This might be the point in my French trip where I blog about the books I’m reading while I’m away. The thing that has really given me a problem is the breakdown of our lovely motorhome. How has that affected my reading? Well, let me explain.
We arrived in France at the end of August. The weather in the Loire was lovely and the only cloud on our horizon was that our favourite gite in France, a lovely villa which we regularly rent, was booked on the exact week we wanted it.
What we tend to do is potter about and explore various places in our motorhome and then spend a week, even a few weeks at the aforementioned villa in the village of Parçay les Pins.
The unexpected booking at the villa meant that after exiting our ferry we headed straight to Parçay les Pins for a week, actually a very hot week, of sun lounging, swimming and reading.
On only our second day there we decided to take a trip out to one of our favourite restaurants, restaurant La Gare. The place is only open at lunchtimes but they have a lovely buffet starter consisting of various meats and patés and a huge selection of salads. Then there is the main course, the fromage course and the final dessert, all served with a basket of fresh bread, chilled water, red wine and cider.
As I’m the nominated driver I always go for the low alcohol cider which is really tasty. After paying the paltry 30 euros for this feast for two it’s back to the villa for a rest in the sun.
On this occasion when we were only perhaps a mile from home our trusty ford transit motorhome conked out. It would not restart but happily, there was breakdown cover attached to the insurance. Within an hour our rescuer arrived, spotted the fault which could only be remedied at the garage so the van was hitched up to the back of his wagon and we were driven back to the gîte.
On the positive side, if the holiday had gone to its original plan and we were touring France, we would have had no where to go as of course we were living in the van itself. As it was the driver dropped us off at our gîte where we had already unloaded a few boxes of wine and plenty of food.
As the day wore on, we discovered various things we could have done with.
I had only one change of clothes although to be fair, in the continuing summer heat all I was wearing was shorts and a t-shirt. We were a little short on water but I had already unpacked the barbecue so at least we could relax and eat. Big problem though was that I had not yet unloaded my collection of books and for a great reader like me, that was a disaster.
As it happens, we have a bag which we call the pool bag which we take out to the pool every day. In the bag we have our sudoku books, reading glasses, notebooks, water, swimming trunks and all sorts of things that we need by the pool. Happily, there was one book which I had already begun to read and that is where we can move on to the book part of this post.
Slow Horses by Mick Herron
This book was on a shelf in my late brother’s lounge and I picked it up when I went to clear his place out after his death. Despite all the praise and good reviews on the back cover, I really found it hard to read. It’s about a group of people who work for the UK intelligence service and all of them are either out of favour with the service or have fouled up in some way. They are all assigned to Slough House instead of the main HQ and they are all a bit fed up and disgruntled.
I found it rather slow reading and I was tempted to abandon it altogether but as one reviewer apparently thought the author was the ‘John le Carré of our generation’ (Le Carré’s books were rather slow moving too) I thought I’d carry on.
Anyway, the plot is about a group of right-wing activists who have kidnapped someone with the intention of chopping his head off on camera. Now it turns out, and I’m not 100% certain I’ve got this right, one of the kidnappers is actually an agent run by Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House.
Later in the book the action kicks off not only with the kidnapped guy but also with some internal fireworks within the intelligence service.
I managed to get to the end but I found it slow and disjointed and I was forever flipping back because I couldn’t understand which character the author was talking about and who is this and who is that person. Anyway, perhaps I was a little stressed with our van breaking down but I wasn’t impressed although to be fair, everywhere I have looked online the book gets universally good reviews.
After reading that I was a little stuck for reading matter but after a quick sift through the bookcase at the gîte, I came up with this next read.
Predator by Patricia Cornwell
Author Patricia Cornwell first introduced Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta in the book Postmortem originally published in 1990. The character is an Italian American. She is a perfectionist and workaholic and lives in a custom-built home where she cooks many Italian meals while she ponders her cases. She also, and perhaps this is me looking at the character from a UK perspective, seems to be overly obsessed with guns although on one occasion, having a gun under her pillow in the bedroom saves her life. In the first book Scarpetta has to deal with a series of murders and works with Benton Wesley from the FBI to create a profile of the murderer. The book also introduces DNA testing as a new technique and later Scarpetta hatches a plot to flush out the murderer. The murderer however, targets Scarpetta herself but is shot dead by policeman Pete Marino.
The books are fascinating reads and have been said to have influenced TV shows like CSI and other shows that use modern scientific techniques of detection and forensics. The first few editions are excellent reads but the later ones tend to stray into a bit of a fantasy area. Scarpetta has an affair with Benton Wesley who is murdered. In a later book he reappears, it seems he was not killed after all but was placed in a witness protection scheme for some reason. That seemed to me to be a little out of the ordinary but later things get really odd. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy appears in the first book as a ten-year-old but in later editions when she grows up, she becomes a computer wizard, and then joins the FBI where she has difficulties because she is gay. Later she develops an internet search engine and becomes a millionaire and creates her own super-secret investigation company called the Last Precinct. It’s all a little bit fantastic.
Anyway, getting on to Predator itself, this is the 14th book in the series and the name Predator is an acronym for a project which former FBI man Benton Wesley is running, in which he examines serial killers to try and find out why they kill. Former officer Marino is now an investigator for the organisation I mentioned above created by Scarpetta’s niece Lucy. Marino has now become some kind of biker wearing the sort of clothes I would associate with Hells’ Angel types. Despite him not being an actual police officer, he seems to throw his weight around a lot with actual police officers which I’m sure that in real life they would just not stand for. Anyway, the tension builds up nicely as the usual cast of characters close in on the murderers. Despite the book being rather gruesome in parts, the author brings the various story elements together really well. The end is rather odd though especially when Scarpetta is assaulted by one of murderers Benton is interviewing and the scene then cuts to Benton and Scarpetta driving away, the attack being sorted we are later told by the intervention of the security guards. The conclusion comes quickly afterwards almost as if the author had something better to do and wanted to quickly wrap up the book. Sadly this wasn’t one of Cornwell’s best.
Interestingly, both these book series (yes there are more books about Slough House) have both been made into TV series that belong to TV channels that I don’t have access to. Scarpetta is on Amazon and Slow Horses on Apple TV. There was a time when exciting new TV shows would have a run on some exclusive channel and then later finally end up on terrestrial TV.
Pity that doesn’t happen anymore.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 