Bout of Books 15: Wednesday-Friday

Hello all. I've been at work for a couple of days so decided not to write readathon updates in my free time, but devote the time to actually reading over my lunch breaks and evenings instead. My third book of choice was Career of Evil by "Robert Galbraith" (who I think we all know is J. K. Rowling.) I don't think it was quite as good as The Silkworm, which followed detective Cormoran Strike as he looked for clues to a murder within the victim's manuscript of a novel, but it still did not disappoint. Career of Evil is another really dark thriller, with moments of pitch-black humour which make way for an investigation into a trio of very, very unpleasant characters. Although the suspects in this novel were limited to three, Rowling - sorry, Galbraith - keeps you guessing right to the end, "It must be this one," "Nope, here's a clue that says it can't be..." and when at last Cormoran Strike reveals the incriminating evidence, we find that, once more, the clues were there if only I hadn't overlooked them. Clever. Meanwhile, all I could do was watch helplessly, as Robin Ellacott, Strike's assistant, made some of the biggest mistakes of her life...

After the darkness of Career of Evil and Disclaimer earlier this week, it's time for some comfort reading, and I fully intended to spend today re-reading Pride and Prejudice. But life had other plans, and instead I got somewhat distracted listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway musical Hamilton which nearly everyone on the internet has been raving about for the past few months. I'd been trying to resist the hype, not being a fan of hip-hop or US political history, but I succumbed and have spent most of the day listening to it instead of reading. I'm not going to become completely obsessed with the show, but I did enjoy the songs, became emotionally involved in the fates of the characters (some of which I knew a little about, most of which I did not) and have had the whole thing in my head ever since. It piqued my interest in Alexander Hamilton and the early years of the USA as a nation, gave me a hunger for more knowledge on the subject. A couple of bloggers I follow, Sarah and Alley are taking part in a readalong of Hamilton's biography, and although I've no plans to join in the reading, I'll certainly be stalking their #Hamalong posts, which may have played a part in persuading me to give the show a chance. I'm glad I did, even if it did disrupt my readathon.

Lock In - John Scalzi

It is the not-too-distant future, and the world has changed. After a worldwide epidemic of a debilitating disease, called Haden's Syndrome, whose worst (non-fatal) effect is lock-in syndrome, science and technology have made great leaps to help sufferers lead some semblance of a normal life. Firstly there are remotely-controlled robotesque bodies colloquially known as "threeps" (as in C-3PO). The Haden's afflicted person may physically be lying paralysed in a bed, but their minds can inhabit these synthetic bodies and do most of the things that everyone else can do. Then there is the Agora, a sort of fully-immersive internet, where people can meet in cyberspace without the hastle of computers or smartphones. Finally, there are the integrators, a small minority of people who can let the Hadens borrow their bodies for a while - but fully conscious, and are an essential part of the decision-making and action processes.

So, this is the world of Lock In. Quite a complex set of ideas to get your head around, and it's best to take the first chapter or two slowly to figure it all out, but it's a really fascinating concept for a book. After all, if a person's mind/soul/personality are all made up of electrical signals from the brain, then why not? Why can't they be remotely transmitted to other places outside the body?

The protagonist of Lock In is Agent Chris Shane*, a new recruit to the FBI - and a Haden. On Shane's very first day, an apparent suicide leads to the discovery that someone is abusing the Haden's technology for their own nefarious purposes, and it is up to Shane and partner Vann to get to the heart of the mystery. But the conspiracy goes far deeper than Shane could have imagined, with far-reaching implications...

Lock In is an intelligent science fiction novel which uses fantastical ideas to make you think about real-world issues, such as corruption in business, the dangers of the commercial side of the health industry, and raises questions about the ethics of  medical advancement, technology, and quality of life. The scientists in the world of Lock In see opportunity in disaster, and in treating Haden's Syndrome, they have made steps towards the evolution of a new life form. But what does this mean for the human race? In such a situation, do we have a moral obligation to fix what is broken or to take the broken pieces to create something new which could end up replacing us?

It is these questions which make Lock In something beyond a simple science-fiction detective novel. After finishing the book, I found myself missing it, sorry to have reached the end and said farewell to the characters, the world and the questions it provokes. An excellent novel, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Ready Player One, Scalzi's Redshirts (very different kind of story but the same humour and narrative voice) or Joss Whedon's TV series, Dollhouse. 


*It was not until it was pointed out to me that I realised that Scalzi never specified whether Agent Shane was a Christopher or a Christine. I assumed all the way through the book that the character was male, possibly because of the masculine-sounding surname, but I'm going to have to reread imagining the character as a woman. Apparently there are two audiobook versions, too, one read by Wil Wheaton and the other by Amber Benson (the lovely lovely Tara from Buffy!)

15 Day Book Blogging Challenge: Day Four

Day 4: What was the last book you've thrown across the room?

That's an easy one: XO by Jeffery Deaver. It was not a great book - a pretty good thriller story, with an interesting premise, twists and turns galore, though not very well written. (There was a lot of telling, not showing, "she thought," "he remembered," that sort of thing.) But there was one point where Mr Deaver made us think something terrible had happened. It's a crime thriller, lots of terrible things happen, but there was one particular event that took things to a new level of awful, the killer crossing the Moral Event Horizon.

Except he didn't. Deaver was trolling us all along. And I fell for it. And the book fell out of my hand to the other side of the garden, where it ended up covered in grass stains. Um, oops?

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Süskind

Just these last few weeks, it has seemed as though the whole world wanted me to read Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. After joining in with a customer about the merits of real books over e-readers, his parting words to me were to recommend this book. My friend had been talking about the movie adaptation, and then Ellie mentioned it as a really challenging book in reply to my comment on one of her posts. Lastly, it emerged that my latest acting "discovery" Ben Whishaw had starred in the movie adaptation. And I couldn't see the film without having read the book. Only Shakespeare is exempt from that.

Perfume starts slowly. Really slowly. We are treated to pages and pages of descriptions of smells, every scent in Paris that you might be able to think of. Scent is, of course, a hugely evocative sense, and this forms the basis of the novel, however, I'm not quite sold on how convincingly it can be described with pen and ink. But though slow, these descriptive pages are compelling. It is easy to describe the appearance of things, but there are all the other senses, and Süskind has chosen to focus on one not widely used in literature.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, Perfume's protagonist villain, is a very unusual sort of character, even from birth. Those who ought to look after the infant Grenouille are repelled by him in ways they cannot describe, other than that he smells of nothing. Yet his own nose is remarkable, able to identify the subtlest scents, and this one sense occupies his entire mind. He is utterly alien, lacking in human qualities, a psychopathic nose. There is nothing relatable about Grenouille, and yet he is pitiable. Süskind seems to use scent as a metaphor for the soul, and Perfume leads one to ponder on the nature-versus-nurture debate, presenting the uncomfortable idea of a person innately evil. Grenouille moves from place to place, and bad things happen to those he leaves behind. No explicit connection is made, but Grenouille leaves a trail of misfortune behind him, leading back even to his mother, which adds to the sense of menace.

Perfume does not end where you might think it should, and I found the expected denouement to be anticlimactic. When compared with the pages of description earlier in the book, the "finale" is prosaically described, lacking all tension. There is a sense of inevitability of events, with Süskind making no attempts to keep the reader guessing. I came to realise (thanks to my friend's comments) that this is actually incredibly clever, because, after all, this is how Grenouille sees the world. The smells are everything - human actions, life and death, mean nothing to him.

But just when I thought the ending was all wrapped up, the plot takes a horrifying turn by showing not just the evil in Grenouille's character, but the depravity he inspires in his fellow man by the seeming of purity. Perfume is a slow-burning novel, which took its time to grab my attention, but one that lingers, turning out very dark and unsettling indeed.

Before I Go To Sleep, S. J. Watson

Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love - all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you half the story. Welcome to Christine's life.

(Cover blurb for Before I Go To Sleep.)

I'd had my eye on this book since it was published, and when I boxed up nearly all my books in order to decorate my bedroom this week, I borrowed this from the staff library at work. Although I'd read books about characters with amnesia before - and even made a half-decent attempt at writing one - Before I Go to Sleep was something altogether new. Christine Lucas wakes every single morning having to learn everything about her life and the world from the last twenty years - sometimes more. Before reading this I wondered just how Watson was going to manage to tell this story; how the reader would learn with Christine and not have to endure endless repetition as she rediscovered everything anew. Watson manages this with a simple solution: Christine's journal, which she reads before adding to each day, meaning that we are on the same page, as it were.

Before I Go To Sleep is a deep insight into what it must be like to live with amnesia: the fear and horror of not knowing anything, the world being a strange place, and discovering each day that you're twenty-odd years older than you thought. There were almost time-travel elements, as of course the world has changed a lot in the past decades. Where the world has changed gradually, to Christine it happens all at once, and she has to come to terms with the existence of mobile phones, photoshop, the Gherkin and London Eye - and living in a post 9/11 world without any understanding of the significance of that date - or knowledge that it is a significant date at all. "I must have missed so much," Christine writes. "Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next."


Being a book all about memory, there are inevitably plenty of flashbacks, which are rather disorientating to read. Christine's mind is a very intense, confusing place to be, and the flashbacks can read like actual, physical shifts in time. Her perception of the world is a mishmash of past and present, real and imagined, and filling in the gaps where memories ought to be - but aren't.

The storytelling is very well-paced, with questions answered at satisfactory intervals - and with every question answered, another two are raised. The most straight-forward resolutions to mysteries add to the suspicion by posing another question: if this is the truth, why lie about it or conceal it up until now? Before I Go To Sleep is an intelligent, well-written thriller and psychological study that keeps you turning the pages wanting to know just what's going on. Although I had guessed at a major twist early on, it was revealed to give me a sense of satisfaction for figuring it out, rather than disappointment with the author for not being cleverer than me - a rare achievement.

Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James

I was amused to see this book and recognise that a professional and renowned crime writer had turned her hand to writing fanfiction. There have been many unofficial sequels to Pride and Prejudice, ranging from the realistic to the ridiculous, sequels which focus on the Darcys' family life, sequels focusing on other Bennets, rewrites with zombies... and now, a sequel combined with a murder mystery. This could be fun, I thought. I received the book as a Christmas present from my sister, who seemed anxious in case I was offended and appalled that someone else dared to write a sequel to this classic.

Death Comes to Pemberley starts slowly, with a far more detailed recap of the events that led up to Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage than must surely be necessary, for why would anyone read this without a knowledge of Pride and Prejudice? It takes about 50 pages to get into the story, with plenty of detail of everyday life at Pemberley and Elizabeth's preparations for a ball. As I read these sections, I suspected that I would be more interested in the ordinary affairs of the Darcys and Bingleys, and the staff of Pemberley, than in the story itself!

When I read Return to the Hundred Acre Woods, the official sequel to A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books, I was struck by the amount of period detail that the author had put in, probably in order to create a realistic sense of the time of the story, detail that was never needed in the original stories because they were written to be contemporary. This is the case here, too. P. D. James has clearly put in a huge amount of research, but sometimes the research stifles the storytelling. Still, I do love to know all about the workings of Pemberley and the expansion of the world of Jane Austen's novels.

The tone of the novel, as necessitated by the combination of the Austen Sequel with the Crime genre, is considerably darker than Jane Austen's original. Shadows creep around the edges of the idyllic lifestyle, and Pemberley is furnished with not one, but two suicides in its history. There is a "gritty realism" to James's Pemberley, and her take on the characters and their relationships. I felt uncomfortably aware of how Lydia and Wickham have never quite been forgiven for their elopement, and never would. It was not all doom and gloom however, and occasionally, James came out with some wonderful Austenian (is that a word?) wit:

"There are few activities so agreeable as spending a friend's money to your own satisfaction and his benefit."

With most of the action set at Pemberley, we don't get to see much of the Bennets, but when we do meet Jane and Mr Bingley, they are instantly identifiable within a few words. Lydia, likewise, is just as she always has been - if not more so. We never get to see Mrs Bennet on the page, but her youngest daughter is growing daily more like her mother. I was also pleased to see a bit more of Georgiana Darcy, a character I liked but barely knew in the original novels. She is about twenty one by this point, and despite her shyness, the Darcy stubbornness is becoming apparent in her character. And although we don't get to see Mr Collins, or even read his letter to the Darcys after a murder took place in their grounds, the description of his epistle is priceless.

"He began by stating that he could find no words to express his shock and abhorrence, and then proceeded to find a great number, few of them appropriate and none of them helpful [...] He went on to prophesy a catalogue of disasters for the afflicted family ranging from the worst - Lady Catherine's displeasure and their permanent banishment from Rosings - descending to public ignominy, bankruptcy and death."

Interestingly, it is Elizabeth and Darcy who I felt were least themselves. Their characters were consistent, but  not strong, and I managed to sit through an entire Pemberley supper without registering the presence of the master of the house until he spoke - as if James hadn't known what to do with him until he was needed to move the plot onwards. The couple rarely even appear together in the same scene, and hardly interact, a disappointment considering that they are supposed to be the ultimate romantic couple.

And I've written this far without even mentioning the murder mystery. It is more of a "trial" mystery than a detective novel, with little on-scene investigation and lots of last-minute revelations. I was unsurprised by the killer's identity, as there was a pretty small pool of suspects, and I didn't believe James would dare to turn one of Jane Austen's characters into a killer.

All this might suggest that I didn't like Death Comes to Pemberley, but that's not true. It was never going to be what really happened next, but it was quite a respectable version of what could have happened. Once I'd got past the somewhat stodgy recap at the start of the book, I kept on promising myself "just one more chapter," or "just ten/twenty/fifty more pages" until I realised I had nearly finished, all in one evening. And although at least part of the ending was predictable, I found myself anxious on behalf of even the less sympathetic of Austen's characters. Death Comes to Pemberley was not a great work of literature - I suspect if you look long enough you'd find something better on fanfiction.net - but it was a fun, enjoyable page-turner, an easy read to help me through a reading slump.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My best friend, Judith, is only two months older than me, but when we were at school, she was in the year above me. This proved very useful when it came to discovering literature. Many a book I read and loved came second-hand through her talking about what she was studying in English. This was certainly the case for my first Sherlock Holmes stories. I must have been either ten or eleven, and after her raving about Holmes, I just had to find out what all the fuss was about. Even at eleven, I didn't like missing out on a good story. I vividly remember that I read four stories, one of which was "The Speckled Band," which captivated me, appealing to my slightly ghoulish imagination. This must have been one of my first really grown-up stories, and it was like nothing I'd ever read before.

I've read The Hound of the Baskervilles a few times, but aside from that, Sherlock Holmes lay at the back of my mind for many years. I watched a few stories on TV, acquired much of the knowledge through the osmosis of popular culture, but didn't read much until about eighteen months ago, when BBC started airing Sherlock for the first time. The series sent me right back to the original stories: A Study in Scarlet, and The Sign of Four. After an unusually long wait for a second series of a TV show, Sherlock returned to the screens once more on New Year's Day this year, and I returned to the next volume of the series: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.


After two novels, the third installment is a collection of short stories. This makes the book easy to dip in and out of, and you need little knowledge of what has come before, but can read the stories in any order - there may be a throwaway reference to "the case of..." but nothing that has any bearing on the tale. In fact, the stories aren't even compiled in chronological order - some are set after Watson's marriage, others before. They are narrated by Dr Watson, as written up long after the event. Though far from simple stories, they are told simply, often to the same formula: The problem is presented, Dr Watson, the client and the reader are all baffled, but not Sherlock Holmes, oh no! He ponders a lot, asks strange questions, goes out, solves the mystery then comes back and then tells us how he did it. My favourite stories in the collection are those which have a little less talking and a little more action, those stories in which Watson gets to go "on location" with Holmes.

Some of the tales are rather silly, such as "The Blue Carbuncle" - a valuable jewel which nearly ends up in the Christmas dinner. Two stories require suspension of disbelief as dodgy characters fool those closest to them with disguised identities, and then there is "The Red-Headed League." A fun, entertaining and cunning tale, but how gullible was Holmes's client, duped into joining this fictitious club, just for gingers?

Adventures also contains some of the most wonderful and memorable cases. We meet The Woman, Irene Adler, the one woman Sherlock acknowledges. There is the gruesome tale of the "Engineer's Thumb," and the "Copper Beeches" mystery, first dismissed by Holmes as his "zero point" for interest, but which turns out to be one of the most intriguing and exciting of all. And of course, "The Speckled Band," my old friend, the original locked-door mystery.

Yes, reading these stories, sometimes I found myself rolling my eyes at some of these cliched tropes - but let's not forget that they were not cliched. These are the original twisty page-turning detective stories, those that helped to invent the genre. I won't say Conan Doyle was the inventor - check out Poe's Auguste Dupin stories that came before - but for twists and thrills and cleverness, I think nothing has topped the Sherlock Holmes series in over a century. Maybe Agatha Christie put up a fair fight.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Jeff Lindsay

Although I'd been vaguely aware of the Dexter books and the TV series based upon them, I'd not given them much thought until I saw a memorable Facebook status update from my sister:

Then, when I realised I hadn't brought a book to read in my lunchbreak at work, and had no interest in getting a magazine, I found an abandoned copy of the first book in the lunchroom, and, remembering Jenny's raving about the TV series, thought I'd give it a try.

I was vaguely aware, from what Jenny had told me and the book and DVD blurbs that Dexter Morgan was a forensic blood spatter analysis for the Miami police, a likeable man who happened to be a serial killer in his spare time - but who only kills the bad guys. The really bad guys. I came to the books unaware of any more of Dexter's character than this, and maybe had some idea that he was some sort of vigilante character whose primary objective was to bring villains to justice who had somehow slipped through the net. When I actually opened the book, it became clear that this view was mistaken. Dexter Morgan is primarily driven by the murderous urges and voices he calls "The Dark Passenger," and it is due to his moral code learned from his adopted father Harry that he has put the Dark Passenger to good use. Hey, if you must go around murdering people, you might as well go after the people who really deserve it, no?

It was difficult at first to get into Dexter's head, because he has no emotions - or so he claims - an outsider who observes humans as a species quite apart from himself, whose entire life is a performance to hide his secret, from his relationship with timid, damaged Rita and her children, to the decor of his house. And I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to get into his head! Gradually, though, I became intrigued by this character, and Darkly Dreaming Dexter is a fascinating insight into the mind of a sociopath with some sort of moral code.

Then, more, I realised I was starting to like this self-confessed monster. His narration reflects his view as an outsider to his own life, facing drastic turns of events with an "ooh, would you look at that?" sort of curiosity and a dry, understated dark humour. What became just a handy distraction in the lunchroom hooked me and made me wonder how Dexter could possibly continue to hide his sinister pastime from his work colleagues including his sister Deborah, who are already starting to worry about how a blood spatter analyst could be such an expert in the serial-killer's psyche. Although I tend to prefer one-off novels to series, I'm alreadythinking, "Bother, only four more to go!" I've been discussing the story with Jenny who is a fan of the TV series, and so far we understand each other, but it seems that from series 2 onwards the books and TV show go their separate ways. Reviews claim that the TV DEXTER is one of the few instances of the adaptation being better than the original material - I shall have to investigate this for myself, I think. Purely for research and comparison, of course. And that way, I've got twice as many Dexter stories to keep my dark side entertained.

Room, Emma Donoghue

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside...

Told through the eyes of a five-year-old boy, at first Room seems to be a quirky family story about a family of mother and son. Their world is tiny, but to Jack, that's the way the world is. There's real, which is Room and everything in it, and then there's TV.

And then there's Old Nick, who is not Room and not TV. Upon the introduction of Old Nick, the perspective shifts and we discover what Jack hasn't realised: Room is a prison, and Ma is a young girl abducted and held captive in a soundproof shed. Once you realise this, you can't help but think of these real-life cases reported on the news that once uncovered were impossible to avoid, splashed all over the papers, monstrous crimes that must be exposed, and at the same time you step back to try to grant the victims privacy. With such subject matter, Room could so easily be unreadable, with an author trying to imagine the unimagineable, fictionalising a scenario that to its survivors were all too real for so many years, making the book feel intrusive or simply downright depressing. Donoghue manages to avoid this trap by using Jack, not Ma, as the protagonist, and for whom there is nothing sensational about his lifestyle - this is just the world.

Jack is a very bright child, yet he is only a child and he can only describe the world as he sees it. Through his limited vocabulary, describing what to him are the mundane realities of life, we get to understand the true horror Ma is concealing from him. As they plan their Great Escape I found myself getting very frustrated with Jack for his reluctance to leave and then his homesickness for Room and for saying or doing things that upset Ma, his mother who has been through so much trauma trying to protect him. But he is only five and this is the only world he knows.

The driving force of Room which keeps it from being morbid or mawkish is the love Ma has for her son, and her courage in trying to bring him up to the best of her ability, making a routine and refusing to give up. Perhaps in places the story seems to be too easily resolved, but you know it will never be easy for Ma and Jack to adjust to the outside world - a world which until a few weeks ago Jack didn't even know existed. Jack is still young, still learning, but I suspected it would take a long time for Ma to recover from seven years of imprisonment. Her love for Jack is consistantly shown to be the thing that helped her survive.

The Crying Tree, Naseem Rakha

Nineteen years ago, Daniel Robbin was found guilty of murdering fifteen-year-old Shep Stanley, and sentenced to death. Now, the execution date is set. The Crying Tree is written in two strands of the same plot: following Shep's bereaved family over the agonising years as they try to find closure to their grief and get on with their lives, and prison Superintendent Tab Mason, the man in charge of carrying out the sentence.

I was expecting this book to fit firmly into the category of Crime Novel, and reading the synopsis on the back of the book I found myself thinking of a John Grisham novel. I bought this book in a two-for-one offer on Richard and Judy's Book Club, but to be honest, I expected it to be a little bit dry, with lots of legalese and moral philosophising. In fact, this book reminded me more of a Jodi Picoult novel, exploring serious issues but with characters one can really feel for, and a plot full of surprises and twists.

The bulk of the book is from the perspective of Irene, Shep's bereaved mother, and to a lesser degree her husband Nate and daughter Bliss, as the family tries to put the past behind them and get on with life. A major theme of the work is the lines that should not be crossed, and yet how easy it can be to step over: the line between wanting justice and wanting revenge, between offender and victim, prisoner and guard. Rakha explores how hatred and forgiveness affect both giver and receiver, and leads us to question whether in fact some lines should be crossed. I would find myself supporting one character in an argument, but at the same time understanding exactly where their opponent was coming from.

Interestingly I found the condemned Daniel Robbin to be the most intriguing character, about whom I wanted to find out more. This could stem from a conversation I recently had with a friend whose mother works in a prison, about how "When a felon's not engaged in his employment, (his employment)" he can seem quite ordinary, like anyone else. Throughout the book, Robbin is a rather enigmatic figure, and I found myself wondering, could he really be guilty? He seemed so placid and sane that I thought it impossible that he could shoot dead a teenager in cold blood. Yet, if he was innocent, why did he not appeal the case? Maybe his outer calmness was the mask of a disturbed mind. I sensed early on that there must be more to Daniel than met the eye, and that, more than anything else, is what kept me turning the pages, in a way that would no doubt appal the Stanley family. After all, this man killed their son. Surely we shouldn't be trying to understand what makes him tick?

TV: Blackpool

Another one of those mid-2000s TV series that I missed at the time, probably due to being away at university, Blackpool is a crime drama with a difference. Ripley Holden (David Morrisey) is a thuggish, ambitious amusement arcade owner whose plans to build a Vegas-style casino hotel are jeopardised when a young man is found dead in his arcade. Enter DI Peter Carlisle (David Tennant) who takes an instant dislike to Holden and an equally instant liking to Mrs Holden (Sarah Parish) and watch as Holden's little world starts to unravel. Blackpool is a fairly standard BBC mini-series with a small cast of complex characters and a compulsive mystery, or would be were it not for the musical interludes.

Now, Blackpool isn't strictly a musical series, in the way that, say, Glee is, but the music is more significant than remaining quietly and unobtrusively in the soundtrack like every other show that uses pop music. In Blackpool, dramatic and emotional highlights are translated through Captain Subtext's Truth Helmet* into neatly choreographed song-and-dance routines performed by the characters under the original pop song. Not as slick as if performing original covers, the musical numbers provide some realish surrealism to the drama. The actors' voices provide an extra layer to the music, especially when it is a male singing along with a female-fronted band or vice versa. The cast's voices vary in musical quality (Tennant has a distinctive, husky singing voice while Morrissey's more shouty voice is usually on-key and always in keeping with the character of Ripley Holden) and everyone gives their all. Most memorable is the manly hate tango between Davids Tennant and Morrissey to "These Boots are Made For Walking."

The characterisation is complex, but none of the main characters are exactly lovable - and yet I still found myself caring for them. As the series goes on, Ripley Holden, who starts off as an entirely unsympathetic person, softens and we get to see the heart behind all the bluster and rage. Natalie Holden is the peacemaker of the family, a quiet pillar of the community (she volunteers with the Samaritans) but never really appreciated. When a handsome young detective comes along investigating her husband's part in a murder, it's clear from a mile off where the story will go. The conflict between Natalie doing the right thing, as she has done all her life, or thinking of herself for once starts off well enough, but in the end she comes across as a bit dithery. When all comes to a head, there is too much "I did this for me," or "What about me?" from all sides to really feel any sympathy.

DI Carlisle is a determined man, whether it is to prove that Ripley committed the murder and bring him down, or to get Natalie. When we first meet him, his is the obvious "side" to take because he is Ripley's enemy and Ripley is highly unpleasant. But as Ripley becomes a little more sympathetic, Carlisle's single-mindedness becomes more personal than based on evidence, and he turns to increasingly manipulative and desperate measures to get his nemesis and rival put away.

When it comes to Natalie, he seems to be the antithesis of Ripley. Peter Carlisle is interested in her, wants her to be valued and appreciated as herself, and besides, Ripley has apparently slept with half of the women in Blackpool - that's how much their marriage vows are worth! Carlisle really loves Natalie. And then you remember that he had decided that she was his before they even met, on the strength of a photo. His anger at Natalie when she tells him she can't leave Ripley after all, while perhaps realistic and understandable, shows that maybe his motives aren't so altruistic and noble as we're led to believe. Like Edward Cullen of Twilight, Peter Carlisle is more a creepy stalker who is lucky enough to have his feelings reciprocated, than a romantic forbidden lover. (That being said, in real life - at least in my experience - creepy stalkers don't tend to be David Tennant.)

By the way, take note of how many times Carlisle is shown eating. Especially in the first three or four episodes, he gets through an incredible number of chips, ice creams, doughnuts, etc. etc. Special note goes to the ice cream he sings into during the song, "The Gambler." You know he's unhappy when he refuses a doughnut.

Although the murder mystery is a bit thin and simple, when compared to most crime dramas, there are enough twists and turns, lies and more lies to keep the story going over six one-hour episodes and still keep you hooked. Yet in a way the murder is really a plot point to get the characters into place for the relationships to unfold and unravel. As well as the love triangle of Ripley, Natalie and DI Carlisle, there are family tensions. Ripley's twenty-year-old daughter Shyanne is engaged to a man her father's age, moreover one who knew him in an unhappy past he'd thought he'd put behind him. And seventeen-year-old Danny Holden is a troubled but likable youth with secrets of his own, who is just looking for his father's approval. The answer to the murder mystery itself is not the grand twist ending that many mysteries require, but with only a handful of suspects it's inevitable that the right one would be at least guessed at during the six-hour duration, before being dismissed. But that's okay. That's not what Blackpool is really about. It is more than simply a crime drama or whodunnit. Instead, Blackpool is a character story, a relationship drama. And of course a musical.

*thank you to Steven Moffat's Coupling

TV: Ashes to Ashes (series 3, contains spoilers.)

Series three is where Ashes to Ashes really gets weird. At the end of the Series two finale, Alex is shot in 1982 and wakes from her coma in 2008... only to find Gene Hunt talking to her through her TV screen. Up until this point, it seemed fairly straight-forward. Even if in some respects the time-travel was real, it is a parallel reality reached through being in a coma. But if Alex is in a coma in the coma-world, just what is real?

In this final season, it is not only time-traveller Alex who would have strange hallucinations and experiences, but also Ray, Chris and Shaz. Each saw stars in the sky "as if they were standing on the edge of the world." Also, each had a significant character-defining episode in the series, where they faced challenges, and overcame them and proved themselves worthy coppers. And when this happened, the screen went dark, they heard a couple of seconds of the song "Life on Mars," and laughter, voices, the sound of a pub. Not just any pub, but the Railway Arms, that gang's hangout back in the Manchester days.

For the first two series of Ashes to Ashes, I found Alex Drake an immensely irritating character, unable to get past her idea of the world existing only to serve her purposes. In series three, she has mellowed and is more likeable - but perhaps that is because there is an even more annoying character: Jim Keats. (Daniel Mays.) Keats is an officer from the Discipline and Complaints department, investigating Gene Hunt's department and spreading discord throughout his team. He brings up the subject of Sam Tyler's (1979) death and tries to persuade Alex that Gene Hunt had a hand in it.

When series three was being shown on TV, but before I had caught up and was avoiding it, I couldn't help hearing my family and friends discussing the character of Jim as a character designed to question what we thought we knew of Gene Hunt. However, there was no such ambiguity. I could never take seriously the suggestion that Gene was a murderer - or even that he was less than the morally-dubious-but-ultimately-good person we'd come to know. Especially not coming from such a character as Jim Keats, who was just plain creepy. Just watching him smarm around, making pronouncements and insinuations with his rubbery, sneery mouth and unsubtly trying to persuade Gene's team to come and join him, made me want to take a long shower.

I started to have my theories about Keats' identity when he made sure that he was present when two police officers died: first a one-episoder, then a supporting member of the team from the beginning. In the first death scene, he was creepy, but seemed that he was at least trying to be comforting. The second was frankly terrifying. The dying policeman was obviously in pain and distress, and Keats did nothing but held his head still, and waited. Was he some kind of Grim Reaper, I wondered? Or worse? And then it was pointed out that both officers failed.

In the grand finale, when all is revealed, I both had an inkling of where the story was going, and simultaneously had to do mental gymnastics to keep up. It seems that everyone was dead: Alex died from her gunshot wound, Ray, Chris and Shaz all were killed at various points in time before ending up in this world, which must be some kind of purgatory. And Gene Hunt. Not only is Gene dead, but he died as a very young policeman in 1953, and has been here ever since as a guardian angel sort of figure, training up his team until they are ready to "move on." (Oh, and in this world Heaven is a pub!) Jim Keats, his nemesis, is revealed to be either the Devil himself, or one of his minions.

When I was watching Ashes to Ashes, I had wondered if "the answers" to the series' mysteries were hinted at by the titles: Life on Mars showed Sam Tyler finding his life's meaning in a strange world, and Ashes to Ashes, from the funeral service, had an awful lot of death themes in it. However, I dismissed the idea that it was actually set in the afterlife, because the epic series Lost had its conclusion on the same weekend, and revealed to have that same explanation. Actually, Ashes to Ashes aired first, but I insisted on being told nothing about it. I wasn't a fan of Lost, but my sister had told me enough to keep me curious.

My first reaction to the great revelation was "Where did that come from?" But after a few moments' contemplation, I realised I wasn't disappointed, because the clues had been woven in from the start, if I knew to look for them. However, I would be interested to watch the whole five seasons of two series with that extra knowledge of what was going on, and see how it changes my understanding of the story.