The Second Stranger

The heroine in Martin Griffin’s The Second Stranger is hellbent on getting on her plane to Chile by the end of her last night working in a deserted hotel in the Scottish Highlands. I found Remie perhaps a little too fixated on this, not realising quite the bad situation she has landed in.

But then I don’t know how I’d react if the snow storm outside suddenly delivered an injured policeman to my front door, warning about a dangerous criminal on the loose. And then a second injured policeman using the same name a couple of hours later. It’s an interesting conundrum. Which one is the detective and which one is the escaped murderer?

Using my judgement and staying aware of double and even triple bluffs, I made my choice. Remie isn’t too sure. Both are plausible.

An adventurous night follows as she tries to stay on the right side of both men, wanting to remain safe so she can be on that plane to Chile in the morning.

I noticed several of the little clues planted, but missed a considerable number more that might have alerted me to further interesting developments. But lessening the thrill isn’t what the reader should be after. This is very much in the vein of those films where the hero/ine finds themselves in one scrape worse than the one before, soldiering on while being absolutely exhausted.

I couldn’t stop reading this book, which is one of the debuts at this year’s Bloody Scotland.

In These Hallowed Halls

Luckily the stories got scarier as I went along. Gulp.

I started with Helen Grant’s, because she gave me this anthology of Dark Academia stories to read. And she’s scary, so I needed to get hers ‘out of the way.’ It’s terribly good, and it’s, well, it’s… well actually, you want to be careful how you go.

After such a beginning, with my heart in my throat, the stories were much more of the pleasant, but dark, kind, taking place in various educational settings. So I decided I quite liked them. You know, without getting too scared.

Towards the end, though, it all got more serious, leaving me in quite a state by the time I had read every story.

One, strangely enough, featured someone I know. I was taken aback to find Daniel Hahn potentially getting up to no good. Is it him? Did he donate money to be put in a book? Did the author pay him? Or is it a weird koinkidink? Whatever, I will now look at Daniel in a different light.

So with Helen Grant putting herself in her tale (I can tell, you know), that’s two friends going academically dark on me.

I thoroughly recommend this anthology, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane. I can even say that I’d be happy for them to do this kind of thing again. Might approach it without tea and scone next time, however.

Sorry about Greta and all that

If I have to choose, I will obviously prefer a world that isn’t frying itself to an early death. Book festivals matter, but there needs to be a planet on which to have them.

Having said that, I was surprised when Greta Thunberg cancelled her appearance in Edinburgh [on account of who and what Baillie Gifford, the sponsors, sponsor]. I would rather she did what happened a few years ago, when she travelled to Davos and told the gathered politicians and other important people what she thought of them and their behaviour. Cancelling an appearance in a worthy huff isn’t always the best look, and if it matters to her – and it clearly does – checking before accepting the invitation would have caused less upset.

But I thought that would be it.

And then a group of authors made the demand that unless Baillie Gifford clean up their act, or the Edinburgh Book Festival sever relations with their sponsor by next year, they will boycott the festival.

I didn’t know what to say, so said nothing at first. Thankfully Charlotte Higgins wrote in the Guardian, and that made me feel a bit better. She had looked into things, in a way I’m not really able to.

After that, I was gratified to find a couple of letters on the Guardian letters page, where the writers expressed things so much better than I could ever hope to. My childish way of thinking of the fifty signatories threatening a boycott, was along the lines of the cool kids at school who decide what’s what. I haven’t come across a full list of the fifty, but since not all those who have been mentioned are household names, I suspect I might not know them. One of them is someone I had been hoping to go and hear this week. Now, alongside my general decrepitness, I have lost what interest I had.

To quote the anonymous letter writer, ‘if the writers were serious about collective action instead of virtue signalling off the back of Greta Thunberg’s cancellation, they should be offering solutions not ultimatums, and campaigning on behalf of book festivals not against them.’

I hope with all my heart that they haven’t killed off most of our book festivals by their actions.

Well, cool…

Ever forgetful, I’ve no idea what I was looking at. But it was one of those sites that provide you with an unasked for translation of whatever word[s] you are reading.

Usually these days, often a lot better than you’d thought. Sometimes quite bad, losing the meaning of what it had to work with.

Occasionally quite genius, like this one.

Reader, I give you ‘acid streaming.’

Death of a Lesser God

I chose the hardback in the end. I felt that I needed Vaseem Khan’s book as a proper book.

He reckons it’s his best, and I reckon he might not be wrong. I mean, I have loved the others and they can’t be unloved, but writing is a skill that tends to grow, and the plot of Death of a Lesser God is pretty intense. Perhaps you can have too many crocodiles. Not sure, but I suspect so.

Persis Wadia is being tested yet again. She’d make a good friend, although you might want to consider the crocodiles. And the tigers. Her mentee Seema is a really promising character, and at first I wondered if Vaseem had simply forgotten about Archie Blackfinch. He hadn’t. It was quite romantic, in a way, and it never hurts to have more than one man circling a heroine. Although, I’d personally prefer it if they could stay sober.

This is about a white Indian sentenced to death for a murder he claims he didn’t commit. Persis has eleven days to discover what happened. It’s quite deep, thinking about the ramifications of his situation and about what the British did to India. You sort of feel there could not be a story if he’s guilty, but you struggle to see who of all the possible people might have done it.

There are many mirror lives, making it a little hard to keep track of who is who, but also making you see that we are often quite similar. ‘Orphaned’ boys, politicians, the bad local crooks, the mothers, the witnesses, the smarmy potential lovers, the policemen.

I just don’t know what will happen next. Perhaps Vaseem doesn’t know either. (Hint; I like elephants. But also a good love story.)

Into the arms of Sean

I’ve been thinking a lot about book festivals, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival in particular. It’s almost time for this year’s bookfest, and although I feel fairly retired, I haven’t made my mind up about what to see, or if.

Because it is different now. I quite like the temporary setting, but it is not Charlotte Square. Whether the new permanent venue starting in 2024 will be able to feel more Charlotte Squarish I don’t yet know. What I have missed is the opportunity of ending up in the arms of Sean Connery. Yes, I know he’s dead, which is one reason, but it’s the layout, where someone like me will run into really famous people a lot less.

(So that Bookwitch only really wanted to hang out with famous people then? No, but it made the bookfest period a lot more exciting.)

And let’s face it, if 007 is appearing in an event, he will entice a lot of people to come and give them much needed money. And it will not be only James Bond, there will be more [almost] like him.

But it seems as if the big names are being event-napped from right under the feet of festival organisers. Yeah, OK, perhaps it would be a logistical nightmare to have Michelle Obama in Edinburgh. Maybe she’s best displayed at a large [London] venue. But if you’re not thinking of a former FLOTUS, there are still many great names who could come, and would come, and have done so.

Except there are now organisations who specialise in this kind of thing; get a really famous author in, perhaps even parading them up and down the country to several venues, sell expensive tickets, possibly with the book included, and you sell out in minutes.

Plus, that author will now not be attending Edinburgh, or Bath, or anywhere else. And if the big name does not draw audiences for smaller names, the whole thing looks decidedly wobblier. I would probably not see 007, even if we were still in Charlotte Square.

I don’t know what the solution is.

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The Den

I am not a boy. That much is clear after reading Keith Gray’s new book The Den for Barrington Stoke. But he is, and half the population are, and we really need boy stories.

This is one of them, and it’s marvellous.

Marshall is thirteen and has problems getting on with his dad. Marshall and his friend Rory accidentally find a bunker in the woods at the start of the summer holidays, and it seems like the ideal place to avoid being near his dad, having a den to call your own.

But then there are some other boys, former friends, and wills clash, quite dramatically. (Girls are mean; boys fight.) We also see how different parents are different from each other; strict, angry, friendly. And when all is said and done, Marshall’s dad was a boy once. OK, so he is now in pain a lot and has a temper, but he knows about crisp sandwiches.

The best thing would be if everyone could be friends. And maybe you can, if you try.

My saviour

I can’t make my mind up. Kindle? Or dead tree book? Which will it be? Vaseem Khan’s fourth novel about Persis Wadia is out in early August. And I need to decide.

The third one, The Lost Man of Bombay, came with me on my travels last year as a Kindle book. It saved me then, but perhaps I don’t need saving now? I loved it and it was terribly reassuring to have easily to hand. Because I had packed the wrong books. And when space and weight is an issue, the Kindle is no heavier even with the collected works of Sir Walter Scott. But you know that already. (And Scott is purely courtesy of the Resident IT Consultant, sharing his ebook selection with me. And I dare say, if things got really bad, Scott would do nicely.)

So, there I was, having picked what I thought would be a fun and romantic novel, but it turned out to be quite dire and at times like that you need a swift move onto something else. Hence my gratitude to Vaseem and his detective.

If you haven’t read his books about the first female detective in Bombay, then it is high time you did. Meanwhile, I must decide on ebook or paper. This is not made any easier by me having branched into Kindle on the iPhone for those very urgent reading emergencies that I am afraid of experiencing. And then a witch has to have a book made from paper, in case the tech fails her.