![]() Haggard is threatening to reveal the police corruption at Tynecastle unless the case is dropped. Clarke is at first working on the criminal aspect of Haggard's domestic abuse of his wife, which has resulted in their separation Clarke interviews Haggard and also the wife, Cheryl, and her sister Stephanie Pelham, who has taken Cheryl in. The three of them frequently exchange information or ask each other for help. In this novel, Rebus, retired since 2007, DI Siobhan Clarke, and DCI Malcolm Fox all pursue their own investigations, though the cases come together around a policeman named Francis Haggard, stationed at Tynecastle in Edinburgh. The novel is framed by a prologue and epilogue both titled simply "Now." In these, John Rebus is on trial for a crime he commits at the end of "Then," the main narrative (divided into 8 days), which takes place not long before. The novel is set during the period when COVID-19 is a threat but lockdown has ended, probably in 2022. The title comes from the song "Single Father" by Jackie Leven, four lines of which are quoted on the last page of the novel. ![]() ![]() A Heart Full of Headstones is the 24th installment in the Inspector Rebus series written by Ian Rankin. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Many avail themselves of flophouses, whorehouses and opium dens.Įchoing Dickens but lacking the full bite of his ironism and wit, Gaffney has also made this novel something of a social critique-lauding emergent ideas in public sanitation, prefiguring feminist thought, criticizing spectator society through impresario P.T. Gaffney's metropolis is slightly more gritty and streetbound than the city drawn by Busch and Doctorow, and her novel focuses largely on the tension between the gang life and grifting and the toilsome straight life open to the Irish and German immigrants who people it, plus the free American blacks and the Chinese who mixed in the dense, fetid, globalized ghetto. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery." ![]() "O my Manhattan!" Doctorow goofs on Whitman, going on to cite "xcess in everything-pleasure, gaudy display, endless toil, and death. Doctorow in "The Waterworks" used the postwar period and the time of Boss Tweed to write quasi-thrillers set in Lower Manhattan, and sometimes struck similar themes. Gaffney is not the first modern novelist to look here for a subject: Frederick Busch in "The Night Inspector" and E.L. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. After managing to land their canoe for the evening, during the night and into the next day and night, the mysterious, hostile forces emerge in force, including large, dark shapes that seem to trace the consciousness of the two men. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible." - Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Yet last night after a cloudy Fall day of rain and falling temperatures, I sat in my favorite chair reading Algernon Blackwood’s novella, The Willows, and finally understood what a thirteen-pound cat must sometimes feel encountering that lonely, terrifying heart of nature, also known as my backyard. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment-river, sun, wind-and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature. Storyteller, mystic, adventurer, and radio and television personality, he is best remembered for his two superlative horror stories, 'The Willows' and 'The Wendigo.' But in his lifetime he wrote over 150 stories, at least a dozen novels, two plays, and quite a few childrens books as well. The Willows is one of Blackwood's best known works and has been influential on a number of later writers. Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) led a rich and varied life. ![]() |