I have been home for a week. It has been a slow start to my Adventure but I have no need to rush, not anymore. At last, I have been able to concentrate on eating properly, on sleeping for as long as my body wants to and on keeping warm.
By so doing, I have all but conquered the unpleasantly productive bronchitis that was the most notable feature of my final three weeks in Seaside City, during which I was sustained largely by Lemsip.
Today, in my absence, I am being formally checked out of my Hillside Retreat, having handed my keys back to the lettings agent at about this time a week ago yesterday, the first of three stops on my journey to catch my ferry.
I shall come back to the stops in the not too distant future and will, for now, just mention the book I bought on the ferry that night and that I have this afternoon finished the reading of.
The selection of paperbacks on board was unsurprisingly limited but I was interested to discover a volume by Peter James, a Seaside City scribe in the crime fiction genre of whom I had heard.
I invested a penny shy of seven English pounds in the 499 pages of his 2015 publication entitled "You Are Dead" and retired to my cabin, where I promptly fell asleep. It wasn't until I was home that I read the first page.
Averaging seventy pages a day since, ploughing through this book has been a struggle but I was determined to finish reading it as soon as possible, just to get it over and done with.
I don't rate very highly the quality of writing and the storyline was surprisingly thin, too, taking well over two hundred pages to develop further than had been revealed by the brief notes on the back cover.
I was unconvinced by a number of characters, the principal villain especially, and was repeatedly distracted by product placements and the wildly differing levels of detail afforded throughout, no reason for which became apparent even with the benefit of hindsight.
Far too much effort is put into the factual description of police procedures and hierarchy and far too little into colouring in or adding depth to anything else. Most disappointingly, I found nothing gave a sense of the city in which the story is set.
How there come to be ten earlier titles pictured on the inside cover of this one, "sixteen million copies sold" advised above the author's name on the front and glowing reviews from reputable sources quoted on the first two pages baffles me. I thought it was very poor.
In Po's world, however, no time is wasted. My week of convalescence in the company of a trademarked detective has reassured me there may yet be potential in creatively combining the weft of my own wordsmithery with the warp of my own imagination to weave a twisted tale or two.
