Review of "Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story" by Leonie Swann

The town of Glennkill in western Ireland is known for sheep and tourism - an industry that garners nice profits for bed and breakfast owners and pub landlords. We'll meet both shepherds and an innkeeper in this quirky cozy mystery, in which a shepherd is killed and his sheep investigate the murder.



George Glenn is a shepherd who, though married, usually stays in a caravan on his field.







George's sheep agree that a good shepherd is a person 'who never docks the lambs' tails; doesn't keep a sheepdog; provides good fodder and plenty of it, particularly bread and sugar, but healthy things too like green stuff, concentrated feed, and mangelwurzels; and who clothes himself entirely in the products of his own flock, for instance an all-in-one suit made of spun sheep's wool.'





George falls a bit short, but his sheep love him, and don't mind too much when George wakes them early, laughs and says, "You lazy creatures! Come on, get down to work!" The sheep graze while George works in the vegetable garden and makes repairs, and in the afternoon, the sheep gather in front of George's caravan and he reads to them.




Sometimes George reads from a fairy tale, sometimes from a book about diseases of sheep, and once from a detective story. Mostly, however, George reads love stories in which all the heroines are called Pamela and have red hair. George also talks about traveling all over Europe with his flock, and the sheep would love to go, picturing Europe as a huge meadow full of apple trees.



The dream of Europe isn't to be however, because one morning the sheep awaken to find George lying in the green Irish grass beside the hay barn, with a spade driven through his body.



Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill - and quite possibly the cleverest sheep in the whole world - notes that a human killed George, and the flock must find out who murdered him.



All the sheep help investigate, but the primary detectives are Miss Maple; Sir Ritchfield - the lead ram; Zora - a ewe with horns; Mopple The Whale - a stout ram who remembers everything he sees and hears; Othello - a four-horned ram; and Melmoth - Sir Ritchfield's twin brother. Othello had spent his youth in the Dublin Zoo, and considers himself very worldly; and Sir Ritchfield and Melmoth were previously in the circus, which was torturous and harrowing.



After George's body is discovered by the town drunk, the police find George was poisoned before being impaled with the spade. The flock takes note of this, and as part of their investigation, spy on the people in Glennkill.

The sheep learn that the town's most prominent men, including Josh Baxter, an innkeeper/pub owner; Ham, a butcher; Gabriel, a shepherd; and the local clergyman are more anxious than sad about George's death. The men also repeatedly try to break into George's caravan before 'something gets out'. Most of all though, the men are VERY concerned about George's Last Will and Testament, which will be read aloud by George's lawyer.



Conversely, the sheep find that the town's women, including Kate, George's wife; Lilly, a perfumed lady; Beth, a bible thumper; and Rebecca, a newcomer promoting the tourist trade, are distressed about George's death.

It becomes clear that nefarious things have been going on in Glennkill, and the murder of Weasel McCarthy seven years ago - which was never solved by incompetent Inspector Holmes - has some connection with George's demise.





In the end, Miss Maple puts all the clues together, and is convinced she's discovered the killer. So Miss Maple and several other sheep put on a play at the annual 'Smartest Sheep in Glennville' contest, to expose the murderer.

The novel is a unique take on the talking animal mystery. The distress of the people and sheep that loved George give the book a melancholy aura, but much of the novel is fun. For instance:

✸✸ Othello was spying on people in Glennville, and hid in the church confessional. When the pastor discovered he was taking confession from a ram, "[He] gave a high, shrill scream. He ran past the rows of benches, stumbled and fell, got to his feet again, leaped over the iron fence with the candles with a single great, clumsy movement, and disappeared through the small door through which he had come."



✸✸ Miss Maple, Mopple, and Othello were peeking in Beth's window to hear a conversation between Beth and Rebecca. After Mopple ate the geraniums in the window box to provide a clear view, "it looked as if Beth had planted three sheep's heads in her window box."



✸✸ The sheep were annoyed when Gabriel brought his flock to their pasture, and did something about it. As Gabriel was watching, "A Blackface sheep had stumbled and fallen on the grass. The sheep picked itself up with difficulty. After a couple of steps it fell over again. Behind it, a second sheep stumbled. A fat ram was rubbing his head on the wall of the hay barn as if possessed...Shit! said Gabriel. Scrapie. Shit, shit, shit!" Gabriel gathered his sheep at record speed and left.



The sheep get too philosophical at times, and their conversations are sometimes overly long. All in all though, this is an enjoyable cozy mystery.

I had a digital copy of the book and the audiobook, narrated by Caroline Lennon, who does a fine job. It's amusing to hear the sheep's voices. 😊

This book has been adapted to a movie called 'The Sheep Detectives.'



Rating: 3.5 stars

Review of "Children of Strife: #4 in the Children of Time Series" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is the fourth book in the 'Children of Time' series, but it can be read as a standalone. To bring readers up to speed (or refresh their memories), Tchaikovsky provides a précis of the previous novels in a foreword. Tchaikovsky's synopsis is detailed, but I'll boil it down to a nutshell.



Background (very briefly): Earth is approaching environmental destruction, and humanity decides to branch out to the stars. Brilliant scientist Avrana Kern devises ways to terraform distant planets to make them hospitable for Earth life.

Kern develops a nanovirus that speeds up evolution, intending to uplift lower primates to human status. Instead, the nanovirus upgrades Portiids (spiders), octopuses, and stomatopod crustraceans (mantis shrimp), all of whom develop sophisticated societies with advanced technology.







At the same time, a planet named Nod is found to harbor an alien organism that is a composite of microbial life. The Nodan organism has perfect recall of its entire past and can invade other beings and take over their minds. In time, humans and Nodans are able to form joint organisms that retain separate identities.



After much difficulty, strife, wars, and negotiation, things settle down. Humans, intelligent invertebrates, and Nodan beings develop a rapprochement and are able to undertake joint missions.

By now, Avrana Kern has made herself immortal by becoming an uploaded artificial mind. So Kern can be EVERYWHERE, in every spaceship/environment hosting her lifeforms.



*****

Children of Strife toggles among three stories in three timelines that eventually converge. I'm going to provide a very quick overview of each narrative, being circumspect to avoid spoilers.

✨✨ The First Age: Planet Hartland

This story is narrated by Redina Kott, a sociopathic troublemaker who delights in ruining people's lives just for fun. Kott hides her intentions behind a permanent fake smile.



In this storyline, billionaire Gerey Hartmand is a megalomaniac and implacable rival of Avrana Kern. Hartmand viciously fights Kern for terraforming rights, but she wins and he loses. So Kern gets almost all the suitable exoplanets and Kern is left with one distant world to prepare for human habitation.



Hartmand acquires a terraforming ship run by an AI, and assembles a team of four narcissistic visionaries with god complexes: Sui Dorcherson, Ken Pil, Ottis Milner, and Redina Kott. Collectively, the crew specialize in geosciences, biosciences, cybernetics, and logistics. The visionaries arrive at their exoplanet - which Hartmand names 'Hartland' - and proceed to apply their terraforming methods.

The plan is to start with artificial organic soil rich in biological and geochemical elements, and a handful of engineered microbes. First, the microbes would liberate oxygen, pump out heat, and free water. Then, as the environment changed, the microbes would mutate, evolve into increasingly complex life forms, and approach Earth-standards. "In the models it had become a livable world in just a few years, ready for trees and bears and whatever you wanted. And people."

The plan fails time and time again until Pil makes an adjustment resulting in unregulated growth of fungi and bugs....enormous bugs.



Hartmand's team tries all kinds of fixes, but things approach disaster territory. I don't want to give away too much, so let's say the Hartmand contingent proceeds with a novel idea.

For fun, here's a depiction of Ken Pil, an aging genius innovator:. "Pil was in his sling as usual, and had a bare, calloused foot up on one of the panels....He was using it to push off from occasionally, to keep him swinging...He had a face that had outgrown its own cosmetic surgery, so that parts of it were wrinkling at different rates, sagging here, taut there...He was a wizard of head candy with a clientele of one [and] had a whole pharmacopeia of elixirs that had exact and calibrated effects on him."



*****

✨✨The Second Age - Ark Ship Marduk

Many thousands of years after the First Age, Earth is on its last tether, no longer able to sustain life. Ark ships are being launched to carry people to exoplanets that (hopefully) will be suitable for humanity.



Lamya Cosimir is tapped to be captain of the ark ship Marduk, whose destination is chosen because of an unearthed ancient recording.



In translation, the recording says: "I say to you, my followers, my faithful, when you are at your utmost of fear and deprivation, know that there is a place prepared for you. I have made a world only for you...Build your ships and come to me, for only here in all the sky can be found perfection. I, Gerey Hartmand, decree it."

Humanity is desperate, and ark ships are being sent to ANY potentially hospital planet, so the authorities decide to give Hartmand's destination a shot.



Cosimir's crew consists of a security chief, engineering team, science team, project manager, classicist, and a few others, with a cargo of thousands of people in pods - to populate the new planet.



The Marduk launches and travels for millennia, with the crew and cargo in a sleep state. When the Marduk arrives at what (we know) is Hartland, the crew wakes up and sees a planet that has infrastructure and seems conducive to human life. However, no one greets the Marduk, and there's some peculiar massive growth from the planet into the vacuum of space.

Cosimir and the crew make startling discoveries, and when the Marduk becomes endangered, they scramble to wake up the pod residents and get them down to the planet.

For interest, here's the condition of the cargo when the Marduk arrives at its destination: "Seventeen percent...cargo spoilage...seventeen was higher than predicted, and of course you always harboured some mad dream of zero. Seventeen percent of their cargo was showing as dead...Someone who had gone to sleep on Earth, having faith in the technology, the system, the good intentions of it all, but they'd never wake up."



*****

✨✨ The Third Age - The Research Vessel Dissenter

Many thousands of years have passed since The Second Age. The Dissenter, a research vessel run by the Avrana Kern AI, has been through hard times; the crew has been at odds; and the vessel has been separated into two parts.

What I'll call 'Part A' of Dissenter harbors the following occupants:

Captain Cato - a stomatopod as large as a human whose claws and appendages contain powerful guns/cannons. True to his combative stomatopod nature, Cato takes offense at everything, and his first instinct is to punch, injure, and kill....even his own crewmates. For this reason, Cato constantly struggles to restrain himself.



Alis - Alis is a human researcher who was removed from Imir, a world where she lived in endless alternate realities. Because of this, Alis has trouble recognizing the real world, and she's been in therapy with a counselor called Mira.



Portia and Fabian - Portia and Fabian are large spiders who do research. The portiids dislike each other, so it's a wrench when both their minds are uploaded into a single spider-shaped robot called Portifabian. The rival intellects struggle to perform as a single entity, and speak in garbled sentences and have confused thoughts. Eventually they work it out.



What I'll call 'Part B' of Dissenter contains the following occupants:

Helena, Galean, Leus, and Polonius - human and spider researchers.





Mira - Mira, a therapist, is a combination human woman and Nodal organism. This gives her extraordinary abilities. Mira has been counseling Alis, and the two 'women' look remarkably alike.



As soon as Dissenter gets to the vicinity of (what we know as) planet Hartland, Part B goes close to investigate the world. Problems ensue, and Mira takes a pod that crash lands on the planet.

When Captain Cato, Alis, and Portifabian in Dissenter Part A go to search for their companions, they're alerted by Mira's beacon on the planet. The threesome+ mount a rescue operation and have a rough landing, but luckily, their vehicle can repair itself.



I don't want to give away too much, so I'll just say there's a colony of humans on Hartland that live in a walled community called Four Dragon Ford. The colony seems like a combination of 20th century Earth and ancient Greece. The residents have weapons - guns, lasers, and flame throwers, but they make sacrifices to appease the 'Life'- the organic components of the planet.



Once all survivors from Dissenter are on Hartland, all the parts of the book come together.

For illustration, here's Cato communicating:. "Cato, in fact, has been signaling to Kern. The gestural language he's using is exceptionally rich and full of qualifiers, imparted by the motions of various parts of his limbs and body...plus an amount of subtext communicated pheromonally through the water... The colours, a panoply of iridescences, sheens, hues, eyespots and metallic patches, all interacting very deliberately with the  light."

****

The science fiction in this series focuses on biology and evolution, and the author is obviously concerned about climate change and over-exploitation of the Earth. It would be great if series like 'Children of Time' helped convince doubters, but I'm not hopeful. There are people whose drive for personal wealth and power overrides concern for the planet, and 'head in the sand syndrome' spreads down the line.

This is an excellent continuation of the series. Highly recommended to sci-fi fans.

Thanks to Netgalley, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Orbit for an ARC of the book.

Rating: 4 stars