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Tag: mysteries

The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman

The Eleventh Doctor isn’t Paterson Joseph.  I really, really wanted it to be, but no, it isn’t him.  They said so today.  It’s some little child twenty-six years old (my generation, for heaven’s sake!) that nobody’s ever heard of.  Except that apparently he was in the BBC film version of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke.  With Billie Piper, Billie Piper!  Hurrah for Billie Piper!  So I decided to read the books and then watch the films when they come in at the library. The Ruby in the Smoke is about a girl called Sally Lockhart whose father has…

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Not Quite Dead, John MacLachlan (a book I forgot about)

My mother mentioned this book as something she might want for Christmas, if it was any good.  My mother is impossible to buy for so I made a specific effort to acquire it at the library and read it, to screen it for her.  It’s all about how Edgar Allan Poe fakes his own death, and Charles Dickens comes to America, and there’s a conspiracy, and numerous Irish people, making trouble.  People from the homeland are apt to behave in this fashion.  (My people were Irish.  I know British people object strenuously to claims of this sort, but I can’t…

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In the Woods, Tana French

I read about In the Woods on Trish’s blog as well as the other Jenny Claire’s, and it sounded very intriguing, and it was.  In the Woods is a twisty murder mystery – lots of interesting detail and inexplicable things.  Detective Rob Ryan, who as a child was one of three children that disappeared in a case that was never solved, and the only one who returned, gets put on to solving the murder of a child in the very same forest where he vanished as a kid. It was a really good book.  I couldn’t quit reading it, and…

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Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, Ruth Rendell

On with the reading of books by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine to decide what I indeed think of her! Adam and Eve and Pinch Me – of whose title, incidentally, I simply cannot approve – is all about a caddish man called Jeffrey John Leach, who is wickedly assuming false names and seducing women so that they will give him money, and then he ups and vanishes, leaving them a bit in the lurch.  He has done just this to two of the three central characters here – crazy Minty Knox who has OCD and hears voices, and opportunist Zillah Leach…

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Vanity Dies Hard, Ruth Rendell

I began Vanity Dies Hard with the working hypothesis that Ruth Rendell was infallibly brilliant, and that even if her books were not as emotionally satisfying as Anna’s Book, they would always have satisfying and elegant plots like Anna’s Book did.  I was most disappointed.  Vanity Dies Hard had an ending that was the biggest let-down since the ending of The Machinist.  (Did you see The Machinist?  I already didn’t like Christian Bale, but my God, even for a movie containing Christian Bale, The Machinist was awful.) Anyway, I had to create a new hypothesis based on my new data. …

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Anna’s Book, Barbara Vine

I have dreams like this. I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I should be very calm and relaxed. I shall probably go to the library tomorrow, get sixteen of Ruth Rendell’s books, and find I don’t like a single other one of them. I liked Anna’s Book.  I read it because I keep hearing everyone going on about Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.  So the last time I was at the library I went to the Barbara Vine section, as I like that name better, and got Anna’s Book because my sister is called Anna.  And it was quite good.  A most…

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