Completed
Denise Mina's The End of the Wasp Season. Done and dusted.
So what makes a good mystery anyway? There are conventions to the genre, and they always apply - even when an author is playing against the conventions, rather than adhering to them, they are still there and still vital. But that's just a framework. Fundamentally, a good mystery is just a good novel. The best writers of mysteries and sci-fi/fantasy (which are the genres I read regularly) are fundamentally good writers, just like the writers of literary fiction.
First off, the writing has to be good. It has to flow and convey information and emotional tone effectively, using language creatively to evince in the readers mind the appropriate content. And it should provide a different perspective that we usually see - they're novels and they should be, in some sense, novel. The characters should act in way that stems naturally from their personality and not unnaturally to serve a plot device.
And the genre conventions need to be addressed, whether that's meeting them or challenging them. There needs to be something to figure out, and clues along the way. The clue presentation should be obscure, but fair. The solving of the mystery should not rely on things completely different from what the reader has seen along the way.
Denis Mina does all these things superbly. Alex Morrow (this is her second outing) is everything you want in a sleuth. I've appreciate in her other books that Mina is not distracted by the glitter of the lives of the rich and famous, but places her action in the grittier side of Glasgow. That still holds here, but even with some characters in that priveleged world of private schools and high finance, the glitter does not distract. And they clues are dribbled out in a nicely obscure manner.
4.5/5 - It's hard to think of a better active writer of mysteries, and she's at the top of her game here.
Continuing Reading
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Started
Chris Miller has written Chip War
Chip War is an epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world’s most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict.
I am not too far into it, but it's full of little tidbits that make things fit together a little better. For example, I had heard that "bugs" in computing originated from actual bugs that would get into computers, but I hadn't seen that connected to the fact that the original computers where built with vacuum tubes, which emit heat and light, and therefore attract moths. Makes sense of the bug thing.
And take the dominance of Asian countries in electronics, like so much that happened at a global scale in the second half of the twentieth century, that's highly influenced by cold war policies. What better way to prevent countries from falling into the Soviet sphere than by binding them into the US economy by having them build the chips that Americans in Silicon Valley were designing. The Japanese building chips cheaper and with significantly lower failure rates than US manufacturers wasn't part of the plan, nor Akio Morita's making Sony an innovator and not just an implementor. But the history makes more sense now.
And that's about as far as I've read, but I'm expecting more such lightbulbs going off as I continue.
In conclusion
Next book will be from my overloaded hold list, probably not David Grann's The Wager - "Wait time: at least 6 months"