Hello St Marks

Here's the joy of second hand bookstores, well proven. I would never have bought Dan Simmon's 'The Terror' in a bookstore - it's a block of a thing, 935 pages, horror title, gory splat of blood on the cover, and I've never heard of him. But in the low-risk world of a second-hand bookstore, I was seduced by two things: it's about the Franklin expedition to find the North-West Passage in the mid 1800s, and Stephen King declares on the cover: "I am in awe of Dan Simmons", which, perhaps oddly, I find persuasive. This is a teriffic book. I was thoroughly engrossed and felt bereft when it was finished. The Franklin expedition was a well-equipped pair of boats, 130 British naval men and marines, the height of seafaring technology of its time. The expedition was lost. Rescue expeditions eventually found traces of the Franklin effort, and it is generally thought that the crew was icebound for 3 winters, savaged by starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning and bot...

Just filling in time with this one, a perfectly amiable and engaging fantasy about a newly trained wizard caught up in royal shenanigans, 'The Accidental Sorcerer' by K E Mills. The conceit is that wizarding is a straightforward profession aquired via correspondence course. Gerald Dunwoody (Wizard, Third Class) is unhappily employed as a probationary compliance offer, Department of Thaumaturgy, with wizarding yet to meet his expectations. He stumbles on a nasty incident in a Staff factory, sorts it out, blows everything up and so discovers greater powers within himself that anyone suspected, etc. The blurb calls it "Harry Potter for grown ups", which is about right. NEXUS declared it "unputdownable", which was very kind.