Random Thoughts

After the fairly incompetent mystery I read last, I wanted something more reliable, and Barnard is usually reliable.

But this isn’t quite satisfactory. Barnard is quite varied in scenery and plot, but this is pretty unusual even for him. It’s like his agent told him to write a mystery set in royal circles, and he reluctantly agreed. So he spends quite a bit of the book bemoaning how little interest he has in royals, and this seems to affect the plot as well: It’s one of those books where it’s not even clear whether there’s been a crime… and then the resolution comes out of left field with twenty pages to go.

So even if this is a short novel, Barnard has to pad it with blather about Society These Days, and it all leads to a book that feels like it’s caught in a complete stasis — as if Barnard, usually a master plotter, didn’t really know where to go with it all.

But Barnard has the amusing patter down as always, so it’s not that bad, really.

Death and the Princess (1982) by Robert Barnard (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

I was quite impressed with the first book in this series. I mean, it was utterly stupid, but it was extremely entertaining. And so I read the second book.

And… it’s not good. The first book was nice in that it was all investigation all the time, but there’s a whole lot less plot in this book. Instead it feels like we’re in total stasis for large parts of the book, and the author resorts to adding bickering between the characters to pad things out, as well as adding character development (it turns out that the protagonist’s father wasn’t there for him when he grew up) and several scenes of gross grossness.

It was way too easy to guess who the killers were in the first book, so I wondered whether he had honed his mystery-writing skills on that point for this one, but nope: As soon as the character was introduced, he might has well have had neon signs flashing pointing at him: “HE’S THE ONE!!!”

This book felt like it was twice as long as the first, so I was shocked when I saw that they’re the same number of pages.

Of course this book has an even higher Goodreads rating than the first book — but that’s usually the case with series: People who didn’t like the first book aren’t going to be reading the second book, so a book has to be really awful to have the ratings decrease. It is interesting that the second book has half as many reviews, but then again, it’s newer, so…

Amusingly enough, the third book (which will be published in August 2026) already has 43 reviews. Lots of psychics use Goodreads.

Wow.

Well, gotta have a look at the one star reviews…

That’s more like it.

This one is accurate.

Well, it’s all a disappointment after the first book — I thought I had found an entertainingly schlocky author, but the entertainment factor dissipated.

A Drop of Corruption (2025) by Robert Jackson Bennett (buy new, buy used, 4.49 on Goodreads)

This is another Lanterne book — I happened upon this while looking for the previous book (The Birds) and thought “yay”.

Jan Erik Vold is Norway’s most famous poet, and this is a fantastic book. His poems are usually funny, absurd, tending towards aphorisms, but can take sudden turns towards being affecting and moving.

Or political:

(“Today’s Czech”.) Still relevant today!

As is his most famous poem, which I didn’t know was in this book:

“Culture Week”. I remember seeing him on TV declaiming this poem when I was a child, and I was rolling around, laughing.

But is this bit on the top of the next page part of it?

Which brings me to the only thing I didn’t quite enjoy about this book — the way it’s set. Poems often start on one page and then continue onto the next page for a stanza or two, and sometimes they don’t, which just makes you stumble a bit as a reader.

It feels like they had to cram the poems into a specific number of pages or something… But on the other hand, it does make them seem less “precious”, which might be the point.

Kykelipi (1969) by Jan Erik Vold (4.03 on Goodreads)