Nothing could be more attractive than the central idea of _The Love Spinner_ (METHUEN), which is to tell the war-time adventures of a little old lady--the good fairy of her circle--whose interest in the heart-affairs of her friends wins her this pleasant if slightly sentimental title. But, ungrateful as is the task of breaking so innocent a butterfly upon the wheel of criticism, I'm afraid I must add that I think Miss CLARA TURNBULL has hardly carried out her purpose with sufficient discrimination. In plain fact she has allowed her sympathies to run away with her. Such a character as _Miss Jessie_, who goes about doing good, and producing incidentally the most benevolent reactions in confirmed misanthropes, demands to be handled with the nicest care if sentimentality is to be avoided. Let me put it that Miss TURNBULL has not always been entirely successful in this respect. Thus, despite some agreeable scenes, the book remains one for the unsophisticated, or for those whose appetite for fictional glucose is robust. There is not very much that can be called plot; what there is concerns itself with the fortunes of _Miss Jessie's_ tenants, the chief objects of her ministrations. In the end an air-raid, of which the details are surely unusual, provides _Miss Jessie_ with the opportunity for a deed of heroism that I am still trying to visualize (her nephew had thrown her down and was protecting her body with his own; but the heroine, seeing this, changed places with her defender "between the flash of the shell's impact and the explosion") and finishes, with an appropriately tearful death-scene, a tale that would have been improved by more restraint in the telling. In _The Thunderbolt_ (UNWIN) _Georgina Bonham_, at home and amongst her intimates, delighted in small-talk. It flowed in an unceasing stream, particularly when _Dr. Rayke_, her chief adviser and confidant, came to tea and ate his favourite currant-and-sultana cake. Everything, in fact, prepares you for one of the tamest of all tame novels, when suddenly the "Thunderbolt" of the title remembers its attributes and bursts from a clear sky. Thenceforward Mr. GEORGE COLMORE'S book is of a particularly painful character. For the horrors which here accumulate on horror's head I find no adequate excuse, even though the villain of the story is a German. * * * * *