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I decided yesterday’s post was getting long enough, so I didn’t include these reviews.

(One would think that after two decades of blogging – two decades as of April – I would be better able to anticipate my own verbosity. But apparently not!)

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• “The Dagger in the Desk” by Jonathan Stroud: I’d mentioned to my cousin that I was disappointed that Lockwood & Co. didn’t get a second season. She told me that all the books were available on Libby and that they dealt with threads that the adaptation had left hanging. I hadn’t been sure that the books would do that – for all I knew, for instance, that cliffhanger at the end of the adaptation had been a Netflix invention, not a Stroud invention.

I’d already read The Screaming Staircase (after I’d watched season one but before I discovered that there wouldn’t be a season two), so I picked up this short story next.

(Incidentally, The Screaming Staircase seems to be the last time I read a novel written by a man (excluding a couple of children’s books that I’ve reread because I was reading them aloud to my class). I hadn’t intentionally set out to avoid books by men or anything like that, it just happened…)

Lucy, Lockwood and George are called in to deal with a ghost in a school. The ensuing adventure is, well, short but I enjoyed it enough.

I stared at the dagger and wondered if I should risk it… Of course I should. I was an agent. Taking horrible risks was part of the job. We might as well have put it on our business cards.

• The Whispering Skull by Jonathan Stroud: This book follows events that were covered in the second half of the adaptation. Lucy, Lockwood and George are investigating the grave of a sinister Victorian doctor. A dangerous relic is stolen, and as they track it down, Lucy ends up spending more time talking to the ghost of a skull trapped in a jar.

It is two years since I watched Lockwood & Co., and at first as I read this, I couldn’t remember in very much detail what happened in the adaptation, nor determine how closely the adaptation followed this book. I just had the sense that everything turned out okay in the end, which somehow robbed the story of tension and meant it was easy to put down.

But as the book progressed, I found myself recalling the adaptation in more detail – and simultaneously feeling much more invested in what was happening on the page. ( “Well, I make that one murder victim, one police interrogation and one conversation with a ghost,” George said. “Now that’s what I call a busy evening.” | Lockwood nodded. “To think some people just watch television.” )


• The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud: Unlike the first two books, the events of this book didn’t feature in the TV adaptation, so I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. I enjoyed that!

There’s a mysteriously intense outbreak of ghosts in Chelsea and Lockwood is indignant that Lockwood & Co. hasn’t been asked to help deal with it. Even though they have enough work to keep them busy, so much so that Lockwood decides they need to expand their team.

Lucy is none too impressed by this development, and I found her experiences of having to work with a new colleague who, despite Lucy’s efforts to be polite and accommodating, keeps rubbing her up the wrong way to be relatable and a bit cathartic. (Which says as much about my own recent experiences as it does about this book but anyway.)

I would have promptly embarked on the next book but there’s a queue. I am apparently “2nd in line” and not feeling wholly patient about it.

(It occurs to me that “2nd in line” sounds like it should have a phrase like “for the throne after it.) ( ‘My name is Lucy Carlyle. I make my living destroying the risen spirits of the restless dead.’ )

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• The Forests of Silence by Emily Rodda: This was my chapter-a-week book. I’d read it before, in fact, I’d reread it before, but not, according to my reading record, since I was thirteen.

It is the first book in the Deltora Quest series and I enjoyed revisiting it. Some parts of it were more familiar than others. I’m now slowly rereading The Lake of Tears.

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• The Greatest Crime of the Year by Ally Carter: This is the sort of romantic suspense I want to read more of! Two crime authors team up to investigate the disappearance of a fellow mystery writer.

Maggie Chase is invited, along with her professional nemesis Ethan Wyatt, to spend Christmas at the English mansion belonging to Maggie’s favourite author, Eleanor Ashley. Some of Eleanor’s relatives are less enthusiastic about their addition to the party but, as everyone is snowed in together, there is little anyone can do about it.

So when Eleanor disappears from a seemingly-locked room, Maggie wonders… is this foul play? Or is it a test?

This was fun, but thoughtful, too. ( ‘She was being silly. She was being foolish. She was letting her imagination get the better of her, but her imagination had also paid the bills for the better part of a decade, so her imagination, frankly, deserved the benefit of the doubt.’ )

“They told her it was all in her head. She was imagining it. She was getting older, after all. Maybe she’d spent too many years looking for mysteries that weren’t there.”
And, suddenly, Maggie wasn’t talking about Eleanor anymore. “You know, if mankind has one universal superpower, it’s gaslighting women into thinking they’re the problem.” It was actually a great comfort, knowing that if it could happen to Eleanor, then maybe Maggie could forgive herself for not realising it was happening to her. “To the world, Eleanor was just an old woman who wasn’t quite as sharp as she used to be. But even if that were true” – Maggie didn’t even try not to grin – “half of Eleanor Ashley is still worth two of most people.”

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• Argylle (2024): This film opens with Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) in the midst of a mission that isn’t going to plan. There’s an utterly ridiculous chase scene and a dramatic discovery … and then the scene shifts to author Elly Conway, who is reading from her latest book. Because Argylle is fictional!

But when Elly, along with her cat, sets out to visit her parents, she encounters some real-life spies and she and her cat are soon on the run. With a spy who seems to be much more rough around the edges than Argylle is.

There’s another twist in the film and initially I wasn’t sure if it shifted the story from one I was really enjoying into one I didn’t like so much, but I decided I liked it! I liked how it fitted the pieces of the narrative, and how that narrative continued to be an action-spy-thriller with a woman’s experiences at its centre.

I also liked the soundtrack’s use of The Beatles’ “Now and Then”, which wasn’t released until 2023, so it sounds like an old song (because, well, it is) but it isn’t overly familiar or already associated with other stories.

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• The Intern (2015): I was surprised to discover that this stars Anne Hathaway (as the CEO of a fashion retail website, not as the titular intern, who is a former marketing executive bored by retirement, who is played by Robert De Niro).

I was also surprised that the film focuses on things I’ve become accustomed to seeing in Korean dramas but don’t necessarily expect from Hollywood, like intergenerational relationships, characters who are over 70, and the challenges faced by women juggling career pressures and personal lives. Or it could have been that the way the film explored those things was more like what I’d expect from a Korean drama. That was interesting.

Anyway, this film wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I liked it.