Buried in a Good Book – Tamara Berry

"'There are at least three dead bodies in there.'" Tess Harrow is a successful thriller writer. This means that her first glimpse of her grandfather's old cabin is met with thoughts about where the dead bodies might be hidden - her mind just works like that, much to the dismay of her teenage daughter, Gertrude. …

Mindful Sketching – Peggy Dean

"How to develop a drawing practice and embrace the art of imperfection." It's been a while since I reviewed an art book, but I'm forever looking for ways back into the hobby, the creative part of myself. I'm also a big fan of meditation and mindfulness, so the title of this book sounded perfect. It turned …

The Lost City (2022)

Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is my kind of person. A writer, struggling with her new novel, reclusive until her publicist drags her on a book tour. Worse, the cover model (Channing Tatum) from her hugely popular bonk-lit series has been booked for the tour, too. However, Loretta isn't just a 'women's fiction' writer: she's in …

Momenticon – Andrew Caldecott

"Dead centre on the Biedermeier table below Monet's lilies lay a largish white pill stamped with a pink sickle moon and an amber star." Fogg is a museum curator, watching over mankind's greatest artefacts. He also has a photographic memory and can draw any painting he's ever seen before. What he doesn't have is any …

Moon Knight (season 1)

Museum gift shop worker, Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) has problems. He's rubbish with romance, his boss won't give him a promotion despite his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Ancient Egyptian, and he has to cuff himself to the bedpost every night to stop some quite extreme sleep-walking. As in, wake up in a different country …

The Girl and the Moon – Mark Lawrence

"Yaz had walked on water her entire life, and now in this place where it fell molten from the skies they planned to drown her in the stuff." And finally, the end not just of the Book of the Ice trilogy, but a story begun in Red Sister that, according to the author, ties in with no fewer …

It’s Wyrd & Wonder time!

I joined the Wyrd & Wonder clan either last year or the year before, but to my shame I never managed to participate much - for no good reason! Because W&W is all about celebrating all things fantasy and bookish, and those are very much 'me' 🙂 So this year I'm trying harder and have …

Dead Man in a Ditch – Luke Arnold

"They say the cold won't kill you if you can remember what it was like to be warm." Welcome back to Sunder City, where we first met Fetch Phillips, Man for Hire. Sunder was one a shining beacon of industry, a vibrant and diverse community than included dwarves, vampires, and more. And then there was …

The Girl and the Mountain – Mark Lawrence

"There had been a great fire and there had been a great flood." The second instalment of The Book of the Ice picks up from the cliffhanger ending of The Girl and the Stars - so usual warning that e.g. even mentioning characters who appear in book 2 could be mild spoilers for book 1. Read on at your …

The Batman (2022)

To be honest, I wasn't desperately fussed about this movie. It feels like we've had at least twenty Batmans (Batmen?) in the past couple of years, and superhero fatigue has long since set in - even for me - more generally. But then people started raving about this a bit, and I allowed myself to …