Yes I know, I know, I know. It’s the third Wednesday of June and I’m only just now publishing the May Quick reviews. But I’ve explained my reasoning – I had the early June new releases to cover and then this month’s Kindle offers were *good* – in fact there’s one spotted lats night I ought to mention – the second Nora Breen book Death at the Spirit Lounge is 99p too. But there here now and I’m sure normal order will be resumed next month!
Banton of Paramonth by Howard Gutner*
This is a photo heavy book looking at the career of Travis Banton who was a costume designer for Paramount and one of the most important of the Golden Age. He’s known for his collaboration with Marlene Dietrich and Carole Lombard among others including Clara Bow in It. I have strongly mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand I’m fascinated by Golden Age Hollywood and it’s great to find out more about a figure that I didn’t really know much about. However, I think this is going to be one of those books where having a physical copy is going to be the key to your experience and enjoyment because I had an eproof via NetGalley and the formatting on it was a real issue. There were photo captions out of order, stuff that was marked as “a rare colour photo” that was in black and white and just a general jumble at times where picture captions were mixed together with the main text and separated from the pictures they were referring too. This meant that it was hard to follow the narrative thread of the writing because you needed to keep flipping pages back and forth to match up the photos to the captions and to keep the thread of sentences. The pictures are the great gift in this though- lots of shots of beautiful outfits.
Hattie Breaks a Leg by Patrick Gleeson*
Hattie is back and after the events of the first two books in Patrick Gleeson’s series, she’s more unemployable than ever. That’s why she finds herself stage managing a one night only play, with a huge cast, written by a first time playwright who is also directing and who seems to have no idea how any of this is meant to work. The good news is that it pays well… the bad news is that alongside this an old friend has asked for a favour and when things go wrong with that she finds herself dragged into some very shady doings. I really like this series and this is a good fun read that I finished in one day. I have a few quibbles – I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced on the favour side of the plot and I had part of the play plot figured out fairly early, but they didn’t really stop me from enjoying myself reading it. The world of the theatre is such a good one for mystery plots – and I love all the detail about the day to day of the behind the scenes that Gleeson includes in this. This is probably best enjoyed if you’ve already read one (or both) of the other books, but it will still work for you even if you haven’t I think.
Major Bricket and the Body in the Bell Tower by Simon Brett*
This is the second book in Simon Brett’s latest series, and I definitely liked it more that the first one -perhaps because I knew what I was expecting when I went in: a espionage-adjacent mystery in a less realistic world than you get in most of Brett’s other contemporary series. This has got a body turning up in the village church on Sunday morning that Major Bricket is the first to discover, and also a threat from his past resurfacing. It’s fun and pacy and felt just more established than the first one did. A nice way to pass a few hours, even if I don’t like it as much as I like (say) the Charles Paris books.
And there you (finally) have it – the May Quick reviews are sorted and just in case you’ve forgotten because it’s so long ago the May Recommendsdays were Island-set mysteries and Cold War mysteries, and the Books of the Week were Blue Devil Woman, The Wyndham Case, Call for the Dead and The Paris Match.
Happy Humpday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 