Chocolate Update

Today's was called World's Best Gianduja? by Charles Chocolatier

It takes the form of a simple cuboid wrapped in gold paper. The predominant flavour is of hazelnuts, which means it isn't going to be my favourite, but the chocolate itself was creamy, with just a hint of a bitter afterbite. The texture was delightfully silky.

Reading Report

I'm giddy because I just finished this:



I love Val McDermid's series books, whether they are the dark, disturbing Tony Hill novels or the lighter Kate Brannigan ones, but this one is a one-off. It sat on my shelf for months and even when I pulled it out it it took me several days to get started on it. The bulk of it is set against at the time of the Moors Murders and having been a child of a certain age growing up in Cheshire at the time that couldn't help but makew me feel queasy.

But once I got going I was hooked. This begins as a conventional police procedural, dealing with events in an isolated Derbyshire hamlet when a thirteen-year-old girl goes missing at the same time as Brady and Hindley's victimes were also disappearing just as mysteriously. And thereafter the narrative proceeds with more shivers than Mam Tor and more twists than Winnatts Pass. You are led to an agonising climax, brough down into the gentle valley again, and then it starts all over again.

Some of it you can see coming well in advance. But that's not important. This is much less the story of a murder than the effect it has on all the people concerned, even a generation on.

An excellent crime novel that ought to take its place among the greats.