Keith Nixon > Recent Status Updates

A page-turner, this one.

Hmm, not the fastest pacing...

Mad as a bucket of toads!

I really enjoyed the first book (5*), the next less so (4*) and this one, so far, has been somewhat of a disappointment. The zing and novelty of the first installment has faded somewhat. And there's now a menagerie of characters, people who've popped up in the series and now have bit parts. So there are 13 separate POVs. The first 8 chapters are all different people. Which dilutes the real stars - the club itself.

This novel is a prime example of how to create an interesting opening premise then swamp it with excess word count and laborious dialogue. Take 30% out of this book and it would be superb.

Struggling with this one, the pace is just off compared to previous installments.

Now this one is a brilliant read - all the promise of the previous novels comes together, at last. Starts at a faster pace, lots of mystery, hardly any tangents off into dreamy description and some brilliant prose. If the rest stays like this then a definite 5*

Took a little time to get going, but is now shifting along.

Interesting approach to this book - the author finds the bands that played on an NME tape in 1986. Very few of the 22 groups made it big, the majority had mid-range success, broke up, then went back to kind of normal lives, but changed by their experiences. Looks like it would have been great fun...

Took a little time to get going, but as good as ever.

Slow start but lifting off now - the usual excellent quirkiness and multiple investigative strands.

After a fast and unusual opening we've dropped into Raker running down a series of dead ends - as Raker takes on cold case investigations I totally get this would happen. I've read enough Weaver books now to know it'll come together. Despite being somewhat frustrated (again) by this I'll (quite) happily stick it out. I expect by the final third will the pace will dramatically up and this will be another decent novel.

A nice, punchy opening and compelling disappearance.

This is quite a disappointing installment compared to others in the series (I accidentally read later novels first). Feels like this novel could have done with an editing haircut, it's padded and not much happens for chapters on end. For example, the protagonist visits a village over three (short-ish) chapters and learns...nothing. They could all have come out and the story would have been exactly the same.