Tuesday, February 13, 2007

A Duo of Scottish Mysteries

I finished Raven Black by Ann Cleeves on Sunday night. Extra quick reading as I really enjoyed the story. The setting was great, I liked the detective Perez, and the ending completely fooled me - not many crime novels do that nowadays. I'm looking forward to the next in the series and in the mean time I shall seek out for of her earlier books which I believe are set in Northumberland.

Then I moved on to Never Go Back by Robert Goddard. This is one of books I'm due to review for Eurocrime. It's also set in Scotland, in a castle in Aberdeenshire. The hotel / castle in the book is in Lumphanan which is where my father's family were originally from. I guess I might have been there when I was very small but I don't remember. Anyway I'm not enjoying this book nearly as much as the Ann Cleeves. It's about a group of men who were stationed there during the war to undergo some kind of academic experiment. It's early days yet, and I'm not saying that the book isn't well written, or smartly paced, just that I'm sure this group of aging men may not be exactly my type of people. We shall see.

Just been doing a little spinning, nothing very exciting - just spinning up the last of the blue / green merino so that I can knit it into something. I've still not knitted up my beautiful multicoloured yarn from last week as I wanted to take it to Spinning Group to show them how it turned out, but the group was cancelled due to the weather last week, so I'm still itching to do something with it.

Just off to take Bubba to Doggy Fat Camp (his fortnightly weigh-in). He's doing really well - almost slimline and he's got tons more energy than he used to - but he will still eat a lot of crap when he's out for walks if you don't watch him carefully.

Links in this post, as usual, are to Waterstones.com for convenience but please try and support your local independent bookseller if you still have one.

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