Dec 14 2024
For most of my time reading Mrs Dalloway, I wrestled with the eight deadly words: I don’t care what happens to those people. The novel begins with a relatively famous opening line, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It tells stories of numerous people in London on one day in midsummer London …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/14/mrs-dalloway-by-virginia-woolf/
Nov 16 2024
Sir Robert Carey is the very model of an Elizabethan courtier; he has skills equestrian, pedestrian and deductional. He’s met the Queen of England and he’s won the fights he chronicles, in England and in Scotland, and some in Lands Debatable. He’s well acquainted, too, with matters barely ethical; he understands corruption, both the venal …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/16/a-season-of-knives-by-p-f-chisholm/
Nov 03 2024
The same friend who, ages ago, recommended I read Dorothy Dunnett suggested I picks up books by P.F. Chisholm, and this is how bookish friendships are sustained over decades. We don’t always like the same things — Little, Big left her cold — but she seldom goes astray when she says she thinks I will like …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/03/a-famine-of-horses-by-p-f-chisholm/
Oct 05 2024
Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. The founder, an …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/05/false-value-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Jun 16 2024
Through most of the first six books in the Rivers of London series, a rogue magician known as the Faceless Man has been leading the mystical branch of the Metropolitan Police on a merry chase. Well, not so merry for his many victims. But he’s a formidable practitioner, and while Peter Grant, Nightingale, and company …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/06/16/lies-sleeping-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Mar 23 2024
“Does what it says on the tin” is a lovely Britishism for a lovely British book because The Sinister Booksellers of Bath keeps the promises that it makes. It’s a direct sequel to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, picking up a few months after the end of that story. Merlin and Susan are still together, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/03/23/the-sinister-booksellers-of-bath-by-garth-nix/
Dec 29 2023
Peter Grant, one of two official wizards of the London police force, owes his life to Lady Tyburn, one of the genius loci of the city’s numerous rivers. So when she wakes him with a pre-dawn phone call to say that one of her daughter’s friends has had an accident — the “fatal” is unstated …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/29/the-hanging-tree-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Nov 11 2023
I hope The Portable Door is a cracking good movie — it’s an Australian feature released in early 2023 — because the premise is terrific. Young graduate Paul Carpenter lands a job at the venerable London firm of J.W. Wells & Co., though even after the job interview he’s not entirely clear what it is that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/11/the-portable-door-by-tom-holt/
Oct 29 2023
All three Rivers of London novellas that have been published to date — The Furthest Station, The October Man, and now What Abigail Did That Summer — have left me wanting more, which is a fine recommendation for books that are meant as light, if occasionally spooky, entertainment. The stories all take place in and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/29/what-abigail-did-that-summer-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Sep 17 2023
Odd reports from the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground have come to the attention of Peter Grant and the Special Assessment Unit he’s a part of. They’ve come through as part of a project to deal with sexual assaults and offensive behavior on the transport system, and part of that was “improving reporting rates …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/17/the-furthest-station-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire