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Book reviews for "Watson,_Colin" sorted by average review score:

Death by Deception: Unmasking Heart Failure
Published in Paperback by R F Quinn Pub Co (July, 1996)
Authors: Dick Quinn, Shannon Quinn, Colin Quinn, and Al Watson
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An excellent followup to "Left for Dead"! A must-read!
I completely concur with clangley's review of this book. Death by Deception is the followup book to Dick Quinn's earlier book Left for Dead. In this book, Dick's daughter explains how congestive heart failure is most frequently there waiting for the person who survives a heart attack. She elaborates how cayenne saved her father's life, but how her father relied on it too exclusively to keep him alive and subsequently didn't make the lifestyle changes necessary for him to avoid eventual heart failure. She then goes into excellent detail describing how heart failure develops and what exactly it is. She describes all of the conventional treatments for heart failure and elaborates on the strengths and ultimate weaknesses of these conventional treatments. She then describes a regimen of using natural herbs--including of course cayenne--that help keep both heart attack and congestive heart failure at bay.

I've recommended this book to I don't know how many people. I consider this book a must-read for any male over the age of 35, and a must-read for any female who's approaching menopause, the time heart disease creeps up on many unsuspecting women.

If you don't ever plan on living this long, forget this book! Otherwise, whip out your credit card and order it already!!

A valuable book on congestive heart failure (CHF)
I knew Dick Quinn well. I knew him very well. He was a good friend.

I saw Dick struggle with CHF -- the ultimate outcome of heart disease -- and I saw him recover using an exotic African herb that lengthened his life and made his struggle with this terrible life-threatening illness far less painful. For most, a diagnosis of CHF is a death sentence, but this book gives hope.

This book is the only one of its kind that shows victims of CHF how to get a life sentence instead of a death sentence.

Dick's highly successful lifelong struggle with heart disease and its ultimate outcome - CHF - is an inspiration to anyone struggling with this terrible life-threatening disease. Dick extended his life for many precious days (years actually) using a variety of herbs that modern medicine is reluctant to embrace. Some of these herbs had instant and immediate impact on his vitality. I know because I saw it.

If you have, or know of someone with CHF, this book can help significantly lessen the suffering, and increase lifespans.


Charity Ends at Home
Published in Paperback by Ulverscroft Large Print Books (January, 2003)
Author: Colin Watson
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Mystery, humor, psychology and more with 110% entertainment.
Reading Colin Watson's Flaxborough mysteries will make you feel as if you had lived in the town all your life. You'll see the Flaxborough citizenry through the eyes and in the mind of inspector Purbright not as a panoptikum of criminal suspects but as your neighbors. Watson puts peoples actions, motives and feelings into such a perspective that along with the pure reading entertainment, one could use it as a textbook for Psychology 101 class, yet you will laugh out loud on every other page.


Coffin Scarcely Used
Published in Audio Cassette by ISIS Audio (January, 1994)
Authors: Colin Watson and Joe Dunlop
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An auspicious debut from a subtle master of the genre
Colin Watson's Flaxborough novels are one of those discoveries that readers should treasure. The vein of serious mysteries intertwined with humour had been richly mined by the likes of John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin already when 'Coffin, Scarcely Used' appeared on the scene in 1958. Over the next twenty-odd years, readers would be treated to eleven more outings in the Norfolk town of Flaxborough, each of them slightly more odd than the previous one.

Crime in Flaxborough is met by the resolute Inspector Purbright. In 'Coffin, Scarcly Used', Purbright must determine how the naked body of an electrocuted citizen arrived in a most undignified position on a local electrical pylon. His investigations among the eccentric and somewhat perverse inhabitants of Flax. will reveal that if an accidental death looks somewhat too bizarre to be believed, then it may very likely be murder after all. Watson's talent for creating unusual names and situations for odd characters with shadowy motives, paired with what must have been a most distinctly English sense of humour, set this novel well ahead of most contemporary offerings - forty years ago, and today.

This Black Dagger reprinting of the 1958 Eyre & Spottiswode first edition would be an attractive offering even were it not the only book of Watson's currently in print either in Britain or the US. If you enjoyed 'The Moving Toyshop' by Edmund Crispin or 'Landscape with Dead Dons' by Robert Robinson, then this will most likely be your cuppa too. Highly recommended.


Hopjoy Was Here
Published in Paperback by Dell Pub Co (October, 1982)
Author: Colin Watson
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Brilliant intriguing and humorous mystery
The many twists in the plot mix with brilliantly drawn characters and understated and iconoclastic English humour. Watson takes you into an eccentric world and plot yet is always convincing, readable and entertaining. This is an outstanding book which deserves to be republished.


Conned Again, Watson! Cautionary Tales of Logic, Math, and Probability
Published in Paperback by Perseus Publishing (15 January, 2002)
Author: Colin Bruce
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Excellent in illustrating mathematics through fiction
This is good enough at what it does: illustrating mathematical concepts under the guise of Sherlock Holmes stories. However, I have one beef and that is that Bruce, perhaps through lack of information on his own part, makes Holmes less intelligent than he should be.

My main example is that throughout the book, Holmes and Watson make reference to the year 1900 (their present year) as being the beginning of a new century. I feel certain that Holmes at least would know that centuries do not begin until the year one, in this case 1901. When Watson mentioned it, I felt sure that Bruce was taking the normal tack of making him obviously less intelligent than his partner (the man *is* a doctor, for crying out loud, give him *some* credit), but when Holmes mentions it later, I was duly perturbed.

Bruce also uses characters purely to tack on surprise endings to his stories, one of which did not work for this reviewer. In one story, the pair meet the Reverend Charles Dodgson, which any bibliophile knows is the real name of Lewis Carroll, but does not present this information until the last paragraph of the story. The surprise ending, using the pseudonym, was therefore lost on me.

In another story, there is no solution presented to a murder. This irked me no end at first, but then I realized that there being no solution to the mystery better illustrated the mathematical principle being explained. I still prefer my murders to have solutions, however.

All in all, this is an entertaining book. Bruce's skills as a storyteller and his ability to mix lessons into his stories is commendable. The stories, as Holmes pastiches, ring true overall, only clunking during the details I have mentioned, such as certain actions that seem totally out of character. One other example is when Sherlock and Mycroft are explaining a principle and Sherlock pulls out a graph to illustrate. Bruce (as Watson) writes the following (to the best of my memory): 'I jumped up, knocking over my chair, and cried, 'I have a horror of algebra!'' I couldn't help but laugh! This behavior from one of the most beloved characters in literature?

But, as I said, as a whole the book succeeds, and if you can overlook these details and engross yourself in the superb storytelling, you will enjoy yourself, and probably be educated in the process.

Watson we've got a winner!
If I could guarantee that the author of this book was as wise as his characters, I would marry him sight unseen.
Regardless, this is a book worthy of many readings.

A Wonderful, enjoyable book!
Unlike some other reviewers, I am neither a statistitian nor a Sherlock Holms lover. I never cared much for murder mysteries perse, but as a tool for exploring such interesting concepts I thought it worked well. Yes he took a few liberties with history (as he pointed out in the end notes)--so what?

The stories were not designed to top those of doyle but to make some interesting probability and decision making concepts approachable, relevent, and enjoyable. This they did wonderfully. As someone who was turned off to math after years of dull, abstract school lecture, my interest arose from my work in business and computer science. Some of these concepts were not new to me, but all were from new angles. I found .the math easy to follow(depressingly difficult to predict!) and only wished I had not run out of pages. I plan not only to check out the author's other work, but some of the additional reading he kindly suggests in the notes. Thank you Mr. Bruce for and enjoyable read.


Just What the Doctor Ordered
Published in Paperback by Dell Pub Co (February, 1982)
Author: Colin Watson
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Wit, satire, and mystery, as usual.
Colin Watson, Just What the Doctor Ordered (Dell, 1969)

This slim novel (originally entitled The Flaxborough Crab) is yet another in Colin Watson's excellently twisted series of mysteries centering around a rural British town that makes the place where Murder, She Wrote was set look like a walk in the park. This time, the redoubtable Inspector Purbright and his sidekick Sidney are stuck with an older chap who seems to lurk about attempting to sexually assault women, always failing miserably and the scuttling off sideways when attempting to escape. I'll bet you never thought you'd come across a book that reminds you of a cross between a serial killer novel and the film Better Off Dead. Well, you've got it. Funny thing is, it was written fifteen years before either the film or the rise of the serial killer novel. Go figure.

As usual, Watson laces his story with a heavy dose of the arsenic of social commentary on the supposed pastorality of rural British life. This is funny stuff, but always with a bite to it; the sense of humor comes off as almost bitter in places. Fans of Dorothy Parker will be more amused by this than will fans of Martin and Lewis.

Also as usual, Watson does one of the things that drives me nuts in detective novels: there has to be someone sitting around at the end explaining some of the piece that never got tied up. (Jessica Fletcher, phone home.) However, the sitting-around-explaining bit at the end shouldn't necessarily put you off Watson, because what comes before it is top-notch stuff, even if it is recognizably genre writing. No one will ever mistake Colin Watson for Dashiell Hammett, but the man's turned out some witty, wonderful novels nonetheless. ...


The Great Indian Mutiny: Colin Campbell and the Campaign at Lucknow
Published in Hardcover by Praeger Publishers (August, 1991)
Author: Bruce Watson
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A short and disappointing rehash not worth the money
This is an expensive and I found pretentious little book which offers little new. I say pretentious as it says that it will be different and that it will explain why so few British soldiers so far from support could defeat the much larger army that they did. Having set himself this task the author then fails to deliver and provides instead simply another potted biography. Not much original here. Four out of ten.


Africa Contemporary Record: Annual Survey and Documents, 1986-1987
Published in Hardcover by Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. (October, 1988)
Authors: Colin Legum, Barbara Newson, and Ronald Watson
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The Airline Pilot (What Do They Do)
Published in Paperback by Nelson Thornes (Publishers) Ltd (31 December, 1973)
Authors: Colin Royman, Chris Mayger, and Brian Watson
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Arthur and the Grail
Published in Hardcover by Pan Macmillan (13 October, 1988)
Authors: Hubert Lampo, Pieter-Paul Koster, and Colin Watson
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