As I mentioned last week, we've been listening to some audiobooks. We finished listening to The Bee­keep­er's Apprentice last night. I read the book many years ago and I've read most of the subsequent books in the Mary Russell series.

Fifteen-year-old Mary Russell is walking on the Sussex Downs with her head in a book one spring day in 1915, when she literally trips over Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes is almost four decades her senior, the two brilliant, lonely people become friends and Holmes tutors Russell in the …continue.

Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles is a series of novels about King Arthur and Camelot in a post-Roman Britain. This book tells how Lancelot (Clothar the Frank) came to Camulod and met Arthur—and it takes the entire book to get to that point. Only after several hundred pages of Clothar's childhood and early manhood and fighting a civil war in his uncle's small kingdom in Gaul, do we proceed to Britain.

As with Uther and other books in the series, I found Whyte to be …continue.

Sequel to The Yellow Admiral.

Sequel to The Commodore.

The Napoleonic wars are drawing to a close. Jack Aubrey is beset with legal problems on land and Stephen Maturin's fortune has been seized by the Spanish au­thor­i­ties. They are sent to sea to be part of the blockade of the French port of Brest, where they are in disfavor with the admiral leading the blockade.

Perhaps the slowest of the Aubrey-Maturin books, it ends with Napoleon being exiled to Elba and then the news that Napoleon has escaped.

Quick, readable intro to Shake­speare's life and plays, setting him in the context of the religious and political turmoils of the late Eliz­a­bethan and early Jacobean eras. You can't do justice to Shake­speare in an hour, of course, Most useful if you didn't already know anything about him or his work.

First of the Bulldog Drummond novels.

Bored former army officer, Capt. Hugh Drummond, “late of the Royal Loamshires”, puts an ad­ver­tise­ment in the paper looking for adventure. He gets more than he expected when a young woman puts him on the trail of a master criminal who is organizing a would-be socialist putsch.

En­ter­tain­ing in a square-jawed, stiff-upper-lip sort of way.

Playback is the last Philip Marlowe novel completed by Raymond Chandler. Marlowe is hired to tail a woman who arrives on a train from the East. He follows her to a small town near San Diego, where she falls under the influence of a black­mail­er—and Marlowe starts to fall for her.

Not Chandler's best work—one is left feeling that both Chandler and Marlowe are old and tired and going through the mo­tion­s—but enjoyable none the less.

Requiem for an Angel is subtitled “The Secret History of a Murderer”; it is also known as the Roth Trilogy.

The Four Last Things is a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller set in the present day (late 90s, when it was written). Four-year-old Lucy Appleyard is abducted in London by the dimwitted Eddie. We follow her mother, the Rev. Sally Appleyard, as she dis­in­te­grates. Her husband, Michael, is the godson of David Byfield. We also follow Eddie who comes to realize that his partner Angel is quite terrifying.

The Judgement of Strangers's …continue.