Michael J. Ritchie's Blog, page 3

“First Time For Everything” by Henry Fry (2022)

“Usually when someone’s fondling my balls, I disappear.”

While I like a good book about time travel, aliens, magic or ghosts, sometimes it’s nice to pause back in the real world for a moment.

Danny flew the nest of his parents fish and chip shop years ago to make it as a journalist and find love in London. Now, however, he couldn’t say that his life is bad, but it’s also not quite what he expected from it. His life is also thrown into chaos as in the space of one weekend he discovers his boyfrie...

“West Heart Kill” by Dann McDorman (2023)

“This murder mystery, like all murder mysteries, begins with the evocation of what the reader understands to be its atmosphere…”

As I’ve yakked on about on this blog many times, I really love a fresh idea. They say there are only so many stories but, if you ask me, we’re just getting started, and it’s gratifying when a publisher takes a chance on something new, not just rehashes an old idea or snatches hold of the tails of a popular novel. Dann McDorman has taken the murder mystery genre and sm...

“Aberystwyth Mon Amour” by Malcolm Pryce (2001)

“Let’s be clear about it then: Aberystwyth in the Eighties was no Babylon.”

And it’s back to Wales, though inexplicably I’ve still never been there in the real world.

It’s the eighties in Aberystwyth, and schoolboys are disappearing. When Louie Knight, the only private investigator in town, is hired by Myfanwy Montez, a local dancer at an adult establishment, he finds himself refusing the case, but somehow wrapped up in it anyway. There are rumours all over the town about what’s going on, and no...

“It’s All A Game” by Tristan Donovan (2017)

“In February 2014, Nick Curci crawled through a hole in the hardboard sealing up a railway arch in East London and discovered his future.”

Board games are always great fun. From the simplicity of Ludo to the deep, complicated set up of Betrayal at House on the Hill, there is something for everyone these days. It’s not all Monopoly and backgammon. In Tristan Donovan’s book, he takes us on a whistle stop journey through the history of board games, from chess to Catan, exploring how they came to be...

“The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe” by C S Lewis (1950)

“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.”

And now to continue with my reading of The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m doing them in chronological order rather than publication date, so this is the second one I’ve now read, having polished off The Magician’s Nephew last month. This one is the one everyone would name if asked for a title of one of the books in the series, though, so I guess it’s the “main” one. Time to see what all the fuss is about.

Evacuated to the...

“After Dark” by Jayne Cowie (2022)

“When I was a young woman at the police training academy, I learned two important things.”

You’d think after reading a dystopian horror and having to immediately go into a Wodehouse, I’d have learnt to keep it light for a bit. No, apparently not, here’s another thriller.

At some point in the near future, the laws have changed and women now hold the power. They’ve taken over workplaces, public spaces and the government, and no longer fear crossing a park at night or walking home alone. With the C...

“Much Obliged, Jeeves” by P G Wodehouse (1971)

“As I slid into my chair at the breakfast table and started to deal with the toothsome eggs and bacon which Jeeves had given of his plenty, I was pretty conscious of a strange exhilaration, if I’ve got the word right.”

After the last book, I asked Twitter for something funny to take the taste away. How I didn’t think about Wodehouse myself is beyond me, but it was exactly what I needed.

At Jeeves’ gentleman’s club for butlers and valets, the Junior Ganymede, there is a book in which all the memb...

“Tender Is The Flesh” by Agustina Bazterrica (2017)

“Carcass.”

My small, barely-remarked-upon, first novel was about a cannibal, but done in a way that complemented the gore with silliness. It was a comedy with a horrific cannibal at its heart. To me, I think I assumed this is the only way to handle such a nasty concept. Turns out I was wrong; you can do it with a straight face, but the results may shock.

Some time in the future, after a virus has rendered all animal flesh inedible, humans have legalised cannibalism as the only source of meat ava...

“The Three Dahlias” by Katy Watson (2022)

“The last of the late August sunshine slid away behind the alder trees by the river as Rosalind watched, Amaretto in hand, leaning against the windowsill to take the weight off her aching knee.”

Barely a week goes by without me rocking up to a large country house to solve a murder does it? Here we go again.

Dahlia Lively is the protagonist of a sprawling series of books by renowned crime writer Lettice Davenport, known as the Princess of Poisoning. At a convention at her home of Aldermere House,...

“The Magician’s Nephew” by C S Lewis (1955)

“This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child.”

Look, there a lot of books. We can’t read everything. I’ve just accepted at this point that if I didn’t read Middlemarch during lockdown, I’m never going to do it now. But sometimes things you really think you should’ve read slipped through the net and passed you by. That’s how, at the age of thirty-five, I arrive in Narnia for the first time.

When neighbour children Digory and Polly become friends, they ...