Category Archives: Book Review

Skin of Tattoos by Christina Hoag – 2016

Posted on March 18, 2017 by alysonebaker

When I first started reading this book, I was thinking there are only so many stories you can tell – and that this was the one about the guy that gets out of prison, wants to go straight, can’t due … Continue reading →

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Snark / David Elliot after Lewis Carroll – 2016

Posted on March 5, 2017 by alysonebaker

Warning: Not for the faint-hearted!  Snark: being a true history of the expedition that discovered the Snark and the Jabberwock … and its tragic aftermath is the delightful filling out of Lewis Carroll’s poems The Hunting of the Snark (an … Continue reading →

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Dead Lemons by Finn Bell – 2016

Posted on March 4, 2017 by alysonebaker

Novels can get your adrenaline pumping, engage your head or your heart, or take you to other worlds.  Dead Lemons to a degree does all four of these.  The narrator is a paraplegic and we first meet him hanging upside … Continue reading →

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The Pretty Delicious Café by by Danielle Hawkins – 2016

Posted on February 17, 2017 by alysonebaker

I picked up this book for a light feel-good romantic break from a run of bleak tales.  It started exactly as I had hoped, but then turned into a darker yet still sugar-coated read.  Set in a coastal town in … Continue reading →

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A Moment’s Silence by Christopher Abbey – 2016

Posted on February 4, 2017 by alysonebaker

Martyn Percival is on a belated OE – in his early fifties he has successfully salvaged a career post redundancy, but wasn’t able to salvage his marriage once his wife of over thirty years was determined to leave.  He was … Continue reading →

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Billy Bird by Emma Neale – 2016

Posted on February 2, 2017 by alysonebaker

Reading fiction fosters empathy – but rarely do you read a book where that process is so front and centre.  Billy Bird is the story of a family, from its rather accidental beginning, through its weathering of a number of … Continue reading →

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Strip by Sue Wootton – 2016

Posted on January 30, 2017 by alysonebaker

I picked this novel up, saw the cover and glimpsed at the blurb, and started to read what I thought would be a humorous story of a man who decides to try a second career as a comic strip writer … Continue reading →

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A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Penthouse by Brannavan Gnanalingam – 2016

Posted on January 26, 2017 by alysonebaker

The title of this novel refers to a true incident in 1981 when one of our top SIS spooks lost his briefcase; when it was discovered by a journalist it had been left in the Aro Valley and found to … Continue reading →

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The Direction of Our Fear by David Briggs – 2016

Posted on January 19, 2017 by alysonebaker

What a great book!  The direction of our fear looks at the many many small decisions we make every day that result in benefit or harm, to ourselves or to others.  Sometimes small harms and slights sometimes catastrophic.  It deals … Continue reading →

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Archangel’s Heart by Nalini Singh – 2016

Posted on January 16, 2017 by alysonebaker

This is the first of Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter novels I have read – despite it being the ninth in the series.  But it is kind of fun to just jump in mid-stream – and there is a plethora of … Continue reading →

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