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
Reviews and Commentary
Author Adele Parks is a tease. Relentlessly so. At least, judging by One Last Secret (paperback, HQ/Harper Collins, 2022) it seems she simply can’t help herself. She never stops. Just when you think you know what is going on, she drops another bombshell and lures you into reading on . Continue reading
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WITH Covid and staff shortages becoming the default excuse for poor service and faulty products it is sad to see the malaise spreading to the world of publishing. Errors there are so visible and so irritating to readers. For publishers they are so difficult and costly to correct. In specialist… Continue reading
IT has been a while – far too long, in fact – since I was last in the moody company of Arkady Renko, the rebellious investigator who is a perennial thorn in the side of Moscow prosecutor, the devious Zurin. Back then, in 1981, Arkady’s creator, Martin Cruz Smith, was… Continue reading
November 30, 2021
Trigger-happy woke brigade way off target →
WHO would have thought it? Who in their wildest imaginings would have been prepared for such a sudden assault on their mental processes? Thank goodness, therefore, for those ever-alert guardians of our sensibilities and weak spots. The do-gooders who see harm where none exists; and attach needless warnings of possible… Continue reading
THE joys of reading are many and varied. Too many delights exist to be contained within a strictly defined list. And always they are dependent on time, place, purpose and numerous further variables. It’s a statement clearly not made to broadcast some newly discovered truth. But uttered in the hope of spreading light into dark corners where doubters and confirmed non-readers can still be found. A truth worth repeating. One of reading’s pleasures is the TBR. This is book-lover talk for To Be Read. This is a limitless list. It can contain a single title or extend to such lengths… Continue reading