Mar. 21st, 2016

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What I've Finished Reading

My very mixed feelings about Career of Evil didn't actually prevent me from reading the whole thing in about two days. A partial selection of mixed feelings, below the cut )

Definitely my least favorite of the three, but will that stop me from putting the next one on pre-order as soon as it becomes available? Reader, it will not.

Also finished: Death of a Fool. Not bad, but the patented Ngaio Marsh Death Performance Reconstruction felt a little tired -- I think the action might just have been too complicated to present clearly while maintaining any kind of suspense. This is another post-war story -- we're up to 1956 in the chronology -- and that aspect of the book is interesting in the ordinary way but not particularly deep or startling. Alleyn is Alleyn, Fox is underappreciated, everyone has a secret or two -- a slightly less than typically excellent Marsh, but still good.

And "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," featuring Spoiler! )

What I'm Reading Now

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. I meant to get the next Marsh book, Singing in the Shrouds, but the university library stacks keep being moved around due to construction, so I got lost and decided to start on Tey's non-Grant books instead. I love it so far. I've never actually seen a harem anime, but now I seem to be reading one? )

There's no sign of a murder yet. Maybe there won't be one? Maybe this is a genre vacation for Tey, and we're all just going to put on our bathing suits and play some lawn tennis and have a couple of sleepovers and call it a day. I think I'd be on board for that. Murder is the worst, after all, and it's been so nice out lately!

Malice by Keigo Higashino. This is a recent translation of a book written in 1998 about the murder of a writer, so it's full of plot-relevant conversations about 90s writing technology -- word processor vs. computer vs. writing in longhand in notebooks, and there is a clever alibi trick with a fax machine. It feels translated -- in that way that's hard to explain; the writing always seems to be stepping gingerly around something -- but that doesn't hurt anything very much. I don't know if I should give too much away about how it's structured, because part of the fun is finding out for yourself, but [spoiler temporarily redacted]

What I Plan to Read Next

I started Champagne for One a while ago, so I should get back to that. It's a Rex Stout story about a murder at a benefit dinner for unwed mothers. And more Annotated Holmes, probably.

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