The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri

The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As always, a fine outing by a writer who makes you want to visit Sicily. I'm distressed about the reading glasses though...

“Wearing glasses for reading meant surrendering to old age without the least bit of a fight.” Honest, I put up a fight. I got a good ten years of perfect vision from laser surgery, but it's reading glasses all the time, now.

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An interesting outing from a new-to-me author, but I can't say I cared much for any of the characters, less for the disillusioned-communist backstory, and it wasn't much of a whodunnit – we know almost from the start who dunnit, and the list of possible who-was-duns is small.

So, I'd try another book by Indriðason, but won't be pushing him to the top of my to-read list.

The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri

The Age of Doubt by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well, that was amazing. I think it took 90 minutes to read. The Montalbano mysteries are always an easy read, but this one just flew by.

This makes up for the previous Camilleri I read: The Wings of the Sphinx

The Last Six Million Seconds by John Burdett

The Last Six Million Seconds by John Burdett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The title refers to the time left, at the start of the novel, to the official handover of Hong Kong to China by the British. As a thriller set in the politics of the period, it's great. The author obviously understands the political and cultural environment of the period, and one can only desperately hope that he's exaggerating (though I suspect not...).

Unfortunately, his understanding of some of the technical details of his plot seem a bit weak. Our hero, Chief Inspector "Charlie" Chan, discovers a cache of "pure" Uranium 235, but fortunately leaves its actual recovery to others - who die gruesomely of radiation burns within a couple of days. Well, I grew up immersed in nuclear physics – my father taught it to nuclear plant operators – and I was pretty sure that couldn't happen. No less an authority than the US Centers for Disease Control agrees with me. The effects described are actually what you would get from exposure to spent fuel, not pure ²³⁵U. Without generating too much of a spoiler, suffice it to say that earlier he accepts personal testimony as definitive without apparently back-checking the facts, and later he has to send evidence to Scotland Yard for analysis, which surely any competent lab could have handled in Hong Kong.

Still, if you're not overly worried by a few little incongruities, the story is fascinating (and scary - more for its depiction of China, and what China's growing economy means for the rest of the world in the future, than for the actual criminal acts that are ostensibly being investigated).

Four stars for the story; two stars for the technicalities.