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RED 33: The Last Hero – Terry Pratchett

The Last Hero is the next in my on-going quest to catch up on the Discworld books.

Just like in the legend on our world, fire on the Disc was stolen from the Gods. Cohen the Barbarian, the eponymous hero of the title, has decided it’s time to take it back. Unfortunately this leads to the very real possibility that the Disc will be doomed and so a team from Ankh-Morpork attempt to stop this from happening by launching a spacecraft to loop around the Disc and land on Cori Celesti the home of the Gods.

So essentially what you get is a series of jokes about heroes and getting old (which we’ve seen before but ok) and a pretty decent Apollo 13 parody.

The Last Hero is subtitled “A Discworld Fable“. I’m not quite sure what makes it a fable. Perhaps the publishers were just looking for something to describe it with due to its different format. Which is that it’s a large 176-page book with lots of illustrations and full page pictures. However it’s not a graphic novel and the text is complete in itself. The pictures, as nice as they are and they are very well done, are illustrations only. You could read just the text and not miss out on anything. Also it’s a Discworld story in exactly the same way that any of the others are. It just happens to be shorter. So a novella yes, fable well maybe.

I mention this only because I struggled with the form-factor a little. I’d’ve preferred an ebook or a regular sized paper-back. So the irritation of handling a ‘big book’ for what was an ok-ish but short Discworld story detracted from the overall experience.

I am hoping that the Discworld books, or my enjoyment of them, picks up again. Reading Rivers of London reminds of what it used to be like to read a light, fantasy-themed book with lots of humour and good characters. However for the umpteenth time I must note that I don’t know that it’s Pratchett’s writing that has changed or just that I’m too familiar with it. That said I did enjoy this, just not as much as I’d hoped.

6/10 – a shorter story that could have happily lived in a smaller book imho.



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RED Book 32: Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch

So, having read London Falling I marked it read on Goodreads and checked out some of the reviews. That lead me to comparisons with this book. Now I’d been aware of this book as it had had quite a lot of promotion. When I checked on Amazon I discovered that there were now three books in the same series and that Rivers of London was available for the princely sum of £1.99.

Rivers of London begins with Peter Grant still a probationary officer in the Met, seeing a ghost and shortly after witnessing a murder. As he becomes involved in the case he meets the mysterious Inspector Nightingale and soon joins his very special unit within the force, both as a fully-fledged Detective Constable as well as a trainee wizard.

I loved this book. It was light and fun and the main character has a snappy line in comic narration that makes it easy to read. The plot soon becomes quite involved and we’re introduced to a whole host of characters some of whom are not-quite human. There’s a lot in here about London, the history and geography of London and even though it’s clearly very well researched it doesn’t come over as dry or lecturing but is interspersed into the story quite naturally. I think the novel will work well even if you don’t know London but I’ll admit trying to figure out if I’d had a meal with Melissa in a particular restaurant that makes a brief appearance in a chase scene (and so on) was fun.

Obviously I came to this from Paul Cornell’s London Falling so a word about the comparison. Clearly there’s no issue between the writers themselves – they’re both Dr Who writers and Aaronovitch has endorsed Cornell’s book with a quote on the cover. They are also very different in tone and style. Despite some striking similarities in a high-level concept way – they both feature London heavily and concern cops that are investigating supernatural crimes – they are clearly very different and no-one would mistake either for the other after having read even a couple of pages. And I could write you a similarly high-level description of a serial killer book that would match several dozen books and no-one thinks that an issue.

What I will say is that I’m glad that I read Cornell’s first because whilst I like them both very much I think I might have been impatient with his more intense style if I’d read the light, breezy PC Grant book first. That said I’m eagerly awaiting the follow-up to London Falling which I believe is finished and winding its way through the cogs of the publishing process. It also has to be said that after reading a few chapters of Rivers of London I picked up the two sequels and will soon be in the position of eagerly awaiting book 4.

9/10 – it really is like a grown-up Harry Potter, but if anything more fun.




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RED Book 31: London Falling – Paul Cornell

It’s that time of year again when I try to catch up on the outstanding book reviews so I can wrap up and launch the current year’s Book Blog Project. Sadly I am a few behind.

London Falling is by Paul Cornell. I heard it about it from his blog which I follow. Cornell is  a writer who has had success in several fields including comic books and novels but it’s as a TV writer that I first came across him. Specifically he’s the writer of my favourite Dr Who two-parter Human Nature/Family of Blood – adapted from his own Dr Who novel.

I’d always meant to read one of his novels and when I heard him say that this was coming out and that he felt it captured his voice better than his previous ones I thought why not? Also I found the premise intriguing – more on that in a second.

London Falling begins as a big drug bust is about to take place. It’s an operation that’s been years in the planning and involves two undercover officers. The bust is happening more because they’re running out of money than because the timing’s just right, nevertheless they manage to arrest a local gang boss and several of his “soldiers”. Unfortunately this coup is short-lived as he’s killed whilst in police custody. In fact whilst he’s being interviewed and in full view of CCTV. Nevertheless it’s not clear who, what or how the murder took place.

Shortly after this a small unit is formed to investigate this. It turns out to have been a supernatural killing and after visiting a related crime scene the team acquire ‘The Sight’ which is the ability to see… well what exactly it is they can see is explored in the rest of the novel, but for now I’ll just say that it adds an extra dimension to things.

I loved this book. However I do have to say that it took me a while to get into it. The first two or three chapters have almost no supernatural element at all and I suppose since that’s why I had picked up the book I was waiting for that to appear. Once it did however we were off to the races. In the past I’ve scored books highly because they had a page-turning quality but they haven’t always stayed with me once I’ve finished them. London Falling was not like that. It was page-turning because I really wanted to know what happened but when I found out what happened I was usually more intrigued and more concerned about the characters.

Cornell has said that one of the things he wanted to do was show how real Police officers would handle the supernatural, and what it would be like if they applied the same set of techniques to these other-worldly experiences as they do to every day investigations. I think that’s where the book sets itself apart. It’s also why I think the first section of the book is what it is – we need to establish what ‘ordinary’ policing is like to some extent.

This book reminded me of a couple of other authors when I was reading it. First Michael Marshall Smith – specifically Only Forward – it has a similar sense of a dream/spirit world that lies alongside the everyday world. Secondly it reminded me of the better Ankh-Morpork set Discworld books. It has that same sense of a city being an intricate working mechanism and of the author being fascinated with how it all fits together. So yes, in the words of the old cliche, London really is a character in this book.

Having said that, this book reminded me of those others but is totally unlike them in style or tone. It is its own book and that’s to its credit. It is a fairly intense book and the crimes committed are pretty gruesome stuff. But then it’s definitely no worse than some of your serial killer thrillers. There is a thread of wry dark humour but it’s not a light read, it is a rewarding one though.

9/10 – A police procedural with added supernatural menace.

(p.s. I’ve avoided the phrase ‘urban fantasy’ because despite the fact that that’s what it is on a plain meaning level, and despite the fact that Cornell is happy with that classification, I think it summons up ideas of romances with Vampires or Werewolves, neither of which are in evidence here.)




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RED Book 30: The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells

Martians, Heat Ray, End of the World etcA while back (maybe a year or two?) I bought an anthology of H.G. Wells books for a couple of quid. 38 novels, polemical works and short story collections all in one handy kindle ebook.

Except not so handy. What they’d done was put all the books together in a single file without a proper Table of Contents (TOC) and no individual chapter breaks. So recently I’ve been fixing that. I split the books into separate files, tidied up the formatting, added covers, a TOC and chapter breaks. It was tedious, repetative but ultimately satisfying work. After all that I figured I should read at least one of those books. So I picked War of the Worlds – which I had in paperback – so I read that copy!

There’s obviously not a lot new I can say about this book. So I don’t intend to post a regular review of it, just a few impressions of this time reading it. If you really want a synopsis click on the image for a link to the Goodreads page.

First thing to say is that it’s hard to read this, well the first chapter specifically without hearing the deep warm tones of Richard Burton, and it’s true that through most of it I was humming Forever Autumn. And I think this is relevant because I think my memory of the story – and I have read the book before – owes more to the concept album than the book itself.

The second thing I noticed was how primitive the human technology was. I know that they were supposed to be out-classed but the fact that this book was written before there were even airplanes, when the main mode of transport was horse-drawn really brings out that difference in weapons tech. It also meant it felt a lot less like a “SciFi” novel because most of the action was at the human level, from the human point of view.

The next thing was how parochial it was. The devastation wreaked by the Martians is swift, extreme and pretty near total – but it covers an area of a few miles between where they landed and London. Even in the book this is acknowledged to some extent. There’s talk of escaping to France and of cities like Manchester and Edinburgh sending help when London needs rebuilding at the end of the book. I presume that this too was deliberate and that if they hadn’t been defeated (spoiler!) then the Martians would have sent further cylinders to build on their beach-head in the UK and spread outwards.

I think the thing that comes out really strongly, and was still a theme in the 2005 Spielberg adaptation, is the effect that the invasion has on an ordinary man and what he is forced to witness, and do, to survive. This stuff is still powerful.

Things I hadn’t remembered were the physical descriptions of the Martians, the way they fed – I knew that they consumed human blood but I hadn’t realised it was directly infused into their veins.

So anyway, a few impressions after re-reading this classic. I definitely enjoyed it but it left a slightly different taste to the one I’d expected.

7/10 – “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one”




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RED Book 29: The Girl in the Wave – Robert Kibble

The Girl in the Wave is different from the other books I’ve reviewed in two ways – first it was written by someone I know quite well and used to work with, second it’s not actually been published yet. So I’m reviewing a book you can’t get your hands on yet. Robert has published a couple of other books Fighting the Philosophical Leopard and other stories and Past Presence. I’ve read a couple of stories from Leopard but when I asked him which book I should read first he encouraged me to read this one rather than Past Presence.

So a bit of a dilemna for me, but not for long. I’d read it and I want it to count so I need to review it on my blog. What I will do is withhold a score since that would be unfair since what I read is probably not the final version. As I understand it he’s planning to give it a final edit at some point and then it will probably be published.

The Girl in The Wave is the story of a man who’s just finished university and is living with his parents in Cornwall and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’s half-heartedly looking for jobs but mostly he spends his days pretty aimlessly. He’s taking a walk along the beach one day when he sees the eponymous Girl, swimming in the sea and suspended momentarily in a wave. He becomes fascinated by her and tries to find out who she is and of course wants to meet her. Once he has actually met this mystery girl they begins a relationship of sorts but in many ways the mystery only increases.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a quick read, I read it on a trip away of a couple of nights – being a novella rather than a novel. I think it’s a book of two halves. In the first part we follow the narrator as he discovers and tries to find out more about and meet this “girl”. In the second part we find out about her story. I found the first part of the story more intriguing, Robert builds the sense of mystery well so that you reader want to know more about this woman as much as the main character does. In the second part of the book at lot of the questions are answered and it becomes much more about suspense and tension. This was still enjoyable but not quite as much as the first part.

To be fair some of this may be due to some formatting issues in the version I had which were particularly pronounced in the second half of the book and quite distracting. Also I know that the ending in particular is something Robert was not 100% happy with. I suspect if he can figure out a way to end it differently he may well do that.

So no score for now, but when there’s an official version, I’ll probably re-visit it.




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RED Book 28: Pump Six and Other Stories – Paolo Bacigalupi

It’s been a while since I did a book of short stories. I got this book through Humble Bundle’s first ebook bundle. For those that haven’t heard of them Humble Bundle usually specialise in “indie” computer games. They sell based on a “pay what you want” basis with some money going to charity and the files are unencumbered by DRM. I bought one of their earlier bundles because I wanted to support the business model which I like (particularly the no-DRM part). Anyway I now have an extra 12 books on my TBR list so I thought I’d better read at least one.

I’d heard of Bacigalupi and already owned The Windup Girl, but hadn’t read him. All I really knew was that he was well regarded and could be broadly considered “steampunk”.

When you’re trying to review a collection of stories you naturally tend to look for themes or similarities. This is perhaps unfair to some of the individual stories but I’m going to do it anyway because otherwise I need to review each story in turn and I don’t have the time or the heart for that.

I suppose there are two things that stand out for me that came through in nearly all the stories. The first is that Bacigalupi’s style veers toward a lot of description of the background details. This isn’t something I always enjoy but I know that for some it puts you right there in that world and makes it feel rich and complete. The second is that the stories are almost all kind of morality tales. They take a trend that’s occurring in our current time and extrapolate it into a possible future and show the ill effects this might have, whether that’s patented GM crops in The Calorie Man or global warming’s effect on water conservation with The Tamarisk Hunter. Again, potentially this isn’t something I will always enjoy because it can veer toward preachy but I think it most cases it avoided being too directly that.

My favourites were Pump Six – the tale of a society in decline where no-one is any longer interested in the technology that supports their lifestyle, Pop Squad – the story of a future where the trade-off for constant re-juvenation is enforced infertility, The Fluted Girl – about body modification gone mad, and The People of Sand and Slag – about the effects of physical invulnerability.

7/10 – definitely a good collection, some gems here.




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RED Book 27: Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett

I originally started this review with “I didn’t plan it but it turns out that my 26th book is Discworld #26 Thief of Time” – except I’d miscounted, it’s my 27th. Anyway this was a book I was looking forward to because I knew that it was a favourite of many people. There’s perhaps one more Discworld book that I am looking forward to in this way and that’s #29, Night Watch.

Thief of Time is a story about the History Monks and how they manage Time on the Disc. It’s about a young apprentice to Lu Tze, the Sweeper, who first appeared in #13 Small Gods. It’s also about the building of a clock so accurate that it follows the tick of the Universe.

I almost don’t know how to review Discworld books any more because I keep coming back to the same themes, that they’re good but I don’t love them like I once did, that I’m not sure if that’s the books or me, that maybe I just know the patterns of humour too well, that they’re always at least pleasant and some are excellent.

So by reputation this was supposed to be an excellent one and whilst it’s toward the better end, particularly of the Discworld books I’ve read lately it didn’t blow me away.

There’s a lot of fun to be had though and I wouldn’t want to put anyone off.

7/10 another reliably good Discworld read.




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RED Book 26: Finders Keepers – Belinda Bauer

So if you’re going to read, or are reading, Darkside then you may not want to read this review yet. It contains no actual spoilers but by implication it tells you at least one thing about the previous book.

Finders Keepers is I suppose the third in a trilogy of books which began with Blacklands but it’s more like the second Jonas Holly book after Darkside.

Finders Keepers begins as a child goes missing from a car on Exmoor and a note is left which reads “You Don’t Love Her”. More children go missing and similar notes are left. Once again a police team is sent across from Taunton, largely the same characters and once again Holly is involved in the investigation.

Steven Lamb returns again and plays a key role. Also this time we also get to meet his younger brother Davey who has a plan to catch the kidnapper.

There are things that Bauer is good at that she still does well in this book – the creation of tension and suspense, relationships between characters, particularly in families – but somehow it wasn’t as effective overall as her previous two books. I definitely didn’t have that same sense of wanting to know what happens next and being caught up in it. Also I think the actual crime and the villain are, ah, a little weird.

The main reason I read this straight after Darkside was to get resolution on Holly himself and you do get that but by the time it came the character was so abused – both in terms of himself and the way he’s used in the story – that I was a little jaded and didn’t really care. Which is a shame.

6/10 – not bad but failed to live up to the potential of the previous two books.




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RED Book 25: Darkside – Belinda Bauer

Darkside by Belinda Bauer is the follow up to Blacklands which I read and enjoyed a couple of years ago. I bought Darkside as soon as it came out but with the way these things go I found myself reading other things first. (This, by the way, is why I’m wary of start a series.)

It’s not quite a sequel to Blacklands although it’s set in the same part of the world and Steven Lamb, the hero of that book is a character in this. It’s a few years later and Steven is now a teenager but the book follows the village policeman Jonas Holly. Holly is relatively young and had a promising career but had to give it up when his wife got sick. They now live in the village of Shipcott. When an elderly woman is murdered as the local policeman Holly is obviously involved, but after a bad start with a team sent over from Taunton he soon becomes sidelined even as the investigation grows and more murders follow.

Something happened to me when I read this book that used to happen all the time and hardly ever seems to happen any more. It’s the reason I read and the thing I look for when I read. I got so swept up in what was happening that I couldn’t put the book down. I just wanted to keep reading in order to find out what happened next. So for that reason alone I really loved this book. I thought the characters were great and the interactions interesting. The head of the Taunton team, who takes an instant dislike to Holly, seems at first blush to just be a barely competent detective who is merely there as an adversary and contrast to Holly, but actually he’s more interesting than that. Holly’s relationship with his wife and the relationship between his work and looking after his wife are also story threads that engage.

There is one thing, and that is the ending. It wasn’t that I was disappointed or annoyed, merely that there was something about it that was left unanswered. Maybe it didn’t need to be and so I chose to reserve judgement.

9/10 – a slightly ambiguous ending but it didn’t spoil an excellent book.




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RED Book 24: The Truth – Terry Pratchett

Yay! Discworld #25. And I’m now into the 21st Century with my catch-up.

The Truth is an Ankh-Morpork centred novel about the arrival in the city of the printing press and the newspaper industry. I knew that this was one of Melissa’s less favourite discworld books and so I was prepared for it to be not that great. So maybe partly because of lower expectations I actually quite enjoyed it.

It was a little odd to have a story in which Vimes and Vetinari appeared but were not a huge part of the plot. There were a couple of new characters that seemed to be a bit over the top just for the sake of it. But I quite liked the protagonist, I liked his assistant/romantic interest and I enjoyed a couple of the other minor characters.

My reviews of Discworld books risk getting samey (like the books themselves?) so I’ll leave it there I think. I’ll try to save myself for the books that make more impact, and I believe #26 is supposed to be very good.

7/10 – another fun discworld romp.