Category: Krimi

Good Reads meta-data is 289 pages rated 3.0 by five litizens
Genre: Krimi, puzzle

Verdict: borderline boring.
Among the aged retainers residing by grace and favour at Hampton Court Palace is old General Hamilton (Ret.) who goes each night to sit by the River Thames and recall the glory days. For reasons never explained he carries a chair with him each night and it is several times mentioned but plays no part in the proceedings. He is good humoured and much liked, living with his sprightly niece who is also well liked.
The equally aged staff, doormen, gardeners, maids, and night-watchmen, are sure there is a ghost in the grounds and this spectre is much invoked but plays no part in the plot. It is fabled the ghost is Samuel Pepys clad in a garish jackanapes coat. There are several references to Pepys but again they are sidebars without advancing the plot. The general’s niece has a colourful coat that provides the mystery.
One night the general is stabbed to death and all are agog. Strangely none of the elderly residents fears that they will be next, though that would surely be the reaction of some among such a group. Instead the protagonists, led by Annabel Sinclair, Lady-in-Waiting (Ret.), leap to the conclusion that — because of the coat — plod will focus on the niece who is completely innocent and to shield her the bulk of the novel consists of a three-ply tissue of lies to mislead the police inspector Margetson.
Quite how the inspector is to solve the crime when everyone lies to him is anyone’s guess. But this is not his first case and he expects lies and works through them with a patience that this reader did not have as I flicked the pages. Indeed he does not solve it, but after 280 pages of lies, the elderly villain commits suicide and leaves and explanatory note.
The setting is unique and fully exploited but because the characterisations are paper-thin and there is no action it hardly matters.
It reads like a puzzle krimi, providing the reader with all the clues to figure out the plot. The acme of this type is certainly Agatha Christie’s ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ (1926). Any hardened krimi reader will figure it out well before page 280, but the prose limps on.
Hampton Court Palace (1515+ ) has a long history as a grace and favour residence. (The last resident admitted by this means was in 1980, says Sarah Parker in ‘Grace & Favour: The Hampton Court Palace Community 1750-1950’ (2005), p. 126. Those in residence remained until 2009 when the last left. Grace and favour is extended by the monarch to those who have rendered past services, and include widows and dependents of such servants. Military officers and court officials (including retired ladies in waiting) are among those so favoured. By the way, none of this is explained in the novel, but derives from Wikipedia.
Edith Keate (1867-1945) was a civil servant who researched and wrote a ‘Guide to Hampton Court Palace’ and other official works about public places.

She penned five other krimis but one is enough for me for the moment. It has been re-issued in the Black Heath Classic Crime series rendered for Kindle. It seem odd that Cardinal Wolsey who built it is never mentioned.
By the way she is E. M. Keate though the Amazon listing has her as M. E. Keate.

Genre: Krimi
GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.6 by 1004 litizens

Verdict: Read all about it!
Capability Weeks, a young woman of nineteen, works for the editor of the Ladies’ Page on the stuffy and staid New York ‘Sentinel’ newspaper in 1915. She and her father, Julian, have only recently returned to the States after decades abroad in Europe and Asia. That experience gives her the caché to land the newspaper job but leaves her unprepared for the manners and mores of the time and place. Though the pair are comfortably well off, Mr Weeks grudging approves of Capability’s work, provided it in no way interferes with her home duties, which fall to her because her mother and his wife died years ago. Later in the book, this need to run the home comes into conflict with her journalistic ambitions.
It was a time of breakneck economic growth, raging war in Europe, submarine attacks in the Atlantic, and a tsunami of immigrants. A volatile mix in the making.
Because it is new to her, Capability observes New York City and its denizens with interest, the skyscrapers, the wind tunnel streets, the underground subway, the class snobbery, the social distance between classes, the profusion of newspapers. All of this brought to the mind the two great chroniclers of the Gilded Age (1880-1917), as the period was later called, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and Capability is no match for either of them. It was a time of rapid economic growth that promised to go on forever, with it streamed millions of immigrants arriving at this new Eden every year. At the same time stupendous wealth was concentrated in the railway and banking barons, a few of whom appear in these pages. (Aside, one of these lesser magnates endowed Duke University where the author of this book obtained a PhD.)
One day the Ladies’ Page editor is indisposed, and sends this ingenue in her place to an elaborate garden party with Japanese daytime fireworks. (A new idea to me which is fully explained in a Wikipedia entry.) While passing among the great and the (not so) good at the party Capability studies them, and has an unpleasant encounter with the penniless scion of a once great fortune, Hunter Cole and his burlesque dancer wife. Capability and the wife hit if off, both being fish out of water in this set. Cole is a rude and crude bore, despite his illustrious forbears. Think of a radio shock jock and there you have him. Seasoned krimi readers will have no trouble in picking him as the first to go, and he does — good riddance — during the fireworks display. Capability may have been the last to see him alive and the first to see him dead.
Because she was there the newspaper editor reluctantly assigns her to assist the male journalist covering murder, but in a very circumscribed role suitable for a woman. She chaffs at that, the more so when she sees how superficial the male journalist approaches the subject. (Ahem, what’s new.)
However the police investigation applies the standard operating procedure of the time and blames Hillary Clinton. (Just joking to see if the reader is paying attention.) No the SOP is to find the nearest immigrant who barely speaks English, in this case an Italian stable hand, and pin the crime on him and beat a confession out of him. This satisfies the police and the journalist, but Capability finds it a long bow.
The book is rich in the detail of life in that rarefied stratum, time, and place, which is seen afresh, if not with the wit and insight of James or Wharton. For example, Capability is assigned an interview with Miss Anne Morgan (yes, of that Morgan family) about her book ’The American Girl: Her Education, Her Responsibility, Her Recreation’ (1915) who like a Hollywood star today displays celebrity compassion for working women. However Capability and this reader, too, found Miss Morgan to be streets ahead of them. That was refreshing. In so many krimi writers there is the ambition to write social criticism by portraying others, especially the rich, the famous, the successful, as grasping dunderheads and imbeciles. Not so here. Miss Morgan knows herself, including her own blind spots. Woe to a journalist who tries to trip her up.
Likewise Capability’s chance encounter with a German diplomat is very well presented. He may be up to shady things but he is no cardboard stereotype, and when called to account for his actions, makes a cogent statement.
Another compensation is the broader canvas the novel offers, no character in a James or Wharton book ever spoke to a stable hand, an Italian immigrant, or visited the Tombs (if one does not know what this is, look it up because it still exists, or did when I saw it in 1980).
In this era everyone is addressed in every exchange by title, thus ‘Miss Weeks.’ While I am sure that is accurate, it is tedious to read, like those rituals of formality that plump up Alexander McCall Smith’s slender stories. The constraints on women are many and they are made apparent but not to a didactic drumbeat of hindsight such as is found in other krimis that want to offer a discounted, hindsight social criticism, i.e., for the author to display peacock feathers of virtue.
The author distinguishes characters, offers their distinct perspectives, and steers on without losing focus. This is the first in a series.

Radha Vatsai
Bones to pick, I have a few, somewhere along the way Capability becomes Kitty to friends and family. Yes, the name does refer to the gardener though why did not register with me.

GoodReads metadata is 256 pages, rated 3.57 by 132 litizens
Genre: Krimi, sub-species Locked Room murder.

Verdict: More, please.
In the hallowed halls of Westminster a financier sits down to dine tête-à-tête with his old friend, the Home Secretary in a private room. The subject of conversation will be money, a lot of it for the Exchequer is at low tide. But before the Home Secretary can pop the question of a gigantic loan, the division bell rings and off he goes to the floor of the House of Commons to cast his vote, leaving Money Bags alone in a closed room with an attendant outside. Yes, I know, not literally a locked room but near enough.
When the Home Secretary, famed both for this stupidity and honesty, the former, say the wits, explains the latter, returns to dinner he finds Money Bags shot dead!
While Scotland Yard puts in an appearance, a young parliamentary secretary is drafted to investigate the nooks and crannies of Westminster where no plod is likely to make headway. The Tory government is already rocky and this murder could send it to the bottom in no time, unless there is a quick resolution that clears the air. More generally the murder of a major financier does not enhance the reputation of England as a safe investment to other financiers!
As a guide to the topography of parliament of the time, this is Baedeker in all but name. It comments on the accommodation, the food, the time to get from one place to another, the friendliness of locals, the standard of service. and so on.

The author was a Labor MP and she has an eye for details, and the wit for satire, all of which is well judged. Just enough to taste but not too much to jade.
It is far superior to J V Turner’s ‘Below the Clock’ set in the same time and place, discussed elsewhere on this blog. This leaden title is rated higher at 3.64, such is the idiocy of the species.

Good Reads meta-data is 383 pages, rated a measly 3.7 by 2515 litizens.
Genre: Libel, krimi

Verdict: How did it get published!
Paris, February 1980. Roland Barthes (1915–1980) noted obscurantist, died in a street accident. But was it an accident? Did he die then or later? Indeed, what is death?
Why were Bulgarians there on the zebra crossing? Where is the notebook that Barthes always carried with him as he read the signs? (But evidently not the one in front of him which said ‘Ne march pas.’) What are the six functions of language? Why are several witness short of fingers? Is Michel Foucault (1926 -1984) completely nuts? Why do those two over there always carry umbrellas? Did the Gulf War occur? Such a lot of questions, it must be a seminar.
The President of the Republic himself assigns the investigation of this accidental death to Commissar Jacques Bayard! A traffic accident! ‘Moi, one of the most experienced detectives since Maigret, saddled with a street accident,’ thinks Bayard. Sacré bleu!
Bayard soon finds that he has landed on Mars. As a representative of the repressive state apparatus in his crumpled Bon Marché polyester suit, driving a clapped-out deux chevaux, bearing chronic shoulder pain from a stab wound inflicted on him by a doped-up junkie, smoking cheap cigarettes, no intellectual will speak to him. They all delight in reviling him in polysyllabic words while proclaiming their humanity.
In addition to Foucault (who is completely nuts) he meets Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Louis Althussier (1918-1990), Phillippe Soller (1936-) , Julia Kristeva (1941-), Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948-), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), and their acolytes. Bayard cracks a tooth clenching his jaw while trying to get one of these useless clowns to answer a simple question. He resists the temptation to slap them around. Though his self-control weakens when he remembers the good old days in Algeria when a slap was the start of an interrogation in a basement room that could be hosed out later.
To navigate this world of extra-terrestrials Bayard press-gangs a cicerone and translator, a Phd student from the mud heap of Vincennes, Simon Herzog, and off this mismatched pair goes: First to Bologna to interview the master reader of signs, semiologist Umberto Eco (1932-2016) who can tell them nothing useful at great length. In Bologna they also cross paths with the Red Brigades, happily murdering by-standers while shouting clichés. And behind the moustaches are more Bulgarians.
Then on to Ithaca….
How Binet managed to publish this libellous and delightful book is the real mystery here. Though the great intellectuals he parodies were often so ridiculous only a PhD could take them seriously, Binet’s achievement is to make them even more absurd than they made themselves. Who would have thought that was possible. Of course the joke is on all those PhDs who incant their names with reverence. This is all the more surprising considering both the grim subject and gritty style of his previous novel ‘HHhH’ (2010).
This is most singular book I have read in ages.

Good Reads meta-data is 529 pages, rated 3.9 by 759 citizens
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Oh hum
Another in a long series of the adventures of Inspector Fredrick Troy. In it he crosses the path of Kim Philby’s network of Soviet spies in England. As always in these krimis Troy finds incompetence vying with corruption in the English policing, politics, and society. He, like Christopher Foyle, is alone virtuous. All other are fallen.
Troy continues to feel sorry for himself though the early years of the Cold War in 1956. He combines upper class snobbery with world weary ennuni. He is a man of many parts. On the one hand every short-changing newsagent sets him off on the lecture about the corruption of the British, while on the other he accepts or ignores his brother-in-law’s admission of murder, his wife’s years as a Soviet agent whose work no doubt took lives, and a traitorous old school tie. The sanctimonious Troy evidently sees no contradiction in any of this hypocrisy. There is, alas, no reason to think any of this is ironic.
There are estimates that the information Philby supplied to the KGB led to the torture and murder of about sixty individuals, and the imprisonment of more. The victims were largely anti-Soviet nationals in Central and Southern Europe. None of these events bothers Troy as much as a Special Branch officer demanding to see his ID.
In character Troy is exactly the sort of disaffected child of privilege that the Soviets recruited. This is an irony beyond the author’s ken.
The plot is intricate but it takes a millennium for it to evolve. Every page is padded with lengthy and pointless descriptions, e.g., of the cracking brickwork of a train station, or the clothes of woman. I gave up reading most of this descriptions since it did not contribute to plot or character.
It is well-written true. The plot, when it finally emerges, is neat. The characters are diverse. But…. well, it seemed like a very long short story that went nowhere for scores of chapters. I flipped through a third of it without losing the thread. Maybe more. Nor did I feel like I was missing anything.
There are discussions of other Lawton titles on this blog. Seek and find.

GoodReads meta-data is 324 pages, rated 2.9 by 108 litizens.
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Dan (Brown) started here.
The sleuth in change of the City of the Flower in the year of their lord 1300 is Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) is called to the site of a ruined ship in the marshes of the Arno with a manacled and dead crew. Is this a life boat from the Mary Celeste, or what? Turns out it is ‘or what.’
Florence is ruled by a small but typical committee — shutter! — whose members are Priors, and Dan is one of them. The others are busy with training seminars, bickering over trivialities, and writing this service onto their CVs while not raising a finger. See, it is a typical committee. Only Dan does any prioring work.
He finds on the ghost ship a strange clockwork, which he conceals, least some zealous churchman declare it devilish and destroy it. There is a lot of that around, i.e., churchmen declaring sliced bread the work of the devil, and devouring it least humble people be corrupted.
It seems the Catholic Church has never changed. It loudest exponents are the first to become corrupt to save the humble people from it. If that is too cryptic, think choir boys.
Dan noses around annoying everyone. Florence is full of travellers, many on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and others to AC Milan away games. They are united by Latin and soccer. Then the murders begin among a group of those travellers. The plot got so thick this reader could not stir it.
Meanwhile a charlatan, no relations to Heston, is gulling credulous Republicans with a new Crusade to build a wall. They throw money at him which he happily collects. When Prior Dan sets out to unmask this scoundrel he finds a deeper and darker plot that harks back to the War of Guelphs and Ghibellinis. This conflict was largely familial though various doctrinal and territorial claims were made to cloak the tribal battle for precedence.
Dan is much less inclined than his fellow committee Priors to accept supernatural explanations for everything and even less inclined to favour destroying anything unusual as the devil’s work. The author brings home the suffocating and hypocritical environment of the time and place very well. While Dan is pious he sees all as part of the divine plan and wants to understand it, not whack it with a sword.
The last great Holy Roman Emperor was Frederick II (1194–1250) of Sicily who was very much larger than life. He travelled widely in the constituents of the Empire and promoted alchemy, astronomy, astrology, and the other arts and sciences of the age. The pope denounced him as the anti-Christ for this support. Freddy also negotiated with Saracens about access to the Holy Lands, and that made him anathema to the Pope. ‘Negotiation, never! The sword, always!’ cried the Pope in the name of the Prince of Peace.
When the Papacy prevailed and Freddy died, it grew avaricious and bloated, and by Dan’s time it was an enemy of Florence, seeking always to extend its grip on the secular city through the sectarian cloisters that abound in the city. (When I spent a semester at the European Universities Institute in Florence I had an office in a one-time monastery. Pretty grim.)
After the Guelphs defeated the Ghibs in 1294, a battle in which Dan distinguished himself, they then split among themselves into Black Guelphs and White Guelphs. The losers of this interniacine conflict went to Ontario where it was a balmy -2 degrees Fahrenheit when I checked this minute. Again the conflict was familial and personal rather than theological or ideological, though inevitably the contestants sought allies on these latter grounds.
The to’ing and fro’ing and the manners and mōres of high medieval Florence are interesting but confusing to the neophyte like me. I never did quite figure out what the point of it all was but nonetheless I will try to SPOIL(ER) it for readers!
The plotters were trying to rekindle the Ghibs. The purpose of the take over was to reclaim Freddy’s mirrors which his court astronomer had made to observe the transmission of light. This was sacrilege because light was God’s creation, or something. So it all had to be done in secret, in the dark. Get it? Why all this had to be played out in Florence was lost on this reader. But the mirrors were the cargo of wrecked ship. Secrecy required the whole crew to be murdered. [Gulp.] UPS could have delivered without all that. Not sure about DHL.
Dotted throughout the text are passages from and references to Dan’s masterwork, the Comedy, which took the name Divine after his death. I have listened to most of it in an Audible book while dog walking years ago. I once met John Ciardi, the foremost English translator of Dan, in that memorable 8 am poetry class that seemed like a good idea for the first and last time at registration.
Giulio Leoni
There a number of titles in this series and I read another one a long time ago. Like this one, I found that one intriguing but confusing. Don’t suppose I will rush to find another title, but if another crops up I would most likely add it to the Kindle.
Wikipedia tells us that Dan’s family was loyal to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy in opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. To pursue a political career the young Dan had to join a guild and the easiest entrance exam was pharmacy so he did that. It made some sense, because apothecaries in those days and for centuries to come also sold books, at first DIY book on diet and health, but others, too. That fits with bookish Dan.

GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 4.1 by 2252 litizens.
Genre: Krimi

Verdict: Craic!
Slacker Paul ekes out a living in contemporary Dublin by doing six-hours of charity work a week. As long as he does this work a stipend from his late, fabulously wealthy aunt, who despised him, gives him a bare living. He was her only living relative. Her idea was that this stipend would get him started, at long last, on earning a living. She over-estimated her man, because his idea is to scrape along on that stipend. As a consumer he has learned how to make that stipend stretch to cover his very few needs. No bargain bin in Dublin escapes his notice. Most Op Shops are too upmarket for him.
Most of the gratis charity work is visiting inmates and patients at hospices and retirement (old folks) homes in and around Dublin. He has shopped around and found the best set-up, taking into account transport cost to and from, level of demands from clients, opportunities with female staff, and such. Paul is none too bright despite all his scheming. The staff at the institutions verify his work and he lets the elderly clients talk to him and he pretends to be whomever they say. He takes the chits to the lawyer managing the trust fund and gets the Euros. Simple. Too. To last.
Those patients that are assigned to him have no other visitors and are pretty confused about who any one is or where they are. He has one of those non-nondescript faces that they can project onto and he is a good listener.
Then one night, as he listens to a new client rattle on, the dying old man, Mr Brown, riddled with cancer beckons him closer to whisper weakly in his ear, or so he thinks. He moves the chair and leans forward and the old coot stabs Paul in the shoulder with a scissor blade he had secreted in the bed. What with all the tubes and wires on the old cuss the two of them get tangled and fall to the floor, killing the patient who was eighty if a day, and leaving Paul bleeding from the stab wound with additional bumps and bruises.
A routine police investigation soon discovers that the cancer-ridden client was not Mr Brown but rather Moriarty long since thought deceased in Montevideo. Whoa! Where has he been these last thirty years and what has he been doing? Who did he think Paul was that he wanted to stab him? None of this interests Paul, until….
It get worse when Paul barely escapes another much younger villain. His car is booby trapped. He is on the run! He blames the nurse who sent him to listen to Moriarty and she feels guilty enough to club together with him, because it seems someone is trying to kill her, too. Indeed anyone is a target who had anything to do with Moriarty at the hospice.
The pace is fast and furious. The throw-away lines are many. The Irish idioms are delightful. Much ground is covered in and around Dublin. Little is as it seems: The beautiful TV journalist is rancid. The upright police commissioner isn’t. The shifty cabinet minister is honest. The objectionable husband (never mind the details) is a wounded lion. The helpless shut-in is far from helpless. Even the dead are not what they seem.
Hurling figures in the story, as does Guiness so we know it is Irish.
The characters who pass in review include Bunny, the hurling coach who never bluffs, Dorothy who lied about the gun collection of her late husband, Detective Inspector Stewart who may be the last and only honest Gardià in All Ireland, pregnant lawyer Nora whose taser is illegal and all the more welcome for it, but nary a priest though the pews were near full.
Glad I read it on Kindle since I could look up the Irishisms as I went. It is the first of series of four or five titles by Caimh McDonnell.

I started the next one a few hours after finishing this one, and finished them all since I drafted this post. Craic!

The fifteenth in the series featuring Sherlock Holmes and his young wife Mary Russell.

This time the dynamic duo come to the aid of Mad Woman, whose madness is to be a lesbian and have a very unpleasant brother, who in addition to sexual harassment, rape, and theft, also wears a blackshirt when visiting Italy. What a package is this straw Marquess.
But the shenanigans give occasion for Mary Russell to break into Bethlehem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam. Thereafter the fashion show moves to Venice and the eponymous island, Poveglia.
There the twosome meet Elsa Maxwell (1893-1963) and Cole Porter (1891-1964) of Indiana. She was born in Keokuk Iowa (been there) during a theatrical performance, and pretty much thereafter never left the stage of her own making.
Maxwell in 1933
Professor Wiki describes her as a songwriter, gossip columnist, radio presenter, and professional hostess. Prof also credits her with engendering the treasure hunt and the scavenger hunt as party pastimes.
There is a nice study of Porter in these pages and his intense relationship with Linda, his wife.
The palazzo the Porters rented in Venice. Porter once hired the Ballet Russe to entertain at a party there.
There is very little sleuthing. Though much of the plot is hidden in plain sight, and that is a nice trick. Many of the things seen and done are taken figuratively, only later to realise they were literal. Though I never did figure out what the brother in the white coat was doing, or quite how Mussolini’s wife related to things. There is also some insight into how Bedlam worked. The research shows, but alas some of its presentation is laboured.
Much too much padding about the fashions and morēs of rich and infamous in corrupt and decadent Venice of 1925. Hmm.

Yet it is remarkable that Laurie King has sustained this series since 1994 through fifteen titles and one collection of short stories.

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.0 by 27 litizens.
Verdict: Best for Proustians

A small conference of Proustians gathers at Illiers in Aunt Lèonie’s house now a museum dedicated to the sickly Marcel. The organisers include the unscrupulous Adeline whose speciality is blackmailing others with her own remembrances of things past. She brow beats her timid secretary who is also at the mercy of her PhD dissertation supervisor, a man combining all the worst features of a god-professor, one who smokes. To add to the spice, Adeline has both a lover, who really does love her, and a fiancee. Neither of whom see her faults, so readily apparent to others. In the case of these two men, love is not only blind, but deaf and dumb.
In addition to the locals, a party of American stereotypes has descended on the conference. Well, the French did invent the concept of ‘chauvinism.’
The plot thickens when Adeline is found dead in the house museum. Inspector Jean-Pierre Foucheroux is there to investigate along with his sergeant Leila Djemani. These two soon establish a long list of people with motives to harm Adeline, including all those mentioned above and more. In fact, just about anyone who ever met her.
There are some apposite Proust references, but never enough to satisfy a Proustian and too many for others. There is the usual bluster from witnesses, and the secretary is so timid it is hard to believe she is a Parisienne of thirty.
Foucheroux and Djemani (nicknamed Gimpy and Chipmunk by colleagues) make a good pair of sleuths, and I liked the context. But the pace is slowed by Foucheroux’s backstory, a matter of indifference and irritation to me. While the characterisations are largely cardboard, I did love the displays of scholarly pretension in several of them. That part rang true. God-professors, indeed.
Estelle Monbrun
The author is a teacher who has no doubt seen all of these characteristics on display more than once. She has several other titles of the same ilk.
As I was finishing this book, I thought it so-so. Then I read the author’s afterward, which I found charming, informative, and engaging. Maybe I will read another one. She being a serious literary scholar had no ambition to write a novel, until moving to St Louis and discovering the necessity raking leaves.
Huh?
She went at leaf raking with such conviction that it led to a herniated disk, and while lying abed contemplating her errors, lacking the concentration to bandy lit crit, she wrote this krimi. By placing it is chez Proust, by dotting it with Proust bons mots, by populating it with Proust enthusiasts, she hoped it might entice some readers to turn to the man himself. The pleasure in forming that ambition led her on to other writers, e.g., Collete, Montaigne, and more.
Moi, I never went at leaf raking with conviction, though I have certainly gone at it, marvelling at how many leaves a couple of trees drop. The last time I did this I had to stuff them into large orange bags because these were collected to later be opened and the leaves shredded and the bags re-used. Well that was the story. However the low bid contractor had taken the money and run, and the bags were all going — unopened — into land fill. But we rakers, until the story was blown, had the comfort of supposing the work of bag stuffing had an environmental benefit. Ha, ha, ha. OK but you try stuffing endless leaves into orange bags to see how much fun it is.

Genre: Krimi
Goodreads meta-data is 282 pages, rated 3.64 by 11 litizens

Verdict: Lifeless is the kindest thing to be said.
When Amazon’s mechanical Turk suggested this title, I was tempted because of the context, namely Westminster. That a Chancellor of the Exchequer might die — murdered — at the dispatch box delivering a budget seemed a neat set-up. So I acquired and started to read it.
I did finish it but only by some quick thumb work on the Kindle to flick through the pages and pages in which nothing happens very slowly. It is consists nearly entirely of conversations, many belaboured to be clever, I guess, but succeed better at being irritating, annoying, and distracting. Nor were the characters either well defined nor distinguished one from another.
Finally, the protagonist is intended to be colourful, I guess, but succeeds in being petty and pompous. His ‘violently coloured’ and occasionally ‘virulently coloured’ handkerchief is much flourished. Aaargh. Note that this is the seventh in the series.
While there is much going back and forth, this reader never got any sense of the geography or ethnology of the House of Commons, its nooks and crannies or its denizens, though it must have them by the dozens.
Then there are the many typographical errors. It is hard to believe they were in the original edition when copy editors prepared books for publication. The mystery is how they crept in. Via OCR software is one possibility without the mediation of a copy editor.
J V Turner is a pseudonym for David Hume. Nor that David Hume.
I am sure that someone on GoodReads says it the best book ever published. Indeed among the eleven raters, there are two at 5.