It's been an odd old February in a never ending procession of tediously odd months.
On the upside a lot of the layout of the older entries on AustCrime has been completed, and I'm back to 2020 in the main.
You'll see the number of books live on the site is steadily increasing, with some author's back catalogues more complete depending on how their entries in the database were encountered (there's not a lot of planning / mostly a bit of slogging going on).
You'll also see that the number of reviews is building as well, same methodology applies to them.
It's getting there in other words.
In terms of where everything else is at - there have been a few reviews posted this month, and a lot of new books added, but really time is now being devoted to a lot of reading. The Ngaio Marsh lists, and the general review lists. At some stage I'm going to stop going to the library. Really I am. But in order to keep track and try to impose some order, I've been posting a "Project Status Update" a couple of times a month. The latest of these went live today.
Just a few books that deserve some special mentions though:
Upcoming releases that I'm particularly keen to get to: Unbury the Dead and Lyrebird
Was also lucky enough to see Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown in Ballarat earlier this week - they were talking about two books Nothing But Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging which is a short story collection of curated works by Mary Fortune and Outrageous Fortunes which is "The gripping story of Australia's first female crime writer and her career-criminal son". For those of us who live in the Victorian Goldfields there will be resonances with the places, and the life of Fortune - somebody Sussex has been researching for 35 and Brown for 25 years (I think that's the numbers quoted the other night). Either way their work is stellar, and the short stories, in particular, full of a dry sense of humour which I hadn't expected, and really enjoyed - but more on that when I get the review formulated properly over the next few days.
Speaking of dry senses of humour, and a steely sense of observation The Grapevine by Kate Kemp is well worth a look, as was Panic by Catherine Jinks (less funny / considerably more sobering).