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Book Review: Tall, Dark and Dead, by Tate Hallaway

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This book got better as I got more into it, although I find the chick-litty cover quite jarring with the content of the book! (Killing and pale yellow? REALLY?) I did find it to be too heavy on the romance and too light on the action for my tastes, although it had some nice humorous moments. One thing that I found inadvertently hilarious was that Garnet’s ex-boyfriend Daniel Parrish and new boyfriend Sebastian Von Traum both had English accents. It’s such a cliche for American romantic novels to star men with English accents, considering the author got the humour right with religion/subculture-tester-William, she could have noticed and mocked this cliche too for good measure!

The author has done her research into Wiccan rituals and astrology, which gives Garnet, the main character, authenticity. However, Garnet likes to pretend she knows things about vampires that she doesn’t, and so a lot of questions I had about the way the vampires in the world of the book work went unanswered. The status of gods in the story was never clear either. Wiccans generally believe that the gods they invoke are not actual individual beings, but facets of a supreme power, but Garnet has a goddess, Lilith, partially and sometimes entirely possessing her. Catholic magic co-exists alongside Wiccan magic, but the author never explains how this is possible. I prefer Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series for world creation and action, but this wasn’t a bad stab at the genre.

TV Review: Murder Most Famous

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Isn’t it exciting whenever a television programme about books and/or writing appears? And then ultimately crushing when it gets cancelled, unless it’s Richard and Judy-related? Well, it is for me. Unfortunately, Murder Most Famous is only on for a week. Fortunately, it’s not very good anyway.

Murder Most Famous is Celebrity Big Brother/Fame Academy but with writing. It features six “celebrities”, two of whom have a bit of an unfair advantage really, being a journalist and a TV writer. The person who writes the worst piece each day has to leave the house, and the competition. The winner at the end gets their novel published. Each day they are set a research task and a writing task. Today’s research task was quite ludicrous. They went to the “scene of a murder” and to a morgue to see a pretend dead body. Because real wannabe crime writers get to do this stuff all the time! They had to write a short scene with a murder ending on a cliffhanger. The part where Minette Walters gives her feedback on each of the celebrities’ pieces is definitely they most interesting, and I think I’ll keep watching it for that, although I’ll probably fast foward to those parts – I have to record it for the rest of the week because of uni.

The worst part about this programme is that everything Minette Walters says besides the writing feedback she says, is a giant cliche, uttered without any sense of irony! Examples include:

“Will they have what it takes to survive the cutthroat world of crime writing?”
and when the losing celebrity was out:
“And then there were five.”

She also introduced each celebrity the same way:

“_name_ is a _positive adjective_ _job_ but, will they be about to _positive adjective_ _reference to writing_”

All in all, a pretty cringeworthy programme. Please, somebody produce something decent!

Murder Most Famous, BBC 2, 1:30pm daily for this week only.