50 Books Challenge 2026 Part Eight

A similar picture I took in Hay!

45 - Glittering a turd - Kris Hallenga
Listened to on audible, narrated by the author and what an inspirational young lady!
The life she lived following a terminal cancer diagnosis could be considered fuller and more meaningful than that of some who live to a 'ripe old age'.
Heartbreaking obviously, and I probably shouldn't have listened to the speech she made at own her 'FUN!-eral' while driving to work as I arrived a little teary.

Please do check your boobs (or pecs).

I had some too! I think I got them for 20p each from a charity shop.

73 The Alice Network, Kate Quinn

Dual-timeline historical fiction. In 1947, American Charlie (female) arrives in Europe trying to trace her French cousin who has disappeared during the war. The last contact she has is an English woman named Evelyn, who turns out to be a bad-tempered and clearly traumatised alcoholic, unwilling to get involved. The second timeline starts with Evelyn as a young woman in 1915, being recruited by the British intelligence services to work as a spy in German-occupied Northern France. Working as a waitress in a high end restaurant, she will eavesdrop on the high-ranking German officers who dine there, and report any information back to her handler, a woman code-named Alice.

The story moves along at a good speed considering its 500-page length, and although the plot doesn't really hold any surprises, it's paced well, and the various climaxed feel well-earned after chapters of convincing set-up.

I had three main issues with this book:

1. The WW1 timeline (largely based on real events as told through memoirs and court cases) is WAY more interesting than the later one, which is part romance, part caper (what do you get if you put a traumatised ex-spy, a pregnant unmarried American socialite and a WW2 veteran with a criminal record into a very fancy car and send them on a road trip across France?). A book focusing on Evelyn's story alone, together that that of her fellow female spies, would have been so much stronger.
2. As previously discussed, I don't like books about real people, and discovering that "Alice" was a real person did cheapen this for me. I also really, really disliked the shoe-horning of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane into the later narrative, given how lightweight that part of the book was. At least Evelyn's story was written around the horrors and trauma of war, and the bravery of every day people. Charlie's half of the book felt frivolous and not the place to use a shocking real life war crime as a plot device.
3. The writer is American and, unfortunately, it shows. There are numerous tiny but irritating little inaccuracies and turns of phrase which make the whole thing feel "off" (people "writing" one another rather than "writing to" etc). Plus she clearly has a thing for Scottish men, to which end she makes the romantic hero speak in exaggerated and rather ridiculous Scots slang, OTT and poorly handled so he sounds like Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons, while another romantic interest is English but has spent "a stint serving in Edinburgh, which must have added the faint Scottish mist to his English voice" - a thing which definitely happens. Don't publishers have readers who can spot these kind of things?

I also used to have some Agatha Christies with the old covers. I remember Crooked House had a massive clue on the front cover! Don't google it if you don't want a spoiler!!

I finished Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman. I lost count but it might've been book number 56. The last of the Thursday Murder Club series and imo the poorest one. It all felt a bit flat, improbable to a silly degree, and the ending was completely meh. I've enjoyed reading them this year on holiday trips but I think that's it for me now.

I have exactly 24 hours left of my holiday trip so contemplating what to start next.

@VikingNorthUtsire I read the Alice Network a couple of years ago and your review is spot on. I preferred The Rose Code by the same author, a similar tale set in Bletchley Park. It was a real page turner and I loved it though it had similar failings mainly down to the writer being American and feeling the need to shoe in a royal. After that I tried a few other books by Kate Quinn and never finished another.

It's taken a long time but I've finished Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver. My number 44.

I don't know why I put this off for so long, I have enjoyed everything I've read by Kingsolver and David Copperfield is one of the few Dickens that I really liked too. I think maybe length/ general bleaknness or just because it was the big one that everyone was talking about back when published and my akward brain sometimes develops an aversion in those instances.

I had the audible sitting there since it came out, but when the kindle version was 99p recently I snapped that up and so I've done a combined approach. Part of the reason it took me a good long while was there were times I read a segment on kindle and then wanted to go back and hear it on audio again - I thought the narrator did an excellent job.

Not sure what I can offer in terms of review that hasn't been said better before. I loved it though, wonderful.

My review of Rose Code is somewhere in these threads (tldr 80% great, 20% Avengers Assemble). But you may enjoy her Briar Club. It's set in the US so bypasses the problems of a US writer writing the English.

The Winter Dead - Lynn McEwan

I have about 5 books on the go of which I have read a chapter or two here and there, so I needed this “Wee Shona” to read in a day.

DI Shona Oliver finds a bloody hammer in a woodpile at the local pub, just before going on a lifeboat shout with the landlord… who turns out to be a suspect in the disappearance of a local ranger.

With Becca away at uni, Shona is not sure where to turn when her lifeboat family might be letting her down.

General Scottish wilderness and wintriness, with an obnoxious poet for good measure. Did what it said on the tin, very satisfactorily 🙂

39 Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott
Once again I bought this due to a review on here but can’t find it - possibly @Welshwabbit? Pimlott is a fine writer and does a good job with this but I can’t help feel that something was missing. Pimlott strains every sinew to make the case for Wilson as a highly intelligent leader, party manager and innovator of equable temperament. Then Pimlott will describe things going on in the country as an absolute dumpster fire, but without any connection or reflection of his actions. I’m generally quite pro Wilson but found this unconvincing. Also Pimlott is magnificently punitive towards Roy Jenkins, who as a middle class social Democrat I am fond of.

40 Jill’s Gymkhana/A Stable for Jill/Jill has Two Ponies/Jill and the Perfect Pony by Ruby Ferguson
Needed some light things to keep me going with Harold and these are available at Badger Books as ebooks only at present I think. I was going to read the whole series but decided to pause after 4. Jill is a great character, an explosively independent but loving child of about 10 when we first meet her, who learns a great deal due to her association with that noble animal, The Horse. Jill and Ann Derry were two of the characters I met in books who resembled my friends and I most closely (though few of us had much to do with horses).

The Five is in the Kindle daily deals

I’d thoroughly recommend if you’ve not read it (though I think many here have). I read this over Covid and if I’d been on 50B then it would have been given the boldest of bolds. Her podcast ‘Bad Women’ is also excellent: a combination of the lives of the women per The Five, and her own struggles to have the narrative wrestled from the perpetrator by traditional ripperologists.

Is The Five showing in the deals for others? I have Story of a Murder, "by the author of THE FIVE"

I never quite know whether the deals are universal or personalised

see, I thought they didn't show it to you if you had already bought it, but I have bought The Five so that theory is no good!

OH sorry ignore me @VikingNorthUtsire is right

The picture is this so I saw "The Five" in big capitals on my phone screen.

Story of a Murder is what I can see in the deals, but it does have THE FIVE very prominently emblazoned at the top! I’d highly recommend SOAM but only if you’re interested at all in the Crippen case and the fact that he’s largely been painted as a poor, henpecked soul with a shrewish wife who virtually ‘deserved’ her fate (spoiler: he was a calculating conman who’d very probably murdered his first wife, and his second was a very capable woman who ran a professional organisation and had many friends who were devoted to her). Rubenhold has done an amazing job of research and revelation here.

Picture

<mea culpa>

I only noticed because the name Crippen caught my eye (perhaps because I'd been reading various reviews and discussions of Barbara Vine, and that case gets mentioned quite a bit).

It's sneaky isn't it? You have to look quite closely at some of these!

47) Medea Sang Me a Corrido by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary. This is a selection of intertwined short stories set in a cartel-run Mexican town. In each story, a reimagined punk/goth Medea (clad in black with snake tattoos and braids) materialises to assist the protagonist, either in birth or in death. There's also a story from Medea's perspective.

I saw this in a bookshop and it seemed interesting, so when it featured on a Goodreads challenge I borrowed it from the library. It's rather violent throughout but I quite enjoyed it, particularly as I got further along and the stories started to weave together. I also liked looking up and learning some of the Spanish used throughout the book, although I'm not sure when I'll get the opportunity to use some of the more colourful stuff!

@SpunkyKhakiScroller I think I have the Briar Club somewhere. Bought after The Rose Code but before I DNFd a couple of hers.

@SheilaFentiman I like the sound of The Winter Dead - Lynn McEwan, it's 99p today are they best read in order?

@NotWavingButReading yes I think I would read them in order as Shona's personal life and team relationships develop over the series.

ETA the first book is £1.99 at the moment so you could try that

The Dying Light - Ann Cleeves

Number four in the Matthew Venn series. I like this series a lot,
though not as much as the Jimmy Perez series. Some good characters running through the books.
Two teenage girls are found dead at the holiday cottage belonging to the parents of one, the father of whom is a left wing MP and minister. All sorts of theories emerge and I didn’t guess whodunnit.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Great on detail of Edwardian era life.

Another email from Persephone this morning about the new Scala St shop - it opens on the 4th of November, which is a lot sooner than I was expecting. They're encouraging visits that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 10am - 6pm.

ETA - maybe if any of us go individually, we should wear some identifying mark to be able to spot a fellow-50 Booker!

THIS IS SO EXCITING!!