I know I said I wasn’t reviewing any books this month because I’m concentrating on my novel but I got to 43000 words yesterday so I took some time off to finish reading an ARC I’d got from http://www.netgalley.com and another book I’d borrowed from the library. My reviews follow.
Category Archives: Book Reviews
Review: A Study in Darkness Book 2 of The Baskerville Affair by Emma Jane Holloway
29th October 2013
Del Ray
- ISBN 9780345537195
- $7.99
- Mass Market Paperback
After the events of A study in silk Eveline Cooper was exiled to her Grandmamma Holmes’ Devon estate, Nick has given up the circus and his horses to become a pirate, captain of the Red Jack, Imogen Roth is fending off unsuitable suitors and Tobias Roth is engaged to the Gold King’s daughter Alice Keating, who is pregnant. Desperate for her company in Scotland Imogen persuades Alice to invite Eveline to visit them at the Keating shooting estate. After a joyous reunion all is turned upside down by Tobias’s unexpected arrival. The Gold King manipulates all concerned and Eveline is once more exiled, this time to Whitechapel. Her mission is to seek out the Blue King’s ‘maker’ – the person designing and creating his weapons and war machines.
Review: ‘When Hollywood was Right: How movie stars, studio moguls and big business remade American politics’ by Donald T Critchlow
5th November 2013
Cambridge University Press
Donald Critchlow describes the history of Hollywood from a political perspective, a conservative Republican one. Hollywood hasn’t always been a liberal place; in the first half of the twentieth century the Republican party was very strong among actors and studio bosses. This is the story of the vacitudes of fate that took the Hollywood Right from repeated decline to success between the 30’s and 80’s. The political careers of key players such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Cecil B DeMille, Barry Goldwater, and supporters like John Wayne and Hedda Hopper are interwoven in this account pf the changing fortunes of the Republican party not just in Hollywood, but in California as a whole.
Review: Donny and Ursula Save the World by Sharon Weil
2013
Passing4Normal Press
Ursula has never had a orgasm, she has drank an awful lot of wheatgrass juice though. She belly dances badly and keeps bowls of mushrooms all over the house.
Donny lives alone with his comic book collection, and has never touched wheatgrass. Until he meets Ursula.
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And here comes a review…
Evening all.
I’ve got myself organised and I’ve written the review I promised earlier (mostly).
Review: A study in silks by Emma Jane Holloway
- Random House Publishing Group – Del Rey Spectra
- 24th September 2013
- ISBN 9780345537188
- $7.99
- EditionMass Market Paperback
I recently had the pleasure of reading an uncorrected proof copy of this, the first title in Emma Jane Holloway’s trilogy ‘The Baskerville Affair’. The next part, ‘A study in darkness’ will be published later this month and the final part ‘A study in ashes’ will be published in December. I have already started reading the second book and have requested the third.
But what are these novels about?
As the title suggests, these are a riff on the Sherlock Holmes canon (for my friends in the fandom it’s an AU fanfic). Set in an alternative Steampunk Victorian England ruled by ‘Steam Barons’ who control the power supply and ruthlessly suppress competition using any and all means possible. Eveline Cooper, the orphaned daughter of Sherlock Holmes’s disgraced younger sister and the army captain she eloped with, is making her entrance into Society with her dearest friend Imogen Roth, daughter of Lord Bancroft, former Ambassador to Vienna.
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Review: Reforming the rogue by Donna Lea Simpson
- Beyond the Page Publishing
- 16th September 2013
- ISBN 9781937349790
- $0.99
- Ebook
Linnet Pelham, genteel but impoverished, has lost her job as a schoolteacher and moved to London to live with her sister, former actress Jessica Landry. Jessica is sickly and engaged to her aristocratic lover Lord Cairngorm. But his Lordships’s brother Dominic Barton does not approve and is determined to prevent the disgraceful union which will damage the family name.
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Review: The Bookstore by Deborah Meylar
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ)
Esme Garland is an English girl in New York. She is studying art history at Columbia University after gaining a first from Cambridge. After a shaky start she’s loving life in New York. She has made friends, met a wealthy boyfriend, Mitchell van Leuven, and more importantly found a great second hand book shop, The Owl. Unfortunately she gets pregnant and dumped before she can tell Mitchell. Desperate for work she gets a job at The Owl. Staff and regular customers help her through the trials and tribulations of the next year.
Review: Comets! by David J Eicher
In 1975, at the age of fourteen, David Eicher fell in love with the Universe. until then he had wanted to be a doctor, but became entranced by Comet West and has been fascinated by comets ever since. Consequently he gave up his medical aspirations and became the editor of Astronomy magazine and author of seventeen books about science and history instead. This volume was written in early 2013 in order to be available in time for the arrival at naked-eye visibility of Comet ISON later this month. Comet ISON is expected to be a ‘Great Comet’ – a particularly bright comet that will put on an impressive show for observers here on Earth.
Criminally good books
I’ve just finished reading a couple of good books:
Silent Witnesses
Nigel McCrery
and
The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton
And Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press
Jeremy Clay
Everything Is Better With Dragons 