Farrell Books

I have often wondered, since I first read this book some while ago, why no one ever reviewed it. So, as I have just re-read it, I thought I would take the opportunity to spread the word that this book is one of the Regency genre's hidden treasures. If you like Kelly, Balogh, Putney, Layton and Beverley, please do make the effort to get a copy of this wonderful novel. Marjorie Farrell, like Kelly, et al above, is absolutely scrupulous in her research and she tends to present her stories from a masculine perspective. So, if you like getting inside the mind and heart of the hero, she has given us one in this novel who is memorable and, as the saying goes, is one to die for.

Simon Ballance, the Duke of Sutton, went into the army and fought as a staff officer under Wellington in the Peninsula. As in Red, Red Rose, Farrell writes with brilliant command about army life and the effect of combat on the mind, heart and soul of a man. After sustaining a head wound, Simon is invalided home permanently blind. The descriptions of him in hospital, the relationship with a fellow patient and the terrible traumatic effects of his blinding are absolutely brilliant. In a poignant scene, he is so helpless and desparate that he suffers lying in his own urine while those around him cry out in pain. This scene was as moving as Anne Gracie's ballroom scene in Gallant Waif or the hospital scenes in Carla Kelly's With This Ring.

On his return to England, Simon at first is unaccepting of his fate and sinks into a predictable depression. As an orphan, his household staff fill in as family and are very supportive of their master, giving help where they can and waiting for signs of improvement. The improvement comes in the form of Miss Judith Ware, a slight acquaintance from the past and a woman of good family fallen on hard times. Simon's secretary Francis and his closest friend conspire to have Judith hired as a reader for Simon.

Then, the developing relationship between these two highly intelligent and thoughtful people develops through a mutual passion for books, philosophy and interest in people and events. They truly are the other halves of each other but, of course, there are many trials to be overcome before they can be happily together. Through the false start of a suggested marriage of convenience (and Miss Ware's "refusal" of it), they go down a wrong track but, as in any romance, they find their was back to each other in the end.

What was truly remarkable about this book was the author's unflinching insistence on portraying the disability of blindness in the true context of the historical setting. Every mis-step Simon takes, the reader feels it along with him. We know his frustrations, anxiety, disbelief, anger and pride. We understand how this desirable and wonderful man shuts himself off believing himself an object of pity, undesirable, unloveable and isolated. How Judith brings him out of himself is memorably portrayed.

I simply cannot rate this book high enough. It is one of my personal keepers and I believe a book overlooked very deserving of reading by those of you who prefer your Regencies to have substance, character and polished writing. Please do seek it out and enjoy an author who truly stands high in the genre and deserves far more acclaim than she has received.

I discovered this author by reading the review that appears below this one and how glad I am to have discovered Marjorie Farrell. I won't repeat the plot description that is well covered by the other reviewer - I just want to add my enthusiatic praise for well drawn characters and quiet plots (no mystery, murder and mayhem). The secondary characters are especially well done - I loved Mr. Wiggins. This is one that will go on my keeper shelf and will be re-read with pleasure.

Connected books are "Autumn Rose" and "Lady Barbara's Dilemma"; this is my favorite of the three.

This book is excellent, not only for beautiful pictures, but the time Mr. Eaves took in finding the RIGHT projects to photograph. It makes an excellent gift as well as a book you want to pick up quite often to just look over again. The photography is just excellent. An unexplainable situation from his camera, but a gift to those who love photography. A wonderful, wonderful gift for any occassion.

This is a wonderful little book of artsy photography. Besides the unique colors and patterns the camera produces, Mr. Eaves also demonstrates his ability to compose the shots beautifully. Even photos of very ordinary objects become beautiful, artistic images. None of the images are manipulated in any way, and their uniqueness cannot be duplicated. This book is a must-have for any photographer or art lover's collection!

I'm surprised that more people haven't discovered Robert Skinner's Wesley Farrell series. Skinner's work is always well written, has interesting story lines, and has believable characters. However, unlike Skinner's previous novels in this series, our hero, Wesley Farrell isn't as prominately displayed this time around. Completely absent is his paramour, Savanna, a black club owner with a voice as rich as the delta. Rather, this time around Marcel Aristide, Wesley's cousin, makes a return appearence and steps to the forefront to follow in his sleuthing relative's footsteps.

It certainly wasn't unusual for a light-skinned black man to pass himself off as a white man in the New Orleans of the 1930's and 1940's. Farrell is such a man and cunningly dangerous to boot, but he doesn't disregard his black heritage or disrepect his white father, an Irishman and Chief of Detectives, Frank Casey. Most father's would regret having a son who has been an unconvicted career criminal, but Frank Casey's life has been saved and his career enhansed because his son knows the wrong side of the law as well as his father knows the right side.

Add to the complex story line the flavor of New Orleans, the taste of danger, a bit of intrigue, a wealth of racial mix and you have one of the most entertaining mysterys around. For other flavorful African American mysteries in New Orleans, try Barbara Hambly's Ben January series and James Sallis' Lew Griffin series.

I am a kid again when I read Robert Skinner, which is why I truly recommend
Pale Shadow, the fifth novel in his crime series featuring Wesley Farrell of New
Orleans. I'm breathless and at the edge of my seat as a gunman "reached down
and jacked a cartridge into the breech of his .45. The metallic clash was like the
crack of doom in the dim room."

I am a longtime devotee of Wesley Farrell, a professional gambler, a nightclub
owner on Basin Street, and (by nature) an alley cat given to prowling the mean
streets of New Orleans. This time out, Farrell seeks to help out an old friend
Luiz Martinez whose mother is dying of lung cancer in El Paso.

Farrell and Martinez go back a long ways, back to Prohibition when both worked
with rum-runners. Martinez was "a Texan by birth, a mixture of Mexican, Indian
and Negro that they called mestizo in Old Mexico." Even then Farrell respected
Martinez: "He had the kind of brains that criminals rarely have, the kind that keep
you out of alive, out of jail, and with enough money to last beyond the next
week." Martinez is a guy whose ex-girlfriends shed tears when they remember
how good they used to have it together.

Farrell learned enough in his night work that he began smuggling liquor on his
own. In the dozen times since then that he had seen Martinez, his friend "had
had some kind of new racket, and had been doing well with it."

What Farrell doesn't know is Martinez has stolen a perfect set of counterfeit

plates and the bad guys are after his buddy. Martinez, on the other hand,
knows the score. Going to the cops meant time behind bars. Returning the
plates was an admission of defeat and submission to execution. "All that was
left was to make war."

The situation Farrell has stumbled into -- a band of counterfeiters out to kill the
renegade Martinez -- can leave Farrell and his buddy as roadkill. Farrell's fight
to save his friend is tooth and claw to the bittersweet end.

Farrell has to find his friend before the evildoers do. Dixie Ray Chavez, the
hired killer out to beat Farrell, tells his bosses, "Martinez has three friends in
New Orleans. I'm bettin' he'll go to one of `em for help, sooner or later." Who
gets there first gets to shoot first.

Chavez is one mean dude. He tortures one friend of Martinez "with a hot iron `til
her heart gave out." On another victim, "it looked as though skin had been
flayed from her." Dixie Ray Chavez is a tuning fork for other bad guys to home
in on. He "liked to think of himself as a bullet who stayed on course until the job
was done." Chavez plans to be there before Farrell and gone before the
Treasury agents stumble in.

Farrell and Pale Shadow are fun for all Farrell's secrets, the most important
being that he is Creole and passing for white in a racist society. His next best
secret is his close relationship with his father, Frank Casey, a red-headed Irish
cop ready to retire from the New Orleans Police department.

Skinner has written four previous Wesley Farrell novels and four nonfiction
books about the hard--boiled detective tradition. He is actually a well-respected
academic at Xavier University in New Orleans.

Pale Shadow takes place during September, 1940, in New Orleans, when the
Negro Detective Squad covered the crimes the white guys won't and backed off
the "white" cases. A time for riverboat gambling. A time when "a well-dressed
man with a slick line of jive" can go a long way.

The counterfeiters are pros: "The engraving technique is so good that the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing is jealous. And the paper is good enough to
fool ninety-seven percent of the people who touch it."

No all cops in Pale Shadow are good guys, either, which surprises no one who
knows New Orleans and its histories. "If there had existed in Detective Matty
Paret even a scintilla of honesty, he might have been an outstanding detective.
He was intelligent, thoughtful, and even possessed a certain shrewd insight into
the foibles of his fellow man. Had he liked money a little less and hard work
more, he'd have been a sergeant already."

I envelope myself in this mythical past of crooked cops, honest robbers and the
gray people who slide between them like a sharpened knife edge. I luxuriate in
the world I am too young to have ever been a party to, a world I most likely
would never have survived within, a world that helps me deal the real, everyday
villains on the front page and the cable headlines.

Wesley Farrell is a questionable hero in the same way that the 1930 and 1940
movies celebrated questionable heroes with actors like Humphrey Bogart, Dick
Powell, and Bob Mitchum. Skinner writes, "Farrell moved silently through the
crowd, his eyes glowing in that peculiar way from the shadow of his hat brim.
Occasionally somebody felt the feral quality emanating from him and stepped to
the side, hurriedly dragging a companion from Farrell's path." Locals whisper
his name when he passes.

Wes Farrell has that classic tenuous relationship with the cops, too. He has
some friends, but even his friends suspect there's much wisdom percolating
behind his mulatto features.

Yes, Wesley Farrell is biracial. So few writers are multicultural, and yet this
world grows more so every day. True cities like New Orleans have always been
multicultural -- although that phrase is still rings new to the city and the world --
and yet Farrell is not part of that 1940s racist past. In the real 1940s Farrell's
story would have been played out as another Example of the Tragic Mulatto, or
worse the Tragic Half-breed. (Think of Paul Newman playing Elmore Leonard's
Hombre; a man so marginalized, he isn't allowed a name until after he dies
saving all the whites.)

Farrell passes for white, and many call him "the great white hope, Wes Farrell,
who reaches down to help all the poor, helpless niggers in distress." Farrell
generally pulls off the masquerade, but not all the times. "Men never asked him
why he did the things he did. It was always the women who tried to understand,
who wanted an explanation for why he behaved in ways that were inexplicable in
a white man."

Skinner gives these denizens of New Orleans the wonderful names that 1940s
crime novels thrive upon: Wisteroa Mullins, Little Head Lucas, cheap thugs
named Tink and Rojo, Margaret "Jelly" Wilde, Marcel Aristide and Theron
Oswald.

I love this world where bodyguards and bouncers can be murdered silently in the
night, this frontier of hard-boiled and noir. Where cons talk of "dumb twists,"
cons mumble about `ofays," where only four aces always win.

A world that of course includes classic femme fatales: "She was tall, maybe
five-seven, with a lean, high-breasted figure and velvety skin the color of hark
honey." She has a devastating effect on men, too. Even men hard as rock get
goofy; "he had the insane urge to race around the room on all fours while he
barked the lyrics to `Jingle Bells.'"

These are dangerous women. One of Skinner's gloriously described femmes
owns and operates Sparrow's Joint, a most curious night club down along the
riverfront warehouses. "Her sallow skin and bold, handsome features were
those of a Jew or an Arab, Farrell had never known which." Sparrow tells
Farrell, "I'll simply tell you to be careful. The other side of the world is on fire

now, but evil energy is in the air even here."

Skinner doesn't over-furnish the 1940s. We get just enough to locate us in that
special time and place. A man might wear "a carefully trimmed mustache" and
"a stylish Wilton fedora tipped over his right ear." Another has a collarless shirt
and thick glasses made of window glass. A neon sign has the colorful shape of
"a top-hatted crawdish leaning negligently against a martini glass." Drinkers
toss down rye highballs in juke joints. Where men keep bottles of whiskey and
Colt .38 Supers in their suitcases.

Pale Shadow unfolds like a movie, and I love watching as "Farrell moved
through the noise and destruction like a hot wind, his rage and blood lust blotting
out all but the faceless shadow that retreated down toward the opposite end of
the building. His gun jumped in his hand until the hammer fell on an empty
chamber."

I love the town that Skinner loves. New Orleans is a border town between the
races. More complex than a love affair, and more shifting than standing on
quicksand. "The center of New Orleans was beating like a healthy heart, and
the death of a Negro woman in Gentilly meant little or nothing to the teeming life
of Rampart Street." Meanwhile, at the bordello, one can hear the bells at Holy
Ghost Catholic Church. We may want to visit Maxwell's Chicken Shack on
Derbigny Street or the Sassafrass Lounge for an matinee drink.

Pale Shadow is great fun. It's fun to watch how Skinner makes sure all the
interested parties keep abreast of exposition. Pale S

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Martindale. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual climate of modernity. It is clearly written and compelling in its argument. It takes the reader from the intellectual positions of the medieval church through the upheavals of the Reformation, into the early eighteenth century, where the paranoid individual becomes a stock literary character and a suspicious slant informs the political analysis of so many major intellectuals. As a college professor, I have often noticed my students' tendency to find plots everywhere: in government, in the media, in our economic system. Their essays are peppered with references to "the system," a large, ubiquitious, invisible entity that is somehow everywhere are nowhere. They are also convined of something called "society," which seems, in their minds, to be a large kabal continually plotting to erode their dignity, autonomy, and self-esteem. When I push them for evidence of these sinister bodies, I'm often treated as naive or unreasonable. It is therefore refreshing and illuminating to read a monograph which so precisely traces the roots of our culture's habits of speech and argument. John Farrell is that double rarity: an erudite author without pretension and an academic with no axe to grind.

John Farrell's brilliant new book is as thoroughgoing a critique of modernism as you will ever see. Farrell illustrates how we have given up on ourselves, and spent 400 years covering up our needless defeat.
The clear first chapter explains the outline of his thinking, the comparison of Gawain and the Green Knight with Don Quixote illustrates the nature of the problem, and from Martin Luther through Rousseau we see how modernism is played out. Now we are living with it.
This should be the book of the year for college faculties. It will not be as popular as Alan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind," but it is more profound and good for the soul.

This is a great companion for an excellent textbook.
The cases are appealing and written really interesting manner, highlighting the most important concepts presented in "Principles of Pharmacology: The Pathophysiologic Basis of Drug Therapy".
By adding a smart dose of clinical medicine to pharmacology, the workbook helps to bridge the traditional gap between basic science and clinical medicine.
Students will find this book a valuable resource for turning a tough subject into something really enjoyable. Lecturers will also value it as an excellent teaching tool. In fact, I would say it's a must have for any pharmacology instructor.
Congratulations to Drs Golan and Farrell!

This review is simply a copy of my evaluation of the main book, "Principles of Pharmacology: The Pathophysiologic Basis of Drug Therapy", 2e by D. Golan et al.

The second edition is usually better than the first one, and the first one was simply excellent! A great book -I mean, the book mentioned above-, with a problem-based learning approach in mind, updated and with many new and important chapters (Protein Therapies, Drug Delivery Advances, Pharmacogenetics, among others). The good thing with this book is that any chapter deals with the necessary coverage of anatomy, physiology, pathology and so on before coming to the drugs facts. With the early med student in mind, the book will be useful for any health related career. The book is clear, is concise -notwithstanding comprehensive-, and with a complete set of drug facts tables at the end of most chapters. Simply said, the kind of book I'd liked to write myself.

One more thing: The book is brilliantly complemented by its companion book, "Principles of Pharmacology Workbook" -the book reviewed here-, by S. Farrell, a great account of more than 100 clinical cases regarding each chapter of the main book, with no less than five questions -and their corresponding answers- for every one of the cases. The ideal complement to make this couple of books the best pharmacology books in the scene today. I work very actively with both of them in teaching my own pharmacology courses.

Wow! What a joy to read a history book on the development of a revolutionary Marxist leadership in the United States that's written by a lifelong participant. Dobbs, a working-class militant in the Midwest, tells how he became a communist because the Marxists were the most consistent fighters for the workers. In this book, Dobbs traces the continuity of revolutionary Marxist leadership from its origins in Europe to the United States. He describes how indigenous revolutionaries joined with immigrant fighters to form the early U.S. communist movement. In light of the current U.S. war against the peoples of the Middle East, Dobbs' account of the challenges to maintaining revolutionary communist perspectives in the context of imperialist war is particularly important for revolutionaries today.

Dobbs does not delve in the minutiae of small radical sects. Instead, he places the growth of socialism and the birth of communist movement in the context of a concise, but vivid history of working class life and struggle in the USA and of the influences of the world beyond that. This is a book written to arm fighters against oppression, fighters for workers rights with their history. Dobbs also provides in one chapter a concise history of Marx and Engels struggles to build the First International. The most interesting to me was his story of how he went from being a forman at Western Electric and a small store owner to being one of the great leaders of the labor upsurge of the 1930s and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.

Redemption is never impossible, and that's what Steve Caplan and Al Richards discover in Satan Enraged.

The two con men are just out of prison and plotting their next moves when Caplan has a horrifying experience. He collapses in his apartment, and has an out-of-body encounter with two evil looking men who try to drag him away. Panic stricken, he fights them off managing to escape back into his body.
When he regains consciousness he reflects on this, and we discover that the two 'men' are actually the demons, Shamaaz and Ashtar, who, not expecting such violent reaction to their attempts at a casual pickup, let their guard down sufficiently to allow Caplan to escape.
Now they can't deliver his soul and Satan is not happy. What follows is their attempt to keep Caplan from straying off the beaten path, and away from the straight and narrow. If they don't succeed, they'll be adorning Satan's office permanently - as two new pieces of leather furniture.
Their attempts are at times funny, and at times scary, but always unexpected. Shamaaz and Ashtar try to be Caplan's puppet masters but he works with a whole different set of strings.
The fun comes in watching how Caplan and his partner Richards never act totally as they should and continue to make life frustrating for the guardian demons.
Have you ever seen the movie where the spirit of a man doesn't quite make it to Heaven? Well this one poses as many challenges for the forces of darkness as that one did for the forces of good.
A thoroughly enjoyable book!

Rob Vogt said it much better than I could!

Review by Rob Vogt, Reporter, Claresholm Local Press

Redemption is never impossible, and that's what Steve Caplan and Al Richards discover in Satan Enraged.

The two con men are just out of prison and plotting their next moves when Caplan has a horrifying experience. He collapses in his apartment, and has an out-of-body encounter with two evil looking men who try to drag him away. Panic stricken, he fights them off managing to escape back into his body.
When he regains consciousness he reflects on this, and we discover that the two 'men' are actually the demons, Shamaaz and Ashtar, who, not expecting such violent reaction to their attempts at a casual pickup, let their guard down sufficiently to allow Caplan to escape.
Now they can't deliver his soul and Satan is not happy. What follows is their attempt to keep Caplan from straying off the beaten path, and away from the straight and narrow. If they don't succeed, they'll be adorning Satan's office permanently - as two new pieces of leather furniture.
Their attempts are at times funny, and at times scary, but always unexpected. Shamaaz and Ashtar try to be Caplan's puppet masters but he works with a whole different set of strings.
The fun comes in watching how Caplan and his partner Richards never act totally as they should and continue to make life frustrating for the guardian demons.
Have you ever seen the movie where the spirit of a man doesn't quite make it to Heaven? Well this one poses as many challenges for the forces of darkness as that one did for the forces of good.
A thoroughly enjoyable book!

Review by Rob Vogt, Reporter, Claresholm Local Press.

Despite the length of The Seven Days of My Creation, I could not put it down until I had finished it. I am amazed that this book has not been taken up by a major publisher.

Jani Roberts writes eloquently and engagingly. She has had a uniquely interesting life, which she shares with her readers with immense honesty. Hers is the tale of an English lad who ends up becoming an Australian lady; of a Catholic priest who becomes a Wiccan priestess. She avoids the bitterness and negativity that can mar the outlook of some converts from one faith to another and retains immense respect for much of the Catholic Christian tradition, looking for points of contact between her Christian past and her Pagan present.

She describes in great detail the psychological struggle of one who from a young age felt as if he had been born into the wrong body - the eventual operation being a way of liberating the spirit within rather than simply altering the body without.

Along the way, Jani shares a phenomenal amount of information about religious history, Aboriginal Australian culture and spirituality and the struggle for social justice in the face of the duplicity and aggression of massive multinational mining companies. Her lifetime of dedication to this work for justice, especially for Indigenous Peoples, colours this description of her inner journey.

The book is a triumph of honesty, integrity and the balancing of spiritual and political struggle.

This book is an amazing spiritual synthesis by an incredible woman who has done activist work for Australian Aborigines, written expose whistleblowing journalism all over the world, and struggled to find a spiritual path that connects with her mystical communion with the natural world. This book is a journey through ancient paganism, the core activism of early Christianity, the explorations of Gnosticism, the heresies of the Middle Ages, and the traces of pagan survival into the present. For those seeking ecological, spiritual, and gender justice, this book is highly recommended! Whether you are Christian, Wiccan, a Deep Ecologist, interested in Transgender studies, or just an unlabeled person curious about connection to the natural world and the cultural history behind such connection, Seven Days of My Creation is the book for you!

The book was recommended by my UCLA French teacher. It helps to simplify some of the complexities of the language.

I've never used this book very much. I know that one of the students I tutored in French used it. When I saw it, I realized that the book was a French version of Side-By-Side Spanish and English Grammar. I used the Spanish version to learn everthing about English grammar before I learned its Spanish counterpart. This book is just like that, except it explains English grammar, and then French.

Both books explain the following:

Parts of Speech
Nouns
Pronouns
Adjectives
Adverbs
Conjunctions
Interjections
Prepositions
Verbs

Brandon Simpson

The bloody Siege of Krishnapur in 1857 is the pivot around which the action revolves in this Booker Award-winning novel by J. G. Farrell, but Farrell's focus is less on Krishnapur and the siege than it is on the attitudes and beliefs of the English colonizers who made that siege an inevitability. He puts these empire-builders under the microscope, then skewers their arrogant and superior attitudes with the rapier of his wit, subjecting them to satire and juxtaposing them and their narrowly focused lives against the realities of the world around them.

Remarkably, he does this with enough subtlety that we can recognize his characters as individuals, rather than total stereotypes, at the same time that we see their absurdity and recognize the damage they have done in their zeal to spread their "superior" culture.

From the opening pages, Farrell builds suspense as the English colony ignores reports of unrest in Barrackpur, Berhampur, and Meerut. The flirtations of the single women, the amorous attentions of the young men, the boorish and insensitive behavior of the officials, the gossipy whispering of their wives, and the unrelenting efforts to maintain the same society they enjoyed at home--with tea parties, poetry readings, and dances--all attest to their degree of isolation from the world around them.

When violence breaks out in Krishnapur and all the inhabitants take refuge in the colonial Residence, Farrell turns it into a microcosm which illuminates their misplaced values and goals as they interact with each other and face dangers from without--and from within. The siege continues for more than three months, with bloodshed, disease, starvation, lack of water and medicine, and the summer weather taking their toll.

Farrell's dark humor is unparalleled. Using irony, understatement, and a sense of the absurd, he conveys his disapproval of colonialism without resorting to the harshness of polemics. By concentrating exclusively on the English in the Residence and not on India's local population (ironically reflecting the approach of the colonizers themselves), he makes their behavior appear ridiculous in its own right, rather than ridiculous in comparison to other cultures. Mr. Rayne, the Opium Agent, calls the sale of opium, "progress." The Padre cannot understand why the Bible was originally written in an obscure language like Hebrew, rather than English, which is "spoken in every corner of every continent." A dying man offering up his last, heartfelt prayer is told by the Magistrate, "Yes, yes, to be sure, don't worry about it." The heads from a collection of small sculptures of the "great minds of Europe" are used as deadly explosives when shot becomes scarce.

Through his precise imagery, his acute eye for memorable and revealing details, his unerring ear for dialogue, his ability to maintain pace and suspense, and his humor, Farrell creates a historical novel with the enduring qualities which make it as relevant today as it was when published thirty years ago. Mary Whipple

I had never heard of J.G. Farrell or The Siege of Krishnapur until one day I was scanning a list of winner of England's Booker Prize and I noticed that Siege was out-of-print in America. I was so intrigued I sent off to England for it, but it is now also available in the U.S.

The novel narrates the story of the British community at Krishnapur during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when the entire community holed up in the Residency (like a governor's palace) for months under siege. Farrell's style is highly cinematic, reminiscent of great movie epics about that era, such as "The Man Who Would Be King," - lots of scope, majesty, explosions, and bright-red uniforms, added to the day-to-day domestic squabbles of the community. Farrell's take is not a shallow war novel though; he is witty, ironic, inspired, and sad in turn.

The book features remarkable turns of fortune and engaging details on every page, all of which were dramatically motivated and apt. (Examples: When the besieged run out of ammunition, they create canister shot by stuffing ladies' stockings with silverware. There's a sudden infestation of flying bugs that will make you jump right out of your chair. Two doctors have an argument about the cause of cholera with dramatic consequences. A lucky shot by a Lieutenant....well I won't spoil it for you.)

The main character, the Collector, seems to stand in for all of Britain as he is transformed by his Indian experience: first arrogance and a passion for bringing British `civilization' to the uncivilized, then bravado as he stands up to the initial assaults, then despair as he watches the failure of mere ingenuity to overcome the natives. In a wonderful little coda at the end of the book you can see how he has been utterly transformed by the experience.

A wonderful find, a 'must read'! I'm off to read the rest of Farrell's novels!