My Weekly Book

Now, this ought to have been right up my street. London, railways and Victoriana, by Jove. Must have a touch of the old Steampunk about it, you would have thought. In fact, jolly close to the kind of stuff I find myself writing in my spare time. (And churning out at great length come November and December, but that’s another story. Literally.) But not a bit of it.

You really would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after having been tricked so neatly by Archbishop Cranmer into risking life and limb in the service of a king who despises him, Matthew Shardlake would have had the good sense to stick to his resolution made at the end of Sovereign never to get involved with court politics again.

This is an excellent example of a very specific genre, and one I’m rather fond of – historical true crime. Typically a writer will take a crime or similar incident and then review all the evidence and available historical material, writing it into a narrative and reaching a conclusion accordingly – or not, depending what has survived and what modern sensibilities make of the evidence.

Another lovely instalment in the tale of Mma Precious Ramotswe and her increasingly large extended family. But I have become aware that, for some reason, these later books seem to have lost their edginess.

I have just finished the third volume of the chronicles of Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and, like the others, it was a joy. And like the others, I read it from cover to cover in less than 24 hours.