Classics, detective, mystery, Series I love

Classic Mystery Series: Miss Marple

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In honour of the new Miss Marple continuation by Lucy Foley which came out this week in the US (and at the end of the monht in the UK) this week’s series post is on Agatha Christie’s classic series, which by some mad oversight I haven’t previously written to a series post for. How fortitous for us all

I mean I’m not sure that there is anyone who doesn’t know who Miss Marple is at this point, but just in case there is someone out there and reading this who doesn’t, I will still recap you the set up. Jane Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St Mary Mead. The first novel that features her isThe Murder at the Vicarage, where an unpopular church warden is found shot dead in the vicar’s study, which is told from the point of view of the vicar, who sees her as just another of the elderly village women – but in reality she is a close observer of human nature and very astute. In this early book she is a little harder and less easy to like than she becomes later in the series – the rest of the village find her nosiness tiresome but as you go through the series she becomes more of the person that people in the village go to when they have a problem that they need to solve – which is closer to the characterisation that you find in the Joan Hickson adaptations if you are familiar with them (which I am very, very familiar with!).

There are 12 novels in the series (and numerous short stories) and with the exclusion of the final book if you read them in order you see Miss Marple ageing and growing more infirm in body (definitely not in mind!) even if the age that she is varies wildly going up and down between books. The exception is Sleeping Murder which was written to be the final story and published posthumously in 1976 but actually written and set in the mid 1940s and so some of the character developments that have occurred over the previous books in the series aren’t there. I was terrified by the cover of the edition of Sleeping Murder my mum had when I was first reading these (aged about 11) which had knitting needles in a woman’s eyes for some reason, and the TV adaptation of it was one of my least favourites and so I hadn’t actually read it for years until this year and actually now I like it a lot more than I did. In fact now I’ve revisited all of them it is considerably higher up my list than it was.

I listened to them all (as you could see from the Week in Books I guess) over the last few months in preparation for reading the Lucy Foley and I think my favourites are The Body in the Library, A Murder is Announced and Nemesis, but it’s hard to decide. I definitely know which ones I like less (The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, They Do It With Mirrors and Caribbean Mystery) but because I’ve watched the Joan Hickson adaptations so many times and I have favourites among them it can sometimes be hard to separate the book from the adaptation – even though there are often a fair few differences. But Miss Marple’s shrewd judgement of human nature and ability to find a village parallel remains across it all – and as the times change and the world changes around her, her ability to unflinchingly find the person responsible for a crime makes for a great read.

They remain one of the exemplar series of classic Golden Age mystery and I love them for it.

Book previews

Out Today: We Solve Murders sequel

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Cover of We Chase Shadows

Happy Thursday everyone and today it’s the release day for what I suspect is goig to be one of the biggest sellers of the autumn releases this year: Richard Osman’s follow-up to We Solve Murders, We Chase Shadows. According to the blue Steve, Rosie and Amy are back. There’s a body on the steps of an Italian Villa and finding the killer will see them in Italy, Palm Springs and Barcelona. It’s going to be absolutely everywhere in the shops and is going to be my airport purchase the next time I go somewhere because I really enjoyed the action adventure fun of the first book and I’m interested to see what Osman does next with the characters.

books on offer

Recommendsday: September Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of September and that means it’s Kindle offer o’clock and it’s a real bumper one this month – probably because it’s a bumper release month too.

Cover of Lessons in Chemistry

In books I read and enjoyed: Bonnie Garmus‘s Lessons in Chemistry is 99p, presumably ahead of the release of her new book next month, same story with Ashley Herring Blake‘s Dream on Ramona Riley except that third book is out the end of this month. There’s also Katherine Center‘s The Rom-Commers, Kate Claybourn‘s The Paris Match, Jess Kidd‘s A Murder at Gull’s Nest, Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby, Lissa Evans‘s Small Bomb at Dimperley, Richard E Grant‘s A Pocketful of Happiness, Dan Jones’s The Hollow Crown, How to End a Rom-Com by Yulin Kuang and one of the rare award nominated books that I’ve read and liked Rose Tremain‘s Restoration and Kevin Kwan‘s Crazy Rich Asians which is £1.49.

Right on to the series: the first in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, The Word is Murder is 99p, the Discworld is The Fifth Elephant (one of the Watch novels) and Tiffany Aching’s Guide to being a Witch, the fifth Canon Clement mystery A Death on Location, Tales from the Cafe the second in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, the first Agatha Raisin – the Quiche of Death as well as the first Hamish MacBeth Death of a Gossip

In historical romances there’s Julia Quinn’s The Secrets of Richard Kenworthy and the Georgette Heyer is Arabella, In classic novels we have Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Muriel Spark‘s A Far Cry from Kensington, R J Palacio’s Wonder and a little bit of non-fiction with Mary S Lovell’s The Mitford Girls,

On to stuff I haven’t read yet – last year’s Emily Henry Great Big Beautiful Life and B K Borison First Time Caller, the Miss Hortense sequel Miss Hortense and the Last Rites and the second and third books in Kate Mosse’s Languedoc series.

Things I bought while writing this: Thinking Fast and Slow, When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between (there are also a couple of Gavin and Stacey cast memoirs on off – from Joanna Page and Larry Lamb), Worth Fighting For by Jesse Q Sutanto – a Mulan retelling! And before I go, in the Sports Romance 2 Recommendsday I mentioned the final book in Simone Soltani’s Lights Out series was coming – and Crash Into You is out now and 99p this month.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Author’s Guide to Murder

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For the second week running I’m picking a book I finished on Monday. I did this to myself last week by picking Vagabond and now I’m creating another potential problem for Future Verity. Fingers crossed the train journeys this week help me with a bigger reading list to chose from and break the cycle…

On a remote island off the Scottish coast, Castle Kinloch is a gothic mansion that’s been turned into a writers retreat in the hands of a literary superstar. Except Brett Saffron Paisley has just been found dead in the folly in the grounds and three American writers who were staying at the castle are among the prime suspects in the case. Kat de Noir writes erotica, Cassie Prigle writes cozy mysteries and Emma Endicott writes historical fiction – but the three of them say they’re working on a novel together, but the detective in charge of the case is suspicious.

This says “A Novel” on the front, but actually this is Williams, White and Willig doing a murder mystery that’s also a satire about the literary world. Now I will say that this is a big shift from what the three of them usually write – which is timeslip historical fiction like The Lost Summers of Newport – and I’m not sure they did a good enough job of setting that up for the regular reader. The characters are very caricaturist and I found it pretty hard going for the first half or so, then it improved as I realised that they were going for maximum ridiculous. Or at least I hope that’s what they were going for. By the end I was won over by the absolutely bonkers finale to the mystery strand and the fact that everyone got a happily ever after.

Basically I liked it when it was over more than I had during the reading process which makes this a bit of a strange one, but hey this has got very, very mixed reviews on Goodreads, so I thought it was worth writing about because I think that says something about the expectations management on this one for regular Williams, Willig and White readers and the blurb saying it’s Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote which really doesn’t describe what’s going on here either. I did love the nods to their other characters and real life authors in this but I definitely prefer their historical fiction – and I suspect if we get another book from the trio (and their usual publication schedule was every other year which should have made this year a year but I don’t see one on the schedule) then they’ll go back to that.

This one is an import from the US if you want it in an actual copy so you’re probably going to have to order it rather than stumble across it in a shop, but it is on Kindle and Kobo – although I think £6.99 is probably a bit much for how much I liked it!

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 31 – September 6

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Two mistakes this week that mean that the list is shorter: two nights at the theatre and committing to a non-fiction book. Add to that the fact that I wrote about the Tim Curry memoir last Tuesday despite finishing it on Monday and I’m in a bit of a bind for tomorrow. Hey ho. Many train journeys this week so hopefully reading balance will be resumed.

Read:

Vagabond by Tim Curry

A Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh

The Kennedys and the Windsors by Caroline Hallemann

The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

Laura Clark Is Away from Her Desk by Helen Russell*

That Detestable New Girl by Dora Chapman

Started:

The Author’s Guide to Murder by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White

Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch by Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent

Still reading:

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

A bunch of Kindle books bought (because I was writing the offers post) but no actual hardcopies of anything.

Bonus picture: A sad victim of my fight with a buddleia over the weekend. So far, the buddleia is winning…

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Quarterback

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The NFL season starts on Wednesday so I thought I’d write abou tthe Netflix series Quarterback today, which has now had three seasons – the latest of which came out in mid July.

Each season follows a group of quarterbacks across the course of an NFL season. The first series followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota across the 2022 season, the second saw Cousins return with Joe Burrow and Jared Gough across the 2024 season and the third season in Joe Flacco, Jayden Daniels, Baker Mayfield and Cam Ward in the 2025 season. If you’re wondering why the gap between the first two seasons – the 2023 season saw a documentary series called Receiver about Wide Receivers instead, reportedly because of the difficulties in finding quarterbacks to feature in a second season at the time.

Each season the quarterbacks featured are at different points in their careers. If you know NFL you’ll have already twigged that, but for those of you (most of you?) who don’t, in the first season Mahomes was aiming for his second Super Bowl, Cousins was a decade into his NFL career and the established starter at the Vikings and Mariota was trying to establish himself as a starting quarterback at Atlanta after having spent a couple of seasons as backup or injured.

Quarterback has got great access to the teams and players – it has the subjects mic’d up during their games which was a first for the NFL. It also has Peyton Manning as one of the producers (it’s made by his production company and Patrick Mahomes’ one) and I suspect Peyton is the reason for this. For the non-NFL fans, he’s part of the Manning dynasty – his dad Archie was an NFL quarterback, his younger brother Eli was an NFL quarterback and his nephew Arch is currently quarterback in college footbal for the Texas Longhorns – he’s the son of Peyton’s older brother Cooper who was a highly rated college footballer before his career was cut short due to a spinal condition. Among his many, many accolades Peyton won two Super Bowls and an Super Bowl MVP and he’s rated as one of the best quarterbacks of all time. So if anyone was going to be able to persuade the NFL to give access and players to be involved it’s him.

Because I watch NFL it’s hard for me to judge how appealing this is going to be for people who don’t, but this was one of the first of the series to appear off the back of the success of Drive to Survive and it’s one of the better ones. Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf) appeared earlier in the same year as Quarterback and I didn’t make it through a whole series of either of those. I have watched a bunch of series of Amazon’s documentary series All or Nothing which started with NFL but hasn’t done an NFL series since before the pandemic and has branched out to other sports and I think this offers more for the casual fan because unlike All or Nothing which follows one team each year, this has the wider focus. I watched the first season back when it came out and binged it, tried Receiver when that started and didn’t get through it, then forgot about Quarterback until the third season came out – but then I binged series two in one day and then series three across the next week around actually doing other things, so I clearly enjoy them – even if they haven’t featured Dak Prescott (from my team the Cowboys) yet.

Once I’d finished this, I moved on to Any Given Saturday which is about the 24/25 season in the SEC conference of college football, which was fine – but missing some of the big teams and just generally not as focused as this. So if you like your NFL documentaries it’s an interesting watch, but it’s not an entry point series really.

Happy Sunday – and enjoy the NFL when it starts with the reigning Super Bowl champions the Seahawks at home to the Patriots on Wednesday. I’ve got to wait until next Sunday when the Cowboys open their campaign against the Giants at the stadium which is back to being known as the MetLife after spending the summer as the New York New Jersey stadium for the World Cup.

tribute

Happy 80th Freddie!

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My love of Queen and of Freddie Mercury is one of my lesser mentioned personality traits here, but it is strong and enduring. Astonishingly it’s 35 years since he died and today he would have been 80. I remain baffled that it can now be more than twice the amount of time since he died than it was the first time I set foot in the Dominion Theatre to see We Will Rock You, which was such a key moment in my teenage years.

The Freddie auction exhibition three summers ago was just an evening of me wandering around with my mouth open at seeing all the things. And the music is still in heavy rotation – even if I hated the biopic. One of the great what ifs of my personal interest areas is what would Freddie have done if he had lived* and what music we might have had. As it is, there’s plenty of music to still enjoy – and this week Mary Austin has popped up giving interviews that are longer than the very short couple of bits she did when the auction happened so there’s lots to dissect there too.

For my videos I’ve picked one of my favourites of the (slightly) lesser known (but still on the Greatest hits I) Queen songs in Seven Seas of Rhye and my favourite of Freddie’s solo videos – I love the dancing-chasing sequence. It’s just so camp and funny. And I say solo videos because I find it hard to discount Barcelona as my favourite of his solo stuff – I adored it from the moment I first heard it which I never know if it was before it was used as the title song for the BBC Olympics coverage in 1992 but I do know for sure that I was tremendously disappointed in 1996 when they (obviously) used something different! Oh and one more before I go: Breakthru, filmed on the historic railway line an hour up the road from here where we used to go to see Santa and ride on a train every year when I was little**.

Happy Birthday Freddie – and thank you for all the music and all the joy.

*another is how many F1 titles would Ayrton Senna have won, I think you can make a case that he would have had either or both of 1994 and 1995 and if he had had then Schumacher might never have become the force he did and even more of F1 history would have been different

**it’s also the railway line in two Bond Movies (Octopussy and GoldenEye), at least one Poirot and also the Biggles movie, which John Deacon wrote some of his very rare non-Queen music for.

books, stats

Reading Stats: August 2026

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Books read this month: 31*

New books: 25

Re-reads: 6 (all audiobooks)

Books from the to-read pile: 7

NetGalley books read: 4

Kindle Unlimited read: 11

Ebooks: 3

Audiobooks: 6

Non-fiction books: 1

Favourite book: The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, but it was close with Swordheart and also Vagabond

Books bought: two actual books, ten ebooks

Most read author: the three Helen books probably mean Linda Graeme, but they’re not long books (and the print is big) so it could be T Kingfisher because Swordheart is 450 pages!

Books read in 2026: 264

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 595

A pretty good month in reading. I’ve tried to tackle the to-read pile after the huge amounts of books acquired in July and actually done ok on that front despite spending a of time away from home. I read all the August released I’d requested from NetGalley which is pretty good going (and I’ve even written some about them) and I (mostly) resisted the urge to buy more physical books – even if I did have a bit of a bonanza time while writing the Kindle offers. We are however heading into the bumper autumn release season so I dread to think what I might manage to get up to this month.

Bonus picture: Judy! on the wall at the Palladium. I’m not going to say it was my favourite thing about the trip to JCS because that would be unfair on how much I enjoyed Richard Armitage as Herod (which is under five minutes of the show and late in the second act). But it was high on the list!

*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – 8 this month!

Book previews

Out This Week: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

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We’re in September and we’ve started to get the first of the autumn releases so I actually had some choices for my new book pick this week but I’ve suddenly been seeing this everywhere and although I can’t quite work out why it sounds like a lot of fun and so I’ve picked it for this week. According to the blurb, history professor Philippa ups sticks to the seaside house she inherited from her grandmother after life gives her a wake up call in the form of a sinkhole. Her grandmother was a writer of romance novels and she’s going to be sharing the house with a reclusive writer who also turns out to have been a romance novel cover model. I’m not eve sure I need to write any more about the plot because I think you can already tell why I picked this one. I just hope it lives up to the promise of the blurb when I read it!

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: August Quick Reviews

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As ever, the first Wednesday of the Month is quick reviews day and I’m back with three more books I read last month that I haven’t talked about yet.

Murder-Sur-Mer by Hugh Morrison

This is the third in Morrison’s Clarice and Cliff series and sees our titular leads tying the knot and heading off on honeymoon to France. Of course crime follows them there – in the form of a murdered jewel thief in their hotel room. The French police seem to them to be making slow progress and determined to look in the wrong places so they take it upon themselves to try and solve the crime. I don’t like this series as much as the Rev Shaw mysteries but this was a light, easy read even if I had the rough outlines of the solution figured out fairly early on. I don’t know if the fact that I’ve been listening to the Miss Marple series has made me a bit fussier at the moment but that can’t be ruled out as a factor in my opinion on this one. Still I liked it the most of the books I’m writing about here today – and I’ll be keeping an eye for the next one – they’re definitely a step above the J G Colgan that I mentioned last month.

The Truth About Love by Stephanie Laurens

This is the twelfth book in Laurens’ Cynster series. I’ve read the first six and then 14th as well. This one was written 20 years ago, which probably counts as an old school romance at this point and it did feel a bit like it – that or my tastes have changed, although to be fair I did start reading historical romances of this sort in around 2008 so it’s not that old school for me! Anyway our hero is Gerrard Debbington a painter who is desperate to paint the gardens of Hellebore Hall, but the only way the owner Lord Tregonning will let him do that is if he also paints a portrait of his daugher, Jacqueline. And Jacqueline is (of course) our heroine, she’s been the target of rumour and innuendo since the disappearance of her suitor and the death of her mother, and is hoping the portrait will help clear her. And of course they fall in love but also solve the mysteries. And I was much more interested in the mystery solving than I was in the romance, but maybe that’s just me. It’s a bit gothic and a lot overblown (anyone actually believe that a portrait can reveal guilt or innocence?) but as I found it on the bookshelf at the hostel I didn’t spend anything on it and and so I can’t complain too much. That said, it was a really useful indication of how my reading tastes change and evolve – it’s the first Laurens I’ve read in some years and as I didn’t love it, I took the opportunity to clear some space on the to-read shelf by checking for any physical copies of Laurens on there and moving them to the charity shop bag!

The Murder on the Enriqueta by Molly Thynne

I read this thinking it was going to be another murder on a boat story – but although the first murder does indeed take place on a voyage from Argentina to Britain, despite what you might take from the blurb the main action happens after that boat journey in London. Chief Inspector Shand is on board ship for that murder and finds himself drawn into events in London because also on board ship is the widow of Lord Dalberry, making her way to England after the death of her husband where two young cousins of her husband encounter her. In terms of plot this is as bonkers as some of the maddest of the Girl’s Own books – I’m talking C Bernard Rutley and Rita Coutts level madness here – but it’s no where near as easy to read. I’ve read two of Thynne’s other books and enjoyed them much more than this one which I can’t really recommend.