RogerBW's Blog

Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Carrie Vaughn 28 February 2018

2005 urban fantasy, first in a series. Kitty Norville is a late-night DJ; one night she gets a call from someone who claims vampires are real, someone else says that werewolves are too, and lots of other people seem to want to talk about them. Which is tricky, because she's been a werewolf herself for three years.

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The Good Place season 2 27 February 2018

2017 fantasy comedy, 13 episodes. Eleanor is still in the afterlife, but things have got much more complicated.

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A Question of Death, Kerry Greenwood 26 February 2018

2007 historical detection short stories, in Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series (1920s flapper detective in Australia).

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Spiced Gins 25 February 2018

I like gin. So I thought I'd test some against each other.

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Lord Peter Views the Body, Dorothy Sayers 24 February 2018 - 2 comments

1928 collection of twelve short mystery stories involving Lord Peter Wimsey.

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Star Trek Continues 23 February 2018 - 6 comments

2013-2017 science fiction web series, 11 episodes; a fan production extends the original Star Trek.

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Diving Into the Wreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch 22 February 2018

2009 science fiction, first of a series. "Boss" finds derelict spacecraft, investigates, and either salvages them or takes tourists round them. But now she's found the claim of a lifetime…

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Marlow Tabletop and Board Games 19 February 2018 21 February 2018

This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.

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Unnatural Death, Dorothy Sayers 20 February 2018 - 2 comments

1927 mystery, third of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. While dining and talking about crime, Wimsey meets a doctor who's lost his practice because he was unhappy about a death (the patient was certainly dying, but should have lasted several more months) and insisted on an autopsy – to the horror of the country town where it happened. Nobody else thinks there's any possibility of a crime, but Wimsey takes an interest.

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Pyramid 112: Action II 19 February 2018 - 2 comments

Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's the Action series, a set of rules for streamlining GURPS to fit the sort of story one finds in action films.

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Places in the Darkness, Chris Brookmyre 18 February 2018

2017 science fiction. Ciudad de Cielo, the space habitat where the first generation ship is being constructed, has just had its first murder. Two unlikely investigators will need to work together to solve it, and the bigger plots behind it.

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Jack the Ripper unmasked 17 February 2018 - 1 comment

For over a century, people have speculated about the identity of "Jack the Ripper", the unknown killer who butchered at least five women in Whitechaper during the latter half of 1888.

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Detect Me, Selma Wolfe 16 February 2018

2013 romance novella. Nikki is an unsuccessful artist in the process of giving up on her dreams by taking a marketing job; Mark is the private detective whose office she walks into by accident. But it seems he needs some help catching an art thief…

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It's Mystery Bird time again 15 February 2018 - 2 comments

Yes, once more I've seen a bird I don't recognise.

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The Convivial Codfish, Charlotte MacLeod 14 February 2018

1984 cozy American detective fiction; fifth of MacLeod's novels of Boston Brahmin Sarah Kelling and art investigator Max Bittersohn. A minor theft is nothing to be taken seriously, but a murderous practical joke has more significance… and there's more murder to come.

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Bermondsey Beer Mile, February 2018 13 February 2018 - 3 comments

Under the South Eastern Main Line viaduct out of London Bridge, there are now lots of small craft-beer breweries and pubs. (Images.)

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She Walks in Shadows, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles 12 February 2018

2015 fantasy/horror anthology, consisting of Lovecraftian stories by and about women. Because, as the editors point out, there's a substantial strand of writers of Lovecraftiana who have continued Howard's premise that women just aren't terribly interesting or worthy of notice (both in their stories and in real life), so why not?

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Gosick 11 February 2018

2010-2011 mystery, light novel adaptation, 24 episodes: AniDB. In the European country of Sauville, Kujō the military brat transfers to an exclusive private school, and meets Victorique the goth-loli enigma. They solve crimes!

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Speaker For the Dead, Orson Scott Card 10 February 2018

1986 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Having gone from universally loved to universally reviled, Ender Wiggin continues to suffer for your sins.

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Wisdom of the Crowd 09 February 2018

2017 science fiction/investigation, 13 episodes; a tech billionaire, obsessed with finding the murderer of his daughter, builds a crowd-sourced crime-solving system.

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Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers 08 February 2018

1926 mystery, second of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey's brother, the Duke of Denver, is accused of murdering his prospective brother-in-law. Why won't he say what he was doing in the conservatory at three in the morning?

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Marlow Tabletop and Board Games 5 February 2018 07 February 2018

This Meetup-based boardgames group continues to meet at the Marlow Donkey.

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Artemis, Andy Weir 06 February 2018

2017 science fiction. Jazz Basshara smuggles contraband into Artemis, the city on the Moon. She gets an offer too good to be true… and of course things go wrong.

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Bølgen 05 February 2018

2015 Norwegian disaster film, dir. Roar Uthaug, Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp: IMDb / allmovie. The Åkerneset mountain overlooks the tourist village of Geiranger, but a landslide could cause a tidal wave along the fjord. It's going to. vt The Wave.

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Bad Dog, Ashley Pollard 04 February 2018 - 1 comment

2017 military science fiction, first of a series. Gunnery Sergeant Tachikoma is about to have a very bad day… repeatedly.

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The Dark Times 2 03 February 2018

The Dark Times, edited by Lee Williams, is a fanzine that follows on from Demonground and Protodimension in dealing with "the horror-conspiracy-weirdness gaming genres", beginning with Dark Conspiracy and drifting into nearby areas.

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Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers 02 February 2018

1923 mystery, first of Sayers' books about Lord Peter Wimsey. A body is found in a bath in Battersea, naked except for a pair of gold pince-nez; and a prominent financier has disappeared from his bed. Unless they're the same man, the cases don't appear to be connected, but Wimsey the amateur sleuth takes an interest in both ends of the affair.

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January 2018 Trailers 01 February 2018 - 2 comments

Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. Calibration: I hate everything.)

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