CatherineL

I only picked this one up because I'd missed the last two episodes on TV and was very disappointed.  What worked well as a TV show, with regular cliff-hangers, was annoying in print.

It's not a short book but the constant rise and fall of suspects in and out of er.... suspicion, quickly because formulaic since one always knew that the right person had not been nabbed for the crime because it wasn't anywhere near the end yet.

So, great TV show, not so great book.  One for the charity bookshop I fear

Not really impressed by this one, it read oddly like Dickens/Wilkie Collins fanfiction in that, places and people from their books turned up weirdly mixed in with people and situations which sounded like they came from the same sources but didn't.

Case in point, Doctor Woodcourt, Jo the crossing sweeper and Trooper George all make appearances under their own names and with their own  characters.  There are  quotes and echoes from Bleak House and other Dickens works.  There are also characters called Hester, Carley and Mr Jarvis - not Esther, Charlie and Mr Jarndyce although they say enough of the same things and behave in enough of the same ways that I spent more time trying to work out who they were meant to be than I did enjoying the story.

Also not impressed by the "detective" work of the hero, or indeed of anyone especially Inspector Bucket who kept turning up and announcing that he knew things essential for the plot without any explanation of how he knew them.

All that said, London and its characters high and low are interestingly portrayed but I don't think that's enough to get me to read any more in the series.

Bleak House is perhaps my favourite book of all time: I don't think this added anything to it.

This is my new BookBlog - I'm trying to write a novel which I intend to self-publish, but life has got in the way leaving me little time for the sort of concentrated attention writing demands.  So, I am making do with reading in snatched moments, and intend to add books as I read them, rather than cataloguing all 822 books my tiny house already contains.

I have set myself a challenge of 18 books in 2013, only because I'm starting in September and it works out at about a book a week.  Let's see how we get on.

I like a lot of genres: crime, historical fiction, 19thC British Lit, history, and modern American theology and its intersection with politics.

If I get chance, I'll try to review at least some of the books I read but ..... like I said, life is a wee bit complicated and stressful at the moment.