Another year, another list.. 😏
| Book | Score (out of 10) | |
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Renko's relationship with his adopted son is getting increasingly complicated as the son gets older.. a chess prodigy who is unwilling to take it further than playing for money at the local station while hanging out with a gang of feral teenagers, he then comes to Renko and tells him he wants to join the army.. Then as a train pulls into Yaroslav Station, Moscow, a teenage girl wakes to discover her baby has been taken... Renko meanwhile is teetering on the brink of resignation when he becomes drawn into a strange new case. A prostitute has been found dead in a trailer in Three Stations, without a mark on her. With the local police keen to dismiss the death as a mere overdose - Renko starts investigating | |
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9 |
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Five months of hell indeed.. this book was hard going as
well, nit because it wasn't well written, it was brilliant, and full of
first person observations from both sides and civilians caught up in the
fighting, but because the nature of the war in Italy during this period
of winter 1944, was utterly appalling, from both a men and weather
perspective... the nature of the terrain the Allies were fighting over,
coupled with intense rain and cold, made their overwhelming mechanised
and air superiority largely nil.. cancelled by their inability to
actually use it.. this period of the war also covered the Anzio
landings, intended to land a Corps level assault behind the German lines
and force them to retreat, but which failed miserably due to either poor
leadership, or misunderstanding of the basic intent of the plan..
such a wasted opportunity.. I finished this with an increased opinion of Alexander, a man on a par with Eisenhower in his ability to manage a multi national force, and I thought Clark excellent (but a bit prima-donna'ish at times), but so many commanders in theatre under performed for one reason or another.. Lucas (who commanded at Anzio) and Freyberg especially.... |
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See
blog post review [clicky].. |
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My regular reader will know that Dick Francis is my (not so) secret vice.. this is the one where we first meet one of his most famous characters, ex-jockey and now private investigator, Sid Halley ... financial shenanigans surround the potential sale of a failing race course... | |
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Another entertaining horse racing based story, this time where the hero is an architect (Francis used to love bringing in examples of various professions as the occupation of the main protagonist of his books). Lee Morris (the architect) is dragged back into the orbit of his mothers ex-husbands truly odious family when some shares he has left him turn out to be the deciding vote in the ownership of their racecourse.. cue fires, beatings, and explosions as the family in fighting gets out of control... | |
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Renko's current partner, Tatiana - who we met in the previous book - is an investigative reporter, in modern Russia, with an axe to grind and a love of controversial stories.. in Putin era Russia, a dangerous career choice. She disappears off to Siberia on a story concerning oligarchs and oil fields, but doesn't return when she says she will, so Arkady goes looking for her.. once he's there he's attacked by a bear (seriously), manages to rescue Tatiana from a sinking helicopter in a frozen Lake Baikal, and yet again manages to defeat the efforts of his boss to get him killed... | |
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On the verge of the Russian invasion - with nationalist feelings running high, and Putin cementing his position in power by removing any opposition, Renko is asked by a Moscow gangster to find his daughter (who has disappeared) - selling it as an official enquiry to his boss he tracks down the flat the girl was living in and discovers that she was heavily involved with one of the Opposition movements, as was her flat mate. The flat mate, a girl, is a Crimean Tartar (which I now know a lot more about in terms of Soviet/Russian history), but also involved with the same group, and the trail leads to the Crimea - where all is not what it seems.. as the series is coming to a close, it is also very very obvious that Renko is increasingly unwell | |
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Last in the series.. and set against a background of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, this time focussing on the paramilitary groups that operate with the Russian Army like the Wagner group. A Russian minister is killed brutally, with what turns out to be an entrenching tool commonly used by Spetsnaz.. was it a Ukrainian attack or not... Arkady finds the killer, but this marks the end of his career as his diagnosis of Parkinson's is confirmed, but more importantly gives his boss the excuse to finally get rid of him.. exceptionally poignant given the author also had Parkinson's and died of it the year this book was released... Ave, Martin.. thanks for such a body of work.. | |
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Third in Scarrow's Schenk series, and dare I say it, but I now prefer these to the Macro and Cato books he's better known for?? Perhaps not quite as good as Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, but very readable for all that... set during the early years of WW2 this is about kif under the Nazi's, and how they managed to infiltrate and influence every aspect of life, Schenk's engagement to Canaris's niece is well and truly over, but far from leading to a quieter life he has fallen in love with a Jewish girl who is living as quietly as possible in a Berlin that is getting more and more dangerous every day for her and her fellow Jews... alongside that the criminal fraternity are also hugely active, Schenk new boss is a firebrand, and he has a huge counterfeiting crime to investigate.. very good.. | |
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A weird premise, but where the hero Neil Blair, recently demobbed from the army, married but unemployed, is hired to go to an isolated ski resort in the Italian Dolomites and pretend he is writing a screenplay. The man who hires him was his commanding officer in the war and was in intelligence. He is told to keep an eye on the other guests at the lodge - and then of course we find out about the stolen Nazi gold.. good but the language and mores are of their time.. | |
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Fantastic account of the true case of the recruitment, handling, and then exfiltration, of the Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky by MI6 over a period of just over 10 years between '74 and '85. Gordievsky was KGB, and from a "spy family" - his father was NKVD - but he became disillusioned after he saw the Berlin Wall going up, and then the crushing of the Czech's in the Prague Summer of '68, and made overtures to various western espionage services before being "accepted" by MI6. Over the years he was active he provided thousands of documents and untold amounts of vital information, but was eventually betrayed by the CIA double agent Aldrich Ames. Happily, and at great risk, MI6 managed to get him out of Russia where he continued to provide valuable intelligence on how the KGB was organised and worked. He was sentenced to death in absentia by Russia but I note he died peacefully last year at the age of 86. | |
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Been after this one for a while as it deals with events on two of my favourite Greek islands, Lefkas and Kefalonia. The main protagonist, Paul van der Voort, is an orphan, taken in as a young boy by his adoptive father, a fairly cold, aloof and tyrannical anthropologist. Returning home after a long voyage (he is a sailor) he gets involved in a fight and ends up having to go into hiding. His father is missing so he goes in search of him at his last known sighting which is in the Greek islands where he is hunting for signs of first man. It is the height of the Cold War and tensions in the region are high - a good example of a 70's thriller... | |
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Got this as a result of a reminder on one of the publishing websites I follow as it is now just over 50 years since this was first published, and I remember reading it way back. The setting is a nothern town in WW2, where the main protagonist Chas McGill is determined to outdo his rival Boddser Brown in obtaining the ultimate war souvenir - shrapnel, spent bullets etc. When he finds a crashed German bomber in the woods complete with a working machine gun, he knows he can not only beat Boddser hands down, but can he also play a role in the war?? Amazing coming of age story, relationships, bullying, and what life was like in war time Britain from a child's, bordering on adults, perspective. | |
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This was the last one Dick wrote, albeit he was well into his co-authorship with Felix (his son) by this time. The back story for this one covers the experience of artificial limbs, in this case Captain Thomas Forsyth's leg, which after a tour of Afghanistan is blown off by an IED. His world is torn apart by the injury - the army is his life, but after 6 months of recuperation he is coming to terms with the idea he will never re-join the army - and is also faced with having to stay with his family who he has never been close to. When he gets home though he finds his remote and hands off mother is being blackmailed.. | |
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Philip Turner writes cracking children's books - I loved them as a youth and they still read well now. I am slowly collecting the entire series of his Darnley Mills books - set in a small Yorkshire mill town at various points through history. This one is set in Victorian times and recounts the struggle of two young people against poverty in Victorian England, particularly the effort of one to alter events by betting a week's wages on a race between a horse and a steam engine. Just lovely.. | |
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A man is killed in the street in a frenzied knife attack, and Maigret then starts receiving anonymous letters supposedly from the killer.. can he find the killer before the killer kills again, either someone else or himself? | |
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Oh my... I've watched the film of course (which is excellent) but this is in a different order of magnitude, stratospherically, better... third in Faulks's French triptych this book is about Charlotte, an emotionally damaged girl who volunteers for SOE. Surreptitiously it is in order to find her lover, an RAF pilot who has crashed in France. The book though is about occupied France in WW2, life in Vichy, and a (to me) little a understood period when the French delivered up their Jews to the Nazi's. Not afraid to say that part of the book affected me deeply.. stunning book.. and now added to my top 10.. | |
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Fourth in the Jack Pembroke WW2 naval series.. Jack is skipper of an armed trawler in the South African navy (SDF later SANF) during WW2. The saga starts with his activities in the Atlantic protecting the convoy routes round the hell of Africa, but a couple of books ago he was transferred to the Mediterranean - on supply runs to Tobruk, but in this book convoy escort for a convoy going to Malta. Excellent - the descriptions of the convoy, the relentless attacks, and their eventual arrival in Malta and what life is like there is hugely descriptive. | |
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