Book Reviews

First published 2024.  Fairlight paperback, 2024, pp 251, c.37,000 words. If you are of the school of thought that all men are bastards then you may well love this book, if not, well that aspect becomes rather tedious.  My notes include for...

First published 1981.  Futura paperback, 1983, pp 430, c.115,000 words. The opening of this book reminded me of the Jody Foster film Maverick, where a group of gamblers are heading to a big tournament.  However this story doesn’t have the...

First published 2022.  Amazon paperback, 2022, pp 220, c.52,000 words. Straight forward thrillers are rare these days, so it was a real pleasure to come across this well written yarn.  The basic form is out of the Shute/Innes/Bagley/Lyle/Kyle/etc....

First published 1990.  Alison and Busby paperback, 1992, pp 192, c.62,000 words. A British family buys a rundown property in rural France as a holiday home.  It has been done before: Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence springs to mind which was published...

First published 1971.  Panther paperback, 1978, pp 188, c.63,000 words. It seems strange now, but there were real fears about the consequences if the population explosion that happened after the second world war continued.  Science Fiction writers...

First published 2004.  Arrow paperback, 2006, pp 254, c.62,000 words. The great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor stands hovering in the background of this journey round the Mediterranean.  Like in Fermor’s most read works, it is based on the...

First published 2019.  SilverWood Books paperback, 2019, pp 340, c.115,000 words. This is a modern murder mystery story, somewhere between Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels and ITV’s Midsomer Murders.  It features a police detective, John Lincoln; a disaffected...

First published 1975. New English Library paperback, 19797, pp 157, c.52,000 words. This is the third part of six books all set in the same future, one where, centuries ago, the people of ‘Old Earth’ spread through the galaxy, seeding it with technology...

First published 1966. Harper Collins paperback, 2017, pp 307, c. 101,000 words. This is a highly entertaining mid-twentieth century thriller.  It has the usual protagonist of a man out of his element facing danger – in this case the man is a meteorologist,...

First published 1998. Granta paperback, 1999, pp 503, c.150,000 words (main text). Right towards the end, Fleming compares the UK’s exploration of the gaps in the map of the globe during the early nineteenth century, the topic of this book, to the USA’s...