Just started The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin - having suffered through Fleming's TMWTGG - quite interesting so far; a nice Edwardian pastiche and only 230 pages so it won't outstay its welcome.
Re-reading Casino Royale. I kept telling myself not to do it so close to rewatching the movie, but I couldn't help myself.
I wanted to read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold as my next book, but I've just found out that it's a sequel to Call For The Dead. Should I read that book first, or is it all right to just stick with The Spy...?
^The Moonstone is great. I love Wilkie Collins--he's one of my favorites. If you haven't read it yet, I'd highly recommend The Woman in White as well.
Since I posted in this thread back in August I have read the newest book by Arnaldur Indridason. It called "The Draning Lake". Following an earthquake, the water level of an Iclenadic lake drains revealing a skeleton that is weighed down by a heavy radio device wirh Russian inscriptions. Inspector Erlendur has to investigates events that occured back in the Cold War period. An interesting novel. I am looking forward to his next book 'Arctic Chill' comes out in early February next year. I am getting quite found of Inspector Erlendur.
I'll be starting to read Skinner's Rules by Quintin Jardine tomorrow on my commute. I'll report back next week, when I've finished it. It's about the chief of detectives in Edinburgh, Scotland (for those who aren't familiar with British geography), Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Skinner, and a particularly nasty murder that makes him mad
Ok, two reviews here. First off, I've finished reading Skinner's Rules by Quintin Jardine and it's a solid read, though the ending is somewhat unbelievable. If you like tough cops who play by their own rules and get drawn in to a place where their rules don't apply, then this book is perfect. 6/10 Secondly, I finished reading Germ by Robert Liparulo. Extremely dull is my final opinion on the book. I have read many biowarfare novels and this one ranks at the bottom. The idea that the CDC now have a law enforcement branch of seconded FBI agents is laudable but other than the occasional sniffle and reference to the DNA-specific ebola virus that is supposed to be the main plot, there is NOTHING about the virus making people ill. There were several threads that appeared to being somewhere and then nothing. I won't be reading any more of Liparulo's stuff. 3/10
Finished The Necropolis Railway and it was OK, if a little slow - but annoyingly ended on a cliffhanger for a sequel I've never even seen on a shelf. WHo knows if it even got published? Meh.
Now reading Body Double by Tess Gerritsen. About a third of the way through already and it's a cracking read. Dr Maura Isles gets back from a trip to Paris to find a woman who looks exactly like her dead in front of her house. Great stuff!
I read that one a while back--it's pretty good! Definitely a hell of a premise. ETA: I'm going home for the holidays and I always pick out a really fun book to take with me on the plane. I usually go for a James Patterson one--the Alex Cross books come out in November generally, so it's good timing--but the last few have been so formulaic and forgettable that I think I'm opting out for this year. I'll probably go with The Host by Stephanie Meyer. The premise of it just really intrigues me! It sounds like it could be decent sci-fi, and pretty exciting, too.
I'm starting to get on a bit of one, too. I've been trying to find copies in the library of the David Timson audiobooks of the stories, but having little success. I heard a couple stories and I really want to listen to more.
That's exactly the same reason I stopped reading Patterson, Reichs and Cornwell, they were just getting so boooooooring. Have now finished Body Double, and I definitely think this was the best Gerritsen so far. Still have Bone Garden, Vanish and Mephisto Club to reead, but that won't be for a while. The next book on my reading pile is a Star Trek book which should take me to the end of my working year. But I have just started reading The Bourne Sanction by Eric Van Lustbader. Hopefully, it's better than the last one.
I just got ahold of a collection of all the Holmes stories -- it was published in 1927 and has that lovely Old Book Smell. The pages are worn slightly, just enough to be soft... makes for a great experience. And a friend of mine gave me some vintage Sherlock films on DVD - Basil Rathbone!
Found myself stuck bookless on the train on Saturday, and so had to go into WH Smiths and buy something in their buy-one-get-one-half-price offer. The wife picked up Dean Koontz's Odd Hours, and I nearly picked up our own Andy McDermott's new one, but, sorry, ended up leaving it on the shelf because it was the sequel to one I haven't read. So I picked up The Survivor by Tom Cain, (mainly because it looked - and reads - like the author had watched the Bourne movies, played the Hitman games, and thought "I could do a bit of that" - though it turns out he's apparently a pseudonym for some old journo from the broadsheets). And natrually it turned out to be a sequel to a book I never heard of, let alone haven't read. Luckily it's working as a standalone. Frankly the hard bit was finding a book that wasn't one of those with a cover showing a pastel-tinted set of vaulted arches, in which a historian/student gets involved with the murder of a professor/cleric in a tourist-heavy historical religious/educational/art location and finds him or herself on the run to beat a secret society to a centuries-old secret that could very improbably change the world in some vague and unconvincing tabloid style way. I know, it's a favourite rant of mine. But I have to say - it's been six years since The Davinci Code, so isn't it about damn time we saw a ripoff of something else hogging the shelves? It's notjust that it's the same plot, but they all have the same kind of cover... They'd be as well having a plain cover just labelled "Smith's Value Thriller" or something... Argh. I want some variety! Something to actually choose from! Anyway, so, yeah, currently, The Survivor by Tom Cain is my thriller book I'm reading.
For 2009, I promised to read the Sherlock Holmes stories. So it's "A Study in Scarlet" right now. I grew up with the Jeremy Brett incarnation of Holmes, so inevitably it's Brett's voice I hear when I read.
At the moment i am reading one of Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective novel,this 1 is called Savages.Nameless is PI hire to find out about a woman's sister's fiance,years later the sister is dead,he is hired by the sister to find out if it was a accident or a murder.
Dammit! (Shakes fist at Smiths' shelf-stockers.) But there's an obvious solution to that problem - buy both books! Ha! Don't forget the silhouette of a running figure and the faded ancient parchment effect overlaid on the cover image! Actually, it's a problem in a lot of genres, such as chick-lit (graphic designer-y pastel cartoon of a thin woman in high heels carrying fancy shopping bags) or 'misery memoirs' (grainy black and white photo of a sad child staring directly at the camera and a title like Please Don't Touch Me There, Daddy). The reason, unfortunately, is that the supermarkets very much like books where the cover immediately tells casual readers what to expect - ie, if they like Da Vinci Code-style thrillers, here's another one! Books with covers that break the mould have less chance of being stocked by Tesco - unless the book is already a bestseller, in which case its cover becomes the new mould...