From Land to Sea

The Whispering Gallery by Mark Sanderson turned out to be a poor book. I had high hopes for it at first, and even after 100 pages I would have said it was quite good. But alas, the plot was terrible, the characters unbelievable and uninteresting and, worst of all, there was no sense of suspense at all, despite the presence of the obligatory psychopathic killer with a succession of victims. I just didn't care what happened. You really got the impression Mark Sanderson himself didn't have a clue what the plot was going to be and he made it up as he went along without then going back and rewriting the early parts of the novel to fit in with what happened later. I award it 3 out of 10 on the basis that the first half gets a 6 and the second half gets a zero.

Bookcase 7 was Crime/Thrillers (P-R), with Ruth Rendell the only writer I was restricted from reading as I had read before. I was looking for a non-serial killer book and in the end I picked Ramage by Dudley Pope. It looks like a historical novel set at the end of the 18th century in the days of Nelson. It's set at sea, and is the first in a long series.

I have read quite a few books so far in Books 1-6 that are sequels to other books I haven't read. Crime and thriller writers seem particularly prone to thrash out a long succession of books with the same characters and similar plots and storylines to an earlier bestselling work. Fine if you have read the original, but if you haven't then sometimes you are reading a book that probably wouldn't have been good enough to get published had it not already acquired a legion of faithful readers waiting to buy it. But Ramage is is the first in the series so I am hoping that it's also a good book otherwise it wouldn't have spawned so many successors.