What makes a good page turner? Anyone seeking the answer needs only to devour the final fifty or so pages of Bad Apples. Allow yourself to be drawn in – which is a hands down certainty in itself – and you will be turning pages with increasing rapidity, helpless to resist. Desperate to know the outcome. Curbing impatience. Reining in an inevitable urge to skip ahead. This is the third of Will Dean’s deeply atmospheric thrillers featuring deaf journalist Tuva Moodyson. Again she is embroiled in the eerie closed-in communities of Sweden’s northern forests. A harsh land of hard-living people;… Continue reading
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CAN’T help wondering how many of the doubtless thousands of air fryers bought in the Christmas shopping madness will end up discarded, re-gifted or otherwise dumped. This must surely be the most useless bit of kitchen gadgetry ever. Over-publicised, over-promoted and oversold it is destined for the dump once reality… Continue reading
November 11, 2022
Frying the air is no way to cook →
Kitchen gadgets come and go. Yet so few stay with us unless stored well out of sight and accessibility. There is a damned good reason for this; cooking is a sensory art. A touchy feely joy; the fondling foreplay before the final act of love – presenting your creation. It… Continue reading
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TWENTY-FIVE thousand? Really? Did I read that correctly? Surely someone with stuttering fingers has been clicking the head-counter at Sharm-al-Sheikh. Or perhaps Rishi has seconded a number-cruncher from the Treasury (you know how good they are with numbers) to lend a hand with collating the stats at Cop27. Whatever the… Continue reading
It is catch-up time . . . . . . and therefore time to continue an already long overdue review of recent reads with this triple treat of works from some of the best in the crime fiction business. Go-to authors who you know will always deliver the goods. Endlessly… Continue reading
EMERGENCY service workers are well known for their macabre sense of humour; for having a giggle with the gore. It is, as they will attest, the only way they can cope with the scenes that daily confront them. The dead and dying, the mortally mangled, bodies broken almost beyond repair. Situations that have to be dealt with humanely, immediately and without flinching. No turning away, no averting the eyes but stepping bravely into the chaos and mayhem ahead. Scenarios of such awfulness that their full horror is rarely revealed to the public at large. It is an immersive experience no… Continue reading