Sharon Wheeler (swapping days this week with Lynne Patrick)
The past few months, all I seem to have had to review are yet more clones of the sodding D*****i C**e (Sharon’s Law No. 17 – if the blurb mentions religion, the bible and lost icons, run like hell) and books where Queen Victoria, Sigmund Freud and Oscar Wilde combine to discover who murdered Shakespeare. Or something.
And, with a nasty dose of déjà vu (for which the doctor can give you an ointment), I checked my email a few minutes ago and what do I get from a publisher but notification of the upcoming Dan Brown book – which is called The Lost Symbol. Excuse me while my head and my desk connect several times.
Having deleted that email with all speed, I shall turn my attention to a pile of about 20 books which I've been working my way down over the past month. Several kept me company on the long train journeys around England – I can confirm that both Reginald Hill and Mark Billingham are on top form. Hill's Midnight Fugue takes place in the space of 24 hours. And there's a welcome return for DI Tom Thorne in Billingham's Blood Line.
I'm intrigued by two authors where there's been a buzz around the books. Adam Creed's Suffer the Children is a debut novel and police procedural set in London. I'm about 50 pages in and certainly interested enough to keep going. China Mieville, meanwhile, is better known for his work in the fantasy and science fiction fields. He's come over to play in our genre sandpit with The City and The City – and it's next up on my pile.
Lynne Patrick will be pleased to know that the Crème de la Crime short stories anthology Criminal Tendencies was a hit with me – among the names supporting the charity project are Messrs Hill and Billingham. All I can say is that you should buy it. And Lynne assures me that my copy of the new Maureen Carter book, Blood Money, is on its way to me. Once it does, I shall have great difficulty not promoting it up the queue.
I don't know how other reviewers work, but I do try to prioritise the books in the order they're being published (and, to some extent, the order in which I've received them). But some do queue-jump – and Stephen Booth, John Connolly and Dan Fesperman are all about to do that. The first two are additions to existing series, whilst the latter is another standalone from one of our foremost thriller writers.
I do keep an eye out for certain publishers. Crème de la Crime is one of them. Akashic, Quercus and Bitter Lemon also tend to be very reliable, and I have a stack of Dutch, Spanish and South American books from the latter and several city-focused short story collections from the former.
It feels at the moment that my favourite authors are like buses . . . You wait an age for the blighters to get a new book out, then a whole load of them come along together. Not that I'm complaining, mind!
