book log: 70) Edward Marston -- The Amorous Nightingale

70) Edward Marston -- The Amorous Nightingale

Second in the Christopher Redmayne historical mystery series, set in London just after the Great Fire of 1666. I'd previously read only the fourth in the series, so I'm going back now, and am pleased to find that this one's just as enjoyable. Young architect Christopher Redmayne is asked to do a service for the King -- to find the King's favourite mistress, the acclaimed singer/actress Harriet Gow, who has been abducted and held for an impossibly large ransom. Redmayne's friend, the Puritan constable Jonathan Bale, initially refuses to help on moral grounds, but finds that he too has a personal stake in the crime, because Harriet's maid is the orphaned daughter of friends of his. The two men have to use their separate network of social connections to hunt down leads as fast as possible, in a situation where secrecy is vital.

As ever with Marston's historical novels, this is a competent, enjoyable, midlist novel which I probably won't keep but am glad to have read. I don't know enough about the period to know how accurate his historical detail is, but the world-building is good, and the plot mechanics work well. I think the characterisations are a little deeper and thus to me better in this series than in the Railway Detective series. And as I've found with his other books, while the lead characters are male, he has good secondary female characters. I'm looking forward to reading the next in the series.

LibraryThing entry

Google Sites

I set up a website some years ago for my fanzine activity on Google Page Creator, and temporarily stopped updating it when they announced that they were moving everyone to the shiny new toy called Sites. And waited for my site to be moved. And waited. And waited...

And eventually stopped bothering to check if my site had been moved, partly because by then I was burnt out on zines and it was too much effort. By the time I noticed that my site had at long last been moved, and mangled in the process, I didn't have any spare effort left for even the paying writing. But today I logged in with the intention of Doing Something about unmangling and then uploading at least one zine and/or some stories.

Ewww.

Some of this is just working with a new interface, but really, eewwwww. I suspect I'd have a less horrified reaction to the interface were I starting a brand new site, but trying to de-mangle my existing site that got moved over is driving me up the wall. I'd consider just starting a new site and copying the text over to that, but that would be work, and you know, given the G+ nym wars, I'm not sure I want to put that much effort into something that might vanish like the mist in the morning sun. It might be simpler to go and learn how to build a website on WordPress.

I still haven't worked out whether, let alone how, I can upload the pdfs of the zines. That was what I planned to do as a quick and dirty way of getting some of them online, because I do not fancy the amount of work involved in properly webifying them, and many modern e-readers can cope perfectly well with pdfs.