Lifeless by Mark Billingham

The Blurb On The Back:

To friends and enemies alike, it looks as though Detective Inspector Tom Thorne's career is on the skids. But his situation is not as dire as that of London's homeless.

Three men, sleeping rough on streets paved with anything but gol, have been murdered - each victim kicked to death and found with a £20 note pinned to his chest. Were they killed at random or where they targeted for a reason.

Thorne is seconded to the same streets. Not as a policemen on the beat but as one of life's rejects. It fits: he looks the part - and feels it as well. In a harsh and harrowing netherworld, with its own rules and moral code, Thorne discovers the horrifying link between the homeless victims and the perpetrators of a fifteen-yeal-old atrocity. Those who know are saying nothing. But the word on these streets is that the killer is a cop. A policeman, it seems, was sniffing around long before Thorne came on the scene ...

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Hopefully this is just a blip in the series and Mark Billingham will return to the tightly plotted novels that made me enjoy this series. Disappointing. Incidentally, the typo in the Blurb on the Back is not mine.

Diaries 1969 - 1979: The Python Years by Michael Palin

The Blurb On The Back:

Michael Palin's diaries begin in the late 1960s when, newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy, he began writing for hugely popular programmes, such as The Frost Report and The Two Ronnies. But Monty Python was just around the corner ...

In this first volume of his diaries he tells how Python emerged and triumphed. Enjoying an unlikely cult status early on, the group then proceeded to tour in the United States and Canada, appearing, like pop stars, at sold-out stadiums coast to coast and on national chat shows. They even stayed in hotels newly trashed by Led Zeppelin, later investors in Monty Python and the Holy Grail/

With this growing fame in the United States came the move from local public broadcasting to national television there and battles over censorhip followed as up to one line in four was cut from the Python sketches, rendering them incomprehensible. Eventually both Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin took the stand in the Federal Court in New York to defend the Pythons' position.

As their popularity grew, so Palin relates how, individually, the Pythons also went their separate ways. John Cleese wrote and acted in the now classic Fawlty Towers, while Michael Palin acted in an adaptation of the memorable Ripping Yarns series. But at the same time, Michael and the others were working to help keep the group together so they could reform for stage shows and the now celebrated series of films including The Holy Grail and The Life of Brian, many of whose lines are known by heart by a considerable proportion of the English-speaking world.

The birth and childhood of his three children, his father's growing disability, learning to cope as a young man with celebrity, his friendship with George Harrison, living through the three-day week and the minder's strike, and all the trials of a peripateticlife are also essential ingredients of these diaries. A perceptive and funny chronicle, the diaries are a rich portrait of a fascinating period.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Interesting, absorbing but not sensational. Palin lives up to his 'nice guy' image in these diaries, but don't go into them expecting new revelations about the Pythons.