The Unhappy Medium was a happy surprise!  While the blurb made it clear that it isn’t a typical ghost/medium/seance/haunting book, I was delighted  just how different The Unhappy Medium is. I was engaged from the get-go with the character and the setting and plot but if you don’t care for books about science in the back story this novel may not be for you.

Set in today’s England it features brilliant physicist Dr Newton Barlow as he blazes a stellar career researching nuclear fusion and a side media line debunking the supernatural.  Sadly he is less wise than smart.

Cold Fusion Anyone?

Newton first accepts post doc money from a R&D company then accepts their job offer to explore the tantalizing hints he sees of nuclear fusion from collapsing bubbles.  He’s unhappy that his employers restrict him from publishing or talking to others, but very glad of the income and research support.  At least he’s happy until the 2008 crash when the company’s investors start asking for solid results – NOW.  Newton tries to soft pedal his findings but the more he explains the more the media pushes:  Just when will we get cheap power from bubble fusion?  Next decade?  Sooner?

Poor Newton has no leg to stand on and he’s alienated so many that he has no allies.  Soon he has no job.  Then he has no wife (which is no loss whatsoever), no daughter, no house.  All he has is a tiny income, an old Citroen car and booze.

I liked this part of the story.  We got to know Newton and the box he managed to fall into.  Plus the research process is fascinating and author T. J. Brown did a great job showing us how commercial realities and science sometimes run together – and sometimes clash.

The Medium

Newton even manages to get fired from a popular (aka crank) science magazine because he’s too depressed and too upright to write garbage.  Just when he’s hit the all time low Newton learns that his old friend and fellow skeptic, Dr. Sixsmith, is terminally ill.  He rushes to the hospital but is too late.  That is, he’s too late until Dr. Sixsmith shows up in person.

Dr. Sixsmith pulls Newton into a brand new world, where he works for an ancient Greek (also dead), making sure that the bad dead guys stay dead and the good dead guys stay remembered.  Despite his skepticism Newton does excellent work and is soon dedicated to the effort.

Characters

Newton is excellent, a full person, still not terribly humble even after his drastic fall.  His girlfriend and daughter are less well drawn.  The best characters were the Greek dead guy bureaucrat, the vicar and the arch villain.   Outside of Newton the characterization was good but not great.

Humor and Plot

The Unhappy Medium is funny, full of snarky, dry humor.  Newton’s ex-wife adds a whole layer of nasty that the author manages to turn into funny.

The sinister property developers and evil arch villain are dedicated to evil, or, for the developers, to profits without consideration of any morality or social considerations.  For example their fondest wish is to raze St. Paul’s in London and build row houses.  Just listening to their spiel gives one the creeps – yet we have to smile at how deluded they are, how their dedication to money and destruction leaves them unhappy and living in a cold dump.

The arch villain isn’t funny because there are people like that, folks who are perfectly happy to kill everyone in the name of terror and control.  He’s a maniac but a scary one.

The book has some goofy theological backdrops, perfectly fine for a fantasy, but I do hope no one takes these seriously.

Overall The Unhappy Medium is a 4 star book.  If the other characters were a bit better done and the plot just a tad more focused it would be 5 stars.  I’ll look for more by author T. J. Brown.

 

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge starts fast and fun, when new business grad Bailey Chen is attacked as she walks home from her job as a bar back.  Luckily she drank a screwdriver before leaving because her attackers were monsters – tremens – and the screwdriver – when made just exactly perfectly – imparts super strength.

Barkeepers are magicians who keep the world safe from monsters and get their super powers by mixing cocktails exactly right and using pure ingredients.  They are members of the Cupbearers, dedicated to keeping the world safe from tremens and use the Obvlinum to erase memories from us non-barkeepers.  (Presumably they make the drinks slightly wrong when serving to us regular customers.)

New idea, yes!  Great concept, unfortunately the rest of the book fell a bit short.

Once past the opener, Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge read like YA fiction, with Bailey, her high school best friend Zane, and Zane’s girlfriend Mona the mysterious, forming a love triangle. In between they serve drinks and fight monsters and worry about the politics in the bar keeping hierarchy.

I didn’t like the characters.  Bailey got As in high school and college by memorizing and makes flash cards about the company that she’s interviewing for a business job. She doesn’t know what she wants to be, only what she wants to own (apartment in trendy but cheap part of town), and as she herself put it, is a teenager grown old, not an adult.

Zane was on again/off again, inconsistent in loyalty and love, self-centered.  The other characters were equally boring and a politically correct mix of genders and backgrounds.  None seemed to exhibit particularly high moral standards or interest in much beyond food, sex, drinking and killing monsters.

The most interesting parts of Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge were the drink recipes and tidbits culled from the barkeeper’s manual, The Devil’s Water Dictionary.  These snippets had the same fun, tongue in cheek feel as the opening scene.

3 Stars.  The concept is 4 stars, original and could be fun, the teenage angst and modest characterization are distracting enough to warrant the lower rating.

I kept getting sidetracked when reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Broken Homes because I was curious about Peter Grant’s British-isms even when context made the meaning clear.  I kept my phone open to Wikipedia and Google and Dictionary and after a few hours reading as much online as in the book I decided to emulate Peter and note down what I found.  Then I read the book all the way through again without stopping – it is that good!

Kathy’s Guide to Peter Grant’s British-isms

Breeze Block = this one is grand.  It’s a cement block, and after living through 20 Michigan winters in a cement block house, “breeze block” is the perfect name.

Crittal strip window.  Crittal is an English window manufacturer, so I’m guessing this is a narrow transom window.

Damp Course = this one turned out to be my ignorance of building, not a British-ism at all.  It’s the waterproof layer one puts in a house.

Flat Packed Furniture = knocked down, stuff you buy in a box and assemble per the easy instructions.

Muggins = myself, me.

Mullered = beat up.

“Isn’t It” = rhetorical type question, way to end a statement without actually saying “duh, you dummy”.

Shebeen = pretty darn informal market, originally one selling unlicensed liquor

Tin = can.  (Yes, I know, anyone who reads any books by English novelists should know this one!)

Jam & Suet Pudding = Sort of a cross between jelly roll, pastry and lard in a steamed dessert. You make a pastry using suet (the cow version of lard and just as healthy), roll up with jam, then steam over boiling water.  Remember our English friends call desserts “puddings” and cookies are “biscuits”.  (Before I read the recipe I feared it might be a jam version of Eskimo ice cream.  Luckily for our English friends’ health, not so.)

Fried Slice = fried piece of bread.  Really.  Think of French toast but without the egg coating.

Candy Floss = cotton candy.

75 Inch Samsung Television in a Poor Person’s Apartment = Clue that said poor person might be collecting televisions that fall off trucks (or lorries).

Garden = yard, as in your front / side / back yard with lawn, bushes, trees and maybe a garden.

Krio = a real language, sort of a pidgin that Sierra Leone residents who originally migrated from Nova Scotia, ex slaves and similar developed.

Jumper = sweater.  This one used to throw me until I looked it up.  We call sleeveless dresses you wear over turtlenecks “jumpers” and they are ladies’ wear, not for men.  English men wear jumpers that are crew neck sweaters.

Artic = a type of articulated bus.

Lorry = truck.  This is one of the basics, like Hoovering for vacuuming or loo for bathroom.

Biro = ball point pen, so named because a gentleman named Biro invented them!

Council Housing = subsidized housing.  This was a fascinating topic, interesting to see differences between English and American solutions to house poorer people.  The town we lived in had subsidized housing but it looked just like regular apartment buildings, or sometimes people got vouchers (or equivalent) to rent a house.  It’s a little different in big cities where well-meaning planners built huge housing projects that today sadly sometimes are assaulted by gangs and may be rather nasty and unsafe.

Per Wikipedia at one time about 25% of all families lived in council housing; I don’t think it was ever so high here.  From the photos and descriptions council housing ranged from individual houses to more commonly duplexes, 4-apartment buildings and on up.  Enormous complexes like Sky Garden apparently got a bad rep, just as the mammoth projects did in the US.

Semi = duplex, two houses stuck together, often mirror images of each other.

Terrace Housing = town house, two story apartments built together in a single structure, each separate entrance.

Estates, as in Council Estates, to Live on an Estate = I’m not sure why the names include “estates” but it apparently refers to a group of homes of any design that are managed together.  I thought this was an odd term, and to live on an estate sounded strange to my ears.  My guess is that the term drifted over from the old lord of the manor who had his tenant farmers who lived on his estate.

Sink Estate = really bad locale, don’t go after dark type of council estate.

There you have it, British decoded for American ears.  Now back to the book…

 

 

 

I first met Peter Grant about a week ago where he met a ghost, Inspector Nightingale, an evil revenant and the merry crew of London police in Midnight Riot (see review here).  Peter and I hit it off big time and renewed our friendship in Moon over Soho (review here), now we are once again traipsing through London in Whispers Underground.

Peter is one of those characters you empathize with – you really feel like you are right with him solving crimes, studying Latin, practicing magic and trying to avoid major faux pas with the police force such as not setting Covent Garden on fire.  The only problem is that empathizing with Peter in Whispers Underground means you are wading through London sewers right alongside.  Yuck!

I’ve usually found that the second book in a series is the weakest, but this series is the exception. I liked Moon Over Soho a lot and Whispers Underground lost a little of the zany action and fast thinking.  Given the high 5 stars I gave Moon, all that means is that Whispers slipped to oh, maybe a 4.

Why was Whispers was less satisfying?

Peter was in plenty of danger in Whispers (and the two earlier books) but the actual danger moments, getting shot and buried alive, didn’t feel real.  Peter created a shield that protected from the bullets and hallucinated during the burial.  Unless Aaronovitch revisits his hallucination in later books the several pages spent visiting with the dream line Mr. Tyburn seemed like a side trip that went nowhere.

There were a couple off tune plot elements, like the visits with Albert Woodville-Gentle.  It felt like Aaronovitch originally planned to build more on the Ethically Challenged Magician but took a wrong turn. Instead he was a throwaway character that didn’t add anything to the plot.

The Lost Tribe of Navvies (tunnel builders from the 1800s who decided to stay underground) made no sense whatsoever.  We never learned why they decided to stay underground for 150 years.  Peter and Leslie were smart enough to realize there was no solution for the tunnel dwellers; if they were brought into the open the massive British social services and social requirements would descend and make their lives miserable.  We didn’t get resolution here.

The book had its fun moments, especially when Peter decides to go ceramic hunting and has to explain himself to the pragmatic Stephanopoulos.  New minor character Zach Palmer is a shameless grifter that we didn’t get to do much with and I hope we meet up again with FBI agent Reynolds.

Overall I’d give this 4 stars, very good but not quite the fun, clever novel we enjoyed in the first two Peter Grant.