Festive Cheer

Well we almost had the Pre-Christmas meltdown on Monday , although I somehow managed, in te face of great provocation to stay just about polite and only snappy rather than shouty, but it was a close run thing. Equanimity was restored by a trip to the library where for once I saw loads of books that I wanted to read and I came home with the following Festive Fare.

 

Bad Blood by Aline Templeton. A young woman returns to the home of her youth from where her mother inexplicably disappeared some years previously, only to discover that her mother had been notorious for murdering  a child there while only a child herself.

 

Cold Rain by Craig Smith in which an Eng Lit professor is accused of sexually harassing two of  his students after which, according to the blurb, he finds himself 'sucked into a vortex of conspiracy, betrayal, jealousy and murder'. The 'sucked into a vortex' almost made me put it back on the shelf, but the betrayal and murder kept me hanging on to it.

 

The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson Ellis which sounds a cheerful little tale centring, as it does, on a young woman who escapes from a train wreck of a life in London only to get a job in Edinburgh tidying up after the deaths of sad people who lived alone.

 

Eeny Meeny by M J Arlidge This was a real charmer, a story of the police hunt for a lunatic who kidnaps people in pairs, and shuts them up with no hope of escape, a gun and a text message on a locked phone saying that when one of them shoots the other, the shooter will be released. Just as a grace note the policewoman in charge of the investigation pays regular visits to a bondage specialist to get whipped. This one is not for the squeamish and indeed I would rather steer people away from it than towards it, especially f you have no desire to know what starvation and dehydration do to the human body. As, in retrospect, I didn't.

 

I upped the intellectual quotient by topping this all off with a critical appreciation of the works of J R R Tolkien, which I suspect will be a great deal more fun than Eeny Meeny to be honest.