January 8, 11.47am
Only when you spend a bit of enforced time away from the internet, can you begin to understand that living without it is possible after all. Well, if you are in an Alpine ski resort it is anyway. With no WiFi access in our chalet I decided to leave my laptop at home and see how I could survive with only mobile phone internet access to keep me up to date with various sporting events.
And I survived.
This gave me a little more time for reading and I finished Cold Case by Alafair Burke (daughter of James Lee Burke) which was not as strong as the two previous novels in her Samantha Kincaid series and was actually quite pedestrian throughout the first half before warming up a little later. All in all a bit of a disappointment as the first two novels - Judgment Calls and Missing Justice - were highly promising.
Far more thrilling was Looking Good Dead, the second Roy Grace novel by Peter James, the British filmaker/novellist. Having developed a reputation for writing paranormal thrillers, James turned his attention to a slightly more conventional police procedural format with the publication of the excellent Dead Simple in 2005.
James' major attribute is being able to hold several strands of narrative together at the same time and bring them together with exquisite timing. He does this with a gem of a plot in Looking Good Dead, which centres around the havoc wrought on the family of a young businessman after he inadvertantly watches a snuff DVD movie he finds on a train.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who after just one outing was already a candidate to be crowned the king of UK detective fiction following the impending retirement of John Rebus, has another excellent outing, and I'm looking forward to a third installment.
That was it for crime fiction over the course of the holiday, but I then started on Winter in Madrid, the historical espionage novel that CJ Sansom wrote between Dark Fire and Sovereign (legs two and three of his Tudor murder mystery series).
I'm roughly a third of the way through Winter in Madrid and beginning to wonder if Mr Sansom isn't a genius of some sort, and certainly one of the best writers of fiction this country currently has.
It may take a brave writer to flit from 16th Century London to post-Civil War Madrid (as one reviewer quoted in the blurb points out) but it takes a fabulous one to pull the trick off so brilliantly and to create such a convincing and compelling work. Within it Sansom creates a mesmerising disturbed picture of the ruined city with its overbearing and agonising poverty, but also (as in Sovereign) he also crafts a tale of high political intrigue and corruption. I can't wait to get back on the train and get back into it.
Which brings me to my resolutions (suspended from January 1 for holidaying reasons). There's all the usual nonsense about losing weight and exercising more etc, but I also want to do two other things.
The first is to finish one of the three half novels of my own which sit forlornly on various computers.
The second is to diversify my reading a little more so crime accounts for only one in two books I read. I'd like to add more history, biography and other literary genres.
A belated Happy New Year.