Books - Review

The story of the eruption of Vesuvius, as experienced by an idealistic aqueduct engineer, who has to battle with corruption and mistreatment of slaves as well as the volcano. Pliny, a big fat Roman scientist/Admiral is in it too.

Jolly good thriller with the ususal ingredients; murder, betrayal and a beautiful girl, together with Roman feasts, plenty of aqueduct engineering and loads of sulphur too!

Ancient Rome, and Cicero, the brilliant lawyer chappie has to save innocent people and further his own career.

Rubbish, just very dull, gave up on page 100ish.

Frazzled mathemetician returns to Cambridge suffering from exhaustion brought on by too much code-breaking at Bletchley Park. Then nothing happens for about 100 pages, but eventually he returns to Bletchley and the plot lurches forward when his girlfriend disappears. He tries to investigate her disappearance at the same time as breaking the latest version of the Nazis code, before the U-boats can find the convoy...

Dull and boring. 500th book though, so a bit of a landmark. Finished this on the tube en route to JEJ's house to play golf.

Imagine a Germany where Hitler won the war, and still leads the country - the setting for a Berlin detective to investigate a series of mysterious deaths of old Nazis. With the help of a pretty American journalist he realises that the Gestapo are trying to hide evidence of the extermination of the Jews from the rest of the world, just as the American President is planning a visit to Hitler...

Pretty good - although it seemed a bit clunky to start with it really built up into a believable scenario, and the last bit was excellent, with betrayals everywhere, and not such a happy ending...

The story of Dreyfus.

Very good - recommendation from Christina at hospital.