Books

I seem to have lost interest in producing what I fondly imagined as book reviews: I have certainly read a good number of books since I posted the last review. A week in France provided the opportunity for some serious reading time and I tried to make the most of it. Following a comment made by Skip, I have read three of Michael Connelly's titles - Echo Park, The Lincoln Lawyer and The Brass Verdict - and thoroughly enjoyed each of them. Thanks, Skip, for the recommendation. I have also read a number of Peter James's books written before the Grace series. What a difference! Two of them turned out to be horror stories (which I normally leave alone) and the blurb on them called the author Britain's answer to Stephen King. The other - Faith - was different again, although perhaps slightly less enjoyable than the Grace books. Despite my slightly derogatory comments about six weeks back concerning Allan Mallinson's Matthew Harvey series, I have read a couple more and enjoyed them. But the book which has made the deepest impression on me, despite this being my umpteenth reading of it, was The Cruel Sea. First published in 1951, this epic story of the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2 is still in print almost 60 years later. My father, who spent some of the war in the North Atlantic, always maintained that this book was one of the very few to tell it as it was.