Earlier Reviews

I've started reading stuff about the Grail again. The Arthurian legends have always been favourites, but I've been doing other things lately. Then I picked up Mary Stewart's "The Prince and the Pilgrim", which is a re-telling of another of the stories from Malory, set in her "real" Arthurian background, the same world as The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and so on. This one is particularly clever, a good, gentle read which twists the knife just enough to remind you that sometimes life's just like that, without going over the top. And it's dedicated to her husband on the occasion of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Hopefully, I shall be so lucky.

Coincidentally, just the next day I picked up

Mike Ashley's new anthology "The Chronicles of the Holy Grail" [1-85487-433-0],

which features Tanith Lee, Phyllis Ann Karr, Brian Stapleford and many others. I don't normally like anthologies like this, but Mike also edited "The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits", some of which I enjoyed immensely, so I thought I'd give it a try. All of this is good stuff, but of course I have favourites. Phyllis Ann Karr's "Idyll of the Grail" is very, very clever and bears re-reading several times. And I was also fascinated by the way the first two stories interlock. "Peter Tremayne"'s "The Magic Bowl" for me evokes the mystery in a very few words, with serious religious overtones. Pause after you've read it and let it sink in. Then Peter Valentine Trimlett's "Maidens of the Grail" stands all of that on its head. Intrigued? Well, you'll just have to read the book...

The book I was most waiting for in the small format paperback was Kim Stanley Robinson's "Blue Mars". I was waiting so hard that I almost snapped and bought the hardback, knowing that I'd still want a paperback to match the previous two. There must be a few people out there who aren't aware of the series: three meaty books about terraforming Mars. It's a mark of Robinson's writing that none of the three suffers from 'trilogy-itis': the second one (Green Mars) isn't just a filler to make you go out and buy the third, and this, the third, doesn't spend half the book explaining what has gone before. It stands on its own very well, although if you intend to read all three, this (naturally) contains plot-spoilers for the first two. I'm impressed by the wealth of new ideas...

I've been travelling a lot lately, so I've tended towards stuff which can be read in short snatches. Two with which I've been particularly taken have been

"The Book of Moons" by Rosemary Edghill [0-812-53439-5],

and

"Blue Genes" by Val McDermid [0-00-649831-0].

The Book of Moons is an "armchair detective" novel which features as its heroine "Bast", aka Karen Hightower, a modern-day witch in the New York occult scene. I found the book marvellous, by turns funny and poignant and, I presume, well observed with great attention to detail - it even features morris dancing on May morning. It's the second book featuring Bast. The first, "Speak Daggers to Her" never surfaced in the UK and the third, "Bowl of Night", never got a paperback publication at all, but they're available in a combined volume which I'll review eventually.

Val McDermid's series of books about Kate Brannigan, a female Private Eye in the Leeds-Bradford area, has me completely hooked. I first came across the author when I was working from home on one of those slow-news days when the BBC decided that all its Radio 4 programs would feature debates on whether the Internet poses a threat to today's youth, or is gender-biased, and so on. Just about the only really useful points were made by Val Mcdermid on the BBC programme "Women's Hour". The presenter mentioned Val's computer-literate heroine and on the strength of that, I went and bought "Clean Break" and "Crack Down", which were all I could find. "Blue Genes" is the fifth, and I think it's probably the best so far. By the end you may know slightly more about IVF than you wanted, but I was riveted right to the end.

I also enjoyed Val McDermid's The Mermaids Singing when I went to Nepal. Not one to read on your own when you're feeling down, though. Sorry, I don't have the ISBN to hand: I left my copy in Pokhara to save on weight for the return flight.