It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Well, I think I've come to the end of the Antonia Fraser Jemima Shore binge - there are a couple of volumes of short stories, at least one of which I think I have somewhere, but I'm not madly bothered. I finished Your Royal Hostage, read The Cavalier Case (Jemima Shore, #7) (1990) and Political Death (Jemima Shore #8) (1994). Am still not impressed with Ms Shore's sleuthing capacities, and while in theory one is all in favour of a distaff protag who pops in and out of bed with the cheerful abandon so oft manifested by the male shamuses of crime lit, she really does bonk some dodgy characters over the course of the 8 books, mixed up in her cases and not at all free of clouds of suspicion. Possibly these would work better if read (as I must originally have read them) at intervals as they were published or appeared in paperback, and not in a bunch.

Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead which was wonderful, and had me frantically looking for my copy of The Goblin Emperor to re-read.

A J Hall, To Call The King Your Cousin the twenty-first instalment of the Queen of Gondal saga:

A quasi-historical AU of the BBC Sherlock series set (more or less) set in three fantasy kingdoms devised by the Bronte children. The time period is the late seventeenth century and readers should bear in mind that this saga contains the doings of a set of supremely dysfunctional more-or-less European Royal families steeped in the “divine right of kings” ideology of monarchy, filtered through an early nineteenth century Romantic/Gothick sensibility and then depicted using the freedom of expression afforded by the early twenty-first century internet. The genre is basically Ruritanian romance, though the author reserves the right to cross over into other genres without notice.

On the go

Nothing except the things that have been lingering on the backburner for weeks.

Up next

Have finally bitten the bullet and acquired at vast expense in dead-tree versions the 7th and 8th volumes of DB Borton's Cat Caliban mysteries (nb I found that the Amazon voucher I had been given for undertaking A Survey was not valid on amazon.com, chiz) - no 7 has not yet turned up, so I am holding off on 8 so far.

Lennie Goodings' memoir of her time at Virago Press?

Coming very shortly, Barbara Hambly's Scandal in Babylon.