Michael J. Ritchie's Blog, page 12
March 8, 2022
“The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman (2020)
“Well, let’s start with Elizabeth, shall we?”
It’s impossible to be unaware that Richard Osman is now an author. His huge advance that the fact it had been sold for adaptation before even being published were well reported, and everyone eagerly awaited the release date to see if Osman can add writing to his already well-strung bow. I’d resisted, however. Part of this is sheer stubbornness, because I prefer to reach things in my own time rather than just do whatever the crowd is doing (and I free...
February 27, 2022
“The Ex Hex” by Erin Sterling (2021)
“Never mix vodka and witchcraft.”
I enjoy a mix of the magical and the mundane. It would be kind of reassuring to think there was a secret group of magic users keeping the world turning, although just ten seconds watching the news for the last few years suggests there isn’t. Or if there is, they’re not very good at it. Anyway, let’s get some magic with a big dollop of romance.
Vivienne Jones, a nineteen-year-old witch, has just had her heart broken after her torrid summer of sexual exploration c...
February 24, 2022
“Snow” by John Banville (2020)
“I’m a priest, for Christ’s sake – how can this be happening to me?”
Thinking on it, I’m not sure I’ve read many stories set in Ireland, which is odd given it’s the only country that shares a border with my own. Time to head back seventy years then to see what I can discover.
In 1950s Ireland, a country where religious divisions remain rife, a Catholic priest has been found dead in the house of a Protestant family. The death is clearly not natural, with blood spread wide and the victim castrated...
February 17, 2022
“The Compendium Of (Not Quite) Everything” by Jonn Elledge (2021)
“Let’s start at the beginning.”
I love a bit of trivia. Always have. It’s really come in even more useful since I started writing regular quizzes, sometimes including a question not because it’s easy, but simply because I have to share the interesting bit of information I’ve uncovered. It helps when people write compelling and interesting books compiling all these titbits, and it helps even more if they’re funny while they do it. Jonn Elledge’s book has both humour and knowledge in spades.
Elled...
February 10, 2022
“Mrs Morris Changes Lanes” by Debbie Young (2021)
“But it’s my day off.”
We’ve all wondered how our life would look if we’d made different choices along the way, but what if we could see how those other lives really panned out?
Juliet Morris has found her day off ruined by having to take her careless, thoughtless husband’s car to the garage to have yet another dent removed. Her day doesn’t get any better when she loses a filling to a bar of chocolate and has to book an emergency dental appointment, only to find that the locum dentist is an old ...
February 3, 2022
“Sourdough” by Robin Sloan (2017)
“It would have been nutritive gel for dinner, same as always, if I had not discovered stuck to my apartment’s front door a paper menu advertising the newly expanded delivery service of a neighbourhood restaurant.”
I am categorically not a foodie. Cooking is time consuming, and it’s just fuel you need to get you through the day. If I didn’t have to eat again, I never would, although I’d make an exception for wine gums. Sourdough bread is a foodstuff that seemed to really come into itself during t...
January 27, 2022
“The Wooden Overcoat” by Pamela Branch (1951)
“Benjamin Cann sat in the warm afternoon sunlight and basked.”
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was over by the 1950s, but the genre carried on regardless. Pamela Branch is a new name to me, one of the forgotten authors of the last century, but manages to perfectly marry murder with merriment and fatality with farce in The Wooden Overcoat.
Benjamin Cann has just been acquitted for murder. Now a free man, he finds he doesn’t want to return to the scene of the crime – namely, his flat – and is ...
January 21, 2022
“The Devil And The Dark Water” by Stuart Turton (2020)
“Arent Hayes howled in pain as a rock slammed into his massive back.”
When I read The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I said it was probably the best book I’d read all decade. Whatever Stuart Turton was going to produce next was forever going to be in its shadow, and he’d have to be something of a genius to produce something that even came close to it. Turns out, however, he’s a genius.
It’s 1634, and a fleet of seven ships are leaving the Dutch East Indies and bound for Amsterdam. On board o...
January 16, 2022
“The First Church On The Moon” by J. M. R. Higgs (2013)
“Jennifer Hammerpot, the Agnostic Bishop of Southwark, looked at the moon buggy with suspicion.”
If you ask me, and there’s surely a reason people don’t, it’s been far too long since any of us stepped on the moon. Time to take a trip to the future to have another go.
It’s 2171, and Bishop Jennifer Hammerpot has been summoned to the moon to perform the first lunar wedding. However, things haven’t quite gone to plan and it’s now the morning after the first failed wedding instead, and everyone is f...
January 14, 2022
“Flake” by Matthew Dooley (2020)
“Dad, what’s that man doing?”
Five books in to the year and we return to the world of the graphic novel. This time, there’s some serious ice cream business to get stuck into.
Howard has only wanted two things in life: to solve the cryptic crossword every morning, and be a successful ice cream van man. When his patch in the small market town of Dobbiston gets encroached on by a rival seller, he begins to doubt himself and everything he stands for. It doesn’t help that his town rival is his half-b...
