Private Detective – DaneCobain.com

Title: Curioddity

Author: Paul Jenkins

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 312

Rating 4/5

This was an interesting little read for me because it isn’t a book that I picked out for myself. Instead, it was sent to me as a belated birthday gift from my BookTube friend Time for Books. In fact, I think it was a thrift shop find and so that makes it my first official thrift shop book. Awesome!

This is a sort of humorous magical realism book, and it reminded me of what The Shadow of the Wind could have been if the author hadn’t disappeared up his own arse. We follow the exploits of a private detective who’s hired to work for the Museum of Curioddity, which houses all sorts of unusual artefacts. He’s actually hunting down a missing box of levity, which is the opposite of gravity.

What was cool about this was the idea that this magic is all around us, and we just need to un-see what we’re looking at if we want this entire hidden world to be revealed to us. It also played with ideas about fate and destiny, as well as the power of narrative in the sense that the characters would often find themselves in just the right place and they’d remark on the fact that the only reason that happened is that it had to happen.

It’s very tongue-in-cheek and reasonably accurately described on the rear cover as a cross between Lewis Carroll and Douglas Adams. I’d argue that it’s more like Douglas Adams with Terry Pratchett, but Pratchett is one of my favourite authors and so I was down with that. Sure, there were occasional bits here and there that fell a little flat, but I think you’re always going to have that with a humorous book. I’d recommend it for sure.

Click here to buy Curioddity.

Robert Galbraith – The Silkworm | Review

Title: The Silkworm

Author: Robert Galbraith

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 456

Rating: 4/5

Robert Galbraith – The Silkworm

The first thing to mention is that Robert Galbraith is J. K. Rowling’s pseudonym, and so in many ways you know what you’re getting here. If you’ve read Rowling’s work before – and let’s face it, you should have – then you know that her name alone is a guarantee of a certain level of quality right from the get go. Unfortunately, in many ways, that acts against her – it sets expectations high, and it also biases the reader before they get started. I suspect that that’s why she started using her pseudonym in the first place.

With that out of the way, we can start to talk about the story line. This book is the second of three that follows the adventures of private detective Cormoran Strike, and while I managed to read the three of them out of order, it doesn’t necessarily matter. Sure, the story of Strike’s life follows from one book to another, but seeing as the man is pretty much consumed by his work, it’s only a minor detail.

In this book, Strike – and his assistant, Robin – are recruited to investigate the disappearance of a writer called Owen Quine, who’s managed to offend almost the entire literary world with his constant shenanigans. Quine was gearing up to release a new novel and disappeared just when he was due to release it, and his long-suffering wife asks Strike and Robin to investigate his disappearance.

J. K. Rowling

And then Quine is found dead. Personally, I’d call that a spoiler because it doesn’t happen until about a third of the way through the book, but it’s revealed on the rear cover and so I guess I can say it. That annoyed me – it basically made me feel as though the first chunk of the novel was really just a long rehash of what was on the rear cover, and I was impatient for the body to be discovered so that I could find out what happened next.

It was also a little too meta for my preference – in writing about Quine, Rowling herself took the chance to take a few shots at the industry, and I’ve always felt a little bit weird about it when writers write about writers. Stephen King does it all of the time, to the point at which it starts to feel cliche or self-indulgent, but he also usually pulls it off and Rowling/Galbraith did it here, too.

Overall then, this is a very respectable crime novel and certainly worth a 4/5. However, I also thought it was the weakest in the trilogy, and not as good as some of the other books on the market.