Reviews

‘One of those rare gems that comes to the reviewer out of the blue . . . enough twists to shame a cobra . . . the story fairly rips along, defying the reader to put the book down . . . Christine Poulson should be heralded as the fine entrant to the world of crime fiction she most certainly is.’ [Stage Fright]

- WWW.CHRISHIGH.COM

Reykjavik Nights

Posted on Oct 31, 2015 in Arnaldur Indridason, Reykjavik Nights | No Comments

In my last blog I wrote about discarding crime novels. Here is one that survived the cull. In fact Arnaldur Indridason is one of my favourite writers and I had been saving his latest. I won’t be recycling it via the charity shop either. Reykjavik Nights (2015) takes us back to the very beginning of Erlendur’s […]

How to reduce a TBR pile

Posted on Oct 23, 2015 in TBR pile | 4 Comments

Now that I am not buying books, I’m taking a good look at the books I’ve got and deciding which ones I really do want to read and which ones I’m going to get rid of. There are two categories that deserve special scrutiny: books from goody bags at conferences and books from charity shops. […]

Thriller-writer James Grady is my guest

Every day the young James Grady, apprentice journalist and college senior on a fellowship in Washington, walked past a white stucco townhouse, the headquarters of the American Historical Association. He never saw anyone go in or out. One day the thought struck him, ‘what if that building were a CIA front and one day someone went out […]

More on my moratorium

Posted on Oct 16, 2015 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

I did buy a book this week, but let me explain. I’ve decided that there has to be one exception to my non-book-buying rule and it’s this: I really can’t go to a book launch and not buy a book. It just wouldn’t feel right. And to turn down an invitation to a book launch because I’m […]

The Adventures of Moriarty

I always enjoy writing a story to a brief and ‘The Mystery of the Missing Child’ was no exception. I’d been thinking for a while that I’d like to try my hand at a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. So when Maxim Jakubowski put out a call for stories featuring Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of […]

How I bought a book by accident

Posted on Oct 9, 2015 in Alan Ayckbourn, Martin Edwards, Silent Night | 4 Comments

I’ll come on to how I did that in a minute. It’s two weeks now since I decided to have a three month moratorium on book-buying. It hasn’t been easy and yesterday I would have probably succumbed if it hadn’t been for the thought of having to own up to the lapse on this blog. I […]

A book on punctuation makes me laugh out loud

‘A couple I’ll call Penny and Jeter come out to my bungalow in Rockaway and proceed to devour the cheries I’ve put out in a bowl on the table. Jeter says, “Don’t put a bowl of cherries in front of Penny and I.” I am not about to snatch the cherries away unless Jeter learns […]

Ten novels set in the theatre

Along with my good blogfriend Moira at http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.co.uk I am posting my list of ten novels with theatrical settings. Theatres are closed communities of people engaged in a very stressful profession and so make wonderful settings – for crime novels in particular. Actors are good at lying. Deceiving people is what they do for living. And […]