Synopsis/blurb......
A collection of original British short stories in the crime genre.
I'm currently on a freebie trial of Kindle Unlimited and the author has been shouting about his books over on Facebook, so I thought I'd have a look see at some of his short stories.
The collection would have benefited from having a table of contents listing the stories in the set, but that's a minor niggle. In the collection we have the following...
Snitch
Invasion of Privacy
Jarrold Give a Hand (1894)
The Wife Killer
Now You See Her....
How Daphne Bagged a Villain
That One Special Image
Jarrold and the Case of High Spirits (1896)
I enjoyed the two Jarrold stories a bit more than I was expecting to as I'm not really a massive fan of fiction set in the Victorian period. Jarrold is a recurring character for the author and I believe he has written at least one novel which features the Victorian copper from Great Yarmouth. Here our intrepid policeman snares a couple of insurance fraudsters and an illusionist-cum-spiritualist-cum-charlatan gets warned off, in-between enjoying cups of tea at the station and pints in the local hostelries. I might actually be tempted to rethink my reservations about the period.
Pick of the bunch was Invasion of Privacy, a small village setting and an unlikely harbinger of death. Someone likes her village exactly the way it is and tolerance of strangers is in short supply.
Snitch was enjoyable, if a little predictable. Nicholson writes contemporary times well and not just Ye Olde stuff.
Now You See Her.... I was enjoying, until the end when the denouement really left me scratching my head. The whole thing made no real sense unless the perpetrator had some kind of figurative death-wish which if it was the case it hadn't been alluded to during the earlier story set-up.
The rest of the collection I enjoyed, particularly The Wife Killer.
Overall - quite enjoyable, even if Now You See Her.... troubled me.
There's worse ways of spending a couple of hours reading time.
3.5 from 5Ron Nicholson - I can't find a website for him, but there's a link to his Amazon page with a bit of a biography and details of all his books - here.
Read in December, 2017
Published - 2016
Page count - 89
Source - Kindle Unlimited
Format - Kindle
That's the thing about those collections, Col. They can be a bit uneven. Still, I'm glad you found a lot to like among the stories.
ReplyDeleteMore to like than dislike, just the one story which bumped me out of my vibe. Usually every set has at least one that disagrees.
DeleteI just don't get on with short stories, which is a pity. he sounds like a reasonable writer.
ReplyDeleteYou might like his longer Jarrold books, probably more your thing than mine.
DeleteThis does sound good, but I am overloaded with short story books, and not making much progress on them.
ReplyDeleteI know the feeling, me too!
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