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The Island, by Adrian McKinty

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The Island by Adrian McKinty My rating: 2 of 5 stars Bog-Standard Survival, Served With a Side of Pretension This is one of those “family vacation turns nightmare” survival thrillers that runs perfectly well on rails, and that’s exactly the problem: I’ve seen these rails so often that there’s no tension left in them. “The Island” isn’t badly written, and it certainly keeps moving, but it’s moving through a landscape of ideas that has been strip-mined for decades. You can almost hear the genre machinery: chase, threat, escalation, “resourcefulness”, repeat. What really sank it for me is the book’s intermittent insistence on being profound. Every now and then, the prose swells up, as if volume could substitute for insight. Chapter 24 gives us: » Civilization meant nothing here. Perhaps it had always meant nothing. There were no monsters on Dutch Island, but the beast was man, had always been man. « This is not depth, it’s a poster slogan pretending it just discovered human nature. Even...
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Talking to the Dead (Fiona Griffiths #1), by Harry Bingham

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Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was an odd, sometimes compelling, sometimes exasperating mix of police procedural and psychological thriller, and it never quite decides which one it wants to be. The result, for me, is a book that kept pulling me along, then tripping itself up. The premise is undeniably strong: a "damaged", hyper-observant detective-in-training, a grim Welsh setting, a dead girl who does not stay neatly dead (at least, not in the way the narrative wants her to), and a mystery with enough hooks to keep the pages turning. When Bingham focuses on the investigation, the novel has that familiar genre satisfaction: clues, reversals, institutional friction - albeit with a slightly skewed angle that separates it from the more straightforward, momentum-first crime writing I usually enjoy. » I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives. « My main problem with this novel...
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The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

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The Dutch House by Ann Patchett My rating: 2 of 5 stars “ But nothing ever happens ” - “Lemon Tree” (Fool’s Garden) I’m going to spoil this rather thoroughly, so proceed with mild caution. Maeve and Danny are the children of Cyril and Elna Conroy. Cyril built a property empire from scratch, taking Danny along to collect rent in cash. Maeve, Danny’s older sister, is mostly sidelined and left in the care of “Fluffy”, the nanny, and the household staff, Sandy and Jocelyn. » “Money,” our father said, nodding. It wasn’t a complicated idea. « Elna is largely out of the picture after leaving, first periodically, soon permanently. While Danny is mostly unaffected due to not even remembering his mother, Maeve is desperate to see her again. A few years after Elna leaves, Cyril marries his second wife, Andrea, who becomes Maeve’s and Danny’s evil stepmother. When Cyril unexpectedly dies, Andrea basically evicts everyone but her own two children, Norma and Bright, from the eponymous “Dutch Hous...
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple

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Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple My rating: 3 of 5 stars I went into Maria Semple's " Where'd You Go, Bernadette " expecting a clever, slightly chaotic satire with a warm centre. That’s mostly what I got, but I also got a structure that kept tripping me up. Bernadette is, by design, difficult: brilliant, prickly, and permanently on the verge of bolting. Semple captures the specific kind of marital whiplash where the person you love becomes unrecognisable, and you’re left staring across the table, wondering when it happened. » There was a terrifying chasm between the woman I fell in love with and the ungovernable one sitting across from me. « Bee, thankfully, is the emotional anchor. She’s smart, steady, and quietly funny, and I cared about her far more than I cared about the Seattle “eccentrics” circling her mother like gnats. » One of the gnats at Galer Street claims I ran over her foot at pickup. I would laugh at the whole thing, but I’m too bored. ...
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Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare (The Watson Files #1), by J.R. Rain & Chanel Smith

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Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare by J.R. Rain My rating: 1 of 5 stars I learned to read by secretly snatching my mother’s early 20th-century editions of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Since then, the fascination with anything Holmes has never left me. Many have tried to spin further tales of Holmes and Watson; some did well, others failed miserably. This one, sadly, falls into the latter category. The story is rather convoluted, albeit light in detail. Watson is reduced to a mere admiring fan, trapped in a constant " reverie and renewed admiration for Mr. Holmes ", while Holmes himself is more of a generic action hero than a detective. In one particularly jarring scene, " Holmes delivered a punishing uppercut to the man’s jaw " so hard his feet left the ground, before the detective " delivered an unforgiving heel kick to his jaw to finish him off ". This isn't the Holmes of Baker Street; it's a Victorian John Wick. The writing is medio...
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The Girl in the Ice (Detective Erika Foster #1), by Robert Bryndza

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The Girl in the Ice by Robert Bryndza My rating: 3 of 5 stars A young high society woman is murdered and DCI Erika Foster from the London Metropolitan Police is sent to investigate. Foster has just returned from extended compassionate leave after her husband’s death, which she blames herself for - on basically every single page. Either because of that or because she has a completely annoying personality, Foster is pretty much constantly acting offensive, rude, and annoying. As if that weren’t enough in itself, she keeps making spectacularly stupid mistakes: She goes to the slummiest bars on her own, she searches a home she has to assume is life-threateningly dangerous on her own, even after having been assaulted by the murderer before. There doesn’t seem to be much more to her character either: Throughout the entire novel, Foster remains a sketch of herself. Apart from working, she doesn’t seem to do or reflect on anything. Since she gets suspended for insubordination relatively earl...
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These Silent Woods, by Kimi Cunningham Grant

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These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant My rating: 2 of 5 stars Gorgeous setup, then a miraculous theological derailment Wow, didn’t that blurb read great? And it started off well enough in the woods where Cooper and his daughter have been hiding for years. The atmosphere felt genuine and plausible, the prose was smart and elegant, the characters endearing - what could possibly go wrong? Cooper especially, and Finch to a lesser extent, live a tense but ultimately peaceful life: they hunt and gather, roam through the wilderness, and they do so frequently, extensively, and repeatedly. Yes, some of these excursions bring new information, but did we really need to hear about the “King of Trees” and each of its manifold brethren? Well, yes, I felt bored with large parts of this novel, but then it got worse: A certain character is introduced, and suddenly, drastically, the story springs into action. What ensues is completely unbelievable and seems to be the author’s traditionalist theo...
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