Library Towers

I picked this up in the library because: The blurb: My opinion: Straight up - I loved this. I really enjoyed it. And I had pre-judged this book by its cover and really didn't expect to. Finely and tightly plotted, the narrative whips along, taking you with it at a cracking pace. It's very well-written and - oh joy! - intelligently written. Undeniably American to this British reader but that was part of its appeal. Set against the city of New York, which winter has in a tight grip, Pobi has created a flawed detective: ex-FBI agent Lucas Page, retired from the agency after a cataclysmic Event that left him with two prosthetic limbs and a false eye, but leaving his ability to manipulate and view the world through the lense of mathematics unimpaired. Pobi is a bit of a mystery to his readers. He has a website but doesn't give a huge amount about himself away on a personal level. This is his fourth published novel and the first in a new series. He doe...

Tidelands by Philippa Gregory England 1648. A dangerous time for a woman to be different . . . Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.   Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life.  Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the...