I'm getting to the point where I'm beginning to revisit "Miss Silver" books because I've read almost all the books in the series at least once.  (There are only some five or so books left that I've yet to read for the first time.)  So I figured, I might just as well start my rereads with the very first "Miss Silver" book I ever read, even before Tigus got us all hooked on the entire series, to see how my first impressions hold up now that I've encountered Maudie a good many times.  And I'm happy to say that yes, this is definitely still a favorite installment.

Some quick comments:

* Miss Silver should have brought cough drops on her visit to her friend.  I mean, we all know those little meaningful coughs are an indelible part of her character, but jeez, she really can't open her mouth without beginning virtually every statement with one of them here.

* There are no less than two professionals who should have recused themselves from having anything to do with the matter (one of them on multiple grounds, at least one of which they're openly discussing, albeit not under the headline of a conflict of interests).  The story wouldn't be what it is without them (and their conflict), so obviously recusal can't enter into things from a writerly point of view, but I'd still at least have liked to at least see it addressed for what it is -- especially in light of the very active part that one of these persons takes in the action, which would be uncalled-for even under normal circumstances and is plainly inexcusable from a professional perspective here.  For however much I otherwise like the book, this is one of the reasons I'm withholding a higher rating.

* I love the fact that this book, for once, doesn't focus on Wentworth's panoply of young protagonists (strong and independent, TSTL, or otherwise), but rather, on middle-aged people.  There are a few twenty-somethings as well, but they are decidedly less interesting (and with one exception, also less important) than the real MCs, who are all in their 40s or above.  I wish Wentworth had focused on that age group in a few more of her books; she did it really well.  (I love the way how she creates characters anyway, but this book contains some of her strongest yet.)

* The plotting is rather well done here, too; similar to the way in which Agatha Christie might have done it, in fact.

* Frank Abbott still remains my favorite policeman in the series.  Randal March is nice enough, but no dice compared to Frank -- whom even the profoundest respect for Miss Silver won't stop from making fun of her every so often.

Well, this was enjoyable.  As in some of Wentworth's other books, the mystery wasn't much to write home about (spoiler tags nevertheless, because at least one participant of the buddy read is still reading the book) --

but at least Miss Silver makes more of an appearance than in book 1 (and she is decidedly more recognizable here as the character we know from later books than in book 1), and you can't help but love and root for Hilary, the female MC, and her "inner imp".  (The imp's poems had me laughing out loud -- every single one of them.)  Whatever made Hilary pick Henry, of all people, as her heart's desire beats me as much as everybody else in this buddy read; though I'll grant that he redeemed himself ever so slightly towards the end, and with liberal doses of frying pans and Hilary's imp I do see some hope for him ... he's just got learn to listen to his better / true instincts and not to what he believes others expect him to think and feel, and what therefore must be the "right" (i.e., socially acceptable) response.  (Incidentally, I loved how Diana Bishop in the audio version read the passages from inside Henry's head with an undeniably ironic subtext, thereby suggesting that Wentworth is mocking him for being the idiot he is.  This worked very well for me.)

Now having read the majority of the books in the series, I can also safely say I'm not a fan of "Wentworth does Gothic".  This book's "foggy road" episode was one of the better-executed examples, but I still wish she'd left "young heroine thoughtlessly puts herself in a sinister situation that she can't control (and which a wiser head would either have avoided or at least not entered alone)" behind at some point.  Unfortunately, that wasn't to be; almost every book of the series contains at least one example of this sort of thing.  So, unlike others in the buddy read, I'm not a fan of the "foggy road" episode.  Maybe if this had been the first book by Wentworth I read, I would feel different about it (and as I said, for what it's worth on its own, it's comparatively well done).  But as a recurring event in almost every book ... thank you, but no.

By and large, though, I enjoyed being back in Miss Silver's world -- I only missed Frank Abbott --, I still love how Wentworth creates characters, and this book is also a marked step up from Gray Mask; less reliant on tropes (even if some are still present), and for once, thankfully also devoid of TSTL females.

As a final side note, I wonder (have been wondering for a while) whether Wentworth ever heard from her contemporary / fellow mystery novelist and great-niece of Tennyson (the poet), F. Tennyson Jesse, on Miss Silver's unquestioning adoration of "Lord Tennyson".

(I already finished this book last night, btw, but life intervened earlier today, so I'm only getting around to posting my summary now.)

Just under the halfway mark, and Miss Silver is being called in AT LAST.  (By the odious Henry and very much against his conviction, not least, which means that the first thing he'll llikely be in for is having the rug pulled out from under his feet and landing on his bottom.  Good -- I hope it will be a hard landing.)  And the person recommending Miss Silver is ... our old friend Charles Moray from The Gray Mask.  I'm not sure I want him to make another appearance here, either ...

A day late (though hopefully not a dollar short), here's my "second bingo week" summary; and it's a summary of a much better week than the first one turned out to be.  (So, yey!)  For one thing this is due to the books, all of which were either outright winners or at least enjoyable on some level or other; for another, even though I finished the week with a fairly lengthy read AND RL was running really major interference, I managed to keep it to an average of one book per day, as a result of which -- and as importantly, due to the way the bingo calls have been coming in -- I've now got several sets of multiple "called and read" squares in a row or column (two of which, also with all five squares marked "read").  Obviously, even three squares marked "called and read" in a row don't necessarily mean I'll be in for a bingo anytime soon, but that one is down to the bingo gods.  All I can do is go on reading ...

The Books

Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor

The second bingo week's first book, and for the longest time it was on a solid track for a 4 1/2 or even 5-star rating.  Tremendously atmospheric, with London (both 17th century and present day) not so much merely setting but additional character and two timelines tantalizingly mirroring and winding around each other like the two strings of a double helix.  From early on, this is also a book that knows very well just how clever it is, but during the first  90-95% that doesn't matter a jot ... until it does in the end and Ackroyd takes "clever" a step too far into the symbolic, as a result of which the ending is seriously deflating.  What a pity that he proved unable to contend himself with an actual dénouement (however cleverly constructed and meaningful) and instead chose to let narrative lift off and take flight straight into the ether instead.  Still, for the vast majority of its contents, definitely a recommended read -- and the beginning in particular, set in the days of the 1665 plague and tying together the plague, a satanic cult, church construction and murder (mirrored by present-day murders in the same churches), definitely packs a punch.

Patricia Wentworth: Eternity Ring

Another book off to a great start; if for no other reason than the fact that we get to meet Frank Abbott's family and learn why he didn't become a lawyer -- as had initially been his chosen career path -- but a policeman instead.  (Wentworth takes us back to Frank's family home in a much later installment of the series, The Fingerprint, which I had already read before moving on to this one, but that only made it feel even more of a priority to finally catch up with this story as well.)  It felt good to be back in Miss Silver's (and Frank Abbott's) world in one of the final novels from the series that I had / have yet to read, and it was cruising along nicely and could easily have earned a higher rating, too ... if it hadn't been for the fact that (1) the murderer is fairly easily to deduce by process of elimination and by looking at it from the perspective of where Wentworth herself, as a writer, was likely going to want to take this book's plot; (2) the conflict besetting the married couple at the heart of the novel feels terribly manufactured (first because during 99% of the book it isn't explained at all, and then because the explanation, when finally offered literally on the very last pages, comes across as ridiculously contrived); and (3) the heroine is exhibiting serious bouts of TSTL behaviour both in connection with the aforementioned conflict and in the moments immediately preceding the big reveal.

Bob Berman: Earth-Shattering

Neither as "epic" nor as "profound" as the blurb promises, and definitely higher on the "popular" than on the "science" part of "popular science writing".  Based on his style of writing, I can very well imagine Berman as a personable guide at his local observatory or as a host of popular radio science programs; the problem is that what sounds approachable in dialogue and oral explanation just comes across as chatty in writing.  (This gets better once the book has left the opening chapters behind, but it never goes away entirely, and arguably the Big Bang -- which is the subject of the first single-topic chapter, i.e., chapter two -- should be the last subject you want to approach with that much of a casual attitude.  For purposes of the audio version, it definitely also does not help that the casualness factor is virtually automatically enhanced in oral performance -- which isn't necessarily down to the narrator; it's just in the nature of the beast.) 

In fairness, astronomy, nuclear and astrophysics will never be my strongest subjects, so as far as the actual depth of topical penetration went, it may have been a blessing in diguise that the book didn't do much more than give an overview of the various types of cataclysms and in so doing, rarely did more than scratch the surface.  (Then again, I tend to acquire both a quicker and a more profound grasp of any topic presented to me both at greater length and in greater depth than here.)  Eitiher way, this was enjoyable for what it was or turned out to be, but IMHO it's seriously being oversold in the blurb -- the author himself also seems to be quite the efficient self-promoter -- and I think it's at least also fair to wonder what medical and man-made events such as the medieval plague epidemics and WWII are doing in a book explicitly setting out to deal with astrophysical and earth-bound types of physical cataclysms.

Fredric Brown: The Dead Ringer

Brown's second Ed & Am Hunter novel and the book that, thanks to Tigus's generous gift of last year, has been pencilled in for precisely this square ever since.  I truly enjoyed my return to the Chicago and Midwest of the Classic Noir era -- Brown's writing and plot construction easily stands up to that of the likes of Chandler and Hammett, and despite their less-than-bed-of-roses life experience both of his heroes are decidedly less cynical than Messrs. Marlowe and Spade, which makes for an interesting change from the classic noir approach. 

In this particular book, it also plays out to great effect that Brown knew the mid-20th century carney world from the inside -- from the start, the setting with all of its bizarre characters and attractions and its very own language (carney talk) comes alive in a way it only can if described by someone who once used to walk the walk himself.

Michael Gilbert: Smallbone Deceased

In my travels in the world of classic crime fiction, one of my truly overdue reads -- a book rightly renowned for its dry sense of humor and truly unique way of disposing of a body.  If you ever thought a crime novel set in a law office specializing on wills, trusts and property law is bound to get mired in the dust of legal lingo and technical details, think again.  Given this mystery's setting and the murdered man's position, the motive for the murder isn't hard to guess (though not all of the details are equally obvious), but thanks to the understated irony of Gilbert's writing, this is deservedly one of the novels that have endured and can still be enjoyed in an era when lawyer's deed boxes are long since a thing of the past.

Side note: Treat yourself to the print edition, not the Michael Mcstay audio -- Mcstay's preferred style of narration consists of hurling rapidly mumbled bursts of speech at the reader, which makes following his performance decidedly more of a chore than it reasonably ought to be.

Anthony Rolls: Scarweather

Quite a change of pace compared to the author's Family Matters, the first book by Rolls that I read -- but if the two books have one thing in common, it's a sense of the unusual and extraordinary, and an incurable urge to pour the acid of satire on experts (self-appointed and otherwise) and on society's habit of treating them, and each one of their pronouncements, as holy cows -- as sages whose every word must be weighed in gold and not under any circumstances be questioned.  In Family Matters, it's doctors, chemists and forensic experts (who are bamboozled by an onslaught of unlikely medical coincidences in connection with a death occurring in the context of a breakdown of a marriage); here it's archeologists.  There is no way this book can be fairly summed up without spoiling half the plot, but if you should decide to tag along with the narrator and his Holmesean scientist friend, you're in for quite a ride ... even if somewhere between the 50% and the 75% mark you'll probably have quite a good idea of what will be waiting for you at the end of the journey.

Jim Butcher: The Aeronaut's Windlass

The week's longest read and, perhaps surprisingly, not its best one.  To start with the plus side, this novel's most interesting characters (and its single most outstanding feature) are the cats -- not merely Rowl, the feline protagonist, but all of them; not least also Naun, the giant black tomcat leader of a tribe of street (or rather, tunnel) cats whose character constituted my reason for attributing this book to the "black cat" bingo square.  (Rowl is a ginger.)  Butcher really "gets" cats, and their scenes come across as both laugh-out-loud funny and entirely authentic.  Needless to say, almost all of the cats in this book are completely badass -- Rowl first and foremost.  If the rest of the book had lived up to the cats, unquestionably this would have ended up straight on my "favorites" shelf.

Unfortunately, that was not to be.  And it's not the fault of the human characters, either -- particularly the three young women, Bridget, Gwen(dolyn) and Folly, as well as Captain Grimm (the eponymous aeronaut) and Gwen's cousin Benedict -- but Butcher's own approach to storytelling.  (Which, incidentally, also makes me even more wary about his Dresden Files series than I had been before reading this book.)  The main characters in The Aeronaut's Windlass are fine, and if Butcher had given them (and me) different stuff to work with, I'd be eager to follow them on their future adventures.  As it is ... well, let's just say the jury is still out on that one.

For one thing, the world building here is not anywhere near as innovative as blurb writers and five-star reviews want to make you believe: Heaven knows I'm not the most ardent reader of speculative fiction, and if even I recognize some the stuff cribbed from elsewhere, there's bound to be a lot more that I didn't see.  (Seriously, Mr. Butcher -- Habble Landing as a place name and The House of Lancaster as one of the ruling families?  Geez, I thought George R.R. Martin was derivative, but are we into the derivative of a derivative now?  And a Discworld style guild system (only minus the satire)??  Be glad you're not being sued by the estate of Terry Pratchett.) 

Similarly, Captain Grimm and the whole aeronautics thing -- warfare, tactical battle  manoeuvers, ship construction and equipment, even down to the details of (aero)nautical language included -- are straight out of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander and C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series: Replace aeronautics (obviously, with the sole exception of aerial ascents and descents) by early 19th century / Napoleonic Wars seafaring craft, ships, and language, and that is precisely what you get.  Grimm himself, too, is so obviously a cousin to Hornblower in his more mature years and to his former Captain Pellew -- and Grimm's Predator a near-identical twin of Jack Aubrey's HMS Surprise (plus the whole "privateer" subplot / past so obviously built on O'Brian's Letter of Marque, as well as, incidentally, Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood) -- that Forester's and O'Brian's (and Sabatini's) estates should, by rights, be asking for a share of the royalties as well.  To be fair, from the book's descriptions this was the one aspect I had expected -- just don't please anybody tell me that this is anything even close to original. 

Finally, while I did appreciate the whole "cinder spire" idea, and I seriously also appreciate the absence of any sort of infodumps, I would have liked to find out a lot more, over the course of the book, what happened to make Earth's "surface" world an uninhabitable wilderness and caused "the Builders" generation to construct the spires to begin with -- and I'm also not entirely clear how you get to square an alleged "democracy" (this is the exact term actually used) with a de-facto king (called Spirearch) who is quite obviously much more than merely a representative figure and wields true power.

My other gripes tie into those that I have with a lot of speculative fiction (especially sci-fi, as well as George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series), so this may be an instance of "it's not you, book, it's me" -- but anyway, the book's plot essentially consists of an incessant series of incidents of armed combat (aeronautic and on terra firma / the spires alike), every single one of which incidents goes down according to the tried and true formula of "hero(es) drawn into fight by overwhelming enemy force -- hero(es) bravely stand their ground in the face of impossible odds -- after a while enemies seem to get the upper hand after all -- and a millisecond before it all goes pear-shaped for good salvation for hero(es) comes from unexpected quarters".  Sorry, but this sort of stuff flat-out bores me every time it's served up more than once to begin with (preferably only at a book's point of climax), and that is true even more if the entire plot of a 700+ page book consists of little else.  (And it is even more true if I can anticipate the precise person or group providing the last-minute rescue -- even if not also the precise manner -- at least a chapter or two in advance, as was invariably the case here.)

On a related note, "surviving impossible odds in battle" also seems to be the only thing accounting for whatever character growth we seem to be seeing in this book; especially with regard to the younger main characters, particularly the young women, all of whom are inexperienced recruits and barely out of their teens.  OK, so Gwen has her moment of "how do I go back from all this warfare and combat to ordinary everyday civilian life" at the end of the book, and that was another moment I truly appreciated.  I just would have wished there had been more of this, instead of our protagonists incessantly rushing from one fight to the next -- and I would also have wished there had been some experiences for them to grow on outside the fighting stuff, as there are (aplenty) in the Hornblower and Aubrey / Maturin books.

Long story short, it's a miracle this book hasn't been made into a movie yet -- there's plenty of things going "boom" with a vengeance, the CGI department would have a field day, and there are also plenty of great characters to root for, both feline and human.  And who knows, I might even watch that movie.  But the whole thing is also so similar to the movies that made me essentially stop caring about any new blockbuster releases years ago that I'm not sure whether I ultimately would go and see it.  And I'm not sure I'm going to be reading the sequel to this book, either ... even though Rowl (and Naun) might eventually tempt me to do so after all.

The Card

... as of today:

(More than The Alington Inheritance, that is.) -- Still a bit too much of a whiny heroine, but at least we're firmly back in true and trusted Maudie territory.  And it has to be said, while the victim is no Mrs. Boynton (cf. Agatha Christie, Appointment With Death), by the time she finally meets her end few would argue that the world is not a better place without her in it.

There are some shades of Grey Mask here (broken off engagement sends the hero to "forn parts", where he roams the wilderness for a few years until he starts missing the old country and returns, only to be plunged straight into his former / still beloved's latest messy circumstances: if there's one trope Wentworth can be said to be overusing, it's probably this one; e.g., it's also the premise of Miss Silver Comes to Stay, and with a twist, of The Traveller Returns / aka She Came Back, and a key character's surprise return also features importantly in The Watersplash, albeit minus broken off engagement) -- and although this is emphatically not an inverted mystery, both the whodunnit and the core "why" is pretty obvious from the get-go.  (Or I've just read too many stories of that type.  But Wentworth really isn't exactly subtle about this particular bit.)  Despite a valiant attempt on Wentworth's part at creating a plausible back story for the "who" and "why", the motive still feels a bit contrived ... or let's say, it's the kind of thing that pretty much only Arthur Conan Doyle could get away with (or the creators of mysteries for young readers, where it's a particular favorite).  But at least Wentworth's attempt here is not any worse than those of other authors using this particular trope.

Most of all, though, Wentworth's fine eye for character(s) and human interactions shines once again -- in the portrayal of abusive relationships (there are several here) as well as the creation of the comic relief, in this instance, three gossipping old-maidish sisters -- who in another book might easily have had a different role (and indeed the local gossip is portrayed extremely negatively in The Alington Inheritance) but here it's clear that they are essentially harmless and, indeed, ultimately even helpful to the investigation.  And of course, watching Maudie and her most devoted fan (Frank Abbott) is always a joy.