Books shelved under “Mystery”

Sometimes I wish I had the power to checkpoint my life, much like one can in many video games. I’d like to index certain times and be able to rewind to them and then make a different decision. For example, this morning I noticed that I was running low on brown sugar, and I hadn’t bought any more last time I bought groceries. It made me wish I could go back to the point where…

I love Agatha Christie mysteries. After mastering the adventurous Hardy Boys and the magical Holmes, I fell in love as a child with the cool, considering Poirot and the keen, canny Miss Marple. As an adult, I love Christie’s mysteries not only for their entertainment but for how she writes about class and English society. Her novels are little slices of a time that no longer (if ever it did) exist, one populated by quaint…

I tend to forget that books can be works of art. This might seem like a strange statement, considering how seriously I seem to take reading. Don’t let my relentless criticism fool you, though: by and large, I read for pleasure. The act of thinking about and analysing the books I read just happens to form an integral part of that process. Yet, for all that analysis, the artistic nature of the work often eludes…

A good book works because it tells a good story about interesting people. Full stop. These two qualities, narrative and personality, intertwine to create a unique and worthwhile experience. If the story isn’t compelling or the people aren’t interesting, then all the tricks and gimmicks and set pieces are not going to elevate the book beyond mediocrity. That being said, I don’t think that the best books are always those with the most hyper-realistic characters.…

The Roanoke Colony was in trouble, and when its governor returned from an expedition to secure more help from England, he discovered the entire population had disappeared: all 114 people, including his grandaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English colonist born in the Americas. To this day, there is no definitive explanation for the colonists’ disappearance, making it the perfect fodder for the literary imagination.

In Blackwood, Gwenda Bond takes some liberties with another Elizabethan…

I actually read this soon enough after Redemption Ark that I can still remember some of the details of that book! Absolution Gap picks up two generations later. The Nostalgia for Infinity is parked on Ararat, and its occupants have set up a “temporary” settlement. Little do they know that, in the space around them, Conjoiners and Inhibitors battle to a standstill, until a lone craft breaks the silence and crashes into Ararat’s ocean. Clavain,…

I love the idea of superhero fiction. I don't actually read that much, mostly because it comes in the form of comics and graphic novels. I don't have anything against those. They're just not my typical jam.

The sudden trend towards writing about superheroes in the novel form is a boon to me, then, because the novel is my jam. (I'm a little pessimistic about the shelf life of the novel as a form in…

Big bad killing machines are coming into your section of the galaxy. Intelligence is a plague they mean to wipe out, because otherwise, intelligence is doomed.

If Revelation Space is a high-concept space-opera archaeological mystery, then Redemption Ark is more of a straightforward thriller. Several of the surviving characters from the first book are scattered across the two systems, Epsilon Eridani and Delta Pavonis, with the Inhibitors closing in and most of humanity none the…

This one of those tales that have percolated down through culture but that most of us have never actually read. I assigned it as a short reading assignment for my sixth form English class, something we could cut our teeth on while we start looking at the possibilities for texts to study this year. They were all familiar with the general idea, though I was surprised to find out that one of them was surprised…

This might be one of my favourite Charles Stross books. I think it’s the effortless blend of bureaucratic humour and horror, and the slight homages to spy fiction, that makes The Atrocity Archives so appealing. It’s not just any one thing, and it isn’t too much of any of these things. There are plenty of ways to play the "secret government agency that fights the supernatural" angle, and plenty of them are valid. Stross has…

I hadn’t heard anything about this book before I snagged it from my library’s new books shelf, which surprises me. I would have thought that one of the book blogs I read would have featured it at some point. Bronze Gods sounds like, and indeed is, a very original and refreshing voice in fantasy. Its authors (Ann and Andres Aguirre, who together form a writing name that is sure to be as close to the…

A few weeks ago, Bruce Sterling shared his thoughts on hacking and activism three years after first discussing the Wikileaks scandal. One thing he said really stuck with me:

Even the electronic civil lib contingent is lying to themselves. They’re sore and indignant now, mostly because they weren’t consulted — but if the NSA released PRISM as a 99-cent Google Android app, they’d be all over it. Because they are electronic first, and civil as

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I’ve read a few of Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels now, in no particular order. This is one of those mystery series, much like Lindsey Davis’ Falco series, where I’m content to dip in and out of the canon as I may. I’m fascinated by Victorian literature and life in Victorian England, and Perry has impressed me with her Victorian mysteries in the past. Midnight at Marble Arch is no exception. In this…

This book has been on my to-read list for four years, and I’m glad I finally got to it. Tanya Huff delivers strong urban fantasy set in a Canadian city. She sets up an interesting family of magic users, where the women and the men participate in complicated rituals that allow them to work charms. Alongside, she sends us a light mixture of supernatural creatures to pad out the character sheet—a leprechaun, some dragons and…

I missed my Xbox while I was in England. I had access to one for the first half the year, during which time I managed to be completely disappointed by Assassin’s Creed 3. Then I moved, and Xbox-playing became a faded memory for a while. So when I came back home for the summer, one of the first things I sat down to do was play Xbox—and specifically, to play Mass Effect through from…

Every so often I read a book that I wish I had written. Right there, in those pages, is a universe that I don’t just enjoy but that I’m actively envious of. Three Parts Dead is not quite one of these books, but it comes close. It’s the kind of book I could see a me from a parallel universe not too far away could have written. It satisfies my current hunger for fantasy that…

The description of The Shadow of the Wind reminds me of Foucault’s Pendulum, another literary-themed thriller in which the protagonists find that the events in a conspiracy-theory manuscript they acquire are coming true. When ten-year-old Daniel acquires a book, also called The Shadow of the Wind, he attracts the attention of all manner of mysterious people who want the book—or its author—including a disfigured man going by the name Lain Coubert, the name…

Roommates lending books they love can be a dicey proposition. It wasn’t that I was worried I would dislike Skallagrigg; I just worried I wouldn’t like it enough. This feeling stayed with me for the first part of the book, because it didn’t seem very straightforward at first. There was cryptic foreshadowing that would make sense towards the end. Thankfully, after the first few chapters, the book changes tack and becomes much easier to…

I read some series like River Song travels with the Doctor: out of order. I’ve dipped and dallied with various books in the Falco series, but most recently I read Venus in Copper before going back to the source, Falco #1: The Silver Pigs. Here we meet Lindsey Davis’ private eye: Marcus Didius Falco, an informer in the first-century Roman empire. Falco is constantly on the hunt for new clients and new income, lest…

For the past three years, I’ve paid for the privilege of voting in the Hugo Awards. I do this not because I love voting in the Hugo Awards (though that’s cool) but because, for the past few years, they have made available a voter packet containing digital copies of most of the nominated works. All I need do is purchase a supporting membership at the year’s WorldCon, which is always cheaper than if I were…