Hour 24: the halftime show

Happy second midnight (well, for your east coast hosts), readers! 👋 Time is a weird thing these days with most of us isolated/quarantined, and …

Hour 24: the halftime show

I got in a little over 10 hours of reading so far. Did a little washing and cleaning, watched a little telly and texted with friends, as we are all pretty much stuck at home. Restaurants are completely closed now. Anyway, I might sit outside on my balcony for a bit, while the sun is still out and the sky is blue… I finished my audio of False Value, I finished the rest of Storm Cursed and read the first 100 pages of Smoke Bitten. I read a few pages of Walking Dead, Vol. #5. And I started The Tempest on this amazing app… Pretty cool. Not sure if that still counts as reading, but what the heck…

A meandering river…

False Value (Rivers of London, #8)False Value by Ben Aaronovitch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Loved all the pop culture references, as usual. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams features heavily. There is also Terminator, Tolkien, James Bond and a few others.

Kobna Holdbrook-Smith does an excellent job again as a narrator, although in my opinion his American accents are crap. Sorry! 🙂

This book pointed me in the direction of apparently legendary movie set designer Kent Adam. Thanks for that, great stuff!
https://thespaces.com/5-of-legendary-…

Possibly my favourite character, although she didn‘t have much page-time: Foxglove. She made me laugh. And FYI, Peter pictures himself as Colin Salmon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_S…

Could his mum please bring me tupperware with left-overs twice a week as well? That would be fab!

So, that leaves me with the story. I liked the alternating timeline in the beginning, it was a nice puzzle. There are some good scenes, I had a few laughs, the drones were a pretty nifty design. But in total the story was not very exciting. The bad guy was not really a bad guy, the climax was almost non-existent. Meh. The plot sort of meanders along, picking up a clue here or there. I think maybe Aaronovich got lost a little in irrelevant details and the pursuit of funny moments. Even in the second half of the book I had problems keeping the characters straight. I had to listen to the last hour twice, because I feel asleep during my first listening. Asleep! In the last hour! Yeah, so, this was not it.

PS: No, I don‘t miss the Faceless Man or Lesley. That story arch dragged on entirely too long anyway.

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