Review of The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (2016, Atlantic Books)

For Tim Wu an attention merchant is a firm that seeks to capture and maintain the attention of an audience and to monetize that attention through advertising. He traces the development of such merchants back to the 1830s and the first adverts appearing in newspapers, which quickly became an important income stream. With the invention of every new media he documents how advertisers found ways to colonize it – magazine ads, sponsoring radio and TV shows, commercial breaks, product placements, celebrity endorsements, ads on websites, etc. – along with other spaces such as posters on streetscapes. He makes the case that we are now constantly bombarded with advertisements and media tricks (e.g., clickbait) designed to nudge us towards consumption. This forced diet of ads has not been accepted without resistance, however, with consumers fighting back in various ways such as switching channels and using ad blockers.

As with The Master Switch – Wu’s history of information industries – the book provides a fairly long history of the relationship of media and advertising through a series of short, accessible chapters full of interesting stories and facts. It’s wide-ranging in coverage discussing a broad sweep of attention merchants and their work, though it’s very US-centric despite a couple of brief forays to the France, UK, Nazi Germany, Canada and Japan. While no doubt the US has led the way in driving the attention merchants business model, media and advertising has been pushed forward elsewhere and also taken different forms and been resisted in varying ways. While up-to-date, including Trump’s use and pursuit of attention, I was somewhat surprised that the present role of data extraction and data brokers in profiling consumers is barely discussed. Overall, an engaging, informative read.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm finally getting round to reading a couple of books by Irish authors who've been on the to-be-read pile for a few months - Black Water by Cormac O'Keeffe and The Defense by Steve Cavanagh. Not quite sure why they never quite reached the top of the pile, but they've fared a better than some. I've a couple of books that have been waiting for a year or more that I still intend to read but I've never quite been in the mood, or I've been saving them as companions for if I ever re-visit a country. I'll get to them eventually ...

My posts this week
Review of Moskva by Jack Grimwood
Review of Corpus by Rory Clements
The shotgun is missing

The shotgun is missing

‘Louise!’

‘What?’

‘Can you come here?’

‘What is it?’ Kenny’s wife said from the doorway.

‘Have you been in the gun cabinet?’

‘No. What’s wrong?’

Kenny stood up, opening the cabinet wide.

‘The shotgun is missing.’

‘Missing? But only you have a key.’

‘And the spare hidden in the shed.’

‘The door hasn’t been forced?’

‘No. And it was there yesterday. Do you think … Aidan?’

‘He’s twelve. What would he want with a shotgun?’

‘That’s what I’m worried about.’

A shot blasted in the distance.

‘Oh, God.’

Kenny bolted into the yard.

‘Aidan!’

Crows were rising in the woods.



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Moskva by Jack Grimwood (2016, Penguin)

December 1985, the body of a teenage boy is found in Red Square clutching a wax angel. A week later, Alex Marston, the precocious teenage daughter of the British Ambassador disappears. Major Tom Fox, newly arrived in the embassy after the death of his daughter and a work-related incident, agrees to try and locate her. For Fox the mission is more than simply offering to help, it is a chance to redeem the death of his daughter. It’s soon clear that Alex was taken and is being held against her will, but there is a larger game going on between a senior group of Russian officials that has its roots in the last days of the Second World War. After working undercover in Northern Ireland, Fox is used to moving through the shadows, but navigating the intricacies of Russia’s politics and personal rivalries is a tricky business, especially with a young girl’s life on the line.

Moskva is the first in the Tom Fox series, following the exploits of a British military intelligence officer at the tail end of the cold war. Fox is a damaged soul, a man who abandoned life as a priest for a wife and family and undercover in Northern Ireland; a man who has recently lost his daughter and is about to be divorced. He’s been shipped to Moscow to keep him out of the way of a select committees questions, but he has a habit of finding trouble. In this case it comes in the form of the kidnapping of the British Ambassador’s daughter. Fox starts his own investigation, which is facilitated by senior Soviet figures, both sides wanting to keep the incident out of the media and political spotlight. Unwittingly he has also stumbled into a wider conspiracy. What unfolds is a cold war thriller set in the early days of Perestroika. Grimwood keeps the pace and tension high as Fox careens from one situation to another, and there is plenty of intrigue and twists and turns. The result is a gripping page-turner, especially towards the end. I was swept along with it, rushing over a number of plot devices used to keep the story on track. I lost the thread a little at the denouement as while most of the elements of the unravelling conspiracy made sense, there were a couple of aspects that seemed a little obtuse. Nonetheless, it was a captivating read and I’ll be reading the next in the series.

Review of Corpus by Rory Clements (2017, Zaffre)

1936. Nancy Hereward, a young woman with communist sympathies, travels to Berlin to deliver papers to a Jewish scientist seeking to escape Nazi Germany. A few weeks later she is discovered dead from a heroin overdose. Despite the police and coroner ruling accidental death, her friend Lydia and her neighbour, Cambridge history don, Tom Wilde think it might be murder. A few miles away, a politician and his wife are brutally murdered, seemingly by communist agents. Wilde visits the scene with Philip Eaton, a Times journalist. He senses that the murders have been staged and that there might be a link with Nancy’s death, given they were the parents of one of her best friends. Old friends seem to be gathering in Cambridge, including a senior member of Stalin’s intelligence service fresh from the civil war in Spain, and an ardent Nazi who is a member of Hitler’s bodyguard. In London, pressure is mounting for the King to abdicate over his affair with Wallis Simpson. Wilde seems to have stumbled into an unfolding conspiracy of some kind, which he’s determined to unravel.

Corpus is the first book in the Tom Wilde series set in the years leading up to the Second World War. Wilde is a history professor at Cambridge University specialising in the key figures and practices of intelligence in the Elizabethan and Jacobian era. He’s somewhat of an outsider, being American by birth and citizenship, with an Irish mother, but has spent a lot of his childhood and adult life in England. He has a kind of Indiana Jones persona, using his knowledge, position and boxing skills to help solve mysteries. In this case he stumbles into a web of conspiracies involving communists, Nazis and British intelligence, and missing Spanish gold, the saving of Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany, and the abdication of King Edward. It’s very much a Boy’s Own tale of adventure, with Wilde pitching his skills against professional nasties of various political hues. The story rattles along with Wilde calmly taking on all-comers as he helps his neighbour Lydia get to the bottom of a trio murders and in so doing prevent a major political incident. The story is populated with a wealth of colourful characters and has plenty of intrigue and escapades. And if one can park the fact that it is largely unbelievable throughout and if pressed some of it makes little sense, it’s an engaging read. (For me, the logic and execution of the conspiracies, in which key actors and acts deliberately drew attention to themselves, ran counter to a secret mission and seemed unlikely, though it did create tension, action and kept the pages turning.) Overall, an entertaining slice of speculative, if fanciful, historical fiction.

January reads

A good month of reading to open the year. Difficult to choose between Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe and The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino for read of the month, but I'm going with the latter for the cleverness of the plot and excellent denouement.

From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell ***
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino *****
Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell ***.5
Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe *****
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak ***
Let The Dead Speak by Jane Casey ****.5
Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave ***.5
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr ****
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly ****.5
Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter ****.5

Lazy Sunday Service

A week of running around, meetings and a quick trip to Germany, with a bit of time left over for reading. Now working my way through Jack Grimwood's Moskva set in the city in the mid-1980s.


My posts this week
Review of From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell
Review of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino
Review of Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell
Forget the plane

Forget the plane

‘Bev.’

‘Is Rachel with you?’

‘No. I’m on my way to the airport.’

‘I can’t find her, Tom.’

‘She’s probably with one of her friends.’

‘I’ve rung round. None of them have seen her since yesterday afternoon.’

‘You rang her friends before me?’

‘Now’s not the time! Our daughter’s missing.’

‘Have you spoken to the school?’

‘Yes. Maybe she’s gone to your place?’

‘I’ve just left the apartment; she wasn’t there.’

‘Something’s happened. I know it.’

‘She’s probably just playing silly buggers.’

‘I need your help.’

‘I’ve a plane in two hours.’

‘Forget the plane! Rachel is missing. Your daughter!’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell (1964, John Lang)

When the prim and proper Margaret Parsons disappears Inspector Burden reassures her husband that she will in all likelihood be back by morning. However, the following day her body is found in a nearby wood. The only clues at the scene is a tube of expensive lipstick and a burnt match. At the marital home they find a set of rare books inscribed from a secret lover called 'Doon'. The books date back to when the victim was a local school girl before she moved to London. It seems that her recent move back to the village might have led to a rekindling of the relationship. But who is the mysterious Doon? Chief Inspector Wexford marshals his team and starts to investigate, though their pursuit is hampered by unwilling witnesses.

From Doon With Death is the first book in the Chief Inspector Wexford series that eventually ran to 24 instalments between 1964 and 2013. I’m surmising that the series must be locked pretty much in the time period since Wexford was 52 in 1964. The story is a straight-up police procedural plotting the investigation into the death of a dowdy thirty year old woman. The story sticks to the case, with little elaboration of the policeman’s lives, and might be considered a novella by contemporary standards given my version only ran to 183 pages. The voice is engaging, with Rendell quickly painting a scene and giving a good sense of the characters. The plot is intriguing, but is linear with a handful of potential suspects that are eliminated in turn, and it kind of runs out of steam a little at the end with an unsurprising twist and a bit of a flat denouement. Nonetheless, a nice, tight whodunit.

Review of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (2012, Abacus; 2005, Japanese)

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother. A former nightclub hostess she now works in a local takeaway where her neighbour, a high school mathematics teacher, Ishigami buys his lunch each day. One day her former husband, Togashi, turns up looking for money and threatening continued harassment. The confrontation spirals out of control, ending with mother and daughter killing Togashi. Hearing the commotion, Ishigami offers to help get rid of the body and to plot the cover-up. All Yasuko and her daughter need to do is stick to the story Ishigami creates for them when questioned by the police. Detective Kusanagi can find no holes in Yasoko’s alibi, but there is something about the case that un-nerves him and he turns to his friend, Manabu Yukawa, a university physicist, for help. Yukawa was a friend of Ishigami at university and knows him as a mathematics genius. He’s somewhat surprised that Ishigami is a high school teacher, but knows that if he is involved in the case that it will be fiendishly difficult to solve.

Set in Tokyo, The Devotion of Suspect X is a police procedural with a difference. The reader is presented with the murder at the start of the novel. Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter murder her abusive former husband. Their neighbour, Ishigami, who is smitten with Yusuko, hears the fight and offers to help them dispose of the body and create a cover-up. A body is subsequently found, quickly identified and the police turn up at Yashuko’s door. It appears though that she has a verifiable alibi for the time of the murder and she’s sticking to pleading ignorance. The unfolding story then revolves around the police probing the alibi and trying to trace Togashi’s last movements, with the mystery essentially being whether they’ll be able to get to the truth given Ishigami’s carefully plotted cover-up. There are two unaccounted element in Ishigami’s machinations. The first is Yashuko, who takes up with an old flame in the days following the murder. The second is Ishigami’s former university friend, Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who occasionally helps the police. Yukawa knows that Ishigami is a genius. What ensues is a battle of wits based around a mathematical philosophical question: what is harder – devising an unsolvable problem or solving that problem and knowing if it is correct? A cat and mouse game evolves, with Ishigami tweaking his plan in light of unfolding events. The police, however, remain baffled. The story and characters make for interesting reading, though the tale slows to a crawl at times with only the hook of wanting to know if they’ll be caught keeping the pages turning. The patient build-up is, however, worth it. Despite having sight of all sides in the game, the pay-off for the reader is the double-twist in the denouement, the first of which is somewhat unexpected and breath-taking, despite the fact that the book is marketed heavily on its existence. It’s relatively rare to come across a twist so clever that is not a blindsiding but makes perfect sense in relation to the rest of the plot. And the ending is just perfect. Overall, an absorbing, clever tale of clever scheming; a mostly four star read elevated by a philosophical spin and a very well executed denouement.

Review of Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell (1990, Scribner)

Richmond, Virginia. A serial killer is breaking into houses and strangling young women. Kay Scarpetta, the city’s medical examiner, is determined to try and help end the killer’s spree. Pete Marino, the lead cop on the investigation, prefers honest detective work rather than the theories of a pathologist. And the city’s commissioner and an aggressive investigative journalist seem to be waging their own campaign against her office. Scarpetta is used to making her way in a man’s world and she’s prepared to use all the forensic tricks her office has to try and make sure there’s no next victim. The killer, however, always seems to be one step ahead.

Postmortem is the first book in the Kay Scarpetta series following the investigative exploits of Richmond’s medical examiner. While Scarpetta has a soft underbelly, she is tough, uncompromising and dogged, used to having to fight battles with misogynists. In this outing, everybody seems to be out to besmirch her character and office as she tries to help catch a cunning serial killer who has been strangling a seemingly random set of women. Scarpetta is convinced that the secret to the case lies in forensic evidence. However, DNA is somewhat in its infancy and each scene seems to be compromised in some way. Moreover, her office and potentially herself are seemingly making mistakes. To add to her stresses her niece has come to visit for a couple of weeks. Cornwell spins the plot out, keeping the personal tensions and rivalries, along with the forensic details (which are occasionally overly-laboured), to the fore. The story is relatively linear, with few surprises and only a couple of twists and turns, and the denouement is somewhat inevitable. Nonetheless, it’s an engaging story held together by inter-personal rivalries, rather than the mystery of the killer’s identity.

Lazy Sunday Service

Picked up a new order from the local bookshop on Friday, which I've added to the TBR. Expect reviews of the following in the next couple of months or so (unless they get lost on the pile!): Corpus by Rory Clements, The Defense by Steve Cavanagh, Bloody January by Alan Parks, City Without Stars by Tim Baker, Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee, Last Orders by Caimh McDonnell, Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark and Snap by Belinda Bauer. I need a phase of reading more than I'm buying!

My posts this week
Review of Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe
Review of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Meeting an angel

Meeting an angel

Danny was running out of steam. His focus was solely the next three yards of tarmac.

One hundred metres more, then walk from there.

The impact blindsided him. He skidded up the bonnet, hit the windscreen, then catapulted forward, landing in a heap.

A car door slammed.

‘Moron! Don’t move! You could have broken something.’

‘You broke it for me,’ he muttered.

‘You ran in front of me, idiot. You okay?’

‘Do I look okay?’

‘You look an idiot who’s going to buy me a new headlight.’

‘And you look like the angel who’s going to take me to hospital.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe (2012, Corgi)

Mancunian teenager Lisa Finn has had a rocky start to life – placed in care by her mother, in trouble with the law, and addicted to drugs. She dies with a single stab wound to the chest. The case is picked up by a Major Incident Team headed up by DCI Gill Murray. Lisa’s mother insists the feckless boyfriend is to blame, but Murray wants everything done by the book, every lead run down and closed off. New recruit DC Rachel Bailey is a cop in a hurry and she’s little time for the book. She has her own ideas as to who the killer is and she want to prove her worth. It’s DC Janet Scott’s job to keep Bailey on the straight-and-narrow and see if she can deliver on the promise that Murray sees in her. The problem is that Scott and Bailey do not see eye-to-eye and that has the potential to cause all kinds of issues for the investigation.

Dead To Me is a prequel to the TV series ‘Scott and Bailey’ and was published mid-way through the run of the second series. Staincliffe was not a writer for the TV series, so I’m not quite sure how the novel came about; I’ve also not watched the TV series so I’ve no point of comparison between them. What I can say though is that I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The premise is relatively straightforward – a fairly conventional police procedural investigating the murder of a young woman found stabbed in her home. The woman had recently left a care home and was found by her junkie boyfriend. What sets the book apart is the trio of lead female characters: the experienced and successful DCI Gill Murray; the stoic Janet Scott, a career DC who wants to stay on the frontline and has no ambition for promotion; and the impetuous and reckless DC Bailey who is hungry for success and recognition. Staincliffe provides all three with a decent personal backstory and unfolding personal issues and interlinks those with their professional lives, and the story hinges around their interactions. In other words, this is really a Scott, Bailey and Murray story, with each given even weight, though Bailey acts as a kind of fulcrum in the story. While the mystery element holds no great surprises, the procedural components and the actions and interactions of the three lead characters make for a compelling and entertaining read.

Review of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005, Random House)

Liesel is nine years old when her mother journeys south to near Munich to leave her with her new foster parents. On the way her brother dies, which is the first time Death sees her. At the funeral she steals The Gravedigger’s Handbook from one of the attendees, despite the fact that she cannot read. Her new papa is a kindly accordion player and her new mother a bit of a battle-axe. She quickly makes friends with the other children on Himmel Street, especially Rudy, though her time at school is a bit more fraught. Each night she has nightmares and when she wakes her new papa helps her learn how to read. She steals a book from a pile being burned by the local Nazis and from the library of the mayor’s wife. As the Second World War progresses her new family hides a Jew, Max, in the basement and he creates a new book for her. Sworn to secrecy, Liesel helps to keep Max alive. She steals food from local farms, shelters from bombs in a neighbours shelter, and watches Jews be marched to the local concentration camp. She hopes the war will end soon, but Death will see Liesel two more times.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel, a child growing up in Nazi Germany and her experiences throughout the war, as narrated by Death who has taken the book she wrote during the period and is fascinated by it. Her communist parents have been sent to a concentration camp and she taken in by foster parents. She’s illiterate but decides she wants to learn to read and is helped by her kindly new father, sourcing new books by stealing them. As the war progresses she helps to shelter a Jew and resists the regime in quiet and sometimes open ways along with her friend, Rudy. Zuzak tells the story almost as a fairy tale, with Liesel traversing ups and downs, adventure and danger, punctuated by facts and observations by Death. However, while the punctuations add a bit of liveliness to story, the telling otherwise felt a little flat and even. And while the story is interesting enough, there is no sense of mystery and the edges are shorn from the danger moments as the narrator consistently telegraphs to the reader how the story will unfold. The result is a story that, for me at least, didn’t quite achieve the emotional resonance it might have, but is nonetheless a thoughtful read.