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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 6158311" data-attributes="member: 70">Finished House of Silk.  It was, as I said before, very Holmesian.  If you like Doyle's stories, this is a good read.  Also read The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin, and The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin.  The former is set in 1836 in Istanbul; the latter in Moscow in 1876.  So yeah, I'm on a bit of a 19th C. international crime/mystery kick.  Both are the first book in a series; both are bestsellers, award-winners, etc, etc.  Both are good and I'll look for more; neither blew me away - they're on my "look-for"  list, but not the "must-buy" list. I don't think either was trying to break new ground.  The Janissary Tree was probably slightly more enjoyable, but The Winter Queen was slightly more...intriguing?  Very hard to reconcile the Russian authorship with the British/English colloquialisms in the text - I'm going to be stuck imagining all Russian peasants as speaking Cockney slang now. I'm assuming this was a weird artifact of translation, but really not sure.  And hang on for the twist at the very end - it rewrites the whole tone of the book into something much more...Russian? Also cliffhanger?  Drat. Tricksie authors.Reading The Lost Army of Cambyses now.  Paul Sussman.  A Da Vinci Code-esque thriller, I think - a buried Persian army in the Sahara near Egypt, dead archaeologists, and a team-up between a cop and the snake-wrangling daughter of the dead archaeologist (I haven't got to the point where he's dead, but it says so on the back, and he didn't pick her up at the airport, so.....).  Seems decent, and I thought it would take longer, but it's got a big font, so probably not.Update: Ooo, he's dead now.  Seemingly a stroke or heart attack, but there's an odor of cigars in his house, and he didn't smoke and didn't allow anyone else to do so around him.  Oooo....</blockquote>

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