Chapter 9 of 28 and still no sign of Miss Marple!
Reviews and Comments
Technical nonfiction and spec fiction. She/her. Melbourne, Australia. Generation X. Admin of Outside of a Dog. BDFL of Hometown (Mastodon) instance Old Mermaid Town (@futzle@old.mermaid.town). Avatar image is of a book that my dog tried to put on their inside.
My rating scale: ★ = I didn't care for it and probably didn't finish it; ★★ = It didn't inspire but I might have finished it anyway; ★★★ = It was fine; ★★★★ = I enjoyed it; ★★★★★ = I couldn't put it down.
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Deborah Pickett commented on A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
Unexpectedly relevant in this pandemic era
3 stars
Content warning Whodunit spoilers - Agatha Christie - The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
Till now I'd only read Christie in the form of Poirot stories in an enclosed setting: Murder on the Orient Express where the train is snowed in; Death on the Nile where everyone is stuck on a boat. This one is set in Miss Marple's town of St. Mary Mead, so people could, and do, come and go. I was actually surprised at how little screen time Miss Marple herself actually gets. The biggest part probably goes to Marple's nephew, Chief Inspector Craddock.
The big spoiler for this story is that the victim signs her own death warrant by admitting that she transmitted a German measles infection to a pregnant woman, resulting in the child having permanent physical and intellectual problems, and the mother having lifelong PTSD from that.
Fortunately Rubella is a thing of the past and people don't go around spreading disease because they're afraid of missing out on an opportunity to socialize.
The story snowballs alarmingly as further characters are killed off because they Knew Too Much, right up to the last chapter when there is another unexpected death, and we are left wondering if that one was suicide or also murder, or if the distinction even matters after everything that happened.
This book might have benefited from a bit of a trim at the start and a bit of fluffing up in the middle as the events happened which led to the additional consequential murders. But it was altogether a pretty painless read and the (rushed) conclusion satisfying.
Deborah Pickett started reading A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie
Deborah Pickett finished reading The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
Deborah Pickett started reading The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
Deborah Pickett reviewed Port out, starboard home by Michael Quinion
Fascinating but for a very small target audience
3 stars
Every entry in this book about folk etymology follows the same format: “Here’s this word or phrase. People say it originates with this far-fetched etymology, but they’re wrong, it’s actually this mundane etymology.”
I certainly learned a lot of trivia tidbits from this book, but I couldn’t consume more than a few per day before they got monotonous.
Deborah Pickett finished reading Port out, starboard home by Michael Quinion
Deborah Pickett wants to read The silver tide. by Michael Tod
Deborah Pickett commented on Port out, starboard home by Michael Quinion
Deborah Pickett started reading Port out, starboard home by Michael Quinion
Deborah Pickett reviewed Shade and Shadow by Francine Woodbury
Fine, not a very coherent whodunit
2 stars
I shouldn’t expect too much from a first-time author under the Del Rey label, but Shade & Shadow feels like two stories—one about magic research, one about the murder—smushed together. The former wasn’t really hashed out properly, and the latter was acceptable but with some poorly chosen red herrings.