It’s a murder mystery special for this month’s Quick Reviews. I didn’t mean it to turn out that way, but it just did and maybe given how many mystery books I’m reading at the moment that shouldn’t be a surprise! Anyway, here are three books (one of which I’ll admit I finished in May although I started it in April) that I read last month that I haven’t already told you about.
Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar*
This is a murder mystery set two years after the end of Pride and Prejudice, where Caroline Bingley gets drawn into investigating a murder after Georgiana Darcy’s maid goes missing. Soon the two women are in London investigating where they find a body and then come up against magistrates, distinctly unsavoury people and the East India Company to try and find out what happened. I thought the murder mystery in this was good – I particularly liked the way the East India Company and their activities were used in it – but I wasn’t convinced about the Pride and Prejudice side of things. There’s lots of P&P related spin-offs out there – I’ve read a load of them myself – but I’m not sure this delivered either of the things that people come to them for – which is Austen-like wit and writing or more of the characters you loved from the book. I think this would have been as good a mystery and maybe even a better book – if it wasn’t hung off Austen’s characters.
Murder on Line One by Jeremy Vine*
Edward Temmis has just lost his job presenting on at a local radio station. He’s still recovering from a tragedy in his personal life and this leaves him somewhat adrift. Then the granddaughter of one of his former listeners asks for his help investigate the death of her grandmother. But as they investigate, he discovers that more than one of his listeners may have been targeted. This is the first murder mystery from radio and TV presenter Jeremy Vine. And given that I used to work in a local radio station this was totally intriguing to me. But perhaps the fact that I used to work in local radio was the reason that I didn’t quite click with this – because this is the best staffed commercial radio station that I’ve ever come across (and yet with no mention of sales staff!) and it just kept lifting me out of the story and making it harder to get lost in the story. Add to that I found quite a lot of the characters quite hard to like and that I had the culprit figured out pretty early on and it just didn’t work for me as well as I had hoped. But that’s fine and it may well work better for other people who don’t have the background that I do – or who don’t read as many murder mysteries as I do!
Murder will Out by Alison Joseph
I mentioned in the Recommendsday a couple of weeks ago that I thought there was an Agatha Christie-solves-crimes series, so as I managed to find one of them and read it and I thought I ought to report back! This is set in 1923, during Agatha Christie’s first marriage to Archie. She’s busy writing her next novel when there’s an actual murder in the village that she lives in and her neighbour is determined that Agatha is the perfect person to help solve it (and exonerate the neighbour’s godson). This is a bit too long to be a novella, but it’s not really proper novel length either. I think it’s probably got too much plot for the length that it actually is – but it’s quite hard to find the balance of enough plot to keep the reader guessing but not so much that it’s confusing for the reader. And a bit like the Caroline Bingley novel above, I’m not sure why it needed to be hung off Agatha Christie, because it didn’t feel that specific to Christie as a character – it could have been a fictional mystery writer getting dragged into a local murder.
And that’s your lot this month – a quick reminder that as well as the Real People Detective fiction Recommendsday, I also gave you some Conclave-y recommendations and some Unhappy Marriage fiction. The Books of the Week were Legends and Lattes, A Case of Mice and Murder, The Edinburgh Murders and The Rest of Our Lives.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 