Book Club 2025: A City of Strangers by Robert Barnard
I wanted to read something entertaining today, so I first tried a new, well-reviewed mystery book, gave up, and then went with yet another old Barnard mystery.
It’s pretty entertaining! The only annoyance this time around was that Barnard was so strongly hinting at one specific character as being the guilty one — by making him the absolutely least likely character, ever, and basically making it impossible for him to have done it, which is very suspicious indeed.
And of course, he didn’t do it, so it was the old double twist kind of thing. Which is fine! But when you sell it that hard, it gets a bit much.
I had a hangover over today from all that jazz yesterday, so I read another mystery. This is pretty solid -- lots of interesting characters and a brisk pace. The only problem was that I took a five minute time out to think about who the murderer could be, and…
Today was a perfect day for an old mystery novel. And as usual with Barnard, half of the book is about stuff that happens before The Crime, and then we get half a book of sleuthing. The problem with this kind of structure is that you have to have sufficiently…
Am I doing this? Hm... Well, I thought it might be slightly amusing to log books I'm reading... but I don't want to review books, because if you're reviewing books, you start reading them in a different way, and I don't want to do that. So, like, perhaps just a…
