Hook, Line & Sinker

I've just finished reading Len Deighton's Hook, Line & Sinker trilogy, which I picked up for a steal in a secondhand bookshop in Shelburne, Nova Scotia this summer.

St Teresa's Hospital

I'm sitting in St Teresa's hospital waiting for my fiancee to be admitted, and I'm a bit concerned by the mural. It says "Jesus Please Heal Me" which doesn't suggest they have much faith in modern medical techniques.

The Quiller Memorandum

I was very excited that my parents were able to beat the Volcanic Ash Cloud of Doomp and make it to Hong Kong, because they brought with them a consignment of books and music that I've been busily buying from Amazon since I was last in England. I'm 45 pages into The Quiller Memorandum and I feel ashamed that I hadn't read it before, nor heard of it until Charlie Stross namechecked it for his third Laundry novel.

It's a tightly written thriller, set in Berlin twenty years after the close of the Second World War, with Quiller following the orders of the eponymous memorandum to hunt down a Nazi war criminal. The book starts with a lovely piece of misdirection, and with every page I just feel more in awe at how elegantly and efficiently the picture of Quiller and Berlin is built up.