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 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.

 

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Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold.

I'd been looking for my copy of this for months, having worked my way through most a re-read of the Vorkosigan Series. I finally found it in my laptop's Calibre library, so apparently I didn't buy it from Amazon as I'd thought. It's a fun romp. The series has mostly portrayed Captain Ivan Vorpatril, Mile's cousin, as shallow but ornamental, with the occasional hint that Ivan isn't nearly as feckless as he seems. And given by this point Ivan is the senior aide to Barrayar's military commander, he really couldn't be.

Ivan's on Komarr, staying in the local equivalent of an AirBnB, while his boss is running a bunch of inspections on the Barrayaran forces in system, when his dissolute and disreputable cousin Byerly Vorrutyer arrives on his doorstep, the complication being that Ivan knows By is really an agent for Impsec, charged with infiltrating plots involving the Vor. By's on a case, and he knows something is going to happen to a young woman, Maybe he can't save her, but Ivan's available.

Tej is working in a shipping office, quietly desperate about her situation, when Ivan arrives, claiming to want to ship a vase, and then proceeds to try and charm her into going out with him. This fails to impress, Ivan's attempts get increasingly desperate, and Tej's solution is to have him stunned by her fellow fugitive, Rish, who is blue, so they can interrogate him as a presumed kidnapper/assassin/bounty hunter. Then the real kidnappers/assassins/bounty hunters arrive.

Shennanigans ensue.

And with people beating down the door, the immediately obvious way to extract Tej and Rish, at least to Ivan's panicked mind, is for Ivan and Tej to get married.

Then the complications start.

It's a fun romp, but Bujold is possibly having too much fun with some of the sub-plots. At its core it's a rom-com about two people who end up accidentally married and then have to deal with all the complications relatives inflict on them while they try and work out how they really feel about each other, complicated by a double hidden prince gambit, and a strapped-on heist movie.

Silence Fallen, Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson 10)

A re-read of the last book I'd read in the Mercy Thompson series to get me back up to speed. Mercy is kidnapped by the European vampire king Bonarota, causing Adam to assemble his allies (including local vampire boss Marsilia, Bonarota's lost love) and fly off to rescue her from his Renaissance-style court. Of course by the time they get there Mercy has rescued herself and ended up in Prague having encounters with a certain legendary force of order. But then, as Coyote's daughter, Mercy is something of a force of chaos herself.

Storm Cursed, Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson 11)

I had a problem with the structure of this one, because once we start to see the threat driving the plot, it's immediately clear a major series character is at absolute best being put on a bus at the end (though on the clever plotting side, it also becomes clear that their replacement has been hanging over the fireplace for several books without giving the game away).

Briggs has been building up the 'Hardesty Witches' as a threat for a while, mostly in the parallel Alpha and Omega series, but this time they make a move against Mercy and Adams pack.  The Hardesty Witches are sort of a black witchcraft crime-family, so they're never going to get along with the law-and-order oriented werewolves, but it's really not clear to me what their aim was here - and it's a really high-stakes play because they're trying to disrupt a summit between the US government and the fae (who are technically at war) taking place in pack territory. I just wasn't convinced that the risk of sending the US government and its agencies after the witches was worth the potential payoff of keeping things disrupted.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it, but this is one where you really, really need to have read all the books that go before it to understand the forces in play.

Smoke Bitten, Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson 12)

One of the complications of Mercy and Adam's life is a playdate for their adoptive son Aiden means Underhill is coming to play, That's Underhill as in the personification of Faery, who is having an ongoing tantrum with the fae. Discovering she's installed a gate to Faery in their backyard really isn't the kind of garden feature that adds to your real-estate market value.

Also complicating things is that Adam isn't himself, and won't let Mercy in to find out what's going on. That takes a backseat when two of Mercy's friends turn up dead in an apparent murder-suicide, but Mercy can smell magic all over the supposed murderer, which makes it a matter for the pack. And as other people start to die, or be taken over, including more people Mercy cares for, it becomes clear that something lethal has escaped from Faery, and that Mercy has become the focus of its attention.

And in our heroes' copious spare time there's the cabal of outsider werewolves plotting a coup.

I read it in one sitting, so clearly I liked it, but given the number of times it's happened to date, Mercy really should be slightly more alert to people manipulating the Mercy-Adam relationship. OTOH what's going on with Adam is a piece of gorgeously evil plotting digging into his characterisation right back to day one. And the denouement does bring the return of an old friend.

Amongst Our Weapons,
Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London 9)

I really wasn't expecting that title to be a quotation, so the plot direction surprised me in a way that might not be the case for other people.

Bev is imminently due to deliver twins, so as the expectant father of two baby river goddesses the last thing Peter needs is a major murder investigation being dumped in his lap. But that's what he gets when the death of a man who was apparently in the process of robbing the London Silver Vaults turns out to have a significant magical component (him being missing half his chest is a major clue). So Peter and new Folly trainee Dannii find themselves back on DCI Seawoll's Belgravia Murder Investigation Team. Things get even more complicated when they turn up a second body, and a connection back to a small group of Charismatic Catholics* at Manchester University in the 80s. And to make matters worse, Lesley is back, and apparently involved.

When Peter goes to interview one of the other group members, now the force behind a Bodyshop expy, he really isn't expecting to find himself facing off against an apparent Angel of Death, complete with wings, halo and burning spear. The outcome is a draw, but that religious link is getting compelling.

Drastic measures are called for, which means Peter and Dannii catching the train to Manchester, with Seawoll along as local guide. Things take several unexpected turns, but we meet a familiar face, and get an insight into another aspect of the Folly's post-WWII disintegration.

But in the end this is the Rivers of London, not Manchester, so it's back to the Smoke for the final showdown with the forces of erm....

Enjoyable, even if I failed the pop-culture test. There are a couple of points about the ending that make me wonder if we won't see a time skip before the next book in the series (which is currently in 2013 if memory serves).

Plus points to Aaronovitch from me for introducing a deaf-without-speech character (and for feeling no need whatsoever to point out her partner is trans) , and for this line: "Whoever had converted the warehouse into offices and flats had clearly done it in the carefree 60s, when lifts were for wimps and people with disabilities hadn't been invented."

* The Catholic church's version of evangelicals, my old physics teacher was one.

Demon's Dance, Keri Arthur (Lizzie Grace 4)

The good news for Lizzie, Belle and hot werewolf cop Aiden is that the new reservation witch has arrived, so Lizzie and Belle can go back to being coffee shop owners, not untrained stand-ins. The bad news is that there's a skin-stealing demon on the loose, and the worse news is the new reservation witch doesn't just recognise on-the-run-from-her-family Lizzie, he's her cousin Monty. Which brings a bunch of revelations about what happened between Lizzie and her father, and forced marriage is only the start of it. It's significantly heavier on the abuse side of things than I'd anticipated from earlier books.

Telling the real story buys Lizzie time with Monty, and lances some of the tension between her and Aiden. But that demon's still out there, and it's starting to look like not just one demon, but two.

This took a darker turn than I anticipated, and I'm not talking about the demons. On the negative side I don't feel I was ever quite clear on precisely what was going on with the second demon. And Arthur definitely has a thing for putting her characters through the mangle, as of the close of this book we're now up to at least two concussions, four broken limbs and sundry burns and shrapnel injuries (plus a couple of deaths of secondary characters).

Rebuilding the Royal Navy: Warship Design Since 1945
, David K Brown and George Moore

Re-read, a history of warship design 1945 to 2002, from one of the people involved.
 

Currently Playing:

7 Days to Die: Definitely getting the hang of things. The last building I raided turned out to have an underground drugs lab, and hearing zombies banging about when I couldn't see them had me seriously freaked out.

Wordle: I finally completed my 100th Wordle - I've been playing intermittently since January.

Overall stats:

1: 0
2: 1
3: 7
4: 41
5: 35
6: 15

Failed: 1


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Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson series

I completed my re-read of the ones I own, so:

Moon Called
Blood Bound
Iron Kissed
Bone Crossed
Silver Borne
River Marked
Frost Burned
Night Broken
Fire Touched
Silence Fallen

Plus the anthology Shifting Shadows which mostly isn't about Mercy. 

I'm a couple of books behind so will be catching up on at least one of them - the other was still priced over what I'll pay for an ebook last time I checked.

The advantage of re-reading a long series is seeing how (or if!) the character grows and how relationships change. Mercy definitely grows during these, she's not quite a loner when Moon Called starts, but she's not too far off - she's lived in the Tri-Cities as a mechanic for a decade at that point, is largely ignoring her supernatural heritage except for occasional runs as a coyote, and has perhaps five friends, plus frenemy Adam the hot Werewolf Alpha. By the end of Silence Fallen she's Adam's wife, second in the pack and making decisions that will affect all the supernatural species on a national level. It's very much a case of growing into her heritage as Coyote's daughter and foster daughter of Bran the werewolf king - imagine if Coyote and Machiavelli had a lovechild together.

It's also clear that Mercy's growth rubs off on those around her, her friends Ben and Honey are both moving up the pack hierarchy, the Grey Lords of the Fae have been reminded why it's a bad idea to piss off Zee, her one-time boss (and one time forger of Excalibur), and even the local vampire queen Marsillia is more secure than she's been in decades, possibly centuries.

The one thing that bothers me is the way Briggs seems to like beating up on her heroine - over the course of the series Mercy's had multiple fractures and burns, on several occasions severe enough they've only been fixable by divine intervention. It's almost unusual for her not to finish a story in plaster or in hospital.

Elizabeth Bear

The  Don Sebastian de Ulloa stories:

The White City
Garrett Investigates
Ad Eternum

And I know I re-read New Amsterdam, the main collection, relatively recently, but my Kindle isn't cooperating in telling me when. I also bounced off Seven for a Secret , which I hadn't read, around about Christmas, which was more down to me than the book. There are links to that in one of the stories in Garrett Investigates and in Ad Eternum, so I'll be taking another swing at it in the near future.

Ad Eternum is the new one to me, it's a comparatively short novella in which wampyr and former great detective Don Sebastian de Ulloa travels to New York in 1962, shortly after the death of the last member of his court through the series, Dame Commander Abigail Irene Garrett, commander of the Detective Crown Investigators and great detective/forensic magician in her own right, who by my reckoning, and extrapolating from the timeline in Garrett Investigates, lived to somewhere about 115.

Sebastian is travelling under a name which tells you he's still beating himself up over the death of the first of that court in 1903 and debating with himself whether it's time to walk into the light. However he soon falls into the company of a coterie of magicians (and one conman), and then meets with an old acquaintance, who also finds herself needing a new future. This isn't really a mystery story, more cycles starting anew. I enjoyed it, and it's a good end to the Garrett/Ulloa stories, but definitely not the place to start!

Currently Reading: Most of the way through Snowcrash, by Neal Stephenson, which I haven't read in long enough the only things I really recalled are the protagonist's name: Hiro Protagonist (seriously), and that he's a pizza delivery driver for the Mob, while being simultaneously a hacker and the self-proclaimed greatest swordsman on the net (it helps if you wrote the software).

 

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I'm on a Patricia Briggs re-reading kick, recently consumed:

The Alpha and Omega series:

Alpha and Omega (Novella)
Cry Wolf
Hunting Ground
Fair Game
Dead Heat

And just started on the Mercy Thompson books

Moon Called

Currently Playing:

I'm still playing Valheim. I just took out the second level boss, 'The Elder', who is basically an Ent. I spent a couple of hours preparing the ground for the battle, and probably helped him more than I helped me. It turns out he has an attack with a wide horizontal fan of effect, so taking out things to hide behind (trees!) in the name of freedom of movement was probably a bad idea - though even the stones I did end up cowering behind were punched through after a couple of hits. I only won (and that after dying twice) because there was a randomly placed burial chamber about 100m from where you summon him, and I ended up using that as a bunker because he couldn't hit anything below ground level - pop out, pepper him with fire arrows, dive back into the bunker to heal damage. So now I have the master key to all the dungeons in the swamp, which should let me progress on to the iron tier. (Building dungeons in the swamp strikes me as an inherently gooey idea, and getting iron from them seems counter-intuitive - rust yes, iron no).

I've spent the past couple of days fortifying my main bases. The more recent one I had to fortify because I wanted to be able to dock my long ship without any of the evil dwarfs who roam the forest getting to it, the original one I spent last night fortifying after a raid by two trolls (which are blue, carry tree-trunks as a weapon, and stand about 25'), which smashed in its front and caused a whole heap of mess. I'd only popped back for five minutes to do something and ended up spending a couple of hours rebuilding.

It's not a game I would have accused of subtlety, but I've twice now spotted a shadowy figure with a staff lurking in the woods, who disappears in a poof of smoke if you try to get close to him. I suspect it's Odin. The first time I spotted him seriously creeped me out as it was immediately after defeating the Elder and I was left asking if I'd really seen it, so seeing it a second time was a relief

 

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So, having been back for a week I've now spent four weeks at home out of the last ten. That's clearly not ideal, if for no other reason than I've forgotten how to do the home thing and am gradually re-indoctrinating myself into things like "You need to do shopping" and "but first you need to defrost the fridge, because that's enough ice to sink the Titanic".

Not strictly about forgetting how to home, but probably related. Standing outside the front door thinking "I know I've forgotten something, what the hell is it? Oh, wheelchair. D'oh!"

The weather has been hovering around almost hot enough to sit out, I tried sitting out for tea yesterday as it was sunny, but had to come back in when I started shivering. Hopefully today has tipped over the edge into acceptable.

I did mean to post about the end of my trip North, but keep forgetting, so I may as well segue into that. Despite being back North for a fortnight I only got to see my Dad during the first week, and the last visit was just 10 minutes prior to the meeting about him. My sister wasn't available for a lift on the Friday or Saturday, and on the Sunday we arrived at the home after a good Sunday Pub Lunch at the Copper Mine near Crook (Oh, god, that mash looks stolid, OMG, but it tastes excellent! - though their Yorkshires were just too thick and weirdly chewy) to find that the care home had had an outbreak of (presumably) norovirus and was asking people not to visit. We could see Dad sitting in the garden, and actually had to call my sister back as she'd gone in through the garden gate, but spending time with him was out. That continued through until last weekend, well past the point I came home, but fortunately Dad never caught the bug.

One advantage of being barred from visiting is that it meant we had greater freedom to take my mother out (it was half-term so my sister was free). Mam didn't want anything special doing for her birthday, and through sheer incompetence I'd booked to come home the day before her birthday anyway, but we took her out to Seaton Carew (on the coast near Hartlepool, also widely known as Seaton Canoe after a famous faked death a few years ago), for lunch. The weather could have been better, there was a heavy sea fret and you almost couldn't see the sea from the other side of the promenade, in fact with the wind blowing the fret into your face it was downright miserable. But we spent an hour in the penny arcades (total expenditure between the three of us £5) and then found a fish shop for lunch - normal practice would have been to eat them out on the prom, but given the weather we went for the sit-down option. Service was slow, but the fish and chips were excellent when they finally did show up.

We came home via Seal Sands, which despite the name is primarily an oil refinery, complete with an oil rig sitting on the shore (a quick google tells me it's the 24,000t Brent Delta production platform, which is in the process of being scrapped https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-39747670). Despite that we did actually see some seals, about a dozen basking on the banks of a creek the road ran across.

All in all a pleasant few hours, even if the weather could have been better.

Books Read:

Burn Bright, Patricia Briggs

Latest in the Alpha and Omega series. As I've been catching up on both Alpha and Omega and the Mercy Thompson series, which is interlinked, I'll save the full review and do all four recent books together when I have a chance.

The Flowers of Vashnoi, Lois McMaster Bujold

Set before Cryoburn, this is very much a thematic sequel to At the Mountains of Mourning, about the Young Miles discovering the hangovers of the Time of Isolation and Barrayaran intolerance of 'Muties'. This time it's Ekaterin's turn. Beyond raising two toddlers (and a teenager who never actually directly appears), and wrangling Miles, she's also helping out with Enrique and Martya's latest butterbug project, which, inspired by Miles, has the aim of cleaning up the radioactive ruins of Vorkosigan Vashnoi (nuked by the Cetagandans in his grandfather's time). The idea is the bugs munch through the various plant life in the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone, concentrating radioactive chemicals, and deposit them at set points for collection and safe disposal. Ekaterin's part of the project is (as usual) to manage the bug's external presentation, in this case by highlighting how radioactive they are, which she and Enrique have encompassed by turning the bug's thorax into a representation of the radioactivity trefoil, lit by bioluminescence. They've just reached the point of field trials in the zone, but it never occurred to Ekaterin that someone on radiation-conscious Barrayar might find the trefoil pretty, or that the intersection of the Vashnoi Exclusion Zone and someones is not the null set.

Overall it's fairly slight, there's not much mystery to the mystery, it's more about Ekaterin being Ekaterin and inately good at people-wrangling in a very different way to Miles. (Miles could lead a Children's Crusade, Ekaterin is much more likely to bring them home and feed them).

French Destroyers: Torpilleurs d'Escadre and Contre-Torpilleurs, 1922-1956. John Jordan and Jean Moulin

Excellent book on the history of France's interwar destroyers and super-destroyers, fully up to the same standard as the books on their British equivalents by Norman Friedman and (with wider focus) D K Brown (unsurprising as Jordan is the editor of Warship International). Fascinating, but ultimately depressing as more were lost in combat with Britain and the US than against the Germans, and most were scuttled at Toulon. So good I had to talk myself out of buying Jordan's books on French Cruisers and French Battleships on the spot, and they'll definitely be bought in the near future. Searching them out on Amazon was an exercise in frustration, I've not found one search that will actually get me all of the books in the series, I actually stumbled on a fourth one, Battleships pre-1922, quite by accident earlier this week.
 

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

I was getting ready to book my ticket home, the stuff regarding my father's care funding having ground to a halt with people on Easter holidays, and just starting to look forward to it, when they got back to us. Ironically at precisely the same time we were ringing their complaints people to say 'how do we move this forward/extend our complaint'.  The call was to offer a new assessment with new assessor, exactly what we've wanted from the outset, but not until the 26th. Which means I'm probably here until the start  of May - that's assuming my sister can make that date - she can't check her appointments diary until she's back in school on Monday

The weather here continues to take 'April Showers' to heart, so we haven't really been out anywhere apart from Sunday Lunch last weekend, which was a little disappointing vs the restaurant's usual standard (watery turnip and carrot mash), though still pleasantly filling.

After Yoon mentioned meeting S L Huang I've re-read the bits of her Russell's Attic series I have: Zero-Sum Game, Half-Life, and Root of Unity, plus the short stories Ladies Day Out and Rio Adopts a Puppy (which I hadn't previously read - deeply creepy, no actual animal harm. but it is contemplated). I would have liked to move on to Plastic Smile, the fourth book, but the series is apparently in the process of changing from self-published (and an example of how that can be done so well it looks completely professional) to being published by Tor, so not currently available.

Having read the latest three Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson (2)+Alpha and Omega (1) novels it looks like I may reread the parts of the series I have on Kindle next.

WRT non-fiction I read The Battleship Builders, a big history of the firms that built the Royal Navy's dreadnoughts, and I've finally finished Norman Friedman's Naval Firepower, which has taken me almost a year, and is that rare thing, a book that doesn't have nearly enough equations. It's basically a history of a very specific mathematical/engineering problem* - battleship fire control, aka bringing two objects together in time and space when one is manouvering to avoid that, and the other follows a ballistic trajectory over anything up to 15 nautical miles that takes several minutes of flight, while being fired from a platform that is itself manouvering and subject to wave motion causing it to pitch and roll, which affects the alignment of the firing barrel. I'd actually have found it much easier to follow with some of the equations ready to hand. I picked up Command at Sea, a set of notoriously detailed naval wargames rules, to see how it handled abstracting that, and inevitably am thinking "well, I wouldn't have done it that way". I may look for another heavyweight naval title to follow

*  probably the most complex successful computational solution prior to Ultra, and all mechanical.

I have managed some writing, line-edited about 110 pages of the first novel, to bring myself back up to where I was(and a bit beyond) when I set the rewrite aside before Christmas. I did consider doing something for Sherwood Smith's ballroom anthology, and came up with a plot for The Elf-Queen's Inaugral Ball, but I think I need to concentrate on the novel, so I'll set that aside as notes. That said I promptly took a couple of days out to experiment with an alternate opening to the second novel which decouples it from being so tight a sequel to the first one. That would let me market it independently if the first goes nowhere, but it's six and two threes, there are plot advantages to both approaches. The first version of the alternate didn't work, the second worked a lot better, but could be tweaked to be better still. Even if I don't want to go with it as an opening, I probably need to work it in somewhere. Meanwhile, back to book one.

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David Gillon

March 2025

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