Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

This series goes from strength to strength. Three interconnected story lines, all of them engaging and each of them with interesting characters. Lots of action but also lots of context and consideration of possiblities and consequences.

A boardingschool for young magicians where the school, the students and teachers feel real and ordinary, except they can all do magic; there’s a powerful demon that’s been invading the campus and eating people at intervals for centuries, magic is taught in same dryly academic tone of any A level subject but with riskier practical sessions and the school has sword-carrying, magic-wielding demon-killing, Martials.

When you’re 20 hours through a book and you’re going ‘No! There can't be only 90 minutes left. I need more.’ you know that the authors have worked magic to entrall your imagination.

I’ve just read a scene where Maggie forces a powerful man from her house with the force of her words and her personality. It was wonderful and very different to the kind of scene this sort of fantasy normal offers.

I’m finding the financial side of this distracting. Even in 2015, Swiss banks had much better password security than this. Certainly not a single, unchanging password that you could copy and reuse. Agatha Christie used the same money laundering trick in ‘At The Bertram’s Hotel’ in 1965. It may still work but it stretches plausiblity for a woman who tracks money for a living to need to have this trick explained.

This would make good TV. You’d get to keep the plot, bring the scenery alive and rely on the actors to add depth to the characters that the novel gives only a seriface view of.

Most of this works in a I-don’t-have-to-listen-very-hard-to-keep-up way. The mild lust/romance pieces feel like a set of going-through-the-motions clichés with no individuality to them.

Still, I do want to find out how the plot works out.

MISTER PETTY by Jim Butcher was a fun read: almost self-mocking noir with a supernatural twist and a unique sense of justice. It was nice to visit Dresden’ts city without having to deal with the weight of Dresden’s accumulated guilt, grief and gloom.

MISTER PETTY by Jim Butcher was good. It was nice to visit Dresden’s town without the weight of Dresden’s guilt, grief and gloom to deal with.

The writing style is strangely arms-length, almost stage directions / notes to actors rather than the intimacy of conventional narrative and exposition in a crime novel

The story is carrying me on curiosity rather than emotional engagement.

The mix of Icelandic and British culture also helps to keep my interest.

The narrator does a good job but I’m still tempted to run the audiobook at a faster speed.

This is wonderfully claustrophobic and menacing but laced with a cloying decadence that makes it hard not to disdain all the characters.

The set up is intresting but the pace is slower than I’d like. That may be down to the narrater whose voice is so gentle and relaxed it's mildly soporific. If there was an ebook version available in the UK, I’d probalbly have switched to it at this point.