Northwick Park

Four of the test cases have regained consciousness, apparently. I've been following this closely because it's of interest to anyone who is concerned about medical research (hell, ultimately it's of interest to anyone who takes a pill). Dreadful case and they still don't seem to know why their volunteers suffered such an extreme reaction.

And more detective fiction

This time, Martha Grimes' THE BLUE LAST, which I bought second hand. I enjoyed the earlier ones, but have not got on so well with the later ones. This sounds terribly carping, but I think she's trying to do a Dorothy Sayers and turn the books into something more serious than they are, and although she is capable of some quite haunting writing, she doesn't have Sayers' approach to plotting as well as character. The result is that I just don't care about the plot, which in a detective novel, even an English Cosy, is not good.

Also, please, please, could she get someone British to check the mss.... She had some howlers from the first book (we don't have skunks over here) but some of the dialogue is really sloppy. No homeless child here would say 'swell,' and 'mad' in UK English means 'deranged,' not 'cross.' I'm sure that British writers writing American dialogue make similar mistakes, which is one reason I have set very little of my work in the US. However....

And this latest would have the copy editors I know spitting into their tea. Describing the protagonist's cousin in law as being called Bert and from Tyne and Wear, and then 50 pages later having him called Bernard and Irish, is just dire.