User Profile

David Hughes

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Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

Grumpy Scottish late career librarian living in Dublin and working in Further Education. Open scholarship enthusiast. Shill for Big Library. Power-hungry gatekeeper. King of infinite space. He/him/his. I read a lot. I "like" (some) sport, politics, walking and my family. Happy to be here and eager to see what happens next ...with everything.

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David Hughes's books

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Homicide in hardcover (2009, Wheeler Pub.) 2 stars

murder is always a bestseller...first in the new bibliophile mystery series!The streets of San Francisco …

Formulaic fungible fluff

1 star

Brooklyn Wainwright is a book restorer who is first to find the body of her murdered mentor. Can she solve the murder before she's arrested? Of course she can! This was awful. There's so much wrong with it, it's difficult to know where to begin. Book repair is library adjacent so I was curious to read this. Alas! I wager the author has a degree in book preservation from the University of Google where the course teaches that you can eat and drink around rare materials. Before the book starts, the heroine has obviously been on the head many times by a hammer, the only way I can explain her stupidity. Nominally a mystery, providing you define a mystery as a novel in which there's a murder after which the heroine runs around aimlessly, faints a lot and eventually confronts the murderer. Clues? Deduction? Logic? Look elsewhere, dear reader. The …

The pusher (2013, Thomas & Mercer) 4 stars

A teenage junkie is found dead in a dark and dank basement. It seems like …

Good old-fashioned police procedural

4 stars

I love old crime novels; a window into another world. Little depth, but expertly done. McBain - Evan Hunter - is a competent writer in command of his subject and it's all done and dusted in under 200 pages. What more do you want? You can even smile whimsically at the 1950s Isola drug underworld - so innocent in comparison to modern times.

Return (2020, Penguin Publishing Group) 4 stars

Excellent premise

4 stars

Slow to get going and again characters are quite dull and underdeveloped, but at least you can see where's she trying to go with them. Excellent setting and decent last third, but if you're a horror (because that's what it is, dear readers) fan you'll have to ask yourself if the pay-off is worth it.

Dead Silence (Hardcover, 2022, Tor Nightfire) 2 stars

Derivative rubbish

2 stars

A spaceship crew responded to a distress signal with dire results. Now, although her corporate masters don't really believe her story, they need the sole survivor to go back to where it all happened.

Alternatively: a spaceship disappears on its maiden voyage. Many years later it's found, but the investigating team find that it's haunted!

The two paragraphs above more than adequately (IMHO!) describe the plot of the book. Unfortunately, they also describe the plots of the films Aliens and Event Horizon, both of which are far superior to this novel.

Clunky, not greatly written and with a bunch of unsympathetic & underdeveloped characters, it at least has a nice, though not particularly unexpected little twist which does explain some things and provides a second star to the review.

There's also a romantic sub-plot, which does nothing for the story.

Go and watch Aliens and Event Horizon instead - a …

No cover

The Map

3 stars

Abigail hopes that her birthday will slip by unnoticed and uncelebrated, but her employer, detective …

Shallow but fun

3 stars

A short short story featuring a Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural and his assistant. It's a treasure hunt. Disengage brain and it's fine. No pretensions or depth and Jackaby and Abigail are pleasant enough protagonists

The Cipher (Paperback, 2020, Meerkat Press, LLC) 3 stars

Horror as metaphor

3 stars

Welcome to the funhole! The great thing about writing is that you don't need to explain anything, so there's this 3-d Rorschach test (ok, to the characters, it's a black hole, but to the reader it could mean ...anything) manifest in an apartment block's utility closet, that draws the attention of a group of mostly marginalised, mostly unlikeable characters. Some decent body horror follows, but the characters are so unsympathetic that we don't care (hiya, Nakota!) and while the ambience & atmosphere is well developed, it's still pretty yucky and you might want a shower afterwards. I'll go with the funhole representing late stage capitalism.

Light From Uncommon Stars (Hardcover, 2021, Tor Books) 4 stars

Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in this defiantly joyful …

"You’re a selfish little thing, aren’t you?”

3 stars

Content warning Very poor ending; selling souls to hell does pay!

reviewed The Just City by Jo Walton

The Just City (2015) 5 stars

Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a …

"But why justice, not happiness, or liberty or any other excellence?"

5 stars

Apart from the time-travelling, the possibly sentient robots and gods and goddesses, not much sci-fi or fantasy here, but plenty of philosophy, melodrama and a little sexual violence. Jo Walton continues to pursue excellence in writing in this thought experiment of realising the Just City of Plato. To be honest, the ideals of the Just City are a bit shit and demonstrate once again why we shouldn't slavishly follows ideas from the Bronze and Iron Ages. Perhaps Walton subtly alludes to this with the demographic and centuries of origin of the Masters. Nevertheless, this is a thoroughly engaging and thought-provoking read, and you may ask yourself the question enunciated by Simmea that appears as the title of this review. Why indeed, eh? I look forward to reading the next book in the series and I hope we see more of the workers.

reviewed Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn (Hardcover, 2010, Atlantic Monthly) 5 stars

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman …

Perhaps the best Vietnam War novel

5 stars

Well, the best I've read anyway. Excellently conveys the tedium and the terror of war. Characters are very well drawn, and like their comrades we mourn their deaths when they inevitably occur. Not for the faint-hearted but a wonderful read

reviewed Stargazing by Peter Hill

Stargazing (Paperback, 2004, Canongate Books Ltd) 5 stars

An elegy to a vanished profession

5 stars

In 1973, Peter Hill takes a summer away from art school in Dundee to be a trainee lighthouse keeper. This book pressed so many buttons for me. I lived in Dundee, in the same streets, albeit a decade later. I remember the Television Peter and his companions watched. And I fancied being a lighthouse keeper before automation eliminated that job.