Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Ordeal by Innocence is one I'd seen previously in the ITV adaptation, which was pretty decent, and I was wondering how it would compare (i.e., what they changed for the adaptation and whether or not I could Spot The Clues™ that would lead the Gentle Reader to potentially solve the whodunnit before the sleuth did).

I watched the full Miss Marple TV series while I was on vacation, and Ordeal by Innocence was one of the episodes I really liked and meant to read the story. I didn't think of it at the time but now that you mention it I do see the shades of Penhallow, a book I thoroughly loathed.

[ATDrake]

^

The novel version of Ordeal by Innocence is somewhat darker than what I recall of the TV adaptation, which I also quite liked, and it really did strike me as a lot closer to Penhallow than the previous few Marples and Poirots I'd remembered reading, which were a lot more breezily light-hearted* in tone.

But it's quite good and according to that old Clues to Christie reading guide freebie that HarperCollins gave out a long time ago, it's one of the author's top 10 personal favourites of her work.

And I found the amateur sleuth's interactions with everyone just delightful and wish he'd shown up in more books (which apparently he doesn't, according to Wikipedia). But then I happen to like scientifically-inclined amateur sleuths bringing their scientific inclinations to bear on how they interact with everyone, so YMMV should you give it a try (assuming you haven't already).

* Even The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, which was based on a true-life preventable tragedy and all.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I just finished reading Mr. Mercedes and, like all Stephen King novels I've read before it, I found it quite engrossing and highly entertaining.

I just began reading Raisins And Almonds (Phryne Fisher #9) by Kerry Greenwood.

Originally Posted by alansplace

I just finished reading Raisins And Almonds and was quite pleased with the experience.

Next, The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot #2) by Agatha Christie.

Pushing aside Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot as my next read I just began reading The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars #1) by Rob Thomas & Jennifer Graham!

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

And I found the amateur sleuth's interactions with everyone just delightful and wish he'd shown up in more books (which apparently he doesn't, according to Wikipedia). But then I happen to like scientifically-inclined amateur sleuths bringing their scientific inclinations to bear on how they interact with everyone, so YMMV should you give it a try (assuming you haven't already).

Oh, the scientifically-inclined detective is my favorite! I do plan to read this one but maybe after a Poirot break (or even probably after I complete the full series; I'm feeling quite ambitious ).

[bert501]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

I haven't posted here in awhile! I read Book of Life, the last in Deborah Harkness' "All Souls" trilogy. I enjoyed it but the best book is still the second, Shadow of Night...

Oh, dear, I thought Shadow of Night was a long, hard slog. I'm trying to decide between Book of Life or reading the Dresden/Skin Game book first. Now I really can't make up my mind!!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

next up: Touched by the Gods by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Looking good.

And good it was. A nice take on the god-appointed hero theme, as one would expect from Watt-Evans.

Now for: Analog SFF for November 2014. (Yes, the November issue actually comes out at the end of August!)

[Luffy]

I don't feel like it(there are other books I'm more psyched about) but I've almost decided to read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World. It has a high score on Goodreads. If I'm especially lazy, I'll put reading the book off till tomorrow. But it's more likely I'll begin today, in the afternoon.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Luffy

I don't feel like it(there are other books I'm more psyched about) but I've almost decided to read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World. It has a high score on Goodreads. If I'm especially lazy, I'll put reading the book off till tomorrow. But it's more likely I'll begin today, in the afternoon.

The Demon Haunted World was good, but I liked his books Broca's Brain and The Dragons of Eden better. Pale Blue Dot wasn't bad, either.

[ATDrake]

Finished Jo Nesbø's The Snowman, 7th in his Harry Hole series, which I got in a deep-discount priced omnibus edition on sale this long weekend from Kobo.

I'd previously seen and enjoyed the film adaptation of and then went and read his standalone secret-criminal vs. secret-criminal wtf-is-going-on thriller novel Headhunters, so I guess I kind of had a vague idea of what I might expect from another Nesbø book.

There were indeed quite a lot of twists and turns and deliberately planted misdirection, with fingers being pointed in all directions at possible suspects for the ultimate serial killer role, gradually eliminating them one-by-one just as you think the case is finally solved. And it was pretty jumpy with the flashbacks and the explanatory personal reminiscing.

But it really wasn't all that much of a mystery as to whodunnit, which I was able to figure out relatively soon even amidst all the red herrings (I'm usually very bad at these). This really was much more on the psychological crime thriller side of a police procedural, with a lot of lingering on the possible motives of the suspects, and the personal dysfunctions which might have led them to kill and kill again.

As mentioned upthread, I liked the partially-Bergen setting of this, which was sprinkled with local flavour tidbits like the Bergenser dialect (apparently a bit non-standard for Norwegian speech).

And I liked the in-story acknowledgement of how this multi-city taunting-clue-leaving serial killer thing was very unusual for low-crime-rate Norway and nobody really had experience with it besides Harry, who had to be specially trained by the FBI for it and then field-tested in Australia which presumably has many more compulsively trail-leaving multiple-murderers to practice upon, and making it a plot point that the regular homicide department was out of their league with this.

It was a nice contrast to a lot of cozier murder mystery-type series which just seem to find it de rigueur to have an anomalously high and continually escalating murder rate which never occasions comment from the small sleepy local villagers who are usually doing all the killing so maybe that's why they don't talk about it.

Overall, I liked this enough to continue with the series, which is just as well because I've already bought another omnibus with some earlier novels in the series using one of the recent 75% off Kobo coupons.

Moderate recommend, if you like this kind of thing. It doesn't strike me as particularly outstanding amidst the usual sort of police procedural serial killer thrillers involving a hardened borderline dysfunctional personally unbalanced yet ultimately professionally brilliant maverick detective hunting down a compulsively clue-leaving sicko who may or may not have developed a fixation on him and is taking the pursuit as a personal challenge by beginning to target him personally.

But there were interesting bits and the story played out well enough and I enjoyed the use of the setting, even if this particular subgenre is not really the kind of thing I usually read.

[Luffy]

I once tried to read a book called Icons by Margaret Stohl. It made me literally sick. The Snowman is the only book that came closest to make me sick again. It's great that the series has its own group of fans, but it's like poison to me.

[MickeyC]

Just finished The Simple Truth by David Balducci and what a fast and scary read! Could not put it down

Just started Fer De Lance by Rex Stout. Am only a couple of chapters into it but, so far, like it a lot.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

Just started Fer De Lance by Rex Stout. Am only a couple of chapters into it but, so far, like it a lot.

The first of the Nero Wolfe books, and they just get better for quite a while. They're all little bite-sized pieces, but quite enjoyable as the characters develop over time to become well-worn old favourites.

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by Loosheesh

I'm following the Poirot series listing on Goodreads so the next book should be Black Coffee. I'm also 60% into Dee Henderson's True Valor. That should do it for the weekend.

I completed Black Coffee and True Valor, along with 4 short stories by Anna Katharine Green. Black Coffee I did not like (meh/), True Valor I enjoyed (Christian fiction that doesn't shy away from being Christian; who knew? ). The Green stories were the usual melodramatic fare but I was in the mood for some of that and it went down good.

Now reading Peril at End House (another Christie/Poirot) and True Honor (the next book in Dee Henderson's Uncommon Heroes series).

[ATDrake]

So, le premier book du bus ride for today was Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Links, 2nd in the Hercule Poirot series, involving Poirot being summoned in advance, with the company of his, well, mostly trusty friend Hastings, to investigate an anticipated murder which turns out to be not all it seems.

It's one of the dozen or so that I also own in French graphic novel adaptations (translated to English), which I've selected to load up on the Sony as the first to read, because I need some way to filter and prioritize the lot, and doing strict chronological/publication order doesn't particularly appeal to me (especially since I don't think I'd care to potentially read multiple Poirots/Marples one after another and thus overdose).

Overall, this was a very complicated-seeming but reasonably decent whodunnit. There was a lot of misdirection (acknowledged on a meta-level as deliberately planted doubtful clues for one of the in-story plots, while the actual writing also deliberately planted its own doubtful clues while telling us all about the in-story plot ones).

Surprisingly, I did manage to figure out the identities of two of the mysterious personages involved, and even to a certain extent their actual involvement before Poirot went and explained it all to Hastings. Given that I'm usually really bad at these things and the general convolution noted above, I'm inclined to think that this particular case was overcomplicated to begin with, with all the shenanigans with the multiple murder weapons and abruptly expanding circle of mysteriously-backgrounded suspects etc.

But then, it's an early work and was still fairly entertaining. And while there was quite a lot of contrivance and convenient misunderstandings, IMHO, the ultimate whodunnit and the complicating factors did make sense in the end.

Mind you, I'm starting to wonder if there was some kind of 20s/30s mystery writer trend for having the

Spoiler:

sleuth, amateur or otherwise, and/or their sleuthy assistant reciprocally fall in love

with one of the murder suspects and kind of aid and abet them along the way before

Spoiler:

settling down to live happily ever after with them because they were totally innocent all along despite things looking very poorly for them what with suspiciously compromising-lookng circumstantial evidence and the occasional false confession done for noble reasons.

Bonus points if they at first seemed to be offputting and antagonistic to each other but then at some point realized that their apparent clash of personalities/styles was actually an indicator of surprising compatibility and thus, True Love®.

It seems to me that I've seen it at least once in one of Georgette Heyer's mysteries when I read the entire lot of them after a Sourcebooks sale, and I've heard it happens in Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series as well. And I've seen it in at least one other Christie I've read, also.

And I sometimes wonder how people who don't actually read French view Poirot's frequent untranslated* francophone interjections. As some kind of colourful foreign decoration which doesn't need to be understood? Random noises that Belgian detectives make when excited? A frustrating exercise in WTF is he just saying?

Anyway, after finishing the novel, dug out my GN adaptation of TMOTL by François Rivière & Marc Piskic to compare. Overall reasonably decent. Artwork reflected the period with a stylized look like an Art Nouveau-influenced Art Deco style. All the major clues and developments/reveals were in place, but with just 48 pages in the album to slot them in, there are some really infodump-y lengthy word balloons and the dénouement is rather rushed.

It was nice to see everything illustrated though.

Mild recommend overall for TMOTL in either form. It's decent, but doesn't strike me as one of the better Poirots, or even one of the better retro-period sleuth mysteries in general. It was mostly entertaining, but I just got this feeling of too much twisting and turning just for the sake of twisting and turning and the sudden revelation of multiple things to clear up the confusion as to who actually dunnit by actually causing said confusion in the first place by requiring multiples of such in order to populate the red herring suspect pool who all had very dramatic-seeming reasons for seeming to not want themselves removed from it.

* This happens using German in the deuxième book du bus ride I started on the way back, which is more of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series from the second omnibus I bought, this time 3rd in the series, The Redbreast, which is apparently the start of his Oslo-based adventures.

This one involves thwarting a potentially revenge/hate crime plot with its roots back in some WWII shenanigans involving Norwegian volunteers for the German Army, which is interesting to read about in the flashbacks.

And there from the flashbacks we get frequent German phrases, which are often immediately followed up by an English gloss (not sure whether this exists in the original or is a translator addition) which when used this often, gives something of a redundant feeling to the use of the language.

Otherwise, so far it's shaping up to be fairly intriguing and I think I've figured out some of the hidden identity/motive stuff. And given that it's dealing with a more conventional sort of premeditated amateur criminal motive rather than a gender-fixated obsessive psycopathic long-term serial killer, it's a much less violent/disturbing read than The Snowman, in case anyone was wondering if the entire series was like that.

[Luffy]

Ellery Queen, in one book and in a particular chapter, spoke a lot of French, and he's an American, not French or Belgian. It was so over the top that a review I read moaned about the French phrases, something I've never seen Poirot readers do.