What I'm Reading

It's hard to believe that the finest sentences I've read in a long time, sheer poetry in paragraphs, lines so good I'm reading them twice and saying, "Listen to this" to K are coming from a murder mystery police procedural with a cover like that. I mean, not to be snobby about genre fiction, I love it, I do, Tana French is a star, Agatha is a high priestess, some of the best books I've read have been murder mysteries but sometimes writing is sacrificed for plot. Not in this case. Listen to this: "It was a nice place but it bothered him in the way houses that have been made self-consciously attractive always did. The whole experience, the talk that had lost all awareness of its own arbitrariness, the carefully arrived at prettiness of the rooms, was like being trapped inside somebody else's hallucination." He's dead, the author, there are only three Laidlaw books (TARTAN NOIR) and you must read the first one, at least, immediately before deciding to purchase all three for your shelves. #bookstagram #nowreading #mrmbookclub #121in2021 #laidlaw #williammcilvanney