Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Next: Dead Cert by Dick Francis. The first of his thrillers based in the world of horse racing.
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Which I had certainly read before, but was still very good. Astonishing for a first novel.
Then I started The Nightingale Gallery, the first in Paul Doherty's Brother Athelstan series, which starts in 1377, the year that Edward III dies, and around 30 years after the start of the Great Pestilence (Black Death) which killed between 40% to 60% of the population, and only 15 years after the next wave, which killed around 20% of the remaining population. But not a mention of these events in the first half of the book.
I could forgive that if the rest of the book wasn't full of the massively crowded conditions in London, and the details of the squaller of city life.
But really, just none of it rang true for me, neither characters nor locations. Abandoned at 50%.
And also discarded another one in the series, and the four Hugh Corbett novels I have in my TBR (I see a decline over the first five in by ratings of them, that I don't think it's worth continuing.)
Next up: A random pick,
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The second in their Martin Beck series.