Hungry for further insight into Lyra’s world, and perhaps gain a glimpse into what happened next after the ending of ‘The Subtle Knife’, I aquired this book as a birthday present. It’s enjoyable, but much too short!

Inspirational and educational birthday present from my sister, Katie.

I already knew I was an apostrophe nut. Now I know I’m not alone. Ahhh.

This book is so vivid in it’s descriptions that it brings the Paris of it’s era to life before my very eyes.

I’ve managed to read a fair chunk of this book in a relatively short amount of time – the story pulled me in and immediately launched into a rollercoaster of tales about the characters. I don’t know where this book is going, but right now I’m keen to find out.

Action packed, but formulaic, especially evident to anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code. Angels and Demons is a fast-paced and clever, weaving fact and fiction into the story using elements of both ancient mythology and modern day urban legend. Good book to read on a plane.

I was worried this was going to be a carbon copy of the previous books, but although Digital Fortress uses similar building blocks (Dan Brown really likes his central characters to be sexy young super-hyper-intelligent women set against older yet more worldly wise super-hyper-intelligent father figure type men) to Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, it somehow manages not to follow exactly the same formula this time around. Pretty good.

As one of the first web-publishing-type-people I heard of who managed to translate their online presence into a published piece of fiction, I have been eager to read his book for a while. It was pretty good and all that, but frankly, I like the website version more. The story build up and up, but lands somehow dissapointingly flat at the end.

One of his earlier books. This was originally published in 1987, and it shows. It’s almost a period piece, set in the dim and distant past where no one had mobile phones, only a few people had computers (or ‘word processors’ as they were called back in the dawn of time) and the Irish ‘troubles’ loomed large in the everyday life of Londoners. It lacks the finesse of the Rebus series, and the storyline jumps around quickly, making it more difficult for the reader to weave everything together into a cohesive storyline. Or maybe I was just feeling the jet lag. Good, but not Rankin at his best.

I loved this book!