I am going to write a review of every book I read this year.
O’Reilly, J. 2020. Curse the Day. London: Head of Zeus. pp414
Highly entertaining, utterly ludicrous military thriller with an indestructible/needs no sleep/has bullet in brain superhero called Michael North (it’s always two syllable forename, one syllable surname, no?)
This is the second in what is a series (a third has been published) and picks up three months after Jason Bou… sorry, Michael North has killed seven people who were responsible for the murder of the woman he l… sorry, Woman He Loved. He’s brought back from a kill-myself-with-booze bender (think Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas) in Berlin to protect the wife of an AI genius who is…
Oh, look, there’s cartoon evil politicians, cartoon military types, a manic pixie dream genius hacker 14 year old.
There’s good set pieces (a massacre at the British Museum involving gunmen wearing masks of Nietzsche, Plato etc) a killer octopus (no, really). What else do you want?
Nobody is editing books anymore, it seems – there’s various purple patches (see below) that could be cut, a “peak crescendo,” a glaring continuity error (page 208) and some howlers “Fang considered biting Lilith’s wrist – going for an arterial vein” (p292). Arterial vein? Eh? It’s also about 40 pages too long, but whatever.
The ludicrousness (ludicricity) of it aside, was I diverted? Did I want to know what happened? Yes and yes.
Would I read another? – sure, even though life is short and there’d be an opportunity cost.
Bought – December 29, 2025 for a quid at the Cat’s Protection Charity shop in Stone
Fate – read and returned to Cat’s Protection January 2nd 2026
Choice quotes
Then he wanted to punch them in the face. Because someone had tried to kill him and the innocent woman alongside him. And call him old-fashioned, but that made him mad. And an angry Michael North was someone who might just kill someone right back.
(O’Reilly, 2020:153)
“But its algorithmic functionality has the capacity to join the dots between computer systems”
(O’Reilly, 2020: 225)
She’d already lost a son and a husband. If they didn’t find Syd, according to Esme, the human race was doomed. Saving the world seemed the least North could do. However dangerous that proved to be.
marchudson.net 
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