Third quarter reading

Another quarter ends, and I've not forgotten how to read, but haven't maintained much of a pace.

Richard Coles - A Death in the Parish

I mentioned [here] that the reverend Richard's first novel had rather too much about what a vicar's life involves, but I was hoping he might have got that out of his system and settle down to focus on a whodunnit.  Sadly for me in his second novel he doubles down on the ecclesastical side, by adding a second vicar to the story.  This allows for plenty of discussion about different kinds of vicar with differences in their beliefs and different views on how to serve their parish.

In contrast, the whodunnit aspect seems even thinner than the first novel.  There are two deaths in the parish (or in the next parish), but Canon Clement seems to form no theories and follow no red herrings.  It probably depends what you look for in a crime novel, but I was expecting a number of plausible suspects with motives and questionable accounts of their whereabouts, and a smattering of false or inaccurate statements, so that the reader can play along and try to work out the culprit before the detective collars him or her.  Thank goodness there's a real police detective in the story to sort things out.

Randall Monroe - What If?

I'm a big fan of the XKCD web comic [xkcd.com].  Even after such a long time, Randall Monroe still manages to find new laugh-out-loud humour for geeks like me.

The book was a mixture.  There were surprising questions like how long could you surprise in space if you were inside a nuclear submarine.  There were fascinating ideas that had not occurred to me, like the rule of thumb for how many pronounceable combinations of letters can exist in a particular length of word.  On the other hand, there were some very odd assumptions between the question and the answer: what if the world stopped spinning?  The answer assumes that the planet stops suddenly but the atmosphere continues to rotate, which raises the question of what kind of action could cause that?  Would it be more likely for the planet's rotation to slowly decrease to an eventual halt, and the atmosphere with it?

So a mixed verdict, with brilliant moments and frustrating ones combined.

Robert Thorogood - The Queen of Poisons

This is the third in the series of Marlow Murder Club novels.  We've had a story with airtight alibis, and a locked-room mystery.  Now we have a murder where all the suspects were in the room and nobody saw it.  It's great fun and my only gripe is that the amateur detectives spent too much of the novel bouncing from one suspect to another and being wrong each time.  I know it's a trope of cosy crime, because my friend David was moaning about it at the reunion, but it felt like the old saying "at least a clock that has stopped tells the right time twice a day".

Robert Thorogood always plays fair by the reader, and the murder scene contained all the clues to questions that puzzled the amateur detectives for the first half of the book.

Greg Costikyan - Uncertainty in Games

This wasn't the book I was expecting.  It was mentioned in a discussion about game design, and appeared to be a recommendation for people who fuss about what kind of randomness to use, percentile dice, buckets of six-sided ones, different shapes for different units (with bigger dice effectively adding as plusses) and so on.  But that's not what it's about at all.

Costikyan's point is that all the interest in a game is about the unpredictable outcome (or in a few cases an unpredictable route to the inevitable outcome).  That's why nobody over the age of about 10 plays noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe in the USA).  Some games rely on a player's skill (e.g. throwing darts at a board), or the fact that there are too many choices to analyse fully (like chess), or random factors like cards or dice, and this book is a survey of what kind of uncertainty applies to each game.  It covers board games, computer games, a broad range.  I found it interesting to read, despite being nothing like what I expected.

Tom Hindle - Murder on Lake Garda

This was a birthday present and the location (Lake Garda) was somewhere I've been on several holidays, so the description of the setting brought back memories.  There are several crimes in the story and the connections between them create an intriguing situation.  Something out of place is a clue, but to which crime?

Disappointingly for me the novel jumps about from one character's point of view to another, using maybe half of the key characters to tell the story.  It's a way for the author to tell us about the history of the characters' relationships when they reflect on how they find themselves in this situation, without having to contrive a conversation where they might talk about it.  Unfortunately, when the character wonders who could have committed the murder it becomes a way of removing suspects from that crime, which is a shame.  As a result, even with important information only being available late on, I was already shouting the solution at the main amateur detective and wondering how she could fail to see something so obvious.

In fairness the story maintains interest even after the culprit(s) are identified, because there are still armed criminals on the loose for the other characters to deal with.  But I still can't recommend this one as whole-heartedly as I'd hoped.

Until next time, health & happiness to you all.