages to lock the ship onto an autopilot program that will return it to its base. Unfortunately for the alien empire, that gives the Baron 10 days of travel time to come up with a plan to conquer the garrison on the alien colony planet...
It sounds daft, and it is, but Anderson was a good enough writer to pull it off. Sir Roger may be a mediaeval baron, but he has an open mind, an excellent grasp of tactics, and a sound understanding of practical psychology. That makes him a formidable opponent for an empire that hasn't had to deal with serious opposition for generations. It also makes for a very funny story, particularly when Sir Roger cheerfully lies his way through various negotiations, presenting himself as the representative of a large multi-planet empire.
First published in 1960, this is a short novel by today's standards, but just the right length for the story it tells. It's enormous fun, and well worth a read.
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at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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This is one of the series of Torchwood audiobooks read by cast members, and the first to be read by Gareth David-Lloyd. This one is only available as an audiobook, not in print. I bought it because I'd heard a sample of David-Lloyd reading an audiobook, and thought he was a good reader. It was well worth the money. The story's the usual competent tie-in work I've found with previous Torchwood books, and David-Lloyd is an excellent audiobook reader.
The story itself is set between series 2 and series 3, with references and foreshadowing that tie it firmly into the series universe for those who've seen the referenced episodes, without excluding those who haven't seen them, or overwhelming the story. The basic plot is standard monster-of-the-week fare for the Torchwood corner of the Whoniverse -- an alien castaway courtesy of the rift, its threat magnified by the meddling of local humans who don't understand what they're playing with. In this case it's alien insect larvae which feed on human emotions, and a vicar who thinks he's found a way to heal people of their sins and guilt. It's competently written, with a good look at love and the complexity of human emotions, but there's nothing particularly noteworthy here.
What does stand out is the characterisation, which is as good as you'd expect from the man who was script editor for the show. One thing which I particularly liked was that it showcases both the Gwen/Rhys and the Jack/Ianto relationships, while still acknowledging the attraction between Jack and Gwen. There are a lot of small details which build on what we've already been shown in the tv series, showing how the characters and their relationships are developing and changing. It's a particular joy to see the playful and affectionate side of both romances.
Gareth David-Lloyd does an excellent job of reading the book. He's a good reader when it comes to the mechanics of reading aloud, well paced and with good tonal colour. He's also very good at portraying the various characters already known to listeners from the tv series, getting most of them spot on in their dialogue. It's usually clear who's speaking, even without dialogue tags -- and you can tell the difference between narrator and Ianto's dialogue. He even mostly gets Jack's American accent right. I hope he's invited to do more of the audiobooks.
At two full-length CDs, it's a lot longer than a standard tv or radio episode, but with it being an audio book you'd expect that for the same basic story. I didn't feel that it was padded or too long. It feels about the same as reading one of the print tie-in books. Minchin makes good use of the format, taking advantage of being able to show interior monologue without crossing too far into telling rather than showing.
I enjoyed this a lot, and happily listened to it again a couple of weeks after the first time through. Definitely worth the attention of Torchwood fans in general, and very much recommended for fans of both Ianto Jones and Gareth David-Lloyd -- both the character and the actor are well served by this title.
Available as both CD and download.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Play
at Amazon US
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Joe Talon is an anachronism. He's a hippie ex-surfer with a James Bond complex working for the CIA, barely conforming at work and not hiding it. But Talon is very good at his job of checking anomalies in satellite photos. Too good. Talon spots an anomaly where no anomaly was marked for his attention, and starts digging into it. Talon's attention to something nobody was supposed to notice focuses attention on him--the sort of attention that has him running for his life.
Talon's choices are simple--die, disappear for good, or find a way to expose the conspirators within the Company while he's on the run. All three look like good choices to him at various times during the course of the novel, but Talon's final choice is to fight back.
Talon isn't a trained spy, just a highly specialised clerk; but he's bright and desperate and he's stolen some interesting goodies from work over the years. The ensuing chase makes for a thrilling read, with a lot of careful world building going into making the story feel realistic. The book was first published in 1978, so the technology is very dated now, of course; as are some of the social attitudes. But it's still a good read, even today.
LibraryThing entry
Talon at Amazon UK
Talon: A novel of suspense at Amazon US
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1978 printing, so presumably the original and shorter version of this novel, which has apparently been published at two different lengths and under several titles. First published in 1965, and thus dated in odd little ways -- not least being the lack of some 1990s-level consumer technology in a story set in a then near future where we have the technology to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
The story opens with that manned mission's return to earth in dramatic fashion, with an emergency landing right on top of Kennedy Airport in New York, one which wreaks havoc on the airport. Young emergency room doctor Sam Bertolli is part of one of the first ambulance teams on the scene, and is directed to the ship itself. Thus he is the first to encounter the sole survivor -- who dies within a few minutes of a deadly disease brought back from Jupiter.
There follows a medical mystery drama, as the city medical services follow standard quarantine procedures, and the situation escalates. Harrison does an excellent job of showing the hard decisions that need to be made and the human reactions -- the people desperate to protect their beloved animals from a vital culling programme, the people trying to cover their own backs in the political games being played, the conflicting priorities in the battle to prevent the disease from spreading beyond the city. There's a lot of good world-building detail about what the medical teams actually *do* in such a situation, rather than simple hand-waving. Unfortunately the mismatch between extrapolated technology levels and what we really ended up with can break suspension of disbelief for current audiences, in part because Harrison did such a good and careful job with this. But for all that it's dated in places, it's a good read, with a strongly drawn near-future world, some great characters, and a deadly serious task for them to do.
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Plague from Space (Sphere science fiction) at Amazon UK
Plague From Space at Amazon US
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New Writings in SF was an anthology series that ran from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, doing exactly what it said on the tin -- showcasing what the editor considered examples of the best in new authors and new techniques in written science fiction. Volume 10 is from 1966, and as such a fascinating look at what was new and exciting more than forty years ago. It's a slightly surreal experience reading an introduction to "new American author, Thomas M Disch"...
Seven stories in this volumes, plus an introduction by editor John Carnell.
The longest is "The Imagination Trap" by Colin Kapp, and I suspect this one was the reason I bought the book in the first place when I found it in a second-hand shop, because as a teenager I was very fond of Colin Kapp's work. It's a fifty pager about a test flight of a new faster-than-light ship; a test flight that is almost certain suicide, as it's a last ditch attempt to find out why most of the previous test flights didn't come back, and those that did had suffered strange dimensional effects. It's an interesting combination of serious thinking about psychology and about physics. It's also very sixties in feel, not least because it comes over to me as being partly an attempt to describe the time/space distortion and hypersensory experiences reported by LSD users in controlled experiments with the drug which were being carried out at that time.
John Baxter's "Apple" is something that required me to actively operate my disbelief suspenders, because it uses an apple mutated to the size of a hill by the after-effects of nuclear war as a metaphor for... well, something. But it was well worth gagging the bit of my brain that insisted that this is not physically possible. There's a lovely brief exploration of human nature woven through a clever piece of world-building in this short.
G L Lack's "Robot's Dozen" is an exchange of letters between a gentleman who has rented a robot to impersonate him as a burglar deterrent while he is on holiday, and the firm from which he hired it. The outcome is predictable enough, but that's not the point -- the joy is in watching how the story gets there.
Joseph L Green's "Birth of a Butterfly" considers an expedition to find intelligent life, and how easily humans might recognise it once they had found it.
Thomas Disch's "The Affluence of Edwin Lollard" examines the problem of wilful poverty in a society wealthy enough that nobody need be poor. The editor suggest that it's about the end product of the welfare state, but to me it looked much more like the end product of conspicuous consumption.
Brian W Aldiss's "A Taste for Dostoevsky" is another heavily psychological piece, one which didn't really work for me even though I can see objectively that it's good.
John Rankine's "Image of Destruction" is a space opera romp, a short from a series of stories about the character Dag Fletcher. Lots of fun, if rather dated now.
I didn't like everything in this anthology, and some of it looks dated by current standards, but it's a solid collection which lives up to its stated aim.
LibraryThing entry
New Writings in SF 10 at Amazon UK
NEW WRITINGS IN SF 10 at amazon US
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Short YA novel, a sequel to "the Star Dwellers". I found that I could read and enjoy this book without having read the first one, as there's enough backstory worked into it that new readers aren't left floundering. It's set in a relatively near future, not long after mankind has first developed an interstellar drive and made contact with other intelligent species. One of those species is an energy-based lifeform which has been around since the Big Bang, but which is nevertheless culturally compatible with humans. The Angels have sponsored humans for membership in another galactic culture, one that is short-lived by the standards of the Angels, but still remarkably long-lived and stable by human standards. So long-lived that even having the normal probationary membership period cut in half at the Angels' urging means waiting 50,000 years for full membership.
Naturally, some politicians are too impatient to wait. And so begins the mission to the Heart Stars, a journey to the heart of the empire to ask in person for immediate full membership. Along the way, the crew of the diplomatic mission ship see exactly how that peaceful, prosperous stability is achieved.
The book has a reasonable balance of engineering and social commentary. The science behind the faster-than-light drive is pseudo-science, but it's the sort that's extrapolated from real physics and internally consistent, not pure plot-devicium powered. It's a little too overtly preachy, but that's largely a result of it being a YA book written in the mid 60s. I'm not sure I'll keep it any longer, but it's a book I enjoyed enough that I've read it more than once.
LibraryThing entry
Mission to the Heart Stars (A Panther book) on Amazon UK
Mission to the Heart Stars on Amazon US
at Powell's
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In the far future, the interstellar law enforcement body is thinly spread and has to use more subtle methods than simply sending in a battleship. Here are two tales of the specialist corps which work undercover, sending in a single man with some very specialised help -- the men of the Porcine Interstellar Guard, and the Robot Obtrusion Battalion Omega Three.
This pair of novelettes were written for children, but are equally entertaining for adults. Each story is a nicely constructed sf mystery, with both genres well integrated. In the first, a pig farmer arrives on a frontier planet with a ghost problem. But the pig farmer isn't a farmer, and his herd includes a collection of very bright mutant pigs with a talent for trouble. In the second, one travelling salesman shouldn't seem much of a threat to a cattle-ranching planet, but the locals are sufficiently paranoid to think otherwise. But not quite paranoid enough to notice just how many robots of all shapes and sizes will fit into that battered old spaceship... Deftly sketched characters, a pair of interesting plots, and often very funny, this is a cheerful short read.
LibraryThing entry
The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. at Amazon UK
The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. at Amazon US
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Nowadays, a good many zoos are seriously involved in conservation work, the last hope for some of the most endangered species on the planet. In the 1970s, that wasn't the case. This book was Durrell's polemic against the keeping of wild animals purely for entertainment purposes, an impassioned plea for things to change. In a series of seven essays he set out the case for zoological gardens to be genuine centres of scientific excellence devoted to the preservation and breeding of the animals in their care, and described the work of the zoo he had set up for this purpose. He made himself highly unpopular in some quarters with his stinging criticism of then-current practice, not least because it's well and entertainingly written, a successful appeal to the public at large to support his campaign. The first chapter is a little dry, but after that this is a fascinating description of the work of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Funny, moving, and utterly devoted to the animals without ever lapsing into saccharine sentiment, this is well worth a read.
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The Stationary Ark
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I usually love Banks' work, both with and without the M -- but I abandoned this one less than a third of the way through. It tried so terribly hard to be shocking and boundary-pushing, and succeeded only in being so deadly boring and predictable that I couldn't make myself read any further.
I tried to read it ten years ago, after which it went into storage. That box of books has just come out of storage again , and this book is going straight in the Oxfam box without any further attempt to re-read it. That's how badly it impressed me at the time.
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Third book in the Adam Dalgliesh series. Dalgliesh needs a break, partly to recover from his last case and partly to think over his relationship with Deborah Riscoe. As is his habit, he goes to stay for a few days with his Aunt Jane, who lives in a small, remote coastal settlement populated mostly by writers. Naturally, he finds murder even in Monksmere.
In this case, Dalgliesh is not only not the investigating officer, but not officially involved in the case other than as a witness and relative/aquaintance of the suspects. But as someone with inside knowledge of the community and a direct connection, he can't but help but be involved with the local police as they attempt to solve the case.
It's all too clear that the only plausible suspects are the inhabitants of Monksmere, but that doesn't stop them trying to find some way to first deny that there has been a murder, and then that it is one of their number who was responsible. James carefully shows the differing and often eccentric personalities, the ways in which they manage to live in a sometimes uneasy tolerance of each other in a very small community, and the effect the murder has upon those relationships. With the victim being a writer of detective stories, and all the suspects being writers, there are multiple levels of meta going on.
I found the book an enjoyable read, though flawed in places. But it's far from her best work, and even if you don't like this one it would be worth trying one of the later books. It's also worth bearing in mind that the book was written in 1967, and social changes since then could make the book feel dated and implausible if you're not aware of this.
Unnatural Causes at Amazon UK
at Play
Unnatural Causes (Adam Dagliesh Mystery Series #3) at Amazon US
at Powell's
LibraryThing entry
Also available in audiobook format at audio.com
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Note: I received an ARC of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.
Tess Drake is a high-flying literary agent on the staff of a top entertainment agency. Sufficiently high-flying that she wants to branch out on her own, rather than continue to take a salary that's a fraction of the money she brings into the business. As the novel opens, she's just been given one final push in that direction by the death of her boss. Tess liked Lowell; she loathes Cosima, the woman who's about to take over, and the feeling's mutual.
The problem for Tess is that she's made more enemies than just Cosima along the way to success. She's left frantically trying to put together her new business without letting slip what she's doing, in the middle of the uproar generated by Lowell's death from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Oh, and then there's the police investigation into the suggestion that Lowell's death wasn't an accident, and that Tess might have had something to do with it.
It's fast, funny, and more than a little over the top. It's also unashamedly for an adult audience, as is obvious right from the first page. There is swearing and there is sex, and most of it is there for genuine plot and character development reasons. There's also a lot of acidly funny commentary on the entertainment business, with much dropping of real names to add to the realism.
Tess is often unlikeable, but she's also aware of her flaws, and there's real growth in her character during the book. She's also fiercely loyal to a few people for more than commercial reasons, and genuinely regrets the damage she's accidentally caused to relationships she valued.
The book's a blend of chick-lit and mystery, and does a good job of both, but is not going to appeal to everyone. I can see why the reviews on LibraryThing range from loathing to loving it. For me personally it was a page-turner, and while I sometimes wanted to shake some sense into Tess, by the last few chapters I very much wanted her to break free of the trap that had been laid for her. The novel is complete in itself and does have a satisfying ending, but I'd love to see what happened next. I'd gladly read a sequel to this book.
[Amazon and Audible.com links deleted. See this post about Amazon's censorship of LGBT books for why.]
LibraryThing entry
ISBN: 978-0312379445 (hardback)
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I received a review copy of this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme. As with many of the books I've requested on LTER, it's a book that I might not have picked up and bought in a bookshop, but which looked intriguing enough on the LTER information for me to want to try it. As such, it's outside my usual reading range, which does have some bearing on my review.
The book is a collection of contemporary short stories by Ron MacLean. It was described in the publishers blurb as "MacLean's characters – from a girl who walks on telephone wires to a memory-addled truck driver — all offer revelatory evidence of the strange workings of the human mind." I've found that it doesn't quite match the impression I picked up from the blurb, being much more experimental litfic than I'd really expected. This isn't a problem as such, but I found some of the "quirky" stories to be a lot less experimental and cutting edge than the publisher suggests, at least from my perspective as a long-time reader of speculative fiction and high end fanfic.
The stories are very much character-driven, a step into the lives of people who range from the ordinary to the bizarre. The characters and their concerns are deftly portrayed in beautiful prose, but I've found that a common feature of the stories is that they feel as if they're the first chapter of a longer story -- there's no real end or closure to any of the ones I've read so far. It works when the stories are taken one at a time, but I find it irritating when reading two or three in a single session, which is a large part of why I still haven't finished the book. I fully intend to read every story, and expect that I'll want to re-read some of them, but I enjoy it better taken a story every so often rather than reading the book through.
In the end, a worthwhile use of my time, but rather hard to review in any coherent fashion.
LibraryThing entry
Amazon US
Amazon UK
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A boy's adventure story first published in 1915 -- while it's fiction, it's clearly inspired by real events and politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book opens in London, where young Marco Loristan is living with his father in impoverished exile. Marco's father is a player in the politics of his war-torn homeland, the fictional country of Samavia, and has raised the boy to be a patriot even though Marco has never seen his homeland. They have travelled extensively in Europe, and the multi-lingual Marco has learnt to guard his father's secrets and pass as a local wherever he might be.
By chance Marco meets The Rat, leader of a group of London street urchins. The Rat is a cripple, but has a brilliant mind and a fascination with politics and military tactics -- and a talent for creating detailed stories to entertain the group he leads. The two boys bond, in part because both Marco and his father recognise and take seriously The Rat's grasp of military tactics, and when The Rat's father dies he is taken into the Loristan household.
Samavia is war-torn because for the last few centuries it has been squabbled over by two families of pretenders to the throne. The last true heir was lost when his father tried to kill him, but it is rumoured that he survived, and that his line still exists, waiting in exile until they hear the call to the return. When the time comes to send a message to the secret network of patriots that the lost prince has returned at last, the boys volunteer to be the messengers. As they point out, nobody will suspect two young begger lads, one of them a cripple. And so begins an adventure across Europe, as they take the signal to a variety of secret agents, avoiding traps and counter-agents along the way. The two boys are very different, but well-matched, and make an excellent team. Their travels and travails make for a cracking adventure story.
It's obvious to the reader from the first few chapters that Marco's father is the lost prince, but has deliberately kept Marco unaware of this. Marco is intelligent enough, but The Rat is a much more imaginative and lateral-thinking boy, and this is shown well as they progress across Europe and The Rat begins to suspect from the reactions of their contacts that Marco is rather more than he knows.
It's an interesting read from a current-day perspective. There's a clear assumption that the lost prince and his descendents are the Right Ruler because they're the legal heirs, and that Monarchy Is Good; but layered over that there are clear indications that Marco is a good person who will make a good king in future years because he has been brought up to be a good person and taught how to be an effective leader, rather than being so simply because of who his ancestors are. There's also a strong strand of Buddhist philosophy in the book, and it's made clear that part of what makes Marco's father an effective leader of the exiles is his encounter with and willingness to learn from a Buddhist guru. While he's willing to fight when necessary, he has learnt self-mastery and a willingness *not* to fight, and taught that to Marco. While the book's often rather predictable (in a way that is perfectly reasonable in a children's adventure book), it's rather more than formulaic. And of course there are now additional layers to the connections with real history, because Samavia is rather obviously set in what later became called Yugoslavia.
I enjoyed this a lot. If you've liked some of Burnett's other work, it's well worth downloading a copy of this one from Project Gutenberg and giving it a try.
It's available as a free download from Project Gutenberg and other public domain book sites, but because it's now out of copyright you can also buy it in a whole slew of POD print editions at Amazon UK and Amazon US . Personally, if I wanted a paper copy I'd look for a cheap second-hand copy of one of the old editions rather than one of the new expensive POD editions.
LibraryThing entry
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This gorgeously written book is the first part of a new fantasy trilogy which draws on medieval China for its inspiration. It's an alternate universe China, of course, and one of the ways in which it's alternate is that magic is real, if largely subtle. Subtle enough that some characters do not realise that the magic is there. Even the dragon of the title is a background menace in this first book, thought of as myth by the people who don't live in her territory, although she's a key part of one of the main plot threads.
That's plot threads, plural. One of the joys of the book is that there are multiple plot threads, skillfully balanced by a writer who knows how to use them to create a complex story with several distinctive characters. All of these threads converge on Taishu, a remote island on the edge of empire. On the physical edge, at least. Taishu may seem remote and insignificant to most, but it is the source of the jade that underpins the power of the Jade Throne and the Emperor who sits on it. He who holds Taishu holds the empire, in a very real sense, and Taishu is about to become the centre of more than one conflict.
Scribe's apprentice Han is enslaved by the raiding party of pirates who kill his master. They are not local men, and their leader Li Ton pays no heed to his frantic warnings against their next raid -- upon a monastery whose monks' magic keeps the chains bound tight about the dragon held under the sea. After all, everyone knows that dragons haven't been seen for hundreds of years, if they were ever real in the first place. As Han and the monastery's sole survivor fight to hold the bindings in place, the dragon senses freedom, and Han senses her.
Fishergirl Mei Feng finds her life changed one night, when her grandfather's boat is commandeered by generals, by the emperor himself. The boy emperor is fleeing from a rebel army, his own loyal troops not enough to stand and fight, or so his mother and his generals say. They have one hope, to hold the Jade Throne and the jade mines that are the true source of imperial power. In the end the Hidden City is wherever the throne is, and so the Hidden City moves to a remote island, along with as much of the army as can find boats to cross the strait. But the Son of Heaven finds one unexpected resource on the fishing boat that carries him to safety -- a local girl to be a friend his own age, someone who is loyal to him both as emperor and as lonely, isolated boy. And in particular, is loyal to him, not the mother and generals who see him as too young to be anything other than a figurehead.
The jade miners have heard that the emperor himself has come to their island, and what they hear is a chance to break free of the middlemen who offer them a pittance, a chance to take his jade to him themselves. It is his jade, they know that; but perhaps he will give them a better reward for their work in mining it than do the jademasters. And so one clan of miners breaks the law and sends one of their young men with the fabulous new piece they have unearthed. Yu Shan is prepared for bandits in the hills, but even so he has a more twisted path to the emperor's notice than he imagines. For he is young and does not know the secret of the jade, why it is so tightly controlled.
These could all easily become a cliched story, but here they are in the hands of a master storyteller. Fox weaves them together to make a multi-layered story where subtle clues are laid well in advance, creating an "oh, of course!" as the hints finally slot together to make the full picture. It's no surprise that this works so well, as "Daniel Fox" is the pseudonym of an award-winning writer with a depth of experience in both crime fiction and fantasy. The world he has created is strongly grounded in reality, but has magic added, and the consequences of that are woven into the world he shows, rather than the magic being thrown in with no thought for how it might affect things. This world and its characters are described in beautiful and beautifully controlled prose. The result is a richly detailed fantasy that explores new ground rather than treading well-worn paths.
Dragon in Chains is quite definitely the first part of a single story, but there is enough plot, and intermediate resolution of various plot threads, to make the book a satisfying read in its own right rather than merely a cliffhanger designed to get you to keep buying the series. This is a complex and enticing dark fantasy that is well worth the wait for the next part.
Official release date is 27 January 2009, and the book is available for pre-order at Amazon UK and at Amazon US .
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Wealthy young executive Tatsuya Soga is trying to trace the younger half-brother he hasn't seen since they were both children, when their father divorced his second wife and threw wife and child out of the house. While Tatsuya's waiting for the detective's report, he goes to a friend's bar for the evening, and has a bad case of love at first sight when he sees a young waiter playing the bar piano. Haru seems interested in him in return; which isn't surprising because as rapidly becomes clear to the reader, Haru knows who Tatsuya is and still hero-worships his adored older brother while being convinced that the Soga family must hate him. Tatsuya quite innocently proceeds to seduce Haru in the belief that the attraction is sexual on both sides, leading to much angst the next day when he finally gets that report with a recent photo and the current name of his long-lost brother...
Emotional ups and downs follow as Tatsuya tries to protect Haru from the knowledge that they're brothers, while resisting Haru's attempts to get him back into bed. It gets all the harder when he discovers the shabby conditions in which Haru lives, and feels he has to take Haru to live with him. There's more than one twist to the tale before reaching an ending that's more or less happy and leaves them together.
This is a single-volume story, so the plot's not that deep, but there's still a solid story that's got more to it than just an excuse to throw two pretty young men together and spice it up with a suggestion of incest. And it's well set up, with the nine year age gap between the men making it plausible that Tatsuya wouldn't recognise the 17-year-old he last saw as a child, and Haru having a good reason to be in that bar.
The characters are interesting and pleasant people. Tatsuya is a decent, kind man who cares about other people, and while he's pushy when he first seduces Haru, it's an honest case of mis-reading signals rather than refusing to take no for an answer. Haru's believable as a teenager who's pretending to be older than he really is, but who's still vulnerable inside. There are also some good supporting characters, in particular Haru's older step-brother from his mother's third marriage.
This one has plenty of explicit sex, but it's there to serve the story, which is good news if you find sex boring without a story to go with it. It's not as graphic as in some manga, but it's erotic as it is.
The artwork is excellent, and apart from the colour cover there are also two very nice colour plates inside. The physical production quality is extremely good, with heavy paper and crisp reproduction of the art.
The subject matter's going to squick some readers, but if you can handle that, this one's well worth a look.
Lies & Kisses at Amazon UK
Lies & Kisses at Amazon US
LibraryThing entry
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First in the trio of books released for the start of the second tv series. There are a couple of internal references to tell you that it's set between "To the last man" and "Meat", but there's nothing that requires specific knowledge of the show other than the basics of who Torchwood are and what they do.
Baxendale takes an old British legend and puts a Torchwood spin on it, as a water hag causes havoc around Cardiff. The book starts with several different strands which have no connection other than stagnant water, and for good measure tosses in a flu epidemic that isn't. It takes the Torchwood team some time to connect all the clues, by which time they're infected as well. Much running around chasing or being chased by bad guys ensues, making for a plot that offers both thoughtful research by the team and physical mayhem before they manage to close down a major threat.
Excellent characterisation, and I could hear the voices while reading much of the dialogue, as Baxendale catches the distinctive speech patterns well. There's a decent spread of word count across the characters, and good ensemble play between various combinations rather than focusing on only one or two (though don't go looking for any overt reference to the relationship between Jack and Ianto, because it isn't there). Owen gets a fair bit of attention, as this is partly a medical mystery and his expertise is directly relevant to one strand of the story. Owen's very likeable in doctor mode, without entirely losing his nasty edge with his teammates, which is the way I like him.
There's a lot of good banter, and some nice one-liners, not just for the main characters but for the one-offs created for this story.
It's a solid story that makes good use of both the inspiring myth and various quirks of the Torchwood universe. This isn't just a generic science fantasy with the right names pasted in, but something that's very clearly Torchwood. There are some minor disappointments (in particular, I felt the ending was rather abrupt), but overall I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I can see why people with different tastes might have found it a bit flat, but it happens to hit my buttons rather well.
ISBN-13: 978-1846074370
http://www.librarything.com/work/4707944
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Another one from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.
This is a short tale in what might seem an unsalubrious setting, but it's a small gem of a book that's well worth reading. It was first published in 1997, but went out of print, before being republished in 2007 by The Friday Project. The republication is well deserved.
Gents is the tale of Ezekiel Murphy, a West Indian immigrant, and the job he takes as an attendant in a public lavatory in London. The supervisor, Josiah Reynolds, and the other cleaner, Jason, teach him the job, which includes more than he had expected. As Ez soon discovers, the facility is popular with cottagers -- men using the cubicles for fast, anonymous sex with other men. The attendants discourage it as best they can, but tolerate a certain amount of activity, because as Reynolds points out, the 'reptiles' are no threat to anyone.
There are still complaints to the council about the goings-on, and the crew are told that they must clamp down on the cottaging or the facility will be shut. Alas, they're too successful for their own good, and takings from the small cover charge that covers the facility's running costs drop precipitously, leading to renewed threats of job cuts, and a dilemma for the attendants...
Gents is a gentle, funny and subtle parable about tolerance, on more levels and subjects than the obvious one. The characters and situations are sketched lightly but deftly, in a lovely display of showing rather than telling, and I wasn't surprised to learn that Collins originally conceived the story as a screenplay. The three West Indian attendants have much in common through their common background, but are still very different people with different attitudes and prejudices. They have an outsider's view of the society they live in, and see it from underneath. Through Ez the book touches on issues of race, class, homophobia, religion and culture, without ever being heavy-handed or one-sided.
There are stunningly good descriptive passages about the men and their world, and the characters are likeable and sympathetic, without being unbelievable saints. The main characters are the three men, but they also all have wives (two in Jason's case), and Ez's wife Martha and his relationship with her is a particular strength of the book.
One minor problem for some readers will be the Jamaican patois in the dialogue, which does take a few pages to get used to if you're not familiar with it. But it's appropriate for the characters and not pushed to the point where it's hard to follow.
This is a much shorter read than its 172 pages might suggest, as a large font and plenty of white space mean that there aren't many words per page. At 25,000 words or so, this is a novella rather than a full-length novel, and you get around an hour's reading for your eight pounds. But it's beautifully written and a joy to read. It may be short but there's plenty of depth, and it will stand up well to re-reading. Even if you feel that the book is too pricy for the word count, it's well worth checking it out from your library.
ISBN: 9781905548767
LibraryThing entry
Gents at Amazon UK
Gents at Amazon US
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This is one of the trio of tie-in novels released for the first season of Torchwood, and is set early in that season, after Gwen's settled in but before Cyberwoman. Tie-in novels can disappoint, but this is a solid story that's well-written and that fits the Torchwood universe well; a dark tale about the things that come through the Rift and their misuse by the locals. It's actually better than the first couple of tv episodes, because the sex and violence is used to good effect in the story, rather than feeling as if it's tossed in just to see how far the show can go in a post-watershed slot.
There are two interweaving plots here. The main plot concerns an outbreak of killings involving cannibalism, and their link to a very dubious weight-loss clinic. The team's hunt for the solution is given added urgency when Gwen realises that Rhys has taken one of the clinic's pills. The minor plot concerns Tosh's research into a series of alien devices.
There's good exposition and world-building, and I think this book will work for someone who hasn't yet seen the show. The characterisation's not that deep, but it's not bad for an early tie-in where even an author who's a fan or involved with the show's production wouldn't have had much to go on, and it's accurate. With one exception there's not much reference to specific events in the tv series, and even the exception is blended in nicely as something that will be simply a character quirk to people who haven't seen the relevant episode.
The book focuses strongly on the relationship between Gwen and Rhys (and does so very nicely), but generally doesn't neglect the rest of the team. There are some decent bits for particular characters: Tosh gets a decent word count, even if she spends it being girl geek as usual; there's a good storyline for Owen where circumstances force him to interact with an attractive woman as a person, rather than just a shag. On the other hand, Ianto's barely mentioned; but when you do see him he's spending a lot of time lurking in the remote archives and discouraging other team members from wandering into them, which is appropriate for this point in his storyline, and he gets some good interaction with Tosh.
Physically, it's a hardcover with a perfect-bound book block, which is what you'd expect at this price point for a hardback. It's solidly constructed with no loose pages, and there's a good cover design which links in with the other two books in the set. Designer Lee Binding's done a nice job with stock art here.
Slow Decay is a good read for both the plot and the characterisation, and I expect I'll be re-reading it soon. Well worth the money.
at Play.com
at Powell's
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at Amazon UK
at Amazon US