So Among the Mad is the fifth in the increasingly excellent Maisie Dobbs series, and finds our heroine in London on Christmas Eve 1931, where she and her faithful right-hand man witness what we would call now a suicide bomber blow himself up in a busy street.
Although she doesn’t know the man involved, Maisie is soon drawn into the case when she is named in a letter which follows the bombing and it becomes clear that some sort of campaign is afoot. Maisie finds herself trying to apply her unique methods of working while assigned to Scotland Yard, and with all of the cases she has been involved in before now, the shadow of the First World War is never too far away.
I really like Maisie as a character and was pleased to see that this story matched up to the previous volumes. The psychological impact of the war on all of those involved in whatever capacity comes across very strongly in the novel, and it’s worth remembering that returning soldiers were not always treated as well as they deserved given what they had suffered, as much because the rest of the population wanted to move on, and of course the Depression also had an effect. The author manages to get this detail into the story without being too heavy handed and I thought it worked very well.
It’s also nice to see Maisie’s own personal story develop, not just in relation to her family and friends but with the people who have become her colleagues in investigating this case, whether she has chosen them or not.
A good solid read for a warm and humid summer.
So, I have been visiting 
So, a rare event for this year, a challenge I have actually completed! So, just to recap, I said 
So 
This is not my first exposure to the Gothic creepy tales of Chris Priestley; last year I read and reviewed 
I don’t like August very much. It can be too hot (though the weather here in London up till now has suggested otherwise, but I bet a mini-heatwave will sneak up on me when I least expect it); all my friends and a large proportion of my team at work head off on holiday (and I get grumpy because my hols aren’t until October but they’ll all miss me when I’m not here, just wait and see); there is very little on TV and all of these things added together mean that I get very bored very easily.
I know I said that I was going to buy less this year and read more from the tbr pile, but the whole point of some resolutions is that they are meant to be broken, and we’re now in August so I’ve done quite well really (special pleading or what?). So the latest additions are, in no particular order:
It’s always interesting to look at the graphic novelisation of a story to see what’s been left out, what’s been changed, do the characters look different to what you imagined and so on. I have to confess that although I have the novel I haven’t got round to reading it yet, but I do remember the BBC TV series from goodness knows when, so I have something to compare it to.
I have to confess that I have never read anything written by Jodi Picoult and from what I know of her work it probably isn’t my thing anyway. I also have never read a Wonder Woman graphic novel before, so the 
OK, so we all know that my admiration for Joyce Carol Oates knows no bounds, that I have read a lot of her stuff but that there is still a huge amount out there to read because she is astonishingly prolific. One of the areas she writes in that I haven’t explored in too much detail is her young adult stuff, and 
Bride of the Book God 