David Gillon

 A Fire at the Exhibition, T E Kinsley

Emily, Lady Hardcastle and her lady's maid/companion Flo are back, and Littleton Cotterell is having a village art exhibition, which can only mean trouble. Though at least for once there are no bodies to be found once the smoke is dispersed - just a missing priceless book (well, not priceless, but worth £1,000, in 1912). Also missing, apparently grabbed up by the thieves on their way out of the hall, are a bust and painting belonging to Emily and Flo's friends Sir Hector and Gertie. The bust is worthless, but the painting is one of a pair Sir Hector was hoping to sell, and without that money they will lose the manor in a matter of weeks. So while Emily and Flo can't really be bothered with the book (which Emily snobbishly dismisses as arriviste), there's a painting to be found, because Hector and Gertie refuse point-blank to let Lady Hardcastle pay off their debts, and a bicycle race to be survived (winning is definitely not on the menu, not even for Flo). There are a satisfying number of red-herrings, and a wandering cast of cycling club committee members, retired circus artistes and treasure hunters.

Definitely at the cozy end of the scale. 

Chooser of the Slain series, Michael Anderle.

Nine books for £0.99, so I wasn't expecting much, especially from someone with a truly ridiculous number of books to their name (if you look at https://www.fantasticfiction.com/a/michael-anderle/ he appears to be releasing a book a week or better), but I'm not sleeping well and quantity has a quality all of its own. That said, these are surprisingly good.

The series starts with Valkyrie and history post-grad/business analyst Val Kearie (geddit!) being interviewed by Viking Inc, a security consulting firm / PMC, who want to steal a march on the CIA, NSA and other TLAs who are also interested in recruiting Val, given she has an interesting skillset, on top of which she's the daughter of a general, has one brother who's a Navy SEAL and another who's in Army or Air Force specops (there's a continuity glitch over which). Impressing Viking's three Jarls (aka managing partners, aka the specops colonel, the specops colonel/ hacker and the specops major/spook), Val finds herself on the company plane to Spain along with huge ex Force Recon Marine Jacob Pinkerton, where a company that advises banks on complying with money-laundering rules is under cyber-attack. Pinkerton has the cyberskills and combat skills Val lacks, she has the European knowledge he's never gained, but things escalate, and so do the stakes.

This first book plays completely straight, and it's a decent enough modern technothriller (well apart from its belief that the language the coder speaks somehow affects how computer programmes work), but it's bookended by dreams about the Allfather.

Into the Battlefield is the second in the series, and Val's heritage is starting to make itself felt, particularly when Reginheid the Valkyrie starts offering her advice from any convenient mirrored surface. It's quite an interesting setup, even if the world-building is a little shaky (Hungarian Romani families called Boswell, Smith and Young. Really? And it takes all of about a minute to look up the name of the Hungarian FBI equivalent instead of calling them "the Hungarian FBI equivalent"). With a US-authored book dealing with anti-Romani/antisemitic violence in Hungary I was quite prepared for it to get painfully gauche*, but it's actually not bad on that front and escalates into an interesting story with an unexpected source of villain (no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, not that it's the Spanish Inquisition). 

* It does make the completely fair point that racism against the Romani is by far the most acceptable form of racism in Europe.

Requiem for Heroes sees Val and Jacob stumbling through a series of seemingly un-connected rapid fire cases, until Val realises that there is a common factor, and one they've seen before. But if you gaze too long into the Abyss, sometimes the Abyss will get pissed and come after your families. And sometimes protecting your families may mean inviting the Allfather to take his best shot at you.

By Savage Harbinger Val has a target for vengeance, but they've disappeared into the high-stakes criminal underworld, until a chance facial recognition hit puts them on the hunt again, and with a maguffin of their own to find. (Warning for ridiculously overpowered computer-based maguffin with little authorial understanding of how this stuff actually works).

4 down, 5 to go.

Witch-Warrior Series, TR Cameron, Marth Carr, Michael Anderle

Another 12 for £0.99 series, only read the first of them so far. 

Witch with a Badge: Deputy Marshal Cait Keane is a spell-slinging witch with the US Marshals Service and has just been reassigned to Boston, where, without even time for the orientation tour, she finds herself working the magical murder of a federal judge with the rest of her new team - a couple of non-magical male marshals and a technomancer/hacker who I'm reading as probably neurodiverse. On top of that job she's a member of the Marshals' Special Operations Group (think FBI Hostage Rescue Team) and also spends her weekends back in Ireland, where her family lives in a magical village. I'm strongly tempted to call the village stuff twee, which is unfair, but not by much. And to add to all that she finds herself summoned for a magical rite of passage, for which the reward is a dragon all of her own. Said dragon appears to be the draconic equivalent of a teenager, and it's not clear if he's a reward, backup for an unrevealed threat, or his family taking advantage of circumstances to get him out of the house.

There's a lot going on here, but it's a readable lot.

Compulsory, Martha Wells

Murderbot is supposed to be making sure the humans don't do any on-the-job pilfering, but mostly Murderbot is watching soap-operas. Then one of the humans gets herself into a potentially fatal situation and what's a Murderbot to do?

It's short, and slight, but it is Murderbot, and only £0.77.

Winter's Gifts, Ben Aaronovitch

Despite the name, this Rivers of London novella is not a story about Winter and Sommer and the Abteilung KDA (aka Rivers of Germany), it's FBI agent Kimberly Reynolds, Peter Grant and the Folly's American contact, investigating a call for help from a retired FBI agent in a small town on the edge of Lake Superior, just as an unprecedented winter storm blows in and isolates her from any backup - even the local cops are busy with search and rescue after the town got kerb-stomped by a snow tornado (which apparently is a real thing). Things get worse when she realises her contact has disappeared, apparently abducted, and likely not by human hands, leaving her to dig into a mystery with roots two centuries old, with the help of only a sexy meteorologist, a Bureau of Indian Affairs ethnologist, and a librarian, none of whom she entirely trusts.

It's very intense, the whole thing resolving in less than 24 hours from her arrival, and very readable, Kim is a very different character to Peter Grant, not being even remotely a wizard (though she can recognise vestigia when she feels it). She's saved from the risk of being a Dana Scully expy by being a committed Christian to the point it's bordering on a fault (she gets called out on it at least once).

The thing with the talking bears is totally a bait and switch, though.

Paranormal Nonsense, Blue Moon Investigations 1, Steve Higgs

This is another of those ridulously prolific authors who keep rolling across my Amazon ad feed, only when this one rolled across my screen for £0.99 in late August I paid enough attention to realise this series (he has about a dozen) is set in the Medway Towns, aka where I live. And it turns out to be a (largely) fun read with an unexpected ending, even if it's difficult to take a protagonist called Tempest Danger Michaels seriously. It does however have a major problem, Tempest Michaels is a complete dick, and so is his best mate/backup. Tempest is clearly an author expy (author was an army officer who took the option of having his commission bought out when the Army downsized, Tempest ditto, picture of Tempest on the cover looks like an idealised, buffed-up version of the author, Tempest has two dachshunds, author admits to owning two dachshunds, and so on), but some of the details don't work, he's trying to write Tempest as an ex-squaddie, not an officer, but the redundancy award for a squaddie is not going to be nearly large enough to let him drive around in a BMW X7 and afford a detached house in one of the villages near Maidstone (minimum of about £.5m worth, by my reckoning). The overall conceit is reasonable, Tempest is a paranormal investigator who doesn't believe in the paranormal, exposing the fakes is his thing. The problem is he's a sexist prig, any woman he runs into is assessed on her looks first, and his chance of getting "Mr Wriggly" inside her panties second - I wish I was exaggerating, and his mate is actually worse on this front. While the instant he runs into anyone from the working class* he turns into a Daily Mail leader writer who believes people get, or at least should get, ASBOs for not keeping their gardens tidy and their doors and windows painted.

The story here is a series of vampire-style killings which has Tempest investigating the world of vampire groupies, with a side-order of the Beast of Bluebell Hill, and they're both reasonably done, it's just that whenever he's off the clock or talking to anyone who's not middle class he turns into a complete holier-than-thou prig - 'I don't keep any form of white carbohydrate in the house' is a typical aside to the 4th wall.

The unexpected ending? The author's afterword in which he admits he realised later he should have made him 'kinder' (probably after reading a bunch of reviews calling him a holier-than-thou dick), but, while this is the rewritten version, he decided against changing him. And if he's going to stay like that I see no reason to continue reading.

* The one exception, his parents.

Soul Taken, Patricia Briggs

I should have reviewed this one in October, when I read it, because it's a very seasonal offering, being set at Halloween and pushing the horror-vibe a lot more heavily than usual for the Mercy Thompson series. 

Mercy and her husband Adam are busy defusing a potentially lethal problem - mysterious pack member Sherlock Post just got his memory back*, and one of the things he remembers is he's more dominant a werewolf than Adam, so either one of them walks, or one of them dies - when they are visited by a spooky apparition of Marcilia, the local head vampire, who gives them a deadline to solve an issue with the vampire seethe, who all seem to have disappeared. On top of which someone has made a film about a local urban legend - sort of Friday the 13th, but with a scythe, and bodies have started appearing with exactly the same MO, meaning the police are reaching out for the pack's help again.

Content warning for eye-scream, a lot of eye-scream.

There's a small bit of retconning around the Sherwood Post thing, the 'everyone always got him confused with Y, but he's totally a legend' explanation for 'He's X? How come we never heard of X?' doesn't really gel solidly. I'm not certain there isn't a larger amount of retconning driving the entire storyline, given it throws up backstory that rewrites how trustworthy a major character is, and sets up as inevitable a conflict we've already been told will destabilise the entire supernatural world if it happens.

* As a result of something that happened in the latest book of the related Alpha and Omega series.

The Viper's Nest Roadhouse and Cafe, Sam Quinn Book 6, Seana Kelly

Sam's friend Stheno (yes, that one, the gorgon), is opening a bar on the San Francisco docks as a business venture, so Sam and husband Clive, now retired from his role as Master Vampire of SF, are there for the soft-opening, when someone turns up dead by vampire and the police arrive all wondering why Clive's old executive assistant also just turned up dead by vampire.

It's pretty obvious who is trying to set up Clive, because his maker, Garyn is arriving in town tonight, what's not obvious is why. So Sam and Clive head over to vampire central for the reception, only for Sam to realise there's a problem - almost any vampire who gets in range of Garyn, especially the menfolk, is reduced to a simpering idiot desperate to obey her every wish. And Garyn is clearly not happy Clive married anyone who isn't her.

So it's Sam vs Garyn, or Sam and her allies versus Garyn and every vampire she's sunk her mental compulsion into in over a millennium of living as a parasite on those around her. Just as well Sam's just levelled up and her allies include a gorgon, several dragons, a half-demon, an Egyptian god, and assorted witches and dwarves.

Other things read:

The annual re-read of the complete Mercy Thompson series, plus a re-read of the other Rivers of London novellas and Amongst our Weapons as a warm-up for Winter's Gifts.

I've got a bunch of new reads to discuss at some point - everything since August if not June, but I've been doing a lot of re-reading, including all of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels and novellas.

And mostly I've been thinking about Lesley May.

I'm headed up to see my folks at the end of the month (Easter trip postponed to Whit given a poorly timed bout of Covid on my brother-in-law's part), so went onto LNER's website to book the ticket on Monday night, at which point I was slightly disconcerted to be see:

1) in the left-hand column a confirmation that I'm a wheelchair-using passenger intending to stay in their chair throughout the journey,

and

2) in the right-hand column, almost exactly opposite, a warning that I may have to 'stand' on the connecting services*.

Slight lack of joined-up thinking in the website design there, I feel! **

* The connecting services don't do reservations, and one is a London commuter line, so the warnings aren't unreasonable for actual ambulant passengers, but we wheelchair-users have spaces all of our own.

** It's not the only issue, the time it allows to walk between stations if your journey needs that (St Pancras to Kings Cross in my case) doesn't allow for the extra 5-10 minutes needed to get off the incoming train if you need the ramp and the 20 minutes you're supposed to allow for passenger assistance at your outgoing station. But the standing thing is new.

Recent Reading

What Abigail Did That Summer, Ben Aaronovitch

This is a Rivers of London novella*, but from the point of view of Peter Grant's 13yo cousin Abigail, who makes up the youth wing of the Folly (aka Falcon, aka the Met Police's tame wizards - though Abigail has to pass her Latin GCSE before she gets to learn any spells). It's the summer holidays, and Peter's out of town helping on a missing persons case (and having encounters with homicidal unicorns - see Foxglove Summer), while Abigail's mother has a full-time job looking after her disabled brother, so Abigail is pretty much being left to her own devices. Until, that is, the espionage-obsessed talking foxes seek her out to tell her that something's amiss on Hampstead Heath (a large London park)**. And Abigail quickly figures out that whatever it is has already tried to suck her in, and, separately, her new friend Simon. So it's up to Abigail, Simon, and Indigo the fox to figure out what's going on.

Abigail's a pretty compelling, and convincingly written, character (there are footnotes to explain the slang, framed as for the Folly's tame FBI agent). It's very easy to accept that a streetwise, very intelligent, 13yo, mixed-race Londoner is going to give most police a very wide berth, or the minimum of (false) information necessary to get away, which makes Abigail taking on the problem herself convincing enough. There's only a brief appearance by Nightingale and not a lot of the Rivers here, bar a short audience with Fleet, but the covert female strand of wizardry does show up. Overall it's a strong addition to the series, though I foresee future issues between Nightingale and Simon's mum.

* At 175 pages short novel may be a better description.

** We're actually dropped into the story in media res, but loop back to the start almost immediately.

Werehunter, Mercedes Lackey

I actually pulled this off the shelf while I was winnowing a few books to go to the charity shop, but ended up reading it instead. It's a collection of short stories and I wasn't really taken by the title story, which may be why I didn't remember it favourably. There are a handful of other stories I was a bit meh! about, but another nine I did like, which is a reasonable ratio. Four of those revolve around S'Kitty, a telepathic ship's cat, and her handler as they deal with a bunch of aliens who have a vermin problem. They're not going to win any prizes, but they are enjoyable. The one Valdemar story deals with how Alberich, the Herald's Karsite weaponsmaster, was Chosen. There are two Diana Tregarde stories, one fairly slight encounter that's really, really not kind to the (thinly disguised) Romance Writers of America. I suspect revenge fiction. The other is reasonable, and went on to be the basis for her novel Children of the Night, but some of the language has not aged well. And the last two are a sort of junior Victorian paranormal investigator series with two girls (one an ex-streetkid) and a parrot at a school for the children of those working in the colonies, whose principal is an acknowledged Diana Tregarde expy. Again there are some language aging poorly issues, but they're otherwise sound enough. Their main issue is an egregious outbreak of Dick Van Dyke Cockney.

Hells Bell, Keri Arthur

Book 2 of the Lizzy Grace series and runaway-witch Lizzy and werewolf cop Aiden are fairly desperate to have sex, but ghostly bells summoning Lizzy to find a dead body with its soul ripped from it throw a major spanner in their plans. So Lizzy and her partner/familiar Belle have to step in again given the werewolf reservation's lack of a resident witch to protect its magical wellspring. It possibly plays the "Oh, bugger, we can't have sex, they just found another body" gambit once too often, but otherwise it's an enjoyable outing and the addition of grump witch troubleshooter Ashworth to the cast is a positive step.

Hunter Hunted, Keri Arthur

Book 3, and Lizzy stumbles onto someone conducting blood magic of the worst kind, the kind that leaves a body behind. The witch hierarchy that practically runs Australia call blood-magic using witches heretics, and has an agency to hunt them down, which is just as well as the wellspring decides Lizzie is just the person to turn to when someone starts hunting and skinning werewolves. On the positive side there's just time between the two crimes for Aiden to finally get her into bed. But when the heretic starts hunting the hunters, it turns out Lizzie really isn't going to get away with concentrating on the less dangerous threat.

Another competent episode, and after the previous book's addition of grumpy Ashworth I really liked the addition of his (non-grumpy) husband Eli.

Recent Gaming

I've been playing a fairly ridiculous amount of 7 Days to Die and my adventures in zombie AI wrangling continue. Over the past three horde nights:

Day 77: This week's preparatory changes were stringing a couple of rows of barbed wire down the sides of my base, and fortifying the stairwell up to the ground floor proper/mezzanine should they manage to beat their way into the cellar. Rather than attack me at the (almost) open front door all the zombies still charged up to the sides of my base, into the barbed wire and set about trying to beat their way through the fencing at the side (5000 damage points per block) that keeps them out from under the balcony. I had great fun when I discovered that they would come to stand below wherever I was standing on the balcony, wading through the barbed wide to get there, so I spent horde night running from front to back and vice versa, and taking potshots at the zombies as they tried to keep up with me and the barbed wire slowly whittled them down from below.

Day 84: I doubled up the side fencing to two layers. And this time I got the zombies to the front of the house, where they promptly tried to beat their way through the fencing under the balcony, which was still single layer there. *Headdesk* 

On top of that the World War Z style zombie pile-on at that corner was reaching the point that it was threatening to overtop the fence on top of the balcony, even though that's the in-game equivalent of four metres off the ground. So I rushed out to the projecting bastion and started shooting out the bottom of the pile, which was the moment I glitched through the balcony, down onto ground level with the zombies.

I'd hosed off three full magazines from my AK-47 in a panic before I realised they couldn't get to me, that I was still safely inside the double layered fencing under the bastion and they couldn't reach through to me. Which let me finish horde-night in a much more leisurely fashion. On the gripping hand it took me 5 minutes to beat my way out with an axe in the morning.

Day 91: This time I upgraded the fencing to two layers all around the base, and three in places (and put escape hatches in the floor/roof of all of the bastions in case of another glitch). I think that makes a minimum of 15,000 points of damage to beat their way into the base at ground level (and zombies mostly do 10-20 points per hit). And it worked, they finally came for me at the front door.

Gulp.

They still didn't come quite the way I'd expected. They came up a couple of side staircases that need an awkward jump, rather than up the nice simple ramp they were supposed to use (and I'd forgotten to pull up the temporary planking over the pit of barbed wire that was supposed to force them onto awkward balance poles that they will fall off half the time). And for the fifteen minutes of horde night I was firing pretty much continuously trying to keep them back. Of five layers of barricade they'd beaten their way through two and were regularly hurdling the third, simply because I couldn't fire fast enough to kill them to give me time to repair the barricades. At one point they actually got all the way in and almost killed me before I managed to hose them down with the AK-47. I ended the night with 6 rounds of rifle ammunition left out of just shy of 200, and had also used about a hundred each of pistol and shotgun ammunition. Eeep!

(This has gotten much harder since I dunked my previous Kindle Fire in the bath and can no longer work back through the carousel to remind myself what I've been reading)

Tales from the Folly, Ben Aaronovitch

A collection of short fiction from the Rivers of London universe. Weirdly this seems to be published by his US agents (JABberwocky), rather than a traditional publisher, and may well be ebook only. Aaronovitch says right at the start that he only started writing these under protest/demands from major bookstore chains for promotional shorts, and hadn't written at short length before. Mostly it's not an issue, but one or two cut off at odd points that I'm not sure are entirely successful.

The first set of stories have Peter as the protagonist, as in the novels. Home Crowd Advantage has him facing off against a French wizard who wants to confess to a crime committed during the London Olympics - the 1948 London Olympics. Some interesting background here on how the French did things differently to the Folly, but not really that differently. The Domestic draws Peter, and Toby the magic-sensitive dog, into what is reported to the local plods as a domestic dispute, but there's only a sharp-tongued old lady living at the address. The Cockpit has Peter, Lesley and Toby investigating a poltergeist at the Covent Garden Waterstones - the bookshop Aaronovitch used to work in. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Granny sees Peter and Beverly stop off at a motorway service station on the way home from Foxglove Summer, which is all the excuse Peter needs to stumble onto a possible granny-napping. King of the Rats, was apparently written for the media junket/announcement that the Post Office Underground Railway was to become a historical attraction, unfortunately it doesn't really deal with the railway, it just uses the Mount Pleasant engineering depot for a setting, with Peter and Jaget, his British Transport Police oppo,  called in by Fleet and her sister Tyburn to deal with a man dressed as a rat who's disturbing the reception. This is a story that decidedly stops in media res, rather than the usual technique of starting there, and I'm not certain it's successful, I was definitely left wanting to know what came after. A Rare Book of Cunning Device was originally commissioned by Audible, with proceeds to a library charity, so it's set in the British Library, with Peter, Professor Postmartin, and 'Hatbox' Winstanley, a librarian who knows Peter's mum, investigating another potential poltergeist - there's clearly a lot of them about.

The second set of stories have protagonists who aren't Peter. A Dedicated Follower of Fashion takes place in the swinging sixties and has the titular protagonist, and importer of illicitly entertaining chemicals, caught up in a series of unfortunate events culminating in the rebirth of the goddess of the River Wandle. Favourite Uncle, sees school-age wizard Abigail asked by one of her school-friends to investigate her uncle, who they only ever see at Christmas, and who she's beginning to suspect is not just not related to them, but possibly much, much older than he's letting on. There's a lot of back-story for Abigail buried in here, or not so much backstory as contemporary background, that explains why her family are so relieved to see her working as the youth wing of the Folly. Vanessa Sommer's Other Christmas List, takes Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer home for the holidays after learning of the reality of magic during The October Man, and being Vanessa, and methodical, she sets about investigating all the aspects of her home town that might relate to the supernatural (this persuaded me to buy The October Man as soon as I'd finished the collection). Three Rivers, Two Husbands and a Baby almost announces its entire cast list in the title, only missing are a chorus of three talking foxes. The husbands are Dominic and Victor, the local cop and his farmer partner from Foxglove Summer, and Peter and Beverly's riverine high jinks during that story are about to come to a climax.

Part three is made up of brief vignettes rather than stories, but Aaronovitch chooses to call them Moments. Nightingale - London September 1966, has Nightingale's burnt-out contemporary, Hugh from Foxglove Summer,  up from the country and during a dinner together he chides Nightingale to show at least some sign of moving with the times. Reynolds - Florence, Az 2014 has Kimberly Reynolds, the FBI agent from Whispers Under Ground, interviewing serial killers, and finding it trying. Tobias Winter - Meckenheim, 2012. The Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters learns that the Nightingale has taken an apprentice, which is going to be life-changing for Tobias. (Incidentally, there's an unexplained joke here that you'll miss if you don't know Cobra 11 is roughly Germany's long-running fictional equivalent to Police Interceptors).

The October Man, Ben Aaronovitch

A Rivers of London novella, but set in Germany, and with only the reputations of the regular characters intruding. I'm not sure novella does this justice, it's really a short novel, with a page count that feels longer than it actually is. Kriminal Kommissar (Detective Inspector) Tobias Winter, of the Abteilung fur Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten of the Bundeskriminalamt (the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters at the German FBI equivalent), is visiting his parents when he gets the word that a suspicious death near Trier is sufficiently weird to have triggered KDA involvement, which means Tobias, because the KDA is basically him, the Director, and the support staff. 

Tobias arrives in Trier to find that someone is clearly trying to be funny, because his assigned liaison from the State Kriminalpolizei is Kriminal Kommissarin Vanessa Sommer. Vanessa turns out to be the departmental expert in agricultural crime, which is handy when the KDA's tame pathologist announces the cause of death was Botrytis Cinerea, aka Noble Rot, a fungal infection which is more normally used to increase the percentage of sugar in grapes. Which means it probably wasn't a coincidence that the body was found next to the vineyard of Jacqueline Stracker, newly returned after years in the Californian wine industry and hoping to get the family vintage back into production after several decades of absence. Tobias, who describes his job as surfing the standard investigation and spear-fishing the bits that interest the KDA, rapidly establishes that Frau Stracker's grandfather believed their vineyards had benefited from the interest of the goddess of the local river, which leads to Tobias and Vanessa meeting with Kelly, the angry goddess of the River Kyll, and Morgane, the terrifying pre-kindergarten goddess of the Mosel. But quite how the local rivers intersect with the murder of an unremarkable forty-something, notable only for his membership of a drinking club of other forty-something losers, isn't initially clear.

I liked this a lot, enough that I read it twice in a row, and have read it again since. Hidden in the text are a lot of details about the Folly's German equivalent, and how its job differs from that of Nightingale and Peter. Amongst other things, it's fairly heavily implied the KDA's Director, the Wicked Witch of the East, is ex-Stasi. Tobias isn't Peter Grant, but he shares a certain attitude to getting the job done in the most efficient way possible, which in his case the Director describes as a combination of indolence and attention to detail. Vanessa, meanwhile, isn't Lesley, but shares the potential to be a more traditionally skilled copper than her male counterpart. OTOH I can't see Lesley keeping up the concert harp, or anything else, in the circumstances where Vanessa doesn't actually like playing, but thinks she should  because she's good at it. It's entirely possible Vanessa's overdeveloped sense of responsibility will get her into trouble if and when Aaronovitch revisists the KDA. And given how much Tobias sees Peter as an overly capable rival, whereas Peter doesn't know Tobias exists, it would be an absolute waste if he doesn't give us both more from Winter and Sommer, and the KDA meets the Folly.

Never Too Old For a Pierhead Jump, David Black

I've just finished reading Friedman's British Submarines in Two World Wars, and WWII naval operations in the Far East are an area I'm interested in, so when this turned up for a pound in my Amazon recommendations I decided to take a chance. A pierhead jump is apparently nautical slang for a last minute assignment to a ship, and this is what happens to Lieutenant Harry Gilmour when the captain and XO of His Majesty's Submarine Saraband are dismissed for failing to stamp down hard on conduct prejudicial en route to join operations in South East Asia in early 1944. This is apparently the sixth book about Harry, they've been drifting through my mentions for a while and given the price I presumed they were self-published, but this is a lot better than I expected. Though I did wince, and wonder if I'd made a mistake, when the conduct prejudicial turned out to be homosexual activity. I'm still trying to figure out how you'd even manage that on a submarine where the only person with his own cabin, or any cabin, is the captain. There's a definite cringe factor for the collision of then contemporary and modern sensibilities. But anyway Harry is parachuted into command at Suez, mostly on the grounds he's the only spare submarine captain handy.

Harry takes over a broken crew, who are basically pissed-off at the world for the situation they find themselves in. And how he sets about rebuilding them into a functional crew is very well done, especially the recognition that they're not going to be a good crew until they're both regained confidence in themselves as a crew, and screwed up at least once to season that confidence with reality. Other than the chief engineer, the characters are functionally restricted to the control room crew, because they're the only ones around Harry when things happen, but they're well done, with individual depth.

I can't think of another novel, or film, which has tackled the British/Commonwealth submarine war in the Far East, there may well be one, but it's not coming to mind. Rather than the mid-Pacific operations of the American subs, this comes down to operations in the tight waters between the Burmese/Malayan coast and Sumatra, with the British boats based in Ceylon and the Japanese in Singapore trying to run supplies up the coast to their army on the Burmese/Indian frontier. There are some similarities to operations in the North Sea, the water is shallow enough to make it difficult to hide, but here it's a rare target that's worth a torpedo. The narrative naturally breaks down into individual war patrols down into the Straits of Malacca, and brief interludes in Ceylon, where Harry finds himself involved with the enigmatic Doctor Victoria Cotterell. 

The action sequences are very well done, and give every appearance of having been written with detailed charts at hand - it was no surprise to find out the author had a senior submariner for a technical adviser. They start out with what's basically junk-bashing, actions against barely escorted impressed local shipping, then as the British submarine crews learn their new environment they press further down into the straits, encountering more capable opponents. The story culminates in a mission to land an agent in Sumatra that goes badly wrong, and then in a mission to transport XE-Craft, mini-subs, to Singapore for an attack on a Japanese battleship. (An appendix gives details of the real XE-craft attack on Singapore and how it differs from the story here).

And what impressed me possibly more than anything is that the author remembers that by this point in the war the RN Submarine Service's war is almost over, and that affects the attitudes of the crew and the other characters. There is a jarring secondary arc taking place in North Africa involving a character unconnected with the main narrative, which is definitely concluded with extreme prejudice, and that seems very out of place, but on picking up the first book in the series (which has a foreword by an ex-First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff!) I see that that's been ongoing almost since Harry first set foot in a submarine. At this point I'd anticipate picking up the whole series, and while the last book reads okay as a standalone, barring the secondary arc, it'll probably make considerably more sense when I read the five novels that come before it.

... on account of I was feeling ever so slightly delicate on New Years Day ;)

(I didn't drink that much, I actually think it was mostly down to Tuesday also being change-my-butrans-patch-day, which has been messing with my stomach for a while now, but there was that headache that kicked in about 10AM, which I can't really blame on patches).

I spent a pleasant New Years Eve in the pub with my sister and her husband, Amusingly, the pub had decided to run Spectre, the New Year's Eve big TV movie (and the latest James Bond), on their over the bar screen, but with the sound off, which meant you had a good two thirds of the guys in the pub trying to follow Bond's progress on screen, while simultaneously trying to convince wives and partners that 'of course I'm paying attention to you, love - did you say something?'. We stumbled home just after Midnight, with the weather continuing startlingly mild.

I temporarily stalled on writing progress on Saturday, courtesy of Windows convincing me that it had lost the rewrite of my short-story 'Wheeler', which I did while I was offline before Christmas. It was in a Onedrive (ie Cloud) enabled directory, so I knew Windows would want to update the online copy when I got back online. What I wasn't expecting was to come back to it later and find no sign of the update whatsoever. I finally worked out, half by chance, that it showed up when I was online and not doing writing, but not when I was offline on account of writing. This was annoying, and if it's working as designed, someone's an idiot.

Another point to avoid, having two or more short stories in one directory, so that when you try to save as Story B after recovering from a crash, you accidentally double click on Story A, make it the filename you want to save as, and almost overwrite your only copy. Soooo close....

So Saturday writing time got swallowed up for re-organising directories and making certain I have actual non-cloud backups of everything I've been working on over the holidays.

I had Monday and Tuesday largely off writing given New Years and family, but short story 3, now titled 'Disruptive Technologies,' now stands at  7200 words, and given that includes the first half and the climax, with only part of the middle missing, I'm confident of finishing it off at about 8500 words. On the other hand I'm also now convinced it's a potential novel concept, which means I now have two viable technothriller ideas competing for my attention. Plotting for short story idea 2, 'Phantom Leg', is also progressing nicely, though whether I get to it before I head home is uncertain. I've belatedly realised I'm reworking the abandoned novel plot from several years back, for a much younger version of the protagonist. Even if I don't get around to writing it, it's still generating some deeply useful character background for the common protagonist of all three new shorts I've worked on over the holidays and has contributed its title, 'A Leg to Stand On', for the first of them.

Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant is your standard London beat cop (give or take his Sierra Leonean heritage); or he will be if he can finish his probationary year without being assigned to do paperwork for people who better fit the traditional mould of a real copper, people like his friend and fellow probationer Lesley. Then a man is found murdered in Covent Garden, attacked so brutally he was decapitated. The murder squad move in, do their job, and leave Peter and Lesley to watch the scene overnight, which is when Peter meets the ghost.

Everything he knows about the Met screams at him not to mention the ghost, and everything he knows about policing tells him he can’t ignore a witness, especially not one whose evidence turns out to match the video footage. With paperwork looming, and Lesley getting an unheard of assignment direct to the murder squad, there’s only one thing for a copper to do - investigate it himself. Which is when Peter runs into DCI Thomas Nightingale, who is older than he looks, and the only wizard on the staff of the Metropolitan Police.

Peter might not have what the real coppers are looking for, but he has what Nightingale’s looking for, and paperwork is averted as he finds himself transferred into Nightingale’s one-man division, 'the Folly', operating out of the eponymous building, which looks remarkably like a one-time Gentleman’s Club that hasn't been updated since WWII, and fed and cared for by the silent Molly, who appears to be rather less than human.

And so begins Peter’s introduction to the world of magical London, where fire investigators can turn out to be ex-paras with a handy supply of thermite grenades, where Scottish gastroenterologist Abdul Haqq Walid is the leading expert on cryptopathology, aka the forensics of the weird, and where there’s a power struggle ongoing between the upper and lower reaches of the Thames, as represented by the upriver sons of Old Man Thames, and the downriver daughters of Mother Thames (who 60 years ago was a suicidal Nigerian nursing student, until the river made her an offer). Nightingale sets Peter to solve that conflict as a training exercise, while warning him to tread carefully among the Rivers, which would be easier if Beverly Brook wasn’t quite so attractive, and demanding.

And all the while brutal murders keep happening.

Rivers of London is that rare thing, a crossover between urban fantasy and police procedural, and it hits exactly the right note for both. The police culture appears absolutely flawless, while magical London slips easily into its shadows. This could have been another run of the mill urban fantasy, but Aaronovitch lifted it well beyond that.

(Apparently the US title is 'Midnight Riot', for who knows what marketing reason.)

Content warning: Not a book to read if violence towards infants upsets you

With Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, one of his old Dr Who scriptwriting partners, handling the writing the story merges perfectly with the main series, but I was delighted by how well the characters have been transformed to the visual medium. Peter, Beverly Brook, DI Stephanopoulos, DC Guleed, and Nightingale are all perfect for their parts. Even Peter’s car is spot on – check the number plate. Stylistically the art is on the realistic end of the comic spectrum – recognisable cars, maps, driving licenses, passports, and so on, and I really like the way the artist, Lee Sullivan, handles facial expressions and posture.

Chapter 1 is pretty short at 22 pages, but does squeeze a properly structured tale into that. There are four more chapters I’ll definitely get around to at some point. Also included for your money are a one-page story involving Beverly and a couple of drunks, a 2-page guide to Peter’s London, in this case Putney, home to a certain Ms Brook, and 2-pages on BMWs (there is a story link to this, though a fairly tenuous one).