Standing in the shadows (2)

As I wrote almost exactly one year ago, this was the final DCI Banks novel, although not by choice. Author Peter Robinson died after completing the book and before it was published. 

I suspect that I have read this book only once before, as I mentioned problems with the Kindle in that blog entry. A few days ago I was thinking about the books that I purchased from Amazon and reside on the Kindle; they're also available to me on my computer via a Kindle reader program. But that does not give me a way to read them on the Kobo. So I looked for - and found - a way to remove DRM protection via Calibre. I may have read about this before but never succeeded in getting very far. This time, I was able to remove the DRM and convert the books to epub format so that I can read them on the Kobo.

In order to remove the protection, I had to know the serial number of the Kindle. Although I checked, I couldn't find this written down anywhere; this doesn't surprise me. So I had to charge the Kindle and get the number from the device. Once the Kindle was fully charged, I turned it on but then was stuck for a few minutes as I couldn't remember how to use it! The button-free Kobo had caused me to forget what to do, but eventually I remembered and found the serial number.

And as for this book ... as I wrote then, [a]s with several of Robinson's books, this one is split between two time frames: 1980 and 2019. It isn't until very late in the book that the connection between the two is made. Thus for most of the book, one wonders where the 1980 thread is leading. It's quite an intriguing tale, but not too involved. Very true; like several of Robinson's books, it starts off very slow and the pace only picks up right at the very end.

One observation that I missed last time around: the book finishes on 23 December 2019. Remember that date, or at least, that time? As this book would put it, that's approximately when everything went tits up, and the latest Coronavirus entered our world. One wonders what the next Banks novel would have been like had Robinson not died. There are very few books or films that are set in the early Covid period.

J.K. Rowling - who is far from dead - has set her Cormoran Strike novels in the 2010s, but has stated several times that the series will end before the Covid period, so she has chosen not to face up to the challenge.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
173	27/05/2009	Holy grail found	Programming, Delphi, Office automation
1034	27/05/2017	Fifty years of Fairport	Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention
1227	27/05/2019	Changing a chord sequence	Song writing