October 2009

December 24 - I haven't been able to update this site for some months, given the pressures of other work over the fall (see http://www.africafocus.org). So I'm a few months late noting books read in October.

I discovered Rennie Airth, with his The Dead of Winter, third in a series set in 1930s England. To my mind this is as good as, or better than, the more famous historical series by Charles Todd set appoximately a decade earlier. And I read yet another good novel by Deon Meyer, who I discovered in September, Devil's Peak

Among reliably good authors read this month were Colin Cotterill, The Merry Misogynist (set in Laos), Eliot Pattison, The Lord of Death (in Tibet), and Walter Mosley, who begins a new series set in Manhattan with The Long Fall.

Also good, if not quite as interesting to my taste, were Dan Fesperman's The Arms Maker of Berlin, set in Germany and Switzerland, and Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, part of his series in an unidentified eastern European country. Robert Parker is predictable but also enjoyable to read, in his new Spenser novel, The Professional.

I liked Ewa Morenos Fall (Ewa Moreno's Case, not yet available in English translation), better than some of the others by Håkan Nesser, mainly because the investigator Ewa Moreno is a much more sympathetic character than his Inspector Van Veeteren. I'm looking forward to finding some books with his new series protagonist Gunnar Barbarotti.