Book Review: Shepherd’s Prayer by Katja Willemsen

I have recently read Shepherd’s Prayer, a Kindle eBook by Katja Willemsen. I reviewed it on Amazon but thought I’d post it here too.

From reading the synopsis, I was under the impression that this would be a thrill-a-minute, somewhat sensationalist adventure and not really my kind of book. From the outset it was clear I was wrong.

While it is fairly fast-paced, there were so many opportunities for the author to take the easy way out with the obvious “the lights came on, the police rushed in and we all went home for tea” ending, which never came. The characters are completely plausible and very well-developed and, while the story is exciting and has you wanting to keep on turning those ‘pages’, some important themes are addressed in an accessible way.

It’s a very interesting combination of adventure and a bit more. It punches well above the weight one might expect from the synopsis, in terms of depth, characters, plot and style. Definitely worth a read.

Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie

I am actually rather enjoying the Sherlock series running on the BBC at the moment. They’ve done quite a good job of updating it, but the spirit of it is quite true to the original. Good fun.

I’ve been reading an Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary, on my phone. There are some really quite amazingly racist, sexist and classist statements in it. Seeing how mainstream views like that were so recently does serve to remind how far we’ve comein a relatively short time. Still a good way to go, of course, but there’s always room for improvement in everything.

I’ve been playing round a bit with a few of the apps I downloaded the other day. I cropped and tweaked this picture in Photoshop Express.