I listened to 'Killing Time' in a single sitting (it's only sixty-nine pages / 119 minutes long). At the end, I was at a bit of a loss to describe whaI listened to 'Killing Time' in a single sitting (it's only sixty-nine pages / 119 minutes long). At the end, I was at a bit of a loss to describe what I'd been listening to. I knew what it wasn't - a cutely humorous novella about old people in council care home coping with the impact of COVID - but I had more trouble saying what it was.
I knew that I had been completely mislead by the publisher's summary. This was not a joyful tale in which the surviving residents "…scamper freely in the warmth of the summer sun." This was a matter-of-fact description of a set of old people whose lives are mostly behind them. Their identities have been reduced down to a few personality quirks garnished with a scattering of possessions that are like driftwood from who they used to be, beached with them when the tide of their lives ebbed and ran them aground in a council-run care home. This was not a cosy narrative It romanticised nothing. It didn't set out to entertain or to push a message. It was a mostly dispassionate description of the people in the home and the impact of COVID on their lives.
There is a little bit of humour and a lot of undramatic, mostly ungrieved, deaths. The realities of being so old that you can no longer take care of yourself and mostly have no energy or motivation to take care of anyone else are well observed. There is a character who finally reveals things about her life that she's previously kept secret but, while the disclosures are dramatic and historically interesting, it's clear that the woman revealing them sees them as something that happened in another life. Who she was then and who she is now are linked only by memory and a recognition of decline.
'Killing Time' is a rare thing - a book about being old written by someone who is very old - Alan Bennett was ninety when it was published. The details of the life in the care home felt real and unapologetically honest. The fatal impact of COVID was treated in a shrugging 'Death happens' way. The overall feeling I was left with was that, if you live long enough, there is so little left of who you used to be that who you were becomes either a story that you tell yourself and others or just another thing that you let go of because you don't need it any more....more
The cover is beautifully designed but it almost put me off the book. When I first saw those tentacles, I thought 'The Mist' might Stephen King's riff The cover is beautifully designed but it almost put me off the book. When I first saw those tentacles, I thought 'The Mist' might Stephen King's riff on Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft's horror never does it for me so I hesitated. Then I thought, "I wonder what Stephen King would do with a Lovecraft story?" and decided I wanted to know the answer. I'm glad I did. 'The Mist' was a fascinating novella about sanity-threatening fear.
I like a lot of Stephen King's writing, especially his shorter pieces, but it's been a while since I read any of his early stuff- 'The Mist' was published forty-four years ago in 1980 but it doesn't feel dated in terms of storytelling style. It's told as a from-the-shoulder narrative being written down so that the main character, David Drayton, can leave an honest and factual record of what happened to him and his son when the mist rolled off the lake and over their small town in rural Maine.
I liked the gradual progression from the normal to the mind-bendingly strange in this story. It begins with a storm after a long hot summer. It's a bad storm, the kind that causes damage to property and injures people, but, while it's stressful, it's something that David has the competence to survive and move on from. Until the mist and the things in the mist arrive and trap him and his four-year-old son in the local Federal Store.
What happens over the next three days is bleak but it felt true. What made the story work for me was that Stephen King didn't focus on the tentacles (and other things) in the mist but on how people react to prolonged exposure to an unexpected, unknowable, lethal threat. This wasn't a story about heroes and villains, It was a story about ordinary people coming to terms with being powerless in the face of a threat so strange, so inimical and so overwhelming that it is hard to hold on to the truth of it. The responses include shock, denial, and letting go of rationality as a form of self-defense.
Maybe it's my imagination, but the tone of the story was harder than King's current writing. I think that this is mostly because the story is shaped by how David Drayton sees the world. He's the narrator, so he takes his own views for granted. He describes his emotions and the emotions of the people around him but he's not a man prone to introspection. Part of the joy of reading the story was seeing both the narrative and the narrator, even when the narrator doesn't see himself.
David Drayton's narrative had a very male taste to it: locker room testosterone, rut musk and fear sweat. He describes the people clearly enough to make them real but it's a reality filtered by the judgments he makes about people: the men he sees as threats or allies, the women sees as attractive or not attractive or simply odd. Even so, 'The Mist' is not an alpha malewish-fulfilment fantasy. It confronts shock and fear and despair and the corruption of hope into hate head-on.
In a way, this was Stephen King's riff on Lovecraft but in the way an atheist might write a riff on religion. The things in the mist are not immortal and are not gods. What they are and how they came there aren't questions David Drayton has or wants the answers to. He's more interested in how they hunt, how they can be harmed and how he and his companions can evade them. I liked that superstition of the snake-oil-selling revivalist-tent kind rears its head inside the Federal Store and becomes as much of a threat as the things outside.
I loved (but won't share) the ending. For me, it cemented the reality of the story....more
'Graveyard Shift' runs for just over three hours and I think it's best consumed in a single sitting. For me, it filled that 'Afternoon Play' slot: an 'Graveyard Shift' runs for just over three hours and I think it's best consumed in a single sitting. For me, it filled that 'Afternoon Play' slot: an entertainment with just enough going on to keep me interested but with nothing challenging in the content to make it hard to understand or difficult to listen to. The production standard was high and using multiple narrators increased my pleasure in listening to the story.
The story is mostly about insomnia: what it does to people, how they cope with it and what they will do to try and end it. The five main characters in the story are insomniacs. Some are more or less coping, some are fraying under the strain and one has come to terms with the idea that she will always be the angry aggressive, nocturnal person that sleep deprivation has turned her into.
The five are acquaintances rather than friends. They all live or work near the university. None of them can sleep and they're all addicted to cigarettes. Their paths most often cross in the graveyard of an abandoned church and it's there that they stumble across a mystery that they spend the night, working sperately, trying to resolve.
This novella is more a mystery than a horror story, despite the graveyard setting and all the dead bodies. The mystery is neat and well-presented. Its main purpose isn't to provide a puzzle for the reader to solve but to give more insight into insomnia and to share snapshots of the lives of the five insomniacs.
I was suprised to find that I didn't connect with four of the five insomniacs. It's not that they're badly written, just that they're not my kind of people. The smoking put me off. It's an addiction I've never understood and which I find mildly repulsive. As I got to know them, I realised that the smoking was mostly a manifestation of their anxieties and their unhappiness with themselves. I know this should have engaged my empathy but it didn't. Empathy isn't my strong suit. The one character I did engage with was the one who had suffered the most damage and was ready to inflict the most hurt. She was also the one who was central to resolving the mystery.
Perhaps because I didn't engage with most of the characters, this story didn't really take me anywhere but it was original, it opened a window onto a world that I'd never normally see and it was delivered in style....more
The premise of 'Mosaic' screams gothic horror - an introverted, socially isolated woman becoming increasingly disturbed by the apparently d 3.5 stars
The premise of 'Mosaic' screams gothic horror - an introverted, socially isolated woman becoming increasingly disturbed by the apparently demonic image that she's bringing back to life as she restores a stained-glass window in a remote, long abandoned thirteenth-century church so I was expecting a story that was heavy foreboding and Hammer Horror vibes. Catherine McCarthy's storytelling was subtler and much scarier than that.
Robin Griffiths, the artisan from whose point of view 'Mosaic' is told, comes across as a very down-to-earth person. The day-to-day details of her life are reassuringly normal. Yes, Robin has some mental scarring from being raised to be the scapegoat in a narcissistic family but she is a survivor: practical, independent and building a new life for herself. We see Robin assessing her new client, planning the execution of the project and interacting with the builders who are repairing the roof of the church she's working in and everything seems normal. Well, almost everything. There are small discrepancie and unexpected microaggressions that raise red flags here and there but they're hard to hold on to when everything else is so normal.
I was fascinated by the way in which normality slowly recedes, like an outgoing tide, leaving Robin mired in something strange and deeply disturbing. Catherine McCarthy controlled the story's pace perfectly to provide a continuous ramping up of tension. It starts with small oddities: the graveyard having become a wilderness with yew trees growing down into graves, pinning the skeletons in place, and gravestones so eroded that the names of the dead are unknowable. Then there is the strange behaviour of some of the locals, the creepiess of the client, the odd flashes of something hidden or possibly imagined in the old man tending the graveyard, all of which unsettle Robin but don't frighten her.
Then there is the pull of the image of the stained-glass window which Robin is having to piece together like a mosaic from fragments of old glass, like doing a jigsaw puzzle without an image to guide her. It fills her imagination, as you'd expect it to. Except, the image that's emerging in her mind is... wrong. Robin knows this but still loses herself in it, drawn to the sensual power of its imagery, texture and colour.
As Robin tries to manage her growing unease, it becomes clear that she's carrying more mental scars than were originally apparent, making her a less reliable narrator and making me wonder how much of what Robin was seeing was only in her head.
The first half of the book is tense and disturbing without falling over the edge into the incredible. Then. as Robin, now working alone in the church, becomes lost in questions about the history of the church and the window, she heralds the shift into darker territory by telling herself:
"The answers I seek might well lie beneath my feet, in the crypt."
Nothing good ever comes from going down into an unlit crypt in which a previously bricked-up alcove with strange marking on its walls has just been discovered.
The last third of the book builds into full-blown gothic horror with a spectacular denouement.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of the ending. I'm an atheist and habitually sceptical so I struggled with the supernatural parts of the story. Then I realised that the ending can be read in two ways: one in which everything happens as described and one in which most of it happens only in Robin's head. Either reading is deeply disturbing....more
Well, Ilona Andrews has done it again, taken a man from the Kate Daniels universe for whom I had an instinctive dislike and made him into a (sort of) Well, Ilona Andrews has done it again, taken a man from the Kate Daniels universe for whom I had an instinctive dislike and made him into a (sort of) hero. The last time she did this was with 'Iron And Magic' when she made Hugh d’Ambray, Preceptor of the Iron Dogs, Warlord of the Builder of Towers, a violent, amoral, narcissistic killer, into a person rather than a monster. This time she's taken Roman Semionovich, Black Volhv, servant of Chernoblog, God of Destruction, Darkn ess and Death, made him into a protector of the innocent and shown him to be a man labouring under an over-heavy burden of guilt-ridden duty.
'Sanctuary' is an entertaining novella, heavy on magical fights, family history and Slavic mythology (which is not as dark as it seems and sometimes is almost cute - if a two-headed vulture with one dead head can be cute), As always, the magical fights are vivid and convincing, escalating from the confrontational standoff to high body count epic conflict.
Roman is surprisingly soft-hearted: a sort of dark shadow of Saint Francis in his treatment of darkling creatures; kind to children and puppies and reluctant to kill the bad guys invading his land unless he absolutely has to (of course, he DOES absolutely have to - in surprisingly large numbers an with great ingenuity).
All the Slavic myths were new to me (I didn't even know how to pronounce most of the names) but Ilona Andrews brought it to life a little at a time without making me feel that I was being lectured.
'Sanctuary' is an alternative Christmas story, that supplants to Christian myths with older Slavic ones and celebrates Koliada but kinda sorta keeps the Christmas spirit. There was even a point, when Roman was in The Glades Of Remembrance, that the story almost hit an 'It's A Wonderful Life' note. As well as being an action-packed story of a lone Volhv standing against a group of magical mercenaries looking to abduct a child, 'Sanctuary' is about duty and guilt and family and foregiveness. That's an impressive achievement in a 130 page novella....more
That was fun. 'Junkyard Roadhouse' was my fourth visit with Shining Smith. following 'Junkyard Cats', 'Junkyard Bargain' and 'Junkyard War'. Her worldThat was fun. 'Junkyard Roadhouse' was my fourth visit with Shining Smith. following 'Junkyard Cats', 'Junkyard Bargain' and 'Junkyard War'. Her world gets richer with each visit that I make.
I love that Faith Hunter has turned her hand to Science Fiction and produced something complex and intriguing, with a strong woman at its heart, delivered at a pace that keeps the action pumping but allows time for plots and conspiracies to be considered and for me to love or hate the characters. I think only Faith Hunter could have come up with a scenario where the people most likely to save the world are in Motorcycle Clubs.
The two AIs in this are a hoot. They're original, amusing but still credible. The mutated junkyard cats remain the scariest thing in the story. They see people as either servants or protein and what they did to that attack dog would make even the toughest biker give them a wide berth.
This episode moves the overall story arc forward by getting Shining Smith set up as the head of her own MC, running a Roadhouse that delivers services and provides neutral territory to the four main MCs. I wondered if that might make the story a little static, focusing on what happens in the Roadhouse and the Junkyard but Faith Hunter quickly gets Shining Smith involved in action in a neighbouring town. This action exposes the Dark Riders as more than opportunistic bandits, builds some new alliances and sets Shining Smith up for a larger scale conflict. I'm already keen to read the next book.
I like the novella format that Faith Hunter is using. It keeps the focus tight and the tension high. It's like watching a TV episode with a Three Act structure. The people, the problem and the context are introduced, the big fight happens, the consequences are worked through and the seeds of the next episode are sewn.
Junkyard Cats was originally conceived as an aubiobook only series. Now it's available in paperback and ebook but my strong preference is to settle down with the audiobook and let Khristine Hvam's narration light up the story for me....more
I had one of those ennui-ridden days yesterday. I had the time and the inclination to read but none of the books I'd downloaded called to me. I nibbleI had one of those ennui-ridden days yesterday. I had the time and the inclination to read but none of the books I'd downloaded called to me. I nibbled at a couple of them but I couldn't taste them. My imagination couldn't get any traction. So I opted for novelty as an antidote to listlessness and searched for something short and satisfying that I could read in an afternoon. I found 'Gwendy's Button Box', a novella co-authored by Stephen King (a go-to comfort read author for me) and Richard Chizmar (who I wasn't familiar with) nd consumed it in an afternoon.
I was glad that I'd opted for the audiobook version. Maggie Siff's narration was engaging and soothing and soon I was lost in another Castle Rock story in the 1970s, this time following a decade of the life of a young girl called Gwendy after she has an encounter with an extraordinary man who gifts her a box that is both a blessing and a curse.
I liked Gwendy, as Stephen King intended me to. She is brave, disciplined, mostly kind and is as honest with herself as any of us are capable of being. She's not perfect and she's very young so some of her decision are not a wise as they might be but those things just made her easier to engage with.
The box... well the box is terrifying. It's like handing a child a nuclear bomb and saying "Only press the button if you're sure it's the right thing to do". To make things worse, the box establishes a silently symbiotic relationship with Gwendy, offering her rewards that build dependency and reshape her life to the point where her ownership of her achievements is undermined and she questions the truth of her own identity.
This is a 'thought experiment' story, a 'What if?' speculation about power and choice and consequences, a reflection on the Spiderman truism that 'With great power comes great responsibility' that, in Stephen King's hands, also becomes the life story of a nice young girl whose childhood is ended early by an understanding that the world is not a safe place and that destruction is just a press of a button away, whether that button is in the hands of Nixon or Brezhnev or by Gwendy herself.
I was cruising along happily in the story but I couldn't see how it could be brought to an end, unless it turned into another 'IT' and one decade became three and I was watching Gwendy decide if Y2K would end the world.
The ending, when it came, was dramatic and a little sad but a little too neat and too cosy to be entirely satisifying. Still, my ennui was gone. I'd had an entertaining afternoon and I was ready to read something else.
Then I found that Stephen King's 'The Music Room' had been added as a bonus story. It's short, stylised and delightfully dark and twisted. Just the amuse-bouche I needed to clear my palette and move on to my next book.
The last thing on the audiobook is a conversation between Stephen King and Richard Chizmar about their collaboration on this story. The two of them were internet friends who often exchanged emails and chatted about things. One of those things was a story that Stephen King had started but couldn't find a way to finish. He'd sent it to Richard Chizmar, who turned it into the 'Gwendy's Button Box' I'd just read. Of course, the geek in me desperately wanted to see what the story looked like before the collaboration started and I found myself going back over the story in my head to see if I could find the join.
There are two more Gwendy novellas but I'm not heading there just now. Maybe the next time ennui has me it's grip, they can help me get free.
Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of Maggie Siff's narration.
Tell Her Story' had a strong plot that leveraged the True Crime podcast trend to frame the story. Dakota Fanning did a good job as the main narrator aTell Her Story' had a strong plot that leveraged the True Crime podcast trend to frame the story. Dakota Fanning did a good job as the main narrator and the supporting cast brought the podcast segments alive.
Despite all of that, I never got fully engaged with this novella. To me, it seemed to plod along, spooning out exposition to move the plot along in a fairly mechanical way. The characters all had the potential to be interesting but I didn't really get to know any of them particularly well. The story didn't bore me but it didn't make me care either about the people and what happened to them or about solving the puzzle about who the killer was.
From the other reviews that I've seen, mine is a minority opinion but I found this novella to be bland. It was more like an early storyboard than a completed story. I wanted something to make me care but there was no threat, no risk, just mild curiosity....more
I picked up 'A Wolf In Thief's Clothing' because it had a clever title, a stylish cover and offered a quick way of sampling Lily Anne Crow's fantasy wI picked up 'A Wolf In Thief's Clothing' because it had a clever title, a stylish cover and offered a quick way of sampling Lily Anne Crow's fantasy world of Erlahain.
Lily Anne Crow packs a lot into this sixty-four pages. The story immediately drops the reader in the moment when a heist being run by a young team of thieves against a corrupt local official starts to go badly wrong. Just when everything seems lost, the story winds back and we get the background to how our heroine, Phrai, hooked up with the crew. From that point on, this is a heist story with a twist. We get a convincing overview of the planning and execution of the heist but with the knowledge that it will go wrong and that Phrai has an agenda she hasn't shared with the rest of the team.
The plot was clever enough to keep me guessing. The atmosphere was tense and the action scenes worked. The scene where Phrai gets involved in a gambling session was nicely done. I liked the details of how the game of Ships worked.
The writing at the start of the book was a bit adjective-laden for my tastes but that settled down once we reached the dialogue and the action took off.
There wasn't much world-building, I think the assumption was that everyone was familiar with Erlahain, but there was enough for me to visualise the action.
If you like your fantasy fast, clever and mischievous, then you may enjoy a visit to Erlahain....more
I met the vampire Coburn last November when I read the excellent 'Double Dead' (2011), a tale of a cynical vampire who having slept through the zombieI met the vampire Coburn last November when I read the excellent 'Double Dead' (2011), a tale of a cynical vampire who having slept through the zombie apocalypse, wakes to find his food source is now an endangered species and he must turn shepherd if he wants to eat. I loved the book and thought Coburn was a wonderful creation. The novel reads like a standalone but Coburn was so vividly drawn and had gone through such traumatic changes, that I found myself wondering what he did next.
I guess Chuck Wendig must have wondered the same thing because, five years later, he answered the question by publishing 'Bad Blood'.
Sequels can be tricky things and the second book can often disappoint so I was delighted to find that 'Bad Blood' wasn't just a 'further adventures of Coburn the Vampire', reprising the best parts of 'Double Dead'. It was packed with new ideas and fascinating character development that extend the story arc and continue Coburn's transformation from a cynical, jaded, loner predator into someone more purposeful and connected with the world.
The novella also experiments successfully with form while retaining the kick-ass action, gritty humour and almost shamefaced pathos of the 'Double Dead'.
For me, the cherry on the cake was T. Ryder Smith's narration. His performance was extraordinary. Passionate and perfect. At points, it was so well done that I wanted to applaud.
If you enjoyed, 'Double Dead' I recommend visiting Coburn again in 'Bad Blood' but don't start here or you'll miss out on the context. Both books are available as audiobooks narrated by T. Ryder Smith in an omnibus called 'The Complete Double Dead' published by Recorded Books...more
This was my first time reading anything by Angela Boord. I came to 'Dragonmeat' innocent of any knowledge of the Eterean Empire universe that she creaThis was my first time reading anything by Angela Boord. I came to 'Dragonmeat' innocent of any knowledge of the Eterean Empire universe that she created in 'Fortune's Fool'. This turned out to be no disadvantage. Angela Boord's worldbuilding was deft, rapid and brought to life by being delivered through the eyes of an engaging character who is hiding in the shadows of her own island as she tries to survive the starvation imposed by the policies of the Eterean Empire Governer. The action was fast without being frantic. Secrets and lies were seeded and truths slowly revealed. There was violence, oppression, sedition and intrigue all spiced up with magic and dragons. I followed along happily, enjoying some set-piece confrontations that increased my engagement. Then, just when I'd finally understood what was going on and who the players were and was engaged enough to care about the outcome, the story shifted gear and I was given an ending that, although it worked, seemed anticlimatic. I'd rather have been given only part of the ending and been invited to learn more in book two. That being said, I enjoyed 'Dragonmeat' enough to make me want to read 'Fortune's Fool', at 737 pages, there should be plenty of time for the story to unfold. ...more
I bought 'The Christmas Guest' for two reasons: to sample Peter Swanson's work and to have a good Christmas story to listen to in the car as my wife aI bought 'The Christmas Guest' for two reasons: to sample Peter Swanson's work and to have a good Christmas story to listen to in the car as my wife and I drove North to be with family. It exceeded my expectations on both counts.
I love the way Peter Swanson writes: the clarity of the prose, the clever structure of the storytelling, the perfectly conjured settings and the believable characters. I'm now looking forward to reading his thriller, 'The Kind Worth Killing' later this year.
For me, 'The Christmas Guest' is an example of what a good, dark, Christmas story should be.
It takes place in two classic settings for Christmas stories, a Manhattan condo and an English country house. It starts in a present-day Christmas, with a woman in her thirties, who has chosen to spend the holiday alone in her apartment, again, deciding to do a bit of decluttering and coming across a handwritten journal that describes a much earlier Christmas, spent in an English country house, when she was a teenager, attending the Courtauld Institute of Art. The next part of the story is told through diary entries, describing how a young American girl gets to spend her first Christmas in rural England at the home of a fellow student. The tone of the storytelling changes as the young woman describes the almost overwhelming newness and strangeness of a Christmas spent in a big house in the woods. It darkens slowly and she observes some of the dark dynamics in the family and develops a sense of threat when she becomes aware that someone is lurking in the woods between the house and the village and that a young girl was recently killed in those woods.
I found both setting and the 'voices' through which they were told convincing and engaging. At the start of the story, I identified with the desire for solitude at Christmas and I smiled at the woman's pleasure in having an opportunity to declutter undisturbed. The shift to reading the decades-old diary entries gave a reflective, visiting the spirit of Christmas Past tone to the story that I enjoyed, as did moving from seeing the world through the eyes of a middle-aged woman settled into a solitary life through to a teenaged woman, abroad for the first time and open to everything the experience has to offer.
But there was much more to this story than some Christmas reminiscences. This is a dark tale, filled with life-threatening secrets and transgressions. Peter Swanson did a superb job in structuring and pacing his story to create a growing sense of threat while increasing my investment in the person threatened.
Then came the twist that changed my understanding of everything and made the story richer and much darker. It wasn't a last-minute cheat of a twist. Peter Swanson had constructed the whole story around it. The twist drives the story to the very last page.
I ended the story deeply satisfied with the journey that Peter Swanson had taken me on. It was a Christmas gift in it's own right.
I recommend the audiobook version of 'The Christmas Guest' narrated by Esther Wane who did a splendid job of matching her narration to the shifting tones of the text....more
The Nadia Stafford trilogy 'Exit Strategy', 'Made To Be Broken' and 'Wild Justice' is one of my favourite female assassin series. I liked that the triThe Nadia Stafford trilogy 'Exit Strategy', 'Made To Be Broken' and 'Wild Justice' is one of my favourite female assassin series. I liked that the trilogy had a strong story arc in which the characters of the assassins, Nadia and Jack, and their relationship with one another developed into something with some depth. It also helped that the plots were clever and twisty and that they took the time to get inside the heads of people who kill for money but still themselves as having an ethical code.
I was surprised but pleased to see that Kelley Armstrong decided to revisit Nadia and Jack in two novellas, 'Double Play' and 'Perfect Victim'. 'Perfect Victim' is a crossover story with Kelley Armstrong's Rockton series, taking place after the events of the second book, 'A Darkness Absolute'.
I spent today reading 'Double Play'. It's only 130 pages long but it still packs a punch and it gave me an opportunity to see how Nadia and Jack are working through their new reality of being a couple.
I liked that the story was told in chapters that alternate between Nadia's and Jack's point of view. It worked well as a way of increasing the suspense while widening the view. Best of all, it finally allowed me to get inside Jack's head - not an easy thing to do with a man who seldom speaks and almost never uses complete sentences.
As usual with these books, the body count is moderately high, the action scenes are vivid and the motivations are murky. The plot had enough twists to keep me guessing. I didn't manage to figure out what was going on before the big reveal and even then, I wasn't sure what the consequences would be.
I enjoyed being back in Nadia's company and getting to know Jack a little more. The novella length was just enough to let me feel that I'd caught up with the characters and seen them react to a crisis, kill a few people and solve a puzzle, all of which was entertaining....more