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Agatha Christie – Witness for the Prosecution | Review

Title: Witness for the Prosecution

Author: Agatha Christie

Category: Fiction

Page Count: 288

Rating: 4/5

This collection brings together a bunch of Agatha Christie’s short stories, including the title story here, which I’ve also seen performed as a stage play. It was excellent as a play, and it was equally excellent as a story, even when I was consuming it for a second time. Better yet, it’s also bundled in with a bunch of other pretty good reads, although none of them quite stand out like Witness for the Prosecution.

Some people find that Christie’s short stories aren’t quite as good as her books are, while others argue it’s the other way round. Personally, I’d say that it depends, but I do think that a few of her short stories are her best pieces, especially if you go and read Miss Marple’s Final Cases, which was a masterpiece.

Here, some stories are great and some are just good, which is pretty much what I expect from any given collection by any given author. Overall, though, it’s on the stronger side, and definitely one that’s worth picking up. In fact, if you’re new to Agatha Christie, you could do a lot worse than to go and watch Witness for the Prosecution in the theatre and then to pick up the book so you can read it.

For me, this book worked effectively as a re-read, because I’d already read all of the stories that were within it from other sources. In fact, I whizzed through it so quickly, mostly just re-reading the stories that interested me the most, that I forgot to post a review. So I had to catch back up.

Learn more about Witness for the Prosecution.

Pam Elise Harris – Oblivion | Review

Title: Oblivion

Author: Pam Elise Harris

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 478

Rating: 7/10

Pam Elise Harris – Oblivion

Disclaimer: While I am to be unbiased and purchased this book with my own money, Pam is also my editor. Full disclosure!

This review is going to be a tough one, because I have a lot of respect for Pam because I’ve worked with her on my own books and her input is invaluable. In fact, that brings us onto the first positive – the book is impeccably copy edited, as you might expect from her, and much more professionally so than most of the indie books you’ll find on the market.

At first, I found it difficult to get into it, but once I stuck with it and started to get an idea of who was who, I got into the swing of things. We follow the stories of six students at Highgarden Academy, a leading New York theatre school, as they try to get their careers on track. And it’s clear that the world of theatre (as well as Doctor Who, which gets referenced throughout) is important to the author, with the level of description clearly coming from someone who’s writing from the heart and drawing on a wealth of knowledge of how things are done in the theatre biz.

I found it hard to relate to some of the characters, but perhaps that’s because it’s such a different world to the one I live in, and it’s not that they weren’t believable – if anything, they were too believable, but they just weren’t my kind of people. That’s with the exception of Chris and Leanna, of course – but I won’t say any more than that because I don’t want to spoil the story line.

Pam Elise Harris

There’s a fair amount of romance here – more so than is typical for the books I usually read – but it all works and is believable, and it’s a nice little compliment to the overarching story line which follows each of the actors as they they spend their careers in oblivion, which you’ll learn more about when you read it. The formatting was strange, though – there were spaces between each of the paragraphs which seemed unusual and threw me off a little, but that’s more of an aesthetic preference than any problem with the book as a whole.

Overall then, this maybe isn’t the right book for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be. If you fancy a cheap trip to New York or have an interest in theatre, or even if you just like a contemporary read with a smattering of romance and a heap of interplay between the different characters, then maybe this is your book. Plus Pam is an indie author and sales are always appreciated, so check it out or tell a friend. Oh, and say hi to Hope for me.