Hello St Marks

"The best Barclay so far..." said Stephen King on the cover. Starting from a very low base, I gather, having now read Linwood Barclay's 'Trust Your Eyes'. "Barclay is such an old pro you feel he can write these terrific thrillers standing on his head," said the [snarky] Daily Mail. In 'Trust Your Eyes', autistic Thomas spots a murder on Whirl360 (a Google Street View equivalent) and his nice brother humours him with a half-hearted investigation, and so on until the inevitable kidnapping and car chases. The Street Library delivers as many regrettable distractions as it does wonders.

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 h...