For some reason last Monday I felt the urge to read a book, something I’ve barely done at all since the last summer holidays.

It’s mostly Kindle these days. In bits and dabs I have finished the John Milton series I wrote about last summer and as I came to the end, Amazon started recommending other similar stuff. Every now and again there’s a special offer and I pay a couple of quid to download a whole series of something, then lose it somewhere on the Kindle as the user interface is not brilliant at reminding you of what is where and when.

So last Monday I started reading a really short novel that I had bought the year before in a sale by Damien Boyd, an author with no wikipedia page but a series of novels on Amazon. I started As the Crow Flies, a police procedural lead by DI Nick Dixon focusing on climbing and taking us down (or up, I suppose) some unusual paths. It had a well signposted denouement that turned out to be rather satisfying. That I finished in a night, so I moved on to the next one.

(I love a good series, me – and it’s nearly time for Sue Grafton’s penultimate novel, Y is for Yesterday)

Head in the Sand is the punning second in the series. Its title is literal not figurative, as the book opens with a severed head in a golf bunker and moves on from there. It was rather satisfyingly guessable and I was slightly ahead of the plot all the way through. I have a whole series ahead of me

Knowing I was away camping for the weekend, I stocked up on the next ones in a few series I am reading rather than rely too much on the Amazon sale spectaculars.

So over the weekend, I read Dust to Dust in the Dr Dunbar series – again, rather satisfyingly, I guessed a major plot twist in the first few pages, although the book has a rather spectacular McGuffin that kept us guessing to the end as well. There is tense drama in the middle and it certainly got my heart racing to turn pages.

I kept going in the Sara Paretsky / Warshawski series and read Hard Time with an extended women’s prison section as suggested by the title. I am still enjoying these books very much, but it is taking me years to read them all, and there are some very obvious plot manoeuvres that happen every time. Our protagonist always gets beaten half to death, usually more than once in a novel. If there is any mention of files, or the location of files, or whether the files are in her office or in her apartment, then you know there’s going to be a break-in and the files will be stolen. And this novel features at least the third time Warshawski ends up looking after a small child who has spectacularly fallen out with its parents…

I bought a few more P D James / Dalgliesh novels too, haven’t got around to those yet, because whilst I was spending money I don’t have on Amazon, the site kindly pointed out to me the very latest in the Janet Evanovich number series, so have been finishing that over the last few days. Turbo Twenty-three is still in hardback so the Kindle edition was three times the cost of anything else I bought.

Now if you’ll excuse me, this post has prompted me to go digging through my Kindle account and I have only just realised I pre-ordered the latest Mary Roach book, Grunt, it got downloaded last September, and I’ve not even looked at it!