[amazon_image id="B00B9PJT20" link="true" target="_blank" size="medium" ]Final Mercy[/amazon_image] Final Mercy by Frank J Edwards ★★★★ There's something appealing about the idea of a madman being charge of a hospital and nobody realising it. That's the premise of Frank J Edwards' Final Mercy: everyone thinks Bryson Witner, the new dean of a once prestigious teaching hospital in rural New York that has fallen on hard times, is a breath of fresh air. But Dr Witner is seriously … [Read more...]
My Bloody Valentine in Fallujah
February 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
I spent Valentine's Day in Fallujah once -- an indication, perhaps, of how unhealthy my lifestyle had become. It was 2004, I was working as a journalist, covering the US-led occupation of Iraq, and it was beginning to go badly wrong. I was at the hotel in Baghdad when the news came through that heavily armed insurgents had stormed the police station and the new Iraqi army barracks in Fallujah, freeing prisoners and killing 17 police officers. The first thing I wanted to do was go … [Read more...]
Burden of the Desert gets five-star review from The Bookbag
February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Burden of the Desert, my novel set in Iraq during the occupation, has got a five-star review from The Bookbag. "Rarely is something this informative also this exciting," the reviewer wrote, adding she was "so mesmerised that I couldn't help but read all 600+ pages in one late, late sitting". You can read the review here at The Bookbag … [Read more...]
Gun Control? Tell that to the Iraqis
January 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Watching the gun control debate in the United States from afar, I was stuck by an odd dissonance. Something about the rhetoric of the pro-gun lobby didn't quite fit with my own experience. It took me a while to realise what it was. And then I remembered, it went back to Baghdad, when I was there as a journalist in the long hot summer of 2003, as the US occupation began to go wrong, and the situations started to spin out of control. Facing increasing attacks from Iraqi insurgents, US forces … [Read more...]
Burden of the Desert gets 5-star review from ForeWord Clarion
January 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Burden of the Desert, my novel set in Iraq during the occupation, received a 5-star review from ForeWord Clarion Reviews in the US. "Huggler writes crisply," the reviewer wrote, "rather than launching into lecture, he refreshingly lets his point come across through the story and the experiences of his characters. Those experiences are exciting and terrifying, wondrous and sobering, and there is action and adventure aplenty to keep fans of this genre turning the pages late into the … [Read more...]
Music Review: The Minotaur
January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The Minotaur at the Royal Opera House, London ★★★★ The story of Theseus and the Minotaur is so old it was already ancient when Plutarch wrote it down. It is one of the oldest stories we teach our children, much older than the Christian religion. A strange choice of subject, then, for a modernist composer to base an opera on, the more so because Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur does not, like Joyce's Ulysses, transpose the story into the modern world, or find contemporary echoes in it. On … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Cover-Up
January 26, 2013 by 3 Comments
The Cover-Up by Dana Griffin ★★★★ The Cover-Up is a thriller set around an air accident investigation. That's an inspired choice: while there are plenty of thrillers set upon hijacked or saboatged airliners, here the crash takes place right at the start, and the real action starts after an Omega Airlines 737 has gone off the end of the runway at La Guardia airport and all the survivors have been picked up, as investigators sit down to try to work out why a routine take-off went … [Read more...]
Book Review: The Honourable Schoolboy
January 19, 2013 by 3 Comments
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre ★★★★ The middle instalment of the 'Karla Trilogy' is very different from the two books that take place either side of it, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's People. In both of those the central character, George Smiley, is a retired outsider investigating the mistakes and betrayals of other men. In The Honourable Schoolboy, we get to see Smiley doing what he is supposedly best at, running an intelligence service. It means we get to see him … [Read more...]
Book Review: Bleak House
January 19, 2013 by 1 Comment
Bleak House by Charles Dickens ★★★★★ Quite simply the best novel I have ever read. From the first page, with its astonishing evocation of a fog-bound London -- "Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners" -- Bleak House draws you into a world and … [Read more...]
Red Alert! Snow of Death!
January 18, 2013 by 2 Comments
Nothing, it seems, distinguishes sane, normal, well-adjusted people from journalists quite like snow. By lunchtime today, London was covered in a soft blanket of snow. Snow on the rooftops, snow on the windowsills, snow covering up the officious no parking signs outside old Spitalfields market, snow being tramped in between the stalls on people's feet, snow on the spire of Christ Church, snow dancing in the wind. London transported, it seemed, to its Dickensian past. Down in Artillery … [Read more...]
