Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

This is good but depressing. There's no light in the book so far, just a gathering storm.

I think Christie may have invented an oxymoron with this book: Cozy Thriller.

All the thriller elements are there but with no more sense of threat than a 'Murder She Wrote' episode. It works because Tommy and Tuppence, especially Tuppence, are engaging. You want them to win through.

This already feels dark and I've barely started. The prose works well, mostly functional but flecked with memorable descriptive phrases - 'eyes catching like silk on roughened wood' to describe early lust in a relationship - and with small differences for each person's point of view. Even so, a narrtor for each point of view would have been nice.

Fast-paced space adventure with a risk-taking main character who isn't a hero but is all the more interesting for that.

It may seem a strange thing to say about an exciting fantasy adventure story but this book is made much richer by a deep understanding of grief.

I don't understand why this wasn't at the top of the bestseller list. It's better than most of the Reacher novels - just as much action and mystery but better dialogue.

Wow! This is an "I wanna stay up all night and finish this" kind of book.

At least it is now that I've ditched the audiobook version and moved to ebook.

I'm surprised and impressed by how good this is. The story avoids simple sterotypes, gives a strong sense of threat from the rise of Fascism and gets the details right on the places. I'm also picking up (and verifying as I go) pieces of history I was ignorant of, like the existence of a passport speciically for stateless people.

This isn't working for me. The main character is hard to like and is, by necessity, passive (being dead will do that to you). There's no tension and not much by way of pathos or passion. There is strong sense of how dreary, grubby, small-minded and soul destroying the school is but that's not enough to keep me engaged. The pacing doesn't work. It's slow and meandering with nothing urging me to read the next page.