Time off

Continuing the holiday -- Christmas day is over and I am not going into work until 3 January, so there is a strange period of spending time at home without the structure of domestic jobs usually applied to weekends in order to be ready for the next Monday. Started to read "Solace" by Nikki Gerard last night -- as usual excellently written and readable. This is the second of her "stand alone" books, and if it is like the first will be the anatomy of a family coping with domestic adversity. The crime novels Gerard writes with her partner Sean French under the names of "Nikki French" are also great reads. The plotting is taut and tension-filled, but I have read that the TV versions do not work as well (never watch TV). This seems to be common with TV or movie versions of good (or bad) thrillers; what works on the page does not on screen. Novels can exist in their characters' heads in a way that movies rarely do. The movie "The Sixth Sense" pulled this off most successfully in my experience -- and that was an original screenplay, not a story adapted from a novel.