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The Great Android outage of 2021
Mar. 30th, 2021 08:13 pmBook Review: The Secret, Book, and Scone Society, by Ellery Adams
I finally joined our local library online a month or two back, and seeking a lighter read, I started to search for likely authors from my to-read list. The results were initially disappointing, but in the "new additions" section I stumbled on this one (published in 2017, but presumably newly added to the library).
This was where the fun started, because I had to install the Libby app on my tablet, and after a couple of days, it stopped working. I could re-install and pick up again, but each time, it would fail after being used once. When other apps also started crashing I wondered whether the tablet was finally coming to the end of its life, but after I noticed the "Web System View" component that powers most HTML-based UIs had been updated the previous day, I wondered whether this might be the cause, and then discovered that Google had issued a botched update. Sure enough, fetching the patch restored normality.
And so to the book. A businessman falls under a train in Miracle Springs, North Carolina. A short time beforehand, he had a chance conversation with bookshop owner Nora Pennington, and he seemed remorseful about something. She is not convinced his death was accidental. With three other locals, she starts poking around the inevitably superficial local police investigation. The dead man was involved in a controversial local property development, and his remaining business partners don't seem all that bothered by what has happened.
I found it difficult to picture the town or the venues within it, because small-town USA is far from familiar territory for me, and some of the plot developments and twists were a bit weak or required some suspension of disbelief. There were moments when this book could have become a parodic mashup of Midsomer Murders and Desperate Housewives, but the main characters all turn out to have interesting back-stories, and on the whole, it gave just enough depth to the story without becoming burdensome in its reading.
I finally joined our local library online a month or two back, and seeking a lighter read, I started to search for likely authors from my to-read list. The results were initially disappointing, but in the "new additions" section I stumbled on this one (published in 2017, but presumably newly added to the library).
This was where the fun started, because I had to install the Libby app on my tablet, and after a couple of days, it stopped working. I could re-install and pick up again, but each time, it would fail after being used once. When other apps also started crashing I wondered whether the tablet was finally coming to the end of its life, but after I noticed the "Web System View" component that powers most HTML-based UIs had been updated the previous day, I wondered whether this might be the cause, and then discovered that Google had issued a botched update. Sure enough, fetching the patch restored normality.
And so to the book. A businessman falls under a train in Miracle Springs, North Carolina. A short time beforehand, he had a chance conversation with bookshop owner Nora Pennington, and he seemed remorseful about something. She is not convinced his death was accidental. With three other locals, she starts poking around the inevitably superficial local police investigation. The dead man was involved in a controversial local property development, and his remaining business partners don't seem all that bothered by what has happened.
I found it difficult to picture the town or the venues within it, because small-town USA is far from familiar territory for me, and some of the plot developments and twists were a bit weak or required some suspension of disbelief. There were moments when this book could have become a parodic mashup of Midsomer Murders and Desperate Housewives, but the main characters all turn out to have interesting back-stories, and on the whole, it gave just enough depth to the story without becoming burdensome in its reading.