Book review: The Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita

“You have to strip away all preconceptions” says one of the characters in Natsu Miyashita’s novel The Forest of Wool and Steel, and I tried when I picked up this book. It was an adventure for me at all sorts of levels. I don’t read much Japanese literature — barely any, in fact — and it’s set in the rather arcane world of piano tuning, about which I know nothing. 

And it’s a book in translation, which wouldn’t normally bother me but there were a couple of clumsy turns of phrase which caught me out, and I wasn’t sure how much of this was down to the translator or ho much was the intention of the author — nothing significant, but enough to distract me. (“A celebratory piece to celebrate the happy couple” is one example.

Tomura is deputed one day to take the local piano tuner to deal with the school piano and this sets off a burning ambition within him to become a piano tuner himself. As he works his way through his apprenticeship he learns life lessons to add to his piano tuning — lessons about talent and persistence, humility and failure. And he learns them not just from his colleagues but from his clients, in particular the talented twin pianists Yuni and Katsune. 

Perhaps it was me, but it took a long while to get going. The technical stuff went over my head and the way that every well-tuned piano brought some positivity into the lives of even the most clumsy amateur pianist left me feeling a little inferior. (I too have had a bad piano tuned and I’m afraid I couldn’t hear any of the subtle differences that Miyashita describes. Was that me? Or did I just have an awful piano tuner?)

I enjoyed it, though. It wasn’t a rip-roaring read but eventually I was drawn in to Tomura’s pilgrimage, to his understanding and interpretation of how the forest of wool and steel (the description of the innards of a piano) tied in with his own upbringing. By the end I understood that he’d learned a lot about himself and his soul, and it’s a book I’ll be thinking about for a while to come. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for a copy of this book in return for an honest review. 

Murder in Park Lane by Karen Charlton: Book Review

I keep promising myself I’m going to kick my cosy mystery habit and move on to something edgier instead, but somehow I never do. My latest read, Karen Charlton’s Murder in Park Lane, did nothing to make me want to look elsewhere. 

The book is set in London in 1812 and it’s the fifth in a series featuring Inspector Lavender and his sidekick Ned Woods, but it worked very well as a standalone. So many series writers slip up here, but Charlton has it spot on — just the right amount of backstory, enough hints about past mysteries to nudge the reader towards them without leaving you feeling that you’ve missed out, and yet she manages to engage the reader with her recurring characters (though I would guess there are only two detectives, so there’s not a huge amount of room for confusion).

There’s murder afoot, in fashionable Mayfair, where a man has been found mysteriously dead inside a locked room with no murder weapon. This intriguing premise was perhaps solved rather earlier than I would have liked, but the mystery took off nicely, full of twists and turns as people’s secrets were revealed. Lavender and Woods are hot on the trail, though, relentlessly picking their way through the mysteries of the wealthy and the titled, the poor, the moneylenders and the fraudsters until they reach a satisfying conclusion.

For the most part I loved the characterisation, which was neat and anything but cliched, and I laughed out loud at some of the turns in the book (such as the nymphomaniac elderly ladies with an eye for handsome young men). I wasn’t so taken with the subplot of Woods deciding he was overweight and fasting to the detriment of his health, which was something that felt far more like the behaviour of a teenage girl than of a policeman with an adult child. It was so odd that I assumed it must have something to do with the plot, but it didn’t and rather petered out.

That one gripe aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and will definitely be going back to read more in the series. 

Thanks to Amazon Publishing UK and Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review. 

The Beginner's Guide to Beekeeping by Samantha Johnson and Daniel Johnson: Book Review

I’ve always had a bit of a fondness for bees, always wanted to keep them some day. I’m perhaps a little nearer to actually doing so than I ever have been before, but beekeeping is nevertheless an activity about which I know very little. Not nothing — I once went along to a couple of beekeeping trial sessions — but very little.

So of course what I need is a Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping and Samantha Johnson and Daniel Johnson have written one. And, on the basis of my limited knowledge of the subject, very good it is too.

It isn’t exhaustive by any means, but it fulfils the function of an introduction — really readable, clearly illustrated and easy to understand. It covers all the questions I might have thought to ask and a whole lot of others that hadn’t occurred to me. And it covers everything from what type of bees there are and what they do, right the way through to how to build your own hive and how to produce and market your honey and beeswax.

It’s geared to the American beekeeper, so that a lot of it wasn’t relevant to me (I don’t need to worry about how to protect my hives from black bears, for example, or from temperatures of minus forty, and the regulations where I am will be different from those covered in the book). That didn’t matter. I still found it both interesting and enlightening.

I’ll have to wait a while before I get round to setting up as a beekeeper, if I ever do. But I feel a whole lot more confident about the project than I did before but if my dream becomes reality, this is the book I’ll turn to to start me off.

Thanks to Netgalley and Voyageur Press for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

A Testament to Murder by Vivian Conroy: Book Review

Oh, thank goodness. The Golden Age of crime fiction is back.

Agatha Christie (people tell me) is passé in these days of gritty crime, but I have a fondness for the gentler, more cerebral crime fiction from the period between the wars. In Vivian Conroy’s A Testament to Murder, the first in a new series featuring retired London detective Jasper, the genre is back with a bang.

The premise upon which the plot rests is as clever and irresistible as any I’ve met. Billionaire Malcolm Bryce-Rutherford is dying and invites a selection of friends and family to spend his final days with him at his chateau on the Riviera. They include his secretary, his business partner and his wife (formerly married to Malcolm himself) and their son; his nephew and his wife. And when they’ve arrived he breaks the news ti them. Each day he will change his will in favour of one of them and that person — unknown — will be heir for twenty-four hours only. He dangles in front of them the temptation to murder. If they kill him on the day they’re the heir they inherit but if the murder is discovered they hang, and if they get it wrong someone else gets all the money.

It’s a fantastic setup, and as the story goes on the characters’ back stories are revelled and it becomes clear that not one of them has a guiltless past. As Malcolm and his lawyer pull the strings the tension begins to mount — and the guests themselves begin to die. Malcolm’s neighbour, retired Metropolitan Police detective Jasper, is enlisted by the local police to see what he can find out.

I thought this was a fabulous book, in the true tradition of the 1920s mystery, from the complicated set-up to the denouement in which Jasper exposes everybody’s secrets, their motives and opportunity, before revealing the killer. Twist after twist in the plot kept me guessing right the way through. I loved it.

Thanks to Canelo and Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.