Book (Fiction) – Page 4 – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

“Against a Dark Background” Iain M. Banks

The last of the Iain M. Banks books we own is the non-Culture book Against a Dark Background. This story is set in some indeterminate future (or secondary world) and follows Sharrow as she tries to find the artifact that will buy off the people who’re hunting her – without losing too much in the process.

Sharrow is a member of the aristocracy, one of the party people with access to the wealth and lifestyle that implies. Expelled from several finishing schools she describes herself as a difficult child who became an easy adolescent.

Sharrow is a veteran, she fought, nearly died and lost her unborn child in a recent war. She and her squad mates were synchroneurobonded, able to anticipate each other’s reactions in combat. In some ways as close as family, in other ways, well, in other ways as close as family that knows how to twist the knife.

Sharrow is an Antiquities hunter, she hunts treasure for pay. A swashbuckling maniser*, with a smart ass reply for every situation (no matter how unwise it might be) and a plan for every heist.

*c.f. “womaniser”, she and her female team-mate Zefla play the James Bond role in love ’em & leave ’em relationships.

Sharrow is the product of her life so far – obvious perhaps, but not always true for fictional characters 😉 Through the book there are flashbacks to formative events in her life, the book even starts with the scene of her mother’s assassination in front of her when she was only 5.

Sharrow is the umpteenth (and last) descendent in the female line from a woman who stole (or not) an artifact from a religious cult (or was abducted by them, or was abducted from them, it’s legend and origin story and the details fade into obscurity). Now the Huhsz must kill her before the new millenium so that their promised Messiah can be born. Or she can return the Lazy Gun her ancestor took (or didn’t) from them in the first place. Which is where the story starts – with her cousin Geis bringing the news that the Huhsz have their licences to legally hunt her.

On one level this is a book of adventure – I compared Sharrow above to James Bond, but she’s a James Bond that works with a team, who she brings back together for this one last hunt. They plot daring escapades, there are thrilling escapes and rescues, there are monomaniacally cackling villains to outwit and foil. But underneath that all there is a darker undercurrent. Sharrow’s life so far hasn’t been easy, her family is pretty dysfunctional and finding your chosen family in a military unit has its own stresses and fracture points. She’s done bad shit in the past, often with good intentions or at least not intentionally bad ones. But intent isn’t magic and she has to live with the real consequences. I didn’t think the ending was as bleak as the end of Consider Phlebas, but it’s still pretty bleak. I certainly wasn’t expecting the highlighted similarities between Sharrow & the Lazy Gun, nor was I expecting who the primary antagonist would turn out to be.

I enjoyed this one more than Consider Phlebas, so that’s a good note to finish re-reading Banks on. Next author on the shelf is Elizabeth Bear, which I’m looking forward to. I’ve got 9 of her books (and there are many more to buy), but she’s a relatively recent discovery for me so I’ve not re-read those before and they struck me on first reading as books that would have more to notice on a second read.

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

“Consider Phlebas” Iain M. Banks

I’ve been dragging my heels about writing up this book ever since I finished reading it nearly a month ago, because I’ve got no idea what to say about it. Consider Phlebas is the story of a Changer called Horza. Changers can alter their physiology to make themselves into a mimic of a person, and so make good spies or military agents. Horza is a minor figure in a vast war between the Indirans and the Culture. The war is about expansion and politics and beliefs, of course, but Horza’s part in it is down to a simple principle. The Indirans are all biological, but the Culture have machine AIs who are not just citizens of the Culture but heavily involved in running the Culture. And Horza feels that is wrong, on a deep fundamental level. He (and in fact his entire world/people) are on the Indiran side, despite the fact that the immortal Indirans regard mortals as not really people. At least they’re all biological, right?

Horza is rescued from near death after a mission goes wrong, and sent to capture a Mind (a Culture AI) which has gone to ground on a Planet of the Dead. A Planet of the Dead is sort of a museum exhibit – a particular civilisation preserve worlds where the sentient species self-destructed, and embargo them. Except that a few guardians are permitted, and for this particular Planet of the Dead those guardians are Changers, and Horza was once amongst their number. So he’s a good choice, but obviously things don’t go smoothly (there’d be no story otherwise). Horza ends up “rescued” by a mercenary ship after a space battle destroys the Indiran ship he was on, and must first ingratiate himself and then wait for his chance to fulfill his mission. As a supporting cast we have the various other mercenaries, and for a primary face of his antagonist we have the Special Circumstances agent Balveda who is trying to get to the Mind first (to rescue it).

And I got to the end of the book and just ended up feeling deflated. In retrospect I suppose it should’ve been obvious it was going to be a tragedy, but I wasn’t expecting it to end with it all feeling quite so pointless. Horza’s mission is important to him, but it’s not really important to the war, or to the Indirans. He just ends up a pawn ground to dust between vast forces he has no chance of affecting. He has chances to turn aside, to make a life for himself somewhere else away from the war – but he sticks to his principles, he does the right thing as he sees it. And the universe doesn’t care, the Indirans don’t care, mostly no-one even knows he existed. And his principles are misguided at best – the Indirans don’t care at all about him or anyone who isn’t an Indiran, Horza’s elevation of biologicalness as the most important thing is just convenient for the Indirans to make him more useful.

I prefer more optimism in my fiction, I think. Or maybe just less nihilism.

A note of comparison to the other books by Banks that I’ve read – identity is again a strong theme. Horza can change his entire appearance & mannerisms to mimic others, I don’t think we once see him in his natural form in the book. People are always interacting with who he’s presenting as, rather than who he is – and he definitely has issues with his identity, including recurring nightmares about forgetting his own name. I’m not sure if I missed something there – was Horza not his real name and I missed clues about that?

Another note is that I thought the Culture was “in our future” but this book makes it clear that’s not Banks’s intention – there are framing vignettes for the story that give Earth dates for the war, and it’s happening elsewhere in the universe during the past 600 years, or so.

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

“Enchanted Glass” Diana Wynne Jones

History lecturer Andrew Brandon Hope has just inherited his grandfather’s house and field of care – but at the beginning of this book neither he nor we have any idea what the latter really entails. About a year later, as he’s beginning to settle into the house 12 year old Aidan Cain turns up on his doorstep. Aidan’s grandmother has just died & she’d told him if he was ever in trouble he should go to Andrew’s grandfather – so here he is. The rest of the story revolves around Andrew’s field of care, Aidan’s parentage, and the magic they both have (but that Andrew had forgotten due to being concerned with being a grown-up).

This book was published in 2010, the year before Diana Wynne Jones’s death, and I don’t think I’d realised before that she was still writing as recently as that. She was one of my favourite authors when I was a kid but I never ended up buying many of her books because they were all in the school library. In fact I think I only own Archer’s Goon, but my favourites were the Chrestomanci books and Homeward Bounders. I was actually looking in the children’s section of the library to see if Homeward Bounders was on the shelf, but this was the only one of hers that was there – so I picked it up coz I’d not read it before.

If I’d been the right age for the book, I’d’ve loved it – as an adult it felt a little too pat at times and everything wrapped up rather easily. Which is not a criticism as such, just an acknowledgement it’s a children’s book I’m reading without the rosy glow of nostalgia 🙂 The tone of the book is fairly light-hearted – most of the secondary characters are broadly drawn & comic. And the antagonist is just sinister enough that you can tell, without being truly scary.

Which all sounds like it wasn’t a good book, but it was – it was a lot of fun to read. I liked the dopplegangers with one from the fairy world & the human world. I liked the servants Andrew inherits along with the house – a housekeeper and a gardener, a comic pair who’re quite determined to make sure that Andrew behaves as they think he should, but also both have their roles to play in the events of the plot. Amusingly both surnamed Stock, as are many in the village, it’s almost as if it’s full of stock types … 😉 The one thing I didn’t entirely like was the final reveal about Aidan’s father – it felt like it grew out of the story, in that the clues were all there, but the relationship it implied it didn’t sit well with me.

So overall, fun, but probably better if you’re 10 or 11 years old.

“Crewel” Gennifer Albin

I reserved Crewel at the library after reading an excerpt from the sequel on tor.com because I was interested in the premise. Don’t read the excerpt if you don’t want to be spoiled for some of the revelations in Crewel btw, and there are some spoilers for plot points later in this post as well.

In Crewel our protagonist is 16 year old Adelice who has just gone through the testing to see if she can become a Spinister – someone who can spin the very stuff of the world. She’s passed – accidentally, her parents had been coaching her how to fail. Tonight they are coming to take her away if she can’t escape. The world is a heavy-handed dystopia, young adult style. Boys and girls are segregated till after they’re 16, then must marry by 18. Women have limited job opportunities with only very 1950s-approved professions available to them (secretary, for instance). Everyone must keep themselves groomed to the appropriate standard – which for women means heavily made up using appropriate cosmetics. The Guild, who control the Spinsters, turn up with overwhelming force and drag Adelice off to her fate … Spinsters are kept in luxury, with their own stylists & so on to keep the girls happy coz we all know that’s all girls care about. But not Adelice, she’s made of sterner stuff and the primary driving force of the plot is for her & us to find out why they haven’t just killed her like they would a normal Spinster candidate who was causing so much hassle.

As you might tell from the tone of that paragraph I didn’t much enjoy the book. I could say “oh it’s YA, that’s why” but I don’t think that actually does excuse the lack of subtlety. There’s quite a lot of anvilicious foreshadowing, and when Adelice does something that shows she’s special we get it referenced several times over a few pages to make sure no-one reading can miss that this is Special. It probably does explain the love triangle which had me rolling my eyes, but that appears to be de rigueur if you have a female protagonist in a YA book. And I’d probably have liked it more when 16 or younger myself, but nowadays I feel it’s rather overdone as a trope.

I found the secondary characters rather shallow. The love interests appear to appeal to Adelice because they’re the first boys of approximately her own age she’s ever met. The antagonists are cartoonish – the leader of the Guild isn’t just interested in Adelice because of what makes her special but SPOILER he’s also interested in her (genuinely? as a means of control? I’m not sure). So there’s a forced-marriage sub-plot that appears out of almost nowhere at the end of the book, with bonus threat of brainwashing if she doesn’t agree. END SPOILER. The other antagonist is a more senior Spinster who takes a hatred to Adelice because Adelice is special and also her pretty boy fancies Adelice, and she’s sufficiently psychotic that she “cleans” (i.e. kills, via the world weaving stuff) a whole handful of people out of petty spite at Adelice not walking into a trap she set (which would’ve ended up with said people dead by Adelice’s hand instead). She doesn’t quite cackle and rub her hands together while talking about her evil plan … but she might as well.

I finished it mostly because it was a quick enough read & I did still like the premise of where this world of Spinsters who could mould reality came from. But I’ve no desire to read further.

“Poltergeist” Kat Richardson

This is the second of Kat Richardson’s urban fantasy/detective series about a Seattle-based PI who sees ghosts & can walk in the ghost world (I read the first one a couple of months ago). The set up for this book is that a psychologist is researching how people react to the idea that they are interacting with the paranormal – he’s set up an experiment where a group think they’ve generated a poltergeist, but he’s got someone faking the ghostly actions. Only now he’s getting things happening that his faker hasn’t faked – so he asks Harper Blaine to investigate & find out which of the group is faking the new stuff. Obviously, given the genre of the book the poltergeist is in fact real and significantly more dangerous than the psychologist comprehends – and Harper must figure out how to get rid of it without letting on that it’s real, and what caused it.

My specific criticism of Greywalker – that Harper appears to’ve appeared fully formed from nowhere is addressed. In this book there’s more of a sense of roots in the city pre-dating her becoming a greywalker, in particular her friend Phoebe & Phoebe’s family. There’s also another improvement that Richardson actually mentions in her afterword – in book 1 Harper didn’t have a mobile phone instead she just has a pager, which felt rather odd and made me wonder if the book wasn’t as recent as I thought. It turns out that the first book was written several years before it was published, and Richardson decided not to entirely update it to the “present day” of the publication date. This second book has Harper get a phone and even lampshades it by having her dislike how it lets people call her too early in the morning.

I still like how the series is tending towards the horror side of the supernatural beasties – this poltergeist is dangerous, and the vampire necromancer that Harper needs help from to deal with it has his own less-than-human perspective on appropriate punishments for the mind that is linked to the poltergeist. I also like how Harper has to hide what she is otherwise people would think she was crazy – it’s like our world, the default is that ghosts and vampires don’t exist. It’s just that in this case Harper and a very few others know that’s not true. But her understandable desire to not be seen as crazy is probably making her miss out on potential allies, I suspect as the series goes on she’ll let more people into the truth of her world – there are various things in this book that made me think that Harper’s need to keep herself to herself is being framed as something she needs to move beyond.

I think this still falls into the fun-read-once category – so I’ll carry on getting these from the library. Sadly the library don’t have the third book, but I’ve reserved the fourth one instead.

“Look to Windward” Iain M. Banks

I took two Iain M. Banks books away on holiday, this was the other one. Look to Windward is also set in his Culture universe, this time centring on some visitors to a Culture Orbital. An Orbital is a massive artificial habitat orbiting a star inhabited by tens of billions of people (human, alien, AI), all run by a single AI. As the story opens the Orbital is gearing up for ceremonies to mark the appearance of light from two supernovas that are 800 light years away. They weren’t natural, they were caused by a weapon wielded during a war that the Culture was involved in – and the AI that runs the Orbital, called Hub, was a warship during that war. While the weapon wasn’t used by the Culture they feel responsible & guilty for their involvement in a war that lead to such terrible acts & terrible loss of life. Hence the marking of the light reaching the Orbital. One of the non-Culture protagonists is Ziller, a composer in self-imposed exile from Chel, who is composing a new piece for the occasion. Quillan, another Chelgrian has recently arrived on the Orbital, ostensibly with the mission of meeting with Ziller & persuading him to return home. But all is not what it seems here & we find out (along with Quilan) via flashback spaced out through the story. Quilan is also a veteran of war – a war caused by the Culture’s meddling in his civilisation’s politics, for which they now feel terribly guilty.

It’s been ages since I’ve read these books, and in my memory the Culture was always very much The Good Guys. But it actually seems more ambiguous than that. I mean, it’d be pretty cool to live in the Culture – it’s a true utopia, and post-scarcity one too. A Culture citizen seems pretty much to be able to do what they want to do and live how they want to live. However the overall civilisation is definitely prone to hubris when it comes to dealing with other civilisations. They (or at least Special Circumstances) meddle, and meddle “knowing” that they Know Best. And when it goes wrong, they’re oh so terribly sorry but they don’t seem to learn from it – 800 years on from a war that culminated in two supernovae they’re still meddling in others’ politics before they know enough to do so.

Culture AI are also definitely not bounded by human feelings about unnecessary brutality when they are “off the leash” and undertaking reprisals. Both the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw in Use of Weapons (post) and the unnamed weapon who appears in two vignettes in this book seem glad of the opportunity to cause suffering when they’ve got an excuse. Both scenes are unsettling because of the gleefulness of the AIs in question.

I had a couple of quibbles with the structure/pacing of the story. It’s obvious from the beginning that both Quilan and Hub are veterans of war, but the other parallels between them don’t appear till late on in the book just before you need to know about them for the ending to make sense. It would’ve been nice to have that seeded in the story earlier, but maybe I just missed some clues. There was also a sub-plot with an off-world Culture citizen who discovers the true plan for Quilan and is trying to get back to warn them. And it just didn’t really seem to go anywhere in the end. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was neat – particularly as this Culture citizen was studying another alien ecosystem where the aliens were truly alien rather than just differently shaped. But I’m not sure what it brought to the overall story.

It did tie in thematically by the end, though – memory & identity were a part of the ending of that thread as they were for the other threads. So far all three Banks books I’ve read have had something about identity, and concealment of parts of oneself – either internally or externally imposed. I’ll be looking out for it in the next ones.

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

“Use of Weapons” Iain M. Banks

I’m reading through the Iain M. Banks in “the order they are on the shelf” which I have a suspicion might be random. Most (all?) of the half a dozen or so that we own are standalone I believe, so this should work out OK. I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of them before but sufficiently long ago that I can’t remember what happens.

Use of Weapons is set in Banks’s Culture universe – a far future human & AI interstellar, well, culture who are very much post-scarcity. They are one of the more technologically advanced civilisations in their era & part of the universe, and they benevolently interfere in the affairs of other civilisations to make sure things go the way they feel they should. To do this they often hire members of other civilisations to do the dirty work, and Zakalwe was one of these operatives. He’s retired, mostly, but Special Circumstances (the interfering branch of the Culture) think he’s the only man for this particular job and Diziet Sma (a human Culture citizen) and Skaffen-Amtiskaw (a drone, an AI Culture citizen) are dispatched to persuade him to join them.

The story is told in a very non-linear fashion, and it’s not always entirely clear where the episode you’re reading fits into the narrative but it doesn’t feel confusing. Towards the end it begins to coalesce into a coherent whole, but it’s not until the last (pre-epilogue) scene that you get the final piece of information that makes it snap completely into focus. And not the focus you might’ve expected.

In some ways it reminded me of The Wasp Factory (post). Not in terms of gruesomeness, Use of Weapons wasn’t short of gruesome but it wasn’t as much front and centre as it was in The Wasp Factory. But it reminded me of it because of the way the very end of the book changes how all before it looked, yet you’re left feeling like the clues were there and you just didn’t see them. It did feel a bit like Banks cheated tho – there’s a couple of sections where the reader is misled as to whose point of view we’re seeing it from in a way that isn’t possible to figure out till after the fact. Despite that the conclusion feels satisfying.

I’m sure I missed a lot of the stuff that’s going on underneath the surface of the story, it felt like there was a lot of complexity there if you paid attention to it. Stuff to think about about identity, and atonement. But I’m not sure I’ve got my thoughts sufficiently sorted out to articulate any of them. Particularly not in a non-spoilery fashion, and it’s a book it would be a shame to spoil – worth a first read through not knowing where it ends up I think.

This will stay out on the shelves, I enjoyed reading it and it’s definitely worth a re-read (hopefully before I’ve forgotten what it was about again!).

< Previous on the Shelf | Next on the Shelf >

“All Our Yesterdays” Cristin Terrill

The book opens with Em in a cell, obsessed with & terrified by the drain in the floor and plotting her & her fellow prisoner’s escape. Her discovery of a note in her own handwriting in the drain – a note she knows she hasn’t written – leads to their success. And the two use their captor’s time machine to head back to 4 years earlier to try & stop the seemingly inevitable chain of events that lead to that cell. The other main point of view is Marina – who starts the book seemingly a shallow, sheltered, spoilt teenage girl obsessed with her looks & the boy next door. Thankfully it quickly becomes clear that not only is that not really an accurate description but also her character arc involves growing out of appearing that way.

Again I picked this up from the library after a review on Tor.com – this time the reviewer had mentioned that she didn’t normally read YA but was glad she’d accidentally read this one. So I still read it even after the disappointment of Gwenda Bond’s The Woken Gods (post) which I’d partly chalked up to it being YA and me not being the target audience, and I’m glad I did read it. Having just read & written up my impressions of Bond’s book something that was very striking about this book was how it felt like the world did exist outside of where the characters & author were focusing on. And Marina in particular has a very naive world view, yet as the reader you see more than she does. The characters feel real, and you get to see enough of their environment & backstory for it to feel like their relationships & attitudes come from their upbringing & their basic personality. In particular I re-read the very first Marina chapter while I was writing the first paragraph of this review, and I was struck by all the little details about Marina & her friends & family. I was left with a sensation that of course this girl acted like that then, just look how she lived & how people treated her.

Being a time travel novel, the plot is like a jigsaw puzzle or an intricate piece of knotwork. I think Cristin Terrill did a good job of setting up the revelations so that you began to realise who someone was or what the cause of an event was just enough before the reveal that it felt right. A few things were hidden by clever word choice or by not naming someone, but generally those were lampshaded reasonably well – like a little conversation between Finn & Em about how she can’t bring herself to use the antagonist’s real name any more. I mean, it’s obvious it’s there to keep some doubt going about who it is in the earlier timeline, but I was willing to accept it for long enough for it to do its job. Terrill also manages to pull off telling us how the loop & the plot will be resolved right near the beginning – the note says “you have to kill him”. But there’s still tension. And even tho you know how it will inevitably end, you don’t know how it will end – what the details are, how it will play out.

There’s a lot of underlying stuff about consequences in the book – kinda obviously as it’s a time travel story. But this also feeds into one of the themes – do the ends justify the means? If you “know” that killing someone will prevent a lot of other deaths, should you do it? Even before they did the things they did? The antagonist is definitely someone who believes that the ends justify the means, but isn’t Em too? And unintended consequences abound – the antagonist is trying to fix things, make the world a better place, but the cumulative effect of his fixes make the world overall a worse place even as the specific things don’t happen.

It’s not flawless – no book is. I had a niggling feeling that not really enough time had passed between the two time periods for people to’ve changed the way they did, but that Terrill had wanted to keep Em & Finn young adults so 4 years was all we got. I also have a niggling feeling that if I poked at the plot enough I’d find other paradoxes (not just the one that’s lampshaded in the text as the way time travel works), but the strength of the book is that I don’t want to follow up on that niggle.

A good book. It ends in a satisfying place, but I believe Terrill is writing a sequel – presumably working out the unintended consequences of the end of this one 🙂

“The Woken Gods” Gwenda Bond

Kyra is a teenager living in Washington, D.C. – but this is a Washington after the gods have woken and are walking the Earth among us. After her father disappears she & her friends band together to try & find him. What Kyra finds is that she’s not just a normal girl, and the reasons for her father’s disappearance have implications for the whole world.

I picked this up from the library after I read a review of this on Tor.com, and it mentioned that instead of the “normal” pantheons of gods that you often find in fiction like Greek or Norse gods this book had Egyptian gods (amongst others). So I thought I’d give it a go, despite it being Young Adult. I think one reason I have problems with this book is that I’m not the target audience any more – I suspect at age 13 I’d’ve liked it a lot more. It feels very “young”.

There wasn’t really much Egyptian mythology. Sekhmet has been executed shortly after the gods woke by the Society as a show of power over the gods – and that’s a shame coz I’m fond of Sekhmet. But I guess if you (i.e. the Society) want to make a point about how living gods can be killed then killing off a personification of rage & war makes that point well. The on-screen Egyptian god is Set, along with a Sumerian god (Enki), the Voodoo god(?) Legba and a selection of other trickster gods (Coyote, Loki, Hermes all get walk-on parts). Sadly Bond refers to Set as jackal headed*, which then made me wonder how well researched any of the gods I didn’t know about were.

*According to the books on Egyptian gods that we have, it isn’t known what the Set animal actually represents and it’s thought to be completely mythological … wikipedia on the other hand says the Set animal is a jackal in one of the articles. Did all of the mythology come from wikipedia? I don’t know enough about the rest to know.

The world-building in general was a bit on the insubstantial side. It didn’t feel like the world existed outside of where the author was looking. Too much of the world seemed to be carrying on as if it was business as usual as if when the gods woke everyone just kind of shrugged and got on with life. But then when “cool facts” were needed we had differences – like horse drawn carriages coz tech is affected (how?) & no-one flies anywhere coz interference by a god when you’re on a plane is more likely to be fatal. The government has apparently been replaced by the Society – in the US? in the world? I don’t know. Most of the time the fact that there’s a country outside Washington D.C. isn’t obvious, let alone a world outside the US. And apparently (and plot-importantly) this all happened only 5 years ago, but it feels far too settled for that. It could be that Kyra is just uber-sheltered (a distinct possibility) but it would’ve been nice if the reader was made more aware of that even if Kyra herself didn’t notice.

There’s a phrase I’ve seen used in reviews of various books elseweb – “Too much boyfriend, too little X”. And that sums up most of my impression of the book – in this case X is Egyptian mythology, or maybe just mythology in general. I could’ve done with less of Kyra’s drooling over the love interest’s muscular chest, and more attention paid to the world the story was in. Overall a disappointing read that could’ve been cool.

“Delusion in Death” J. D. Robb

J. D. Robb is a pen name for Nora Roberts who writes mostly romance & romance/crossover novels under her real name. Robb writes futuristic crime/thrillers, and her protagonist is Eve Dallas, a police lieutenant in a future NYPD homicide division. There are loads of these books, all called Something In Death, this one (Delusion in Death) is last autumn’s one (there appear to be two per year). In it Dallas must figure out what could make a bar full of perfectly normal business people suddenly slaughter each other – leaving 80 dead and nearly no witnesses. What could’ve caused this, who did it & why? And can Dallas stop the perpetrator from doing it again?

These books are guilty pleasure books for me, candy floss for the brain – ok in small doses but you wouldn’t want too much. There’s definitely a formula for these, a pattern to the shape of the story that holds true across the whole series. And I have the distinct feeling that the choice of a futuristic setting is to remove the need to have the murder methods be plausible with today’s tech or have the police follow acceptable to now standards. She’s even written in a collapse of society & rebuild in between now & then so extrapolation from here to there doesn’t need to be obvious. (Although having said that, the world she’s invented for them does hang together pretty well it’s not just a get out of jail free card she’s put some thought into it.) It doesn’t stop them being fun reads, and a series that I will pick up the next instalment of as soon as I see it in the library (and mostly finish reading while standing in the library) but I won’t bother reserving them.

Robb/Roberts’s strength is creating characters and making them feel real, and distinct. Obviously in this series Eve Dallas and the other recurring characters get fleshed out gradually over the course of several books, but even the one-offs for this book feel like individuals. Even the antagonist – who’s a pathetic weasel of a person, not a meglomaniac or caricature.

I don’t know if I’ve really got anything else to say about this book – fun but possibly not worth looking too closely at the plot in case I see holes.