Hello St Marks

So much reading, so little blogging. I've wolfed down a smorgasbord of books without even tasting them; all calories, little goodness. For the record, I note: The really dreadful 'Parting the Veil' by Paulette Kennedy—what a muddle. American heiress marries rich but psychotic English Lord in haunted mansion, with lashings of sex, grief, PTSD and Jungian psychology. 'Model Home' by Courtney Sullivan features universally awful people living in US home re-modelling reality TV-land. I felt mean and stupid reading it, but thankfully it was short. Matthew Fitzgibbon's 'Constance' is a near-future sci fi cloning thriller. 'A Day Like This' by Kelley McNeil has a solid premise: Annie wakes up from a car accident remembering a daughter who doesn't exist. 'The Colour of Law' is a wannabe John Grisham; perfect beach reading, thanks Mark Gimenez. James Patterson's 'The Noise' starts well—a very loud noise destroys a town, 2 kids survi...

My happy place is with Lady Georgiana Rannoch. I visit her often and never get bored despite each novel following the exact same pattern as the prior. This past month or two I've returned to 'Her Royal Spyness' (in which we meet Georgie, 34th in the line of succession and dead broke, with a dead Frenchman in her bath), 'A Royal Pain' (in which Queen Mary asks Georgie to babysit a dodgy German Princess), 'Royal Flush' (in which our heroine spies on the Prince of Wales and the odious Mrs Simpson), 'Royal Blood' (in which Georgie encounters murderous vampires in Transylvania while attending a royal wedding), 'Naughty in Nice' (in which Lady Georgiana is an accident-prone model for Chanel; murder ensues) and—oh yes—'God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen', Rhys Bowen's 2021 release, long-awaited by Lady Georgie's avid followers, in which we catch up with her life since... but that would be telling. 

"We tell this story to point out that we all do stupid things as children, and most of us live through them."  'Dirt Town', Hayley Scrivenor's first novel, is bush noir of the best kind. A child goes missing and a methodical investigation begins. The police are diligent and the people of Durton are believably kind, blind or flawed. The drama here is low and steady, the tension builds slowly as the story leaks from the Greek chorus of kids whose voices elevate 'Dirt Town' into something very special. 'Dirt Town' was a magnificent gift from the street library gods, as this uncorrected bound proof copy arrived four months ahead of its planned publication date (April 2022). I hope Scrivenor has many more books in her; this one is fabulous. 

For readers, trauma memoirs are the literary equivalent of slowing down to gawk at a crash; the drama is magnetic but you can feel like a heel afterwards. Rachel Gotto's trauma memoir, 'Flying on the Inside', leads with a string of catastrophes—a dead husband, a dead brother, a brain tumour—then becomes an essay on addiction. Having survived radical surgery for her brain tumour, Gotto finds herself cured but physically addicted to benzodiazepines. Her approach to recovery challenged my preconceptions about medicine and made me uncomfortable; see what you think.