Matthew Hurst

Read: An Honest Man by Michael Koryta 📚 Straight ahead innocent man vs corruption, gripping and unpretentious. Fast, easy read. #Bookstodon #booksky #iamreading

Read: Heartwood by Amity Gaige 📚

Great American wilderness novel on the Appalachian Trail. Three women intersect after one of them gets lost. It’s character more than breakneck action (in a good way) and human warmth rather than darkness.

Read: This Is Not a Game by Kelly Mullen 📚

Self consciously smart arse and genre-aware. People say things like ‘but how could the maid be leaving the kitchen at 9pm? Letitia said the dog hair wasn’t on the vicar’s collar till 10pm!’. Not my thing. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel📚

Safe to skim everything before Chapter 24 (which covers Diesel inventing his engine and getting rich in a boringly methodical way) because all the interesting stuff about his disappearance is in the last third.

… and it’s weirdly underdeveloped, as though the author is far more interested in the licensing agreements Diesel had with foreign engine makers than - [SPOILERS] - the British secret service making him disappear and secretly setting him up in a new life with his wife in Canada to stop the Germans forcing him to make submarines for them to win WW1.

There are literally two sentences about his wife’s disappearance and perfunctory research.

And there’s strangely little about the fuel we call diesel now, as opposed to petrol or gasoline. Diesel engines can run on anything that will ignite under pressure and Diesel the man specifically wanted them not to use oil-based fuel. However, Rockefeller somehow managed to ensure his oil company got in on the act, hence the oil based fuel we now call diesel. However, this is skimmed over in the book, in favour of copious infodumps of Diesel’s tours of America and development agreements with other companies.

No idea how this got to be an NYT bestseller.

Read: Never Flinch by Stephen King 📚

King is always compulsive, without me being able to figure out why. He’s sneaking some suspense in there without me realising how. #Booksky #amreading #bookstodon

Read: Mood Machine by Liz Pelly 📚 Audiobook recorded by the author, Liz Pelly, in an intensely irritating? slackjawwwd valleh girrl drawl? that almost made me? stop listening? Not helped by? Adolescent horror that? the music business? is a business? #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

Read: Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump, PhD 📚

As fellow family-of-a-narc, I found a few moments in this resonated, but if you’ve come across The Donald ever before, there’s not a lot new here. #BookSky #amreading #bookstodon

Read: Come Closer by Sara Gran 📚

New York architect is either possessed or has a psychotic breakdown in a tightly written novella. Psychological thriller or horror? You choose.

Read: The House of My Mother by Shari Franke 📚

What life was actually like for the kids of picture perfect but abusive 8 Passengers vlogger Ruby Franke. Gets the nuances and complications over better than the Netflix doc, including the spineless and acquiescent father.

#booksky

Read: Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow 📚

Courtroom thriller that actually uses the legal procedures and tactics for its twists, and plays with the reader’s knowledge of Presumed Innocent. Class.

#booksky

Read: How to Lose a Country by Ece Temelkuran 📚

Turkish writer who’s fled Erdogan tries so hard to stay humane, humorous and hopeful despite the pandemic of populist demagogues. She almost succeeds.

Watched/went to a webinar about making money from short stories. The good news is that there are many more outlets for my genre than I thought. The bad news is that ‘payment’ is not really a thing. Good for just getting stuff out there anyhow.

Finished reading: The Survivors by Jane Harper 📚

As ever, quality small town murder mystery, intelligent and grown up.

Finished reading: the company by Robert LIttell 📚

Long, suspense-free fictionalised history of the CIA in novel form. I’m sure the CIA approved it.

Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚

Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched communication, embarrassed romance, virulent racism.

Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚

Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels like no-budget indie film. Enjoyably scuzzy and down at heel.

Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.

Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚

Everybody should read this. It manages to put both the Holocaust and the Stalinist famines in human terms and closer to comprehensible than anything else I’ve read.

Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th century Zeligishness, somewhere in the general ballpark of Greene, Deighton and Muriel Spark.

Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚

Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure as they go along.

Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚

This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown and it turns out he’s never heard a human speak and can’t manufacture a moment’s suspense. Holy fuck it’s awful. Did not finish.

Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚

I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a sociopath would want, when you think about it…

As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.

Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.

Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚

Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.