The CriminOlly Plain Dealer #6

Week two of Occult Detective October ended up featuring a couple of books which I’m not sure fit in the sub-genre. Both Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris and Jekyll and Hyde: Consulting Detectives by Tim Major feature detectives who are in some way supernatural, rather than truly monstrous villains. Jules de Grandin righted that balance though, with some very enjoyable (if ridiculous) supernatural foes.

I had the pleasure this week of chatting to Mike from the channel Mike’s Book Reviews on his Talk About Nothing series. I’m always super nervous about doing live streams (or anything that isn’t just me talking to my phone), but I think it went well. I certainly enjoyed the experience.

Cheerio!

Books I’ve Read This Week

Jekyll and Hyde: Consulting Detectives by Tim Major

This book has a fantastic concept – Jekyll and Hyde as a pair of detectives – but ends up being less fun that it might have been. The mystery is decent enough and the female lead (Jekyll’s ex-fiancée) is great, but I felt more could have been made of the mismatched duo. Trash-loving me wanted something exuberantly silly, and this isn’t that. What it does, it does well though, so I think this is a case of the reader and book not matching, rather than the book being bad.

Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris

A solidly enjoyable romantic suspense novel that gets the balance between those two things just right (for my tastes anyway). The suspense is definitely the priority here and the story is enjoyably gripping, with a psychic investigator unravelling a complex mystery in a small Ozarks town. Heroine Harper is an interesting central character, but it’s the twisting plot that’s the star and Charlaine Harris does a good job of keeping you guessing. The romance was decent too!

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn

An enjoyable collection of very pulpy stories featuring the occult detective Jules de Grandin, who is kind of like a ghostbusting Poirot. They’re often silly, sometimes salacious, and definitely have the feel of stories from another decade that were bashed out quickly to make a buck. None of that makes them less fun though, and the sheer variety of foes de Gradin and narrator/sidekick Trowbridge go up against means each story is fresh.

The Flesh Eaters by LA Morse

An interesting, historical horror novel based on the maybe true legend of Sawney Bean, a 16th century Scotsman who led a cannabalistic clan of 45 comprised of his children and inbred grandchildren. The clan live in a huge cave and prey on nearby travellers who they kill and then butcher for food.
If that premise makes you think that the book is going to be rough going, you’d not be wrong. It’s excessively grim at times, like ‘The Girl Next Door’ level grim. It never lingers too long on its unpleasant goings on, but it doesn’t flinch from them either. There’s a matter of factness to the prose style that somehow diminishes the horror. It’s only when you stop and reflect back on what you’ve just read that you start to feel a bit nauseous.
It makes for compelling, gruesome reading, but the absence of a central character to root for means there isn’t a huge amount of tension. It’s more a rinse and repeat of scenes of the clan hunting their human victims, with the plot (such as it is) concerning the growth and evolution of the family.
Definitely interesting reading if you’re a fan of dark and disturbing books, but not a classic.