A Missive

There was a time not long ago when I deemed myself unworthy of writing book reviews thinking I wasn't learned enough or that I didn't have enough to say. I had an attitude adjustment when I saw a tweet saying how much of a benefit reviews are to authors and this sent me forth into action. This blog is basically an extension of this idea to share my reviews outwith the confines of Goodreads and Amazon and try to champion the books I'm reading.


You might recognise the inspiration for the title of the blog as being "Eight Million Ways to Die" by Lawrence Block and the reason for this is that this book and series sent me on the path to almost exclusively reading crime fiction. Before this I was a huge fan of the Pelecanos, Lehane and Winslow among others, but I was never sure who else in the crime fiction hemisphere I would enjoy. I tended to read a lot more literary fiction, but I had grown a bit bored of it. Lawrence Block showed me the way.


The next evolution of this was picking up a free Kindle Unlimited subscription for three months during Black Friday week last year and this introduced me to the world of indie crime, which I fully embraced. The final piece of the puzzle was discovering the Writer Types podcast, which in turn led me to the Unlawful Acts blog and opened my eyes again to all that's out there. All told my reading list is enormous.


My intention here is to review the books I've read and hopefully inspire other readers to seek them out. I'll post a rundown of the best stories I've read on the web every so often too as there is a lot of good reading out there for free. Basically I'm just looking to spread the good word about good books and stories.


Thanks
Scott





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