Slow Horses (Slough House #1) 3.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Slow Horses
Series: Slough House #1
Author: Mick Herron
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 309
Words: 112K
Publish: 2010

Fraggle recommended this series in the Recommend Me a Book V post and I think getting to it within seven months is pretty fast, for me :-)

Slough House is where British secret agents go when they are failures. Now, there are different kinds of failures and so you get a real disparate group of people here. We follow River Cartwright and boy, he IS a failure. Not because of the incident that sent him to Slough House (turns out he was framed) but because he won’t listen to anyone or stop to think through the consequences of what he wants to do. Plus, he just doesn’t listen, literally. There were several times where the author has him “tune out” of a conversation and River goes into his own headspace. I was kind of hoping he would die and make the world a better place.

But River Cartwright isn’t the only character and that is the saving grace of this book. From an obnoxious hacker who nobody likes to the head of Slough House, these people ARE people. They aren’t cliches or stereotypes but actual people and I enjoyed that. The plot about MI5 “solving” a problem it purposely created and having it go off the rails was pretty good.

I was pretty happy with this book and I think I’ll be reading more in the series. That is always a good feeling.

★★★✬☆

From Wikipedia

Slough House is an MI5 office overseen by Jackson Lamb, a crotchety Cold War era agent, where "Slow Horses" (disgraced agents) are relegated to pushing paper and sorting through bins.

Everyone has a reason for being at Slough House. River Cartwright accidentally shut down London King's Cross railway station during a training assessment, a mistake he claimed resulted from being fed false information. Louisa Guy misplaced an arms dealer, Min Harper left confidential information on a train and Roddy Ho for his repulsive personality. Only Sidonie "Sid" Baker, a new agent at Slough House has unknown origins. Baker starts to be given assignments in the field and quickly attracts the envy of other agents. After Baker is tasked with following a disgraced conservative journalist, Robert Hobden, Cartwright does everything he can to get involved.

When Hassan Ahmed, a British-Pakistani university student, is kidnapped and held hostage by the white nationalist group Sons of Albion, the agents of Slough House begin to wonder what they can do to help. The Kidnappers announce they will behead Ahmed on a live stream in 36 hours, rain, hail or shine. What the agents of Slough House don't know is that the terrorists have been infiltrated by a former Slow Horse, Alan Black, who has been secretly tasked by the deputy director of MI5, Diana Taverner, to sabotage the Kidnappers as a publicity stunt for the agency.

Hobden suspects foul play, as he previously overheard Taverner in a bar discussing creating sting operations on far-right political groups. When Hobden begins to make attempts to expose the scheme publicly, Taverner convinces Jed Moody, a discontent Slough House agent with a background in international espionage, to plan an assassination attempt on Hobden. Unbeknownst to Moody, Cartwright and Baker are monitoring Hobden's house the night he attempts a masked break-in. Before noticing the intruder, Baker reveals to Cartwright she was assigned to Slough House to survey him. The pair rush to Hobden's defence. A violent scuffle results in Moody accidentally shooting Baker. Hobden and Moody flee into the night, while River rushes Baker to the hospital.

Realising what he's done, Moody returns to Slough House for supplies in preparation to go on the run. Both Louisa Guy and Min Harper return to work after hours for some private time together and rush to attack the masked intruder. The embroiled Moody and Harper fall down the office stairs, where Moody dies instantly after breaking his neck on impact. After Jackson Lamb is alerted to the death of two of his in one night, he begins to piece together Taverner's meddling in his affairs.

Hobden rushes to the house of Peter Judd, a conservative politician. While Judd is reluctant to help Hobden expose MI5's antics, Hobden threatens to release a compromising photo of a young Judd throwing a Nazi salute.

Meanwhile, the kidnappers have discovered and killed the traitor within their ranks. After they change their plans and take their hostage on the road, Taverner begins to look to hide her involvement. Taverner begins to alert people within MI5 that one of the kidnappers was a former Slow Horse and tries to pin the situation on Jackson Lamb. Lamb decides to break into the MI5 headquarters with Cartwright to find evidence and confront Taverner with proof she is framing the agents of Slough House.

The other Slow Horses work to track down the van the kidnappers had hired. Working through the known aliases of the former Slough House agent who infiltrated the group, the Slow Horses find the booking. Roddy Ho works out how to hack the rental company's navigation system and they alert the police of the forest where the kidnappers have stopped. The two remaining kidnappers in the meantime had begun to argue, disagreeing about actually killing Hassan. Hassan uses the opportunity to escape and hide in the forest before he is saved by the police.

In the days after, it is announced that Robert Hobden died in a hit-and-run accident and Cartwright discovers all records of Sid Baker have been wiped from existence, her status now unknown.

Holy Strength - MTG 4E

 

Unlike last week's "Holy Armor", this actually looks "holy" to me. I can practically hear the angelic choirs singing in the background.

1. Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!

Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!

2. Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

3. Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow'r, in love, and purity.

4. Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.

There you go, your weekly dose of hymnary. Bet you didn't expect that :-D

Announcement: Barbara Cartland Buddy Read

 

Last year on a dare, I read a Barbara Cartland romance novel and did a Buddy Read with whoever wanted. It was last minute (for me) but it did go ok. Therefore I wanted to do another one but give a longer lead in time so more people could plan to join if they wanted to.

This year, as you can see by the cover above, I will be reading A Rainbow to Heaven. Cartland wrote it in 1934 and is one of her earlier works. It's 12 chapters and approximately 130'ish pages long. I hope to follow the same format as before, ie, three chapters a week in December with an update and then a final review of the book as whole in the first week of January 2026.

Once November hits, I'll do another Announcement post with more specifics. I will include a link here to Devilreads if you would like to check the book out. Devil Reads Will Devour Your Soul!

I enjoyed Love Saves the Day so I hope to be able to enjoy this read as well. If you'd care to read along, maybe you'll enjoy it too :-D

[Journal] Jane Austen: Persuasion

 

This is the blurb from Paperblanks:
Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) is the author’s most biting and ironic work. In the novel, Austen gives us a satisfying love story while also turning a critical gaze on the kinds of persuasion enforced on young women. Here we have reproduced a rare surviving manuscript page from the story’s eleventh chapter.

I WAS hoping for something a bit more "authorial" than something so flowery but I guess it can't be helped. Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel, even while whichever novel of hers I am currently reading is always my "favorite", but it has held up to repeated readings and I see no chance of it ever falling out of favor. I do like the blue and gold a lot.

I was wondering about buying several of these and just using one after another, but upon actually seeing it, I think one flowery journal at a time is enough. Between the Pear Garden Journal and now this, I think I'm full up on flowery motifs. What I was hoping for was a Captain Wentworth holding a sword or something :-D

Conan the Relentless (Conan the Barbarian #31) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Conan the Relentless
Series: Conan the Barbarian #31
Author: Roland Green
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 194
Words: 76K
Publish: 1992

Roland Green is the next author I am trying out who wrote Conan pastiches. I believe he wrote seven books and I was able to get a hold of five of them. I wasn’t paying attention and just added them willy-nilly to my calibre library and thus when I began this book, by the references Green makes, it was obvious this came after at least one other book of his. It didn’t really matter though, so I just rolled with it. I did end up re-ordering these Conan books by Green after reading this one, so hopefully the future books won’t have any more of that “huh, I’ve missed a story” feeling.

Overall, these was a slightly less than average Conan story. Green knows how to include all the elements of a good Conan story but like many of the writers of these pastiches, just doesn’t have the same fire that Howard had with his words. If I were to compare this to a food item, I’d say it’s kind of like store brand rice krispies.

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia

After the events of "The Lair of the Ice Worm", Conan enters the Border Kingdom. Encountering a group of bandits, he learns that the guards of a caravan they plan to raid are led by Raihna, a female adventurer he had previously encountered in Conan the Valiant. This news leads him to abandon his inclination in joining the bandits and come to the aid of Raihna, instead. Afterwards, the duo enter the service of Eloikis, theoretical king over the restive and semi-independent lords of the country, who needs their aid against a powerful count and two demon-controlling wizards. The story follows their adventures as Eloikis' troubleshooters, which ultimately concludes with their rescue of both his daughter and grandson. But their partnership dissolves when Rhiana decides to marry one of the king's guards, and Conan resumes his wanderings, heading south.

• The “Essential Conan” Trilogy

• All of My “Conan” Reviews

Casebook of the Black Widowers (The Black Widowers #3) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Casebook of the Black Widowers
Series: The Black Widowers #3
Authors: Isaac Asimov
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 161
Words: 75K
Publish: 1980

Another enjoyable set of short stories. The secrets and mysteries involved here were much less “intense” than in previous books, just a step up from cozy in my opinion and I enjoyed the more laid back feeling.

Onward!

★★★☆☆

From Wikipedia.org

Every month, the Black Widowers convene for sumptuous food, fine wine, and a cosmically baffling mystery. Attended by Henry, the all-knowing waiter, these gentle rogues ponder such imponderables as: * the one-syllable middle name that represents what every schoolboy knows, yet doesn't... * a murder by solar eclipse very far out in space... * a Soviet spy's dying message utilizing a Scrabble set and a newspaper sports page... * a satanic cult leader's Martian connection... * a computer criminal's strange equation of Christmas and Halloween... * an ancient symbol that provides the key to a woman's mysterious disappearance...

Contents:

* The Cross of Lorraine
* The Family Man
* The Sports Page
* Second Best
* The Missing Item
* The Next Day
* Irrelevance!
* None So Blind
* The Backward Look
* What Time Is It?
* Middle Name
* To the Barest

• All of My Asimov Reviews

Jane Austen: A Collection of Letters 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: A Collection of Letters
Series: ----------
Author: Jane Austen
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Juvenilia short story
Pages: 32
Words: 10K
Publish: 1789

This was tantalizing. Austen wrote 5 letters at the age of 14. Each letter is not connected to the other and tells a very short story, or at least lets us get a glimpse of a story in progress. Most of the names we have come to know in her novels make an appearance here and I must say, it was wicked weird for me to see “Willoughby” as a good guy.

Part of me wishes I had read this whole Juvenilia collection as a whole (I still have more to go) but the other part is glad I am reading just bits and pieces. It keeps it from blending all together into a one big slurry.

★★★☆☆

From The Internet:

A Collection of Letters is an epistolary short story collection written by Jane Austen when she was fourteen years old. Although the novels Austen became known for were not published until she was in her thirties, she was an active writer from the age of twelve, frequently composing epistolary works such as A Collection of Letters. Austen eventually compiled 29 of her early writings in three notebooks that became known as the Juvenilia and that she called “Volume the First”, “Volume the Second”, and “Volume the Third”, including A Collection of Letters in “Volume the Second”.

A Collection of Letters is set contemporaneously to Austen’s writing and consists of a series of five letters, each written by a woman of high society living in Great Britain. Unlike Austen’s later epistolary works, A Collection of Letters is not a novelette; each of these five letters tells a self-contained story, with no characters appearing in multiple letters. Nonetheless, the collection is unified in its lighthearted, humorous tone. Austen dedicated A Collection of Letters to her cousin Jane Cooper, who married famed Royal Navy officer Thomas Williams two years later and who died in a horse accident before the end of that decade; Williams went on to marry again twice, reputedly because his first marriage was so happy. Ironically, there are multiple parallels between Cooper’s later life and the second letter of this collection.

Letter the First

Letter the Second

Letter the Third

Letter the Fourth

Letter the Fifth

• All My “Jane Austen” Reviews

• Reading Austen 2025 Master Post

Holy Armor - MTG 4E

 

I don't know, that doesn't really scream "HOLY" to me, not at all. The horns, that's what doesn't really work for me on this picture, as well as the face. 

Sacred Marriage (Non-Fiction) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Sacred Marriage
Series: -----
Author: Gary Thomas
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Non-Fiction
Pages: 324
Words: 83K
Publish: 2000

I am always on the lookout for Christian books that will help me in my relationship to God, in my relationship to Mrs B and in my relationship to everybody else. I am also always on the lookout for non-fiction books that I can squeeze into my reading rotation because I have such a hard time with non-fiction. One of the elders at the Sunday church was talking about this book to me and was saying how it really helped him change his perspective on his marriage and on how God viewed his wife. It sounded very promising, so I hunted it down and added it to my Calibre library. However, instead of just making it be the odd duck out with the non-fiction tag, I decided that since I wanted to read more non-fiction this year, I would actually read more non-fiction this year. Not necessarily all deep works of Theology or philosophy or Christian self-help, but just several books that the ideas appealed to me. I spent several months coming up with five other non-fiction books alongside this one. They range from the celebrity bio to memoirs about a movie being made to shifts in societal expectations of law and order. I have gathered them together and put them into a Non-fiction folder on my Pocketbook and will now be treating “Non-fiction” like any other series or author and cycle through it each reading rotation. That is how I will read more non-fiction each year. It’s going to be work to choose new ones but just choosing one at a time over the months is something I CAN do. With that out of the way, on to the review itself.

Yeah, I wasn’t really impressed with this. I don’t know anything about the author, but from everything he let slip, he’s either Roman Catholic or some sort of Anglican (the protestant version of RC’s just without the pope pretty much). His big beef was that through the years and decades and centuries, Singlehood has always been viewed as “more holy” than being married and he wanted to counter-act that. Only the Roman Papists with their unbiblical call to being monks and nuns take that view, as far as I know, so when I realized just what the author was trying to accomplish, I felt like saying something along the lines of “Brother, join the revolution! Luther had it right.”

And that is not to say that the author didn’t have anything good to say. He did. He made some wonderful points about how being in a marriage gives you chances to see yourself like God sees you, ie, just how fallen you are and it gives you chances to express Christ’s love more, ie, sacrificing your comfort to help your spouse. But he was very big picture and big idea and I wanted some concrete ideas that I could put into practice or at least try out, like in the book Hedges that I’ve read previously.

This was not a waste of time at all, but this book did not help me like it helped the Elder who had recommended it. That’s a big thing I am finding with books like these. They do not and cannot help everyone who reads them. So I keep on reading to find the books that ARE going to help me more.

Finally, this book was written explicitly to Christian men and women. If you haven’t given your life to Jesus, this book will sound like the worst kind of foolishness and will go counter to everything you hear about taking care of yourself first. But if you are a Christian, Thomas does an excellent job of showing just how marriage can bring you closer to God and how it can make you more like God, even if only in the abstract.

★★★☆☆

Update

 

Last Saturday I woke up and in the afternoon went on a walk with Mrs B. I looked down the street and saw two stopsigns. I was seeing double. Got an eyepatch as the double vision was causing me some serious nausea. Sunday I was still dealing with double vision, so called the Eye Specialist. He listened to all my symptoms and recommended I go to the Emergency Room the next morning to get checked out.

Mrs B dropped me off at the ER at 5am Monday morning. I had all the the tests by 11am and then just sat in the ER waiting for the neurologist to go over my results. They moved me into the hospital proper at 8pm and I was in a room overnight for observation. Tuesday morning the head nurse and the Neurologist went over my results. Everything was fine. I hadn't had a mini-stroke, no clots or anything. Basically, my optic nerve in my left eye had "frozen' (it's common for type 1 diabetics). They scheduled a follow up with my Primary for Thursday and Mrs B picked me up around noon time. Wednesday was spent at home recovering and dealing with setting up more appointments.

Because of wearing an eye patch, I can't drive. I have almost no depth perception. So Thursday I walked to my primary drs' appointment. It was sidewalk the whole way, so it wasn't an issue, thankfully. She just confirmed that nothing had changed (or gotten worse) and wrote a dr's note excusing me from work until I saw the Eye Specialist. I am seeing him next Friday, July 11th.

During all of this time, our car is due for inspection. And the sensor to check everything out wouldn't work for the one garage, so they wouldn't even start the inspection. It would cost $400 to replace that sensor. I have to try to find another garage that will do the inspection BEFORE doing all the computer stuff. I'm not very hopeful though. Which means we're going to have get another car by the end of the month.

I am looking at some big medical bills, no money coming in as I can't work and then one of our cars won't pass inspection. Plus there's a bunch of other life stuff which just adds to the load. I am just incredibly stressed out, hence my lack of visiting you all. I am back to responding to the comments on my blog, that's a big step up from even a few days ago.

This exact same thing happened to me about 15 years ago and it took 4-6 weeks to recover. I am NOT looking forward to telling my boss I can't work for over a month. Even with a doctors note, it's just not going to be easy. Because it didn't happen at work, I'm not eligible for short term disability either. So I will probably continue to not visit you for a bit longer. I'll just be sticking around here.