And then there were none - Agatha Christie

'Ten little soldier boys went out to dine;
One choked his little self, and then there were nine...'

This is the poem that And then there were none is based upon. The novel starts out with ten people of different ages and social classes being summoned to an island off the devonshire cost, all by friends of a friend or a new employer etc, but when they get there their host mr.Owen has not arrived and the island, other than them is compltely deserted. As they start to dissappear one by one it becomes apparent that the murderer is following the nursery rhyme (a copy of which is hung up in each of their rooms) and it becomes a race against time to discover who he/she is before they strike again...

This is my first full agatha christi novel, and apparently here best selling one to date (over 100 million copies, the world's best selling mystery and the seventh most popular book of all time. - wikipedia) It was recomended to my by a friend and is brilliant :D I've never really tried reading crime/mystery before because i've found it too chilling, however, christie delivers this with all the thrills and guessing but less of the chills :P (still didnt read before going to bed though :P) Its a bit hard to review because i dont want to give anything away, but it was rather amazing, it took me the first chapter or two to tell all the different characters apart, but their shriking numbers certainly helped with this :P

As far as guessing the ending goes... i failed, however, there were certain ideas id considered, but then dismissed, only to find out in the sumary that they were right after all, but the things id thought would prevent them had been considered and gone around a different way (if that makes sense, again, i dont want to give anything away) As it is my first i cannot compare it to other Christie novels, but it is said to be one of the best and most confounding. I'd say read it yourself and see :P its always fun guessing the endings, and frustrating when the different twists prove you wrong!

Mr.Cavendish, I Presume - Julia Quinn

Julia Quinn writes regengy-style romances and has often been described as 'jane austen meets bridget jones' they are light-hearted novels that can be read in a day if you feel so inclined (around 300-400 pages each) personally i cant read them in public because they just make me smile. Quinn often writes novels about related characters (e.g. in the bridgerton series there is 1 novel for each of the 8 siblings), this novel comes after the book The Lost Duke of Wyndham (which i thought was rather good) i had been anticipating this one for a while, after reading about the characters but it was a bit of a dissappointment...

I have recently read almost all of Julia Quinn's non-bridgerton books (although i've read most of those too) and i felt that this was probably the least well written of them all. Because the storys overlap almost completely there is a lot of repetition if you've read the one before it, and if you havent then i dont think theres quite enough detail to enjoy it properly. I think this book would benefit tremendously from being combined with the one before it and published as one book. Unfortunately this style is generally written with guidelines of how few characters you are alowed and as if the reader is incapable of reading from more than two peoples perspectives (the hero & heroine) i think this is a bit of a dissappointment, but its that kind of genre so you can't really ask for much.

The basic storyline is that the lead guy is the duke of wyndham but then a long-lost cousin arrives (hero of book before) who would be the rightful duke if his parents had married - a large chunk of the book is spent in ireland trying to prove his legitimacy - the cousin falls in love with the duke's grandmother's companion while the lead guy falls in love with the woman who was promised to him at birth. Its a bit of a stretch for the plot of one book, but making it into two is painful to read. However, i doubt that many people who are really serious about their reading delve into this genre often so its probably pretty irrelevant. The sad thing is that julia quinn is one of the better writers of the genre i've met, there are some truly appauling books out there but hers are usually quite fun for a de-stress.

Addition - Toni Jordan [241 pages]

I picked this one up from my college library as part of an end of year book-binge. I first heard about addition on one of the veryvery few occasiions that i watched richard and Judy, and for some reason it stuck with me.

Addition is about Grace - a 35yr old woman who has an obsession with counting everything; the measurements of her walls, the number of poppy seeds on her daily slice of orange cake, the ratio of her hand, the number of steps it takes to get her anywhere, the number of bites it takes to eat something... it has got to the state where she is unable to work and her whole life seems to revolve around the numbers. Then, when she meets seamus o'reiley everything changes and the numbers start to slip away. this book is in ways light hearted, in others quite serious. It is about a young woman coming to terms with her self and learning to live life again.

This book was enjoyable to read; happy but serious and although other reviewers have found faults, nothing glaring stood in the way of my enjoyment of it. I'd say give it a go if you have an afternoon spare and fancy something a little quirky and different.