Chloe > Recent Status Updates

I’m really enjoying the book, and if it keeps up this way, I’m sure it will get 5 stars from me, because I want more histories from this author. It moves really well. Very well written and it flows beautifully. But I think all history books should have at least one map at the front. I don’t want to be looking maps up on my phone, and interrupting my reading time with screen-time, as I trace people’s journeys.

In addition to being a painful slog of a read, Patricia Cornwall’s intense hatred of overweight women is loathsome. She quite lazily and obviously uses slenderness as a proxy for virtue and excess weight as a proxy for dullness, slovenliness and evil. I would imagine the author is genuinely not okay. She also wins the “breasted boobily down the stairs” prize. Most male authors aren’t this ridiculous.

…I’m unimpressed with the prose, and the plot relies mostly on shock and gore, but it is pretty genuinely creepy, in an icky way.

Um, at 10% in, I am baffled that the author wants me to believe that anyone would be upset by Laura disarming a spree shooter, or consider it anything but self-defense. Like, sure, the detectives might be very curious about her skills. They might investigate her on the sly. But acting like they might possibly charge her with murder is straight up hilarious.