The Steampunk Murder

Thank goodness! There's a new Inspector Carmichael mystery novel from Ian McFadyen!

This is probably my pick of the Summer reads.

Inspector Carmichael is a very genuine and plausible police detective. He's no super sleuth, but then neither is a a shabby breaker of rules just because he can break them. He is a working copper who always gets results.

But this case tests him and his team to the limits in some ways, as it introduces him to the rather weird subculture of Steampunk.

Kendal Michelson is a leading light in the Northwest England Steampunk movement. That is he was, until someone rather cruelly put his light out by murdering him. By rather gruesomely imaling him on his own sword.

But Kendal was a popular young man, so who would have a motive for murdering him?

Could it be one of his apparently close friends in the Steampunk movement? One of his former partners? And even if they didn't actually kill him, do they know more than they are revealing to Inspector Carmichael and his team of detectives?

Then there's Kendal's father, a self made millionaire who made his fortune in making sweets. Does he know anything about who might have had a motive to murder his son?

But before the end of the investigation more murders are committed and it becomes clear that the local Steampunk scene is a lot more than just wearing fancy, Victorian-based clothing and monocles.

So... who is committing the murders and why?

Take this book with you to the holiday destination of your choice and you'll have to be prised from it to leave your deckchair!

It's published by The Book Guild at £8.99 and will make an excellent gift for the mystery lover in your life.

Three Funerals and a Wedding

Three Funerals and a Wedding is a highly readable and very valuable book for anyone in business.

The author, John Thorp, takes a look at four businesses that are undergoing radical changes. He points out how they succeed or why they failed.

John Thorp has worked in business management for over a quarter of a century. This was in the main in IT leadership roles at some very well known brands such as Laura Ashley, The Burton Group, Compass Group, easyJet and the Dixon Stores Group. At the last two concerns he served as a member of the board of management.

The firms are all still operating today, but some are in very different forms. Although for some their survival was a bit of a nail biting situation.

As well as having seen business management form the inside, he is also a visiting lecturer at Cranfield University, where he also earned his Masters degree.

John states that the book is about systems and change. However, he points out that unlike other books that deal with business change it is not about 'business change management' it covers other areas of change, what change is, how systems can bring about change and how change can bring about unintended consequences for the organisation concerned.

John Thorp points out that although change, especially when it involves IT departments, can be vital, it can also be fraught with danger and pitfalls.

His writing on the Laura Ashley brand is an object lesson to all involved in business that although change must happen it must be managed well.

Published by the Book Guild at £8.99, this book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone involved in business management, no matter at what level they might be.

5 Simple Steps to Saving Planet Earth

5 Simple Steps to Saving Planet Earth is a novel for children from Jo Withers.

Billy is having some problems. Due to an unforeseen set of circumstances he finds himself trapped beneath a hedge with a good half kilo of sausages round his neck to act as bait for a runaway dog.

Far from being early, he was now running very late and covered in dog slobber. But then the day, Thursday 18th of May, got even worse for poor Billy!

He gets detention and later becomes injured and insults his friend Wayne and misses getting to the newsagents.


That night Billy is having a bad dream. Which, with the interruption of his dream by a tiny creature called a Ysgol from the planet Blykpstpst.

It transpires that the world will cease to be next Wednesday (exact time computed as teatime, in case you are interested) and that would be it for humanity. And every other creature mankind shares the planet with, for that matter.

At first Billy thinks he has gone bonkers, but when the Ysgol appears in Billy's back garden, Billy know that he isn't going mad and that something must be done to save the world, from a band of interplanetary contract cleaners who want to clean the Earth out of existence!

The Ysgol is trying to help, though an emergency survival kit the basic contents of which appear to be an old apple core and little else, might be thought of as a unique employment of the word 'help'.

Though the emergency survival kit might be more important than one might think.

Billy gets together a team of heroes to heroically fight against the interplanetary contract cleaners (it was they who brought the last ice age) and fight against the menace with pluck, bravery, panicking and a leaflet called "5 Simple Steps to Saving Planet Earth."

Will they find out who the Chosen One is? And will they still be able to save the planet from being taken to the cleaners?

The book costs £7.99 from The Book Guild and is a very good read for children and adults, too, for that matter.

This is an ideal book to read over the summer holidays.

Miss Winter's Demise and Other Crimes Against Poetry

Miss Winter's Demise and Other Crimes Against Poetry is a collection of new poems from Paul Minton.

The Poems are quirky, quaint and quintessentially amusing and cover a wide variety of various subjects.

There's a boy who is driven quackers (not really, though if you fail to buy a copy of this book, it's a mere £6.99 from Matador, you'll never realise the hyper relevance of my quirky quackers quip!)  the mystery of the lost chair, Auntie Mabel the biker, newsletters from the afterlife, flying animals, and flying farmer's wives, are all some of the subjects from the poetic pen of a man whom I am dubbing as the Bard of Wellington. That's Wellington in Shropshire, though he now lives in Newport, South Wales.

(Reviewer's digression: I have just realised that Paul Minton attended (though years after me, I expect) the same school in Wellington, Shropshire, Orleton Park School. It is indeed a small world, though I still would not like to have to paint it! I wonder how many other pupils of that school ended up as writers? And one must not forget our geography teacher George Evans, still writing books at 93!)

There are poems about dogs that aren't, a poem about a sort of hyper virtual reality device called The Room of Doom, a child with many medical concerns, an apple who longs to be bitten and the bear at the door who might not be what it appears to be at all!

And what exactly did happen to Miss Winter? Read the book and you'll find out in a flash! (Hope I haven't given too much away?)

And I hope Paul reads this review because, Sir, you really should make a cartoon series out of "Super Squad"!