Liza Cody

I believe that with her books featuring Anna Lee, Liza Cody was in the vanguard of the upsurge of crime novels featuring assertive and independent female private detectives. It certainly proved to be a rich seam, yielding such enduring characters as Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Michelle Spring’s Laura Principal. Sadly, although initially very popular, even to the extent of a television series featuring Imogen Stubbs as Anna, the books seem to have faded from the reading public’s attention.

I am fairly sure that I read this blood about thirty years ago, prompted to do so by having seen the television series, although it didn’t evoke many memories (to be fair, that would have been thirty years ago, and I have read more than three thousand other books since). Coming to it again I found it enjoyable, but it has not aged well. Anna Lee is a great character – far from flawless, but very empathetic. The plot is rather turgid, and revolves around film piracy which was a serious enough problem in the early 1990s, even before the proliferation of illegal copying spawned by the explosion if home computing and the internet.

This was an enjoyable trip back into the past, although I don’t think I will be delving any further into this particular archive.… (more)

“Bad Company” proved to be a bad read.

The potential was there for a great crime thriller, but thrills are sadly missing here. It lacks an engaging narrative and compelling characters. I won’t give the ending away but will state that it left me dissatisfied.

What irritated beyond everything else was the excessive number of adverbs. If, as the saying goes, “The road to Hell is paved with adverbs”, then that road first passes through this book.

This is worst of all in the dialogue attribution, where the author tries to use a different adverb every time a character speaks: “he said conversationally,” “she said angrily,” etc. It’s distracting to the point that come halfway through the book, I would wonder which adverb was coming up whenever a character began to speak.

A good writer should be able to *show* the characters' emotions with actions, not rely on adverbs to *tell* the reader about it.… (more)