Another month over, and as you probably saw on Monday, a mega reading list to finish the month off, because we were on holiday. Only one of these is actually something finished on the holiday – but I promise you will hear more about a bunch of those holiday books at some point. However in the meantime here’s a three of the books I read in November and haven’t told you about yet!
Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin
I’m slowly working my way through the Gervase Fen series – so slowly in fact that they’ve now started a fresh redesign since I started reading them. I’ve now read six of the ten slightly out of order as this is in fact book seven. It sees Gervase entangled with the movie making set and trying to untangle the mystery around the death of a young actress who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge one night after a party. I had part of the solution figured out, but not all the whys and wherefores so it was a good read finding out.
Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans*
The Second World War is over and Valentine Vere-Thissett is on his way home. Except the war has changed his world – his elder brother has been killed, leaving him with a title he doesn’t want and and now the fate of his family home, built in the 1500s, in his hands. I have really enjoyed a lot of Lissa Evans’s novels, but for some reason this one didn’t quite work as well as I wanted it to. It’s got all the elements – a reluctant younger son taking over, post war setting, an ill-assorted group of people thrown together, but just this time, it didn’t provoke as strong a set of emotions as her books usually do. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not brilliant, and I was hoping for brilliant.
A Body on the Doorstep by Marty Wingate
It’s 1921 and Mabel Canning has moved to London to try and strike out on her own and be a Modern Woman. To this end she’s got a job with the Useful Women’s Agency, but one one of her assignments a dead body turns up on the doorstep when she answers the door. And of course she can’t help but get drawn in to trying to figure out what happened to him. This was the latest in my quest to find a new historical mystery series to fill the gap left by the end of the Daisy Dalrymple books. And it’s not bad – the mystery isn’t the most complicated, but it’s got a fair bit of set up to do and characters to introduce as the first in the series so I don’t mind that too much. It’s in KU so I will likely read more of them as and when I get a chance.
And there you are, that’s your lot today – but a quick reminder of the November Books of the Month, which were Rivals, Top of the Climb, The Anti-Social Season and Death at the Dress Rehearsal
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
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