Lee Child, Helen Simpson, Linwood Barclay_8 to 10

A few embarrassing admissions today. Yes, I re-read Lee Child's '61 Hours'. Again. The perverse advantage of rarely remembering a plot is being able to re-discover books like lightly recalled acquaintances: ah yes, how lovely, hello again. It's the 14th Jack Reacher novel by order of publication, somewhere in the middle of the almost 30 of them in the series, and—yes again—I've read them all.  

Just finished is Helen Simpson's 'The Summer Before the War'; the war being WWI. This is a tricky piece of publishing marketing sleight of hand, because the cover is a perky, hand-illustrated, cutesy job, promising English country garden witticisms and light romance. Inside the cover is quite a dense, surprisingly complex and really quite dark account of English village life in the first years of the war. Sold a motsa, apparently. 

Also read (via Audible) an utterly daft thriller 'Elevator Pitch' by bestselling hack Linwood Barclay, which asks what would happen if saboteurs targeted New York city's elevators—that's got potential—then plays out a perfectly conventional whodunnit on a disappointingly small stage. Forgotten it already.