Drew Payne

Nick Nowak is back in three mysteries that follow directly on from the first book. It is the second half of 1981 and Nowak has three new cases to solve. Firstly, he is hired by a defence attorney whose client is refusing to help in his own defence. Next, he is hired to find the killer of a porn star. The last story sees Nowak searching for the only survivor of that most American of crimes, a serial killer. These are tight and involving mysteries and on their own would be interesting reads, but again the joy here is Nick Nowak’s life, which also fills these stories. He is now in a relationship with Detective Bert Harker and dealing with having a lover in the profession that has excluded Nowak. But he also has to deal with the return of his ex, Daniel Laverty, the first man he loved. Nowak handles this all poorly, doing the wrong thing as he realises he’s doing it. This makes the character all too real. He’s not a hero, he’s a real character and very flawed; he still carries a chip on his shoulder for the deeply homophobic treatment he received when he was thrown out of the Chicago police force. He also has a bad habit of sleeping with clients, witnesses and the wrong people. He is also the narrator of these stories and his voice is refreshingly original. These stories are firmly set in a time and place. Chicago is so prominent here that it’s almost an extra character. It is also set in 1981; Nowak and Harper discuss the emergence of AIDS in America via obscure newspaper stories about gay men coming down with strange cancers. Marshall Thornton has hit on a great detective story series with Nick Nowak, interesting mysteries, character development and a story arc for a personable narrator, with all his flaws. Fortunately, there are a lot more books in this series. Find it here on Amazon

Thanks, I enjoyed this book, and the white hot poker scene sticks in the memory.

Harry Starks is the quintessential 1960s London gangster, an Eastender, thuggish, violent, sharply dressed and homosexual, but he also loves Ethel Merman, Judy Garland and opera music. This novel tells his story from the 1960s until the early 1980s, portraying the changing face of London’s organised crime. In the 1960s he’s a racketeer, running cons and criminal corruption, but he has a pathetic desire for respectability too, first through his nightclub, at the wrong end of Soho, and then through foreign investments. By the 1970s he has become a porn king, but his crown is tarnished and grubby, with “bent coppers” snapping at his heels. In the 1980s it all catches up with him. This novel isn’t narrated by Harry Starks but by five different people from his life, in five different sections. They are the toy boy boyfriend, the disgraced lord, the petty criminal, the actress (the failed blonde bombshell) and the university lecturer. This isn’t an original idea but Arnott handles it with skill and insight. Each narrator has their own distinctive voice and a distinctive view of Harry Starks and his life, giving their own insights into him. But each narrator, in their own different way, is corrupted and changed by their relationship with Harry Starks. With this style, Arnott paints an interesting picture of a complicated character; Harry Starks is more than just another stereotyped Eastend gangster. This novel also paints a picture of a very changing world. Harry Starks is a crime boss, but his criminal empire is a changing one. The crimes he is living off at the beginning of the 1960s are different to the ones that make up his empire in the 1970s. With this changing world of crime, we’re given a window onto the changing world of London society in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a fascinating read and an equally interesting reread. There is so much here, both in the fictional world and the real world and real-life personalities that also make cameo appearances here. The description of Judy Garland in London, very much at the end of her life and her career, is so pathetic as to be heart-breaking. What is most memorable here, though, is the character of Harry Starks, a much more complicated and nuanced character than is usually presented as a crime boss in fiction. Find it here on Amazon

Back in 1986, Michael Nava published his first novel to feature the West Coast American lawyer Henry Rios. Over the years that followed, Henry Rios featured in seven novels and all of them have been highly readable and enjoyable. But Henry Rios is not the clean-cut, all-American male lawyer who breathlessly solves murders. Henry Rios is a defense lawyer who usually defends the underdog, but that is where the similarities end. Henry Rios is Mexican, from a forcefully working-class family and gay. Ghosts of a macho-abusive father and a pathetically Catholic mother constantly haunt him. For many years he was estranged from his lesbian sister (his only living relative). He is an AIDS-widow, having found and then lost his lover to AIDS over the course of these novels. His outspoken views have made him as many enemies as friends. This man has enough emotional baggage to fill an SUV. This man is a real character. He is everything Perry Mason wasn't. Rag and Bone is the last Henry Rios novel and so I started to read it with a heavy heart, so much had I enjoyed the previous novels. But this is a novel with which Henry Rios leaves the literary world on a high note. Rag and Bone opens with Rios collapsing, in court, with a heart attack. While he is recovering from this, slowly regaining his confidence, he repairs his fragile relationship with his sister, Elena. This leads to Elena telling him she had a child while in college and has not yet come to terms with her sexuality, so she gave the child up for adoption. Later, when Rios is home, his newfound niece and her young son turn up on his doorstep. She is on the run from the police, who want her for the murder of her husband. As Rios takes on her case, he also meets a man, John, a builder who was once married, with whom he starts a tentative relationship. The main thrust of this novel isn't the murder Henry Rios investigates; that takes second place to the main theme, which is the mid-life change he makes following his heart attack. It is also about him building a family around him, not the apple pie propaganda of the far right but a real-life family. Rios also becomes a substitute father for his great-nephew. Nava sensitively and insightfully writes about a middle-aged gay man finally coming to terms with his life and exorcising the ghosts of his past. He writes with great insight about Rios' heart attack, not just the medical details but also how it changes a person's priorities through 180 degrees. He also explores what it means to be a father figure/role model for a young child. Not least are the complex and alive relationships in this novel, they are more than mere plot devices, from Rios' rebuilding those with his sister and niece to the emotional minefield with his great-nephew and the tender but no less difficult relationship with his new lover. If you are looking for a tense courtroom mystery, this isn't the novel for you. If you enjoy a novel that explores how people react to unusual events in their lives, how their lives are changed and rebuilt, then I certainly recommend this novel. Find it here on Amazon:

This is a gay comedy of manners and that can be a genre. It is the early 1990s and Lenny, in his early twenties, is trying to find his way through gay London. He lives in a gay house share; he works as waiter at a restaurant and dreams of finding a boyfriend and a better job. He has run away to London from his suburban Evangelical Christian home; unfortunately, he might not be in Kansas anymore but London is certainly not the Emerald City. Lenny, the narrator here, is a likable and engaging character, quickly winning the reader over onto his side, making us root for his success. The humour ranges from broad to the very poignant, in some places lingering long in the memory. But the most memorable parts of this novel are when it turns dark and inward looking. Unfortunately, Robert Farrar does not make the most of these dark moments, exploring Lenny’s inner life when they happen. This novel did ask a question about sexual fluidity long before we were even discussing it. With this novel, Robert Farrar showed he was an emerging talent, certainly a writer to watch out for. Unfortunately, he only wrote one other novel and that is impossible to find. I don’t know why he stopped writing, but we lost so many writers like him when we lost all our small and medium-range publishers. At least we have this novel, but what would Robert Farrar have gone on to write? Find it here on Amazon:

It is 1979 and Alan Groombridge, the manager of a small, provincial town bank, has a fantasy. One day, he’ll steal all the money from the bank’s safe and run away from his suffocating life. A life with a wife and children he no longer loves and doesn’t even like. But he only gets as far as taking the money out of the safe, when he is alone in the bank, putting the money in his pocket, fantasying about where that money will take him, before putting the money back. Then one day, as he holds the money from the safe, the bank is robbed at gunpoint. But these robbers, Marty and Nigel, are almost comically inept; they end up taking the bank’s cashier Joyce and one other employee hostage and leaving with a fraction of the bank’s money. On a wild impulse, Alan runs away with the rest of the money to fulfil his own fantasy. This is only the premise of this novel. This is no comic story of a failed bank robbery but instead a downward spiral of four characters swept up in a moment’s bad decision. Ruth Rendell charts these characters’ lives and bad decisions with spot-on physiological skill; her plot comes out of her characters’ psychology rather than forcing them into her plot. She unnervingly captures the changing dynamics in her characters’ relationships, the shifting power dynamics. An illegally acquired gun becomes a lightning rod for the power between three of the characters, corrupting and ultimately destroying them. This isn’t a conventional crime novel, where a crime is committed and a detective must solve it. This is a novel about the effects of a crime, the effects it has on all the lives touched by that crime, the guilty and the innocent. Rendell wrote these psychological crime novels alongside her Chief Inspector Wexford detective novels and later alongside her Barbara Vine novels. At their best, and this novel is her at her best, these psychological novels are refreshingly interesting and darkly original, and several of them were her best novels. Make Death Love Me is an uncomfortably original novel and, if you have never read one, a good place to start reading Rendell’s psychological crime novels. Find it here on Amazon

I don't fully agree. I've never worked in aviation but I have worked in the NHS all my working life and my brother works in the nuclear power industry, so I have been able to compare my working environment with his. The big differences with the NHS is that it is seriously under staffed and is under a great deal of pressure from the government to meet their targets and requirements, including annual "efficiency savings" each year. 8.6% of all roles in the NHS are empty, that includes 5.8% of all doctors' posts and rising to 10.3% of all nursing posts. The only role that isn't short staffed is senior management and Trust chief execs. But the vast majority of empty posts are in patient-facing roles, people like me. It is hard to raise concerns when so much of your time is taken by making sure patients are safe and receive their required care. But even under these current impossible conditions, staff are still raising concerns. Clinical staff are very concerned to learn from all their experiences, it has been ingrained in us to do from the being of our training. For registered healthcare professions, reflexion on practice is part of our re-registration requirements. But the NHS is under a lot of government requirements and targets that senior management see as the priority because of their consequences. One example is A&E departments that have dangerously high levels of demand. If an A&E department closes to admissions, even if only for a short period, because they have more patients than they can safely treat (And it is only closed to ambulance admissions, who are diverted to other hospitals) then that Trust if fined by the Department of Health for doing so. The Trust is fined if their A&E Department is at Level Black, that's the highest level of alarm that their level of clinical demand is approaching a dangerous level, then they are fined. There are a lot of these targets that if a Trust doesn't comply with or breaches then it is fined. So senior management are under a lot of pressure not to breach them, or else a Trust loses money and Trusts' funding is stretched to the maximum as it is. Two of the biggest NHS scandals of recent years were because meeting targets was put above anything else, and those Trusts were also struggling with low staffing levels. The North Staffs scandal was, partly, because senior management were under a great deal of pressure not to breach A&E waiting times, so patients were being admitted from there as quickly as possible, often onto already over-full wards, that were under staffed. Staff raised concerns about this repeatedly but were ignored. Some senior management were even changing figures to reduce waiting times (Two senior nurses were struck off for it). The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital maternity scandal was due, in part, to serious under staffing in their maternity department, especially with midwifes and doctors, and the culture of the Trust to meet Department of Health targets to reduce caesarean section. Therefore, caesarean sections had to be avoided at all costs, therefore putting mothers and babies at risk. Unfortunately, so much of the culture in the NHS is to meet or not breach the targets set by the Department of Health, because if they do it will cost them, and there are penalties for over spending too. This does not create a culture of openness. The NHS also has direct demands placed on it by politicians, to meet their own agendas, and if they are unrealistic there is nothing that can be done (The currents Secretary of Health has demanded a massive reduction in the Covid back log without any investment in more staff). There is also often a huge divide between clinical staff, those on the "front line", and senior management, it often feels that the two are working to completely different agendas. This too is a huge barrier to openness. All my nursing career, which is over thirty years, people from outside the NHS keep saying that the NHS needs to "learn" from the private sector. But you are comparing completely different organisations with very different objectives and environments. I would love a completely transparent environment in the NHS, then the public would see how bad and over worked and underfunded it is, but there is no political will for that. Last month the government voted down an amendment that require the NHS, every two years to have an independent workforce audit and the results be published, then everyone could see how under staffed it is. That was all the amendment required, to find out and publish how under staffed the NHS is, not even to act on the results, but that was too much for the government. I don’t want this to be a rant, and I’m not having a go at anyone, but I do want people to know how difficult the situation is.

Homophobia is a word used frequently in our media, but what is meant by it? The dictionary definition is fear of someone homosexual, but Julie Fish (senior lecturer and research fellow in social work at De Montfort University, Leicester) doesn’t think it goes far enough to define the discrimination faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual people. This is the argument behind her book. In her opening chapter, Fish argues for the use of the term Heterosexism for prejudice/discrimination against LGB people. Her argument is homophobia is seen as a personal fault, the prejudice of just one person, it doesn’t have the social/political element of sexism or racism and therefore can be marginalised as the fault of the individual and not society. Changing to the use of Heterosexism also encompasses this social/political element. This might not be a new argument, originating in America, but Fish firmly roots it in British culture and health and social care, making this book very relevant for British readers. Other chapters analyse LGB health care needs (not just sexual health), how stereotypes feed into discrimination (not just negative ones), the barriers to LGB research (why often there is so little published), why information on LGB demographics is often poor, examples of Heterosexism from research, and the last chapter is a review of the current government’s legalisation that affects LGB people and the way forward for social equality. Though coming from a social care background, Fish’s book has plenty to offer for nurses and healthcare professionals, especially challenging us in how we marginalise LGB people often without thinking. Though an academic, Fish’s tone here is straightforward and readable, not the dry and uninteresting tone that often creeps into academics’ writing. The main drawback is its price, which for such a concise book is high—which sadly shows how little faith the publishers have in it. My advice, if you can’t afford it then pester your Trust’s library until they get a copy. Certainly a must-read for all in healthcare. (This review was originally written as a commission by the Nursing Standard magazine) Find it here on Amazon

Sue Townsend rightly has the reputation as one of our finest comic novelists. Adrian Mole is one of the great comic characters and Sue Townsend did the most refreshing of things, she allowed him to age naturally. What we often forget is was what a good satirist she was too. This book steals the format from her other creation, Adrian Mole. This is the secret diary of Margaret Hilda Roberts, aged 14¼, living above her father’s grocer's shop in Grantham. This is Margaret Thatcher as a girl, long before she met and married Denis. Here Sue Townsend presents all the character tropes that Thatcher was renowned for – the workaholic, surviving on two hours’ sleep a night, the disdain for the working class, the distrust of the BBC and the inability to see the benefit of art – and she presents them in the character of a fourteen-year-old girl. This makes them seem absurd and very strange. Sue Townsend subtly questions these qualities, are they really positive characteristics? This book is also populated with caricatures of political figures from the same time. They are broad caricatures and often presented as other children in Margaret Hilda Roberts’s life, but the in-joke of recognising the real politicians just adds to the fun. This book is fun too, Sue Townsend’s wonderful sense of humour is plainly on display here and her jokes hit the mark (more than once I laughed out loud). The only problem with this book is that it’s so short and ended too soon. Find it here on Amazon

Beryl Bainbridge, at her best, always had a dark view of life. It wasn’t just the unhappiness of life she wrote about so well but the pain and regret under that unhappiness. This novel is a fine example of the darkness she found in ordinary people’s lives. It is set in Liverpool in 1945. The war is finally turning and the city is awash with American GIs, but this is still the world of ration books, shortages and make do and mend. In this cold and austere world, naïve and immature Rita lives with her two aunts, Nellie and Margo. Her mother has died and her father is incapable of raising a daughter. Rita dreams of being a GI bride, her head was turned by the fantasy of the Hollywood films she escaped to in the local Picture House. At a party organised by a neighbour she meets her own GI. She rapidly falls in love with him, though she is far more in love with the idea of having her own GI than with the man himself. Her aunts, though, are certain that this young man is not suitable for their niece. This is not romantic fiction, it is a drama of downtrodden lives; Rita’s relationship with her GI has no breath of romance about it. The aunts’ lives are as dull and washed out as the wartime city around them. Nellie is the matronly character forced to be the head of the family. Margo is what was once called “blousy”, an unmarried middled-aged woman who behaves as if she was still young, though here she is no caricature; she is a woman who is desperate not to let life pass her by, even though it is rapidly doing so. The male characters are very much secondary characters here, but this is a novel about the women at the heart of it and it is no less a novel for that. This was the first Bainbridge novel I read. As a teenager, I was wary of literary fiction, finding it highbrow and inaccessible. With this novel, I was gripped by its dark opening and carried along by its dark plot. I was surprised that a novel with the plaudits this one had would also have such an interesting and readable plot. The characters were also all too recognisable. Rereading it recently, I found it had lost none of its dark appeal. This is Beryl Bainbridge at her height. Though a short novel, none of its pages are wasted and it still lingers in the memory long after I finished reading it. Find it on Amazon

Anthologies can be interesting reads and, in the past, have introduced me to writers I might not have found in other ways. If it’s by one author then it can be an interesting introduction to an author’s work or else it is a way to see how an author handles writing short stories, which are different form from novel writing. If it’s an anthology of different writers then there is a chance to discover new authors. Unfortunately, this anthology did not provide any of this. I found this anthology so frustrating because none of the stories developed any of their themes. None of the stories had any character development or even led anywhere. After finishing each story, I was left with the feeling, “Was that it?” None reached any sort of resolution. Now, short stories are not novels, I don’t expect complete character story arcs or resolution of big themes, but they are stories and stories do need to take the reader somewhere. All the stories here left me feeling frustrated because they didn’t go anywhere. Some of the stories had an interesting premise but did not follow through on that premise, ending too soon or just not exploring that premise. One story, which illustrates my frustration with this anthology, was about two work colleagues sharing a car to a team-building event. They bought coffees; they argued over what music to play in the car; the car got a flat tyre; they waited for the breakdown van to arrive; they restarted their journey and it started to rain, but they didn’t reach their team-building event. The characters didn’t share anything, they didn’t get to know each other, they didn’t contact in any way; they were just the same at the beginning as they were at the end of the story, nothing had changed or been challenged. What was the point of this story? It was just a catalogue of their morning. For an anthology to have one story as frustrating and pointless as this is one thing, but to have a whole collection of stories like that is another thing. It had to be a conscious decision by the editor, but why would someone collect together a group of stories that all left the reader feeling so disappointed? I don’t know. My advice is not to waste your time with this anthology, I wish I hadn’t. Find it here on Amazon

I'm only up to book seven, I have way too much to read (Having a Kindle has been my downfall), but have enjoyed every one so far. The eighties setting is so well painted and the character development, across the books, is so refreshing. They are such good books, and there are so few gay detectives left now.

@TetRefine, YOU'RE A STAR!! Thank you for this, it is fascinating and really helpful.

It is Hollywood, Los Angeles, 1943 and 19-year-old Nathan Reed’s life is turned upside down. Nathan, an innocent who has recently moved to Los Angeles, has everything changed when Hoyt Stubblefield ambles into his life. Within a week of their first meeting, in the Hollywood Boulevard bookshop where Nathan works, Nathan is living with Hoyt in Hoyt’s run-down upstairs apartment and sharing his bed. This marks the start of a whole new life for Nathan, an adventurous roller coaster ride of experiences. Hoyt, an artist and painter, introduces him to a whole new world of ideas, books, music, painting and the underground world that was gay life in 1940s Los Angeles. In return, Nathan is his pupil, model and lover. But this is no easy, romantic love story. Hoyt is as mysterious and secretive as he is handsome and charming, leading Nathan into an increasingly fraught and confusing life. Joseph Hansen is best known for his series of detective novels, featuring Dave Brandstetter (one of literature’s first openly gay detectives), but with Living Upstairs he again proves he was an accomplished novelist. The central relationship, between Nathan and Hoyt, is drawn with sensitivity and care. This is Nathan’s first relationship and Hansen perfectly captures that heady rush of lust and romance that so often makes up our first love affair—in this case it is also all on Nathan’s side. This novel is also full of other extremely well-drawn characters, the kind of characters that are not present in Hollywood films of the time or later. Hansen shows his ability to capture his characters in one or two well-drawn paragraphs, so from the moment we meet them we recognise the person. The atmosphere of this novel is evocative of a very different time and place. Not just period detail, though there is plenty of that, but this novel also has a deep feeling of its time and place. Hansen knew this world well, the fringe world of 1940s Hollywood, not just the underground homosexual world but also that of American communists and the poor on the fringes of tinsel town, and evokes it equally as well (the scene where Nathan and Hoyt, in a desperate bid to raise money, sell a pair of homoerotic paintings to a deeply closeted gay man is so telling). The novel is written in the present tense and solely from Nathan’s perspective. This style of writing is not to everyone’s taste, but I would suggest persevering with it because otherwise you might miss an excellent novel. This is Joseph Hansen at his very best and not to be passed over. Find it here on Amazon

I think the fact that they got back together in 1991 and were together for the rest of Kramer's life is far more interesting then the plot of this book. I wish he had written about that relationship, with the insight he showed in The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me. Thanks for the details.

I first read it as a teenager and, though all the sex scenes made a "big" impression on me, I found I couldn't identify with any of the characters and the ending left me so down. It was just as negative as what the homophobes, back then, were telling me gay life would be. I sort-of re-read it for this review (well I skipped through it) and sadly found my memory of it wasn't wrong. I think Kramer always wanted to be one of the hot gays EVERYONE wanted to shag, and Heaven knows he wasn't. I also think he was a much better playwriter than he was anything else, he wrote two great plays (to my knowledge, because I haven't read his first one) and two great screenplays, but maybe that was because he HAD to work with other people to have them produced, the final draft wasn't just down to him. One interesting thing I found out, only just before he died, was that his partner for the second half of his life (long after this book was published) was the man who was the bases of the super gay hunk Dinky Adams, in this book, who the central character didn't end up with.

Thank you for this. This all happened 19 years ago which has made it easy to write this, what made it difficult to write was that I didn't know where to start it and what to do with it when I'd written it. I wrote an essay about my mother in the week between her death and her funeral, but I never wrote anything about my father. I always felt awkward about not having written about him. If I had written it, what would I have done with it? The piece about my mother sat unused on my computer for years and years. Then I started this blog. When I posted the piece about my mother, I got such good feedback that I knew I had to write about my father too. With him there was so much to write about. I wanted to write about what grief did to him, how strange and useless I felt because I'm a nurse and yet there wasn't anything clinical for me to do, that really dumb thing the vicar of my sister's church said and what my father was waiting for. When I remembered how quiet his room was at the hospice, and I remembered the few sounds in it, then I had my way into writing this essay. I wrote it in one afternoon. I thought it was egotistical to write about myself, thinking that I was so important and interesting that people would want to read about me, which isn't the case. I'm not that interesting and I'm certainly not important. But what I found out was that people have been through the same things as me, and that recognition speaks to them. That's so humbling. But I only write about things that I've come to terms with, that no longer hurt me. There are still so many things that I won't write about because they still generate too many emotions for me. My father and I had a complicated relationship. Since his death I've had plenty of time to think about it. I've also been able to talk with Martin, my husband, and my brother, who had a very different relationship with him, about my father. This has all helped me to understand so much about what happened. That has helped so much. Life can be so complicated.

The events here took place 19 years ago and yet I can remember it like it was yesterday, sitting there in that hot quiet room. I hate the attitude that says "you'll get over it", but I have found that I've accepted it and that adversaries and memories don't hurt as much, I've stopped constantly questioning myself that I should have done things differently. I can now enjoy the memories of my parents, good and bad.

Thank you, it wasn't easy to write because I kept putting off doing it, but I also felt rather guilty for not doing so because I had written an essay about my mother but not about my father. So when I started this blog I set myself the deadline of writing this, of giving my father the essay I'd given my mother. My memories of my father are mixed but he was a complicated human being and had his faults as well as his virtues. I will be writing some essays about him and my mother, it is my way of keeping them alive and honoring their memories. On the surface they lead such simple and quiet lives, but once I started to look further their lives were anything but simple. They have already given me so much to write about.

That is the perfect description. Here people are given everything they think they need to be "happy" and it is used as a cage to imprison them. This is a more subtly disturbing dystopia than 1984. I am so envious of you though, I never read anything as exciting as this and 1984 at school, we did "the classics".

Thanks for the feedback. There is so much more to Liam's story and I am enjoying writing his relationships with the other characters, especially as I know where they are heading, plus some characters can say what I believe and know. I just need to get on and write more, which has been so delayed by my stupid asthma. Plus I am going to bring back an old character for a bit of a cameo appearance.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, Liam is worrying what people would think of him if they know all about him but he isn't blaming himself for Britney being shipped out of the hospital. He is moving forward, but slowly because he has had years of abuse and neglect to overcome, and no road is smooth and straight.

The following two days felt calm on the ward, and he found himself relaxing back into it all. The ward was still running on its usual routine. He spent his days in the Education Centre, in his afternoons he met with Aiden or sat through the Group meetings, and in his free time, he hung-out with Chrissy and TJ. Chrissy made most of the conversation with TJ shooting his comments into whatever she was saying, but he enjoyed listening to them. They did involve him in their friendship and, though it

I read this novel when it first came out in paperback, I think back in 1987, but it left such an impression on me. The son's sexuality causing such a drama within his family but it wasn't because of the usual theme of homophobic parents throwing him out of the home. At the end of last year, I set myself the project of reviewing as many of the books I've read as I can, and I've read a lot of them. I will checkout Christadora, by Tim Murphy. Posting these reviews, I've had lots of people recommending books to me. The only the problem is that I've a Kindle full of books I want to read too. So many books and so little time (!!).

I wouldn't say Christie had a formula, though she had a lot of tricks she used. Her books are game between her and her reader, can the reader guess the murder before she reveals them (I learnt so much about plotting from her). Though The Sittaford Mystery is by no means is her best, it isn't as bad as The Mirror Cracked From Side to Side. It had a good premise but the execution of it was so poor, Miss Maple was kept away from all the action. Sayers doesn’t seem to being forgotten, not when all her books are still in print, not just e-books, and so many Golden Age fans still rave about her.