2019 books, #41-45

Broken promise, by Linwood Barclay. Kindle edition.

David Harwood left the Boston Globe to spend more time with his son, back at his home town paper. Unfortunately, the paper folds the week after he's re-employed, and he ends up moving back in with his parents. Also of concern is David's cousin Marla, who lost a stillborn baby 10 months earlier and isn't coping. When David goes to take food to Marla, he finds her feeding a 10-month-old baby, and there's blood on the doorframe of her house. On tracking down the baby's home, he finds a dead body in the house... As he looks into the case at his aunt's request, everything just becomes steadily more confusing, and more dangerous. What is happening, and does it have anything to do with the number 23, which seems to be involved in several crimes in the area?  This is satisfying on one level because this case is resolved, but also leaves many questions to be answered in the remaining two books of the trilogy.

Just one damned thing after another, by Jodi Taylor. Kindle edition.
A symphony of echoes, by Jodi Taylor. Kindle edition.

A case study in why selling the first couple of books in a series at a discount works for Kindle marketing. These are absolutely tremendous. Max (Dr/Miss Maxwell) comes from a terrible home situation to the University of Thirsk, and then to St Mary's, a historical research institute where they don't do time travel; oh, no, they "investigate major historical events in contemporary time", which sounds like the strapline for The Archers but way more fun.  These are at turns hilarious, touching, scary and just very much overall a rip-roaring read. I love the Thursday Next and Rivers of London books, and there's something of that in here - but also a very wry look at academia, action movies and historical stereotypes.  I am promising myself that I'll read some books I actually own before reading the next one of these, but it's difficult!

One more croissant for the road, by Felicity Cloake. London: Mudlark, 2019.

This is a lovely book - Cloake does her own, culinary, Tour de France, accompanied at times by a motley crew of friends and family; this is a love song to France and French life and cooking, with all the joys of the beauties of France mixed with the frustrations (lunchtime closing, the lack of corner shops, strangely poor croissants). It's self-deprecating, hilarious and also very informative, from someone spending 5 weeks eating her way round France. There's also a classic regional recipe with each stage/chapter.

The Tour de France: a cultural history, by Christopher S. Thompson [audiobook]. Read by Kevin Scollin. Audible edition.

The Amazon reviews on this criticise it for being too academic. I didn't find it so - but if you want one of those stage-by-stage who-won-what-where top-ten-lists books, this is not it.  It's a history of how the French sense of self has on occasion been defined and justified by the Tour, and what the Tour can say about the French character, and what France has wanted to say about itself.  There's also a thoughtful chapter about doping and the Tour; although this book is more than 10 years old, and even the 2009 "afterword" is well out of date on this.  One thing I'd say though - don't get this in the audiobook version if you'd prefer a reader who has any familiarity at all with French (and, on occasion, English) pronunciation.  This would have been a much more relaxing read if I'd not continually been going back 10 seconds to work out what a particularly mangled phrase should have been...