Mark Thomson

On the eve of Chief Superintendent Isobel McArthur’s 30th anniversary with the Scottish police force, she finds herself thinking about another anniversary: 25 years ago, she arrested notorious serial killer Alfred Chalmers, and the case has always occupied significant mental real estate. Now she’s revisiting the case, but what cost will this decision have?

The play itself was pretty good, and it was probably even more interesting on the stage, with the revolving set and the lighting show more effects. A nice touch was including photographs from the original stage production. Was pleased to see Sara Vickers as the original Alexandra—I love her as Joan Thursday in “Endeavour”! The story itself was fast-paced, maybe a touch too fast because all of the internal dialogue you’d expect from a novel is not shown here. A challenge indeed.

I’d give the play itself 3 stars, and an extra half-star for the supplemental material included with this edition of the book: interviews and notes about the process of bringing the play to the stage, and the differences between working alone as an author and as part of a team on a stage production. The actual reading of the play was visually pleasing, because I love “Ian Rankin font”! I liked it for what it was, although I’ll probably still prefer his novels. show less

A nice overview of about fifty trades grouped under Stone, Timber, Metal, the Bush, Marine, Horse and Leather, Decorative, Apparel, plus others. Each gets four pages of text and photographs. It's ironic that one of the trades is bookbinding but my copy was so badly bound that it fell apart.

Very good background on rare trades. A simple informative read.

I'd really, really like to see a stage production of this. I feel like I'm missing so much just in tone, body language, posture, volume, just everything really.

Also, I've got to stop marking my books as currently reading the minute I bring them home from the library. This was an afternoon read, not a 9 day read.