Fire in the Flint - Eva St John

39%

30.08.26

As with the first in the series, a good idea, poorly executed. It's inexplicably well reviewed on Amazon so maybe other people don't care about the poor quality of writing and lack of editing and proofreading (so, many, comma, splices) that make it a confusing, hard-to-read mess. It reinforces all my assumptions about self-published fiction but gets points for being about Magical Norwich.

Edith Holler - Edward Carey

68%

21.06.26

This was marvellous in all senses, with the added bonus of featuring my local city Norwich and its Theatre Royal. It's a strange, hypnotic, poetic fever dream that's certainly a fresh take on, well, everything. But it's let down by wandering too far into the grotesque, and the author's ugly drawings don't do it any favours either.

Flint in the Bones - Eva St John

52%

06.08.25

I'm all for a story set in Norwich but there was too much time spent on (the admittedly intriguing) worldbuilding and not enough on plot, character development and continuity. There were, in fact, so many annoying continuity errors and unnecessary typos that I wondered if anyone, including the author, had actually read the book before (self)publishing it. 

Floodland - Marcus Sedgwick

52%
30.05.20

This is set in my neck of the woods - or rather floods, if the dystopian climate chaos described here comes to pass. Even so, I struggled to find much, well, depth, and read it in less than three hours.

The Chalk Pit - Elly Griffiths

49%
14.02.18

The ninth book in the series creaks under the weight of the characters' emotional baggage. Not a great deal happens, except in their heads - the actual crimes seem to be an afterthought. Readable enough, as always, but not a particularly thrilling thriller.