Category: genres

Book of the Week, Book previews, historical, mystery, new releases, previews

Book of the Week: The Shadows of Kensington Gore

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This is a slight cheat again this week but for a different reason than the last two weeks have been. I did read this last week – but it’s not out until next Thursday so that’s where the rule breaking occurs. But as I always say, I make the rules so I’m allowed to do what I want about them in the end. It was my favourite thing I read last week though so it totally deserves this spot.

I really enjoyed The Murder at Worlds End and so I was looking forward to this follow up – and I was not disappointed. Stephen and Miss Decima are now in London, installed in a mansion block near the Royal Albert Hall. Miss Decima is and running a detective agency from it. But all the cases she is getting are household pilfering and she’s is getting bored. Stephen is finding is feet in a new neighbourhood and is growing frustrated that he’s not as involved in the detecting as he was hoping – and that he’s running the whole household on his own and having books thrown at him when he’s not doing things as quickly as Decima wants him to. But all this changes when they go to a Suffragette meeting ahead of the Coronation and Stephen is first on the scene of a murder. This also means he’s the police’s prime suspect – and so he and Miss Decima are back on the case again.

The atmosphere of pre-Coronation London is great – and so is the portrayal of the various factions within the movement for women’s suffrage. Too often this can get flattened to just the suffragettes, but this has got the peaceful and the militant factions in the thick of it – as well as all the various movements trying to prevent women from getting the vote. It’s also got the working class – or more accurate the servants class view, all of which makes for an intriguing mystery to solve. It’s also funny – Stephen’s antics as he tries to find his place in the neighbourhood are great, as is Decima and her various foibles. The body count is fairly high – but it manages to balance the light and the shade really well. Miss Decima hasn’t changed her character since the first book and so she’s as cantankerous and difficult as ever – and the book is trying hard not to soften her into fluffy old lady, which must be a temptation given the rest of the genre.

I raced through this and I really hope that there is a third book coming because this showed that there is plenty of material for mining in London for these two.

My copy came from NetGalley and as I said it’s out on the 22nd so you can pre-order it now if you’re desperate to read it after this rave review. Here are the Kindle and Kobo links. It’a a hardback release but should be fairly easy to find in the stores when it does come out – Waterstones have a signed version for preorder which is usually a good sign for availability and I’ve seen Murder at Worlds End all over the place since it came out last year. There’s an audiobook too – which looks like it might be dual narration between Joe Jameson and Juliet Stevenson which would be fun.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, mystery

Book of the Week: The Final Problem

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Yes, yes, yes, I know. I’m doing a book I finished on Monday again. But I have reasons: I’m carrying on two themes – it’s Sherlock Holmes related following on from the new Lady Sherlock coming out last week and it’s also translated – this time from Spanish. So there’s method to my madness.

It’s 1960 and in Greece bad weather has stranded tourists on the island of Utakos where they are staying in the only hotel. Then one of them is found dead in a beach cabana. It looks like suicide but one of the guests Basil Ormond – an out of work actor who is best known for playing Sherlock Holmes in a series of movies – thinks that it may be murder. The police can’t get to the island because of the weather and the other guests depute him to investigate because of his experience playing the detective on the big screen. Can he find the killer before the police arrive – or before the killer strikes again?

This is billed as inspired by Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and I think that’s pretty accurate. It’s got a clever mystery, an interesting group of characters and it’s got a really nice style about it – I don’t know how much of that is the translator Frances Riddle vs Arturo Pérez-Reverte himself but it makes for a good reading experience. I didn’t have the killer worked out – which is also good – and once it was revealed I thought it was really neatly done.

Pérez-Reverte is a long established author in Spanish – I’ve seen him on the book shelves when I’ve been browsing on holidays in Spain – and upon looking on amazon it looks like an other series of his about a Spanish D’Artagnan type may also be available in English but I’ve certainly never seen them in shops the way I have this one over the last few months. If you like a classic crime novel this is worth a look, and I enjoyed it enough that I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more of his books – and if this does well may be we will get some more of them in English.

It’s on offer for 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment, and as I said it should be fairly easy to find in the shops too.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, mystery, new releases

Book of the Week: A Game of Cat and Killer

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Happy Tuesday everyone. After last week’s Japanese fiction Recommendsday it just so happens that I’ve got another Japanese novel in translation today – it’s actually a new release in English and it’s got a very different feel from the ones I mentioned last week…

Yoshitaro Katayama is not an ideal candidate to be a detective: he doesn’t like heights, he’s socially awkward and he’d rather not come into contact with dead bodies. But his father was detective and it was his dying wish for his son. And so here he is. One morning he’s offer the choice of looking at some gruesome crime scene photos of a murdered young woman or going to the college she was a student at to conduct investigations. He chooses the latter, but soon there are more bodies and he has acquired a cat which belonged to one of the victims. He’s not keen on having a pet, until she starts to show an unusual level of interest in the case…

Now I know there are a lot of cozy mysteries with cats (often talking cats) in them. This is not one of those. Katayama also has a sister that he lives with and worries a lot about, and an auntie who is trying to arrange him a marriage but this is not cozy. Do not be deceived. This is a serial killer mystery which happens to have a cat. The detective is a bit hapless but the crimes he is investigating are anything but.

This originally came out in the late 1970s and is the first in a long running series by Jiro Akagawa that has only just making it into English. Considering their age they felt surprisingly current – obviously there are no mobile phones or computers but apart from that they could have been now. Of course that could be down to the choices Haydn Trowell has made in the translation. The murders were a bit on the gruesome side for what I’m used to reading, but I am interested enough in what happens to detective Katayama next that I may pick up the next one when it comes out in a few months time.

My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out today in Kindle and Kobo and all the usual formats. I have no sense of how easy (or otherwise) this will be to get in hard copy, but it’s got physical copies listed so it may be possible

Happy Reading!

cozy crime, series

Mystery Series: The French Village Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I’ve got a mystery series for you that has a fourth instalment that came out this week – and I’ve read all four this year so they’re even fresh in my mind!

The French Village mysteries are about Zoe, who moves to Provence to take over a bookshop in a hilltop village because she wants to spend her older years somewhere with books, good food and lovely scenery. The first book was a BotW back at the end of March and covers her arrival in Sainte-Catherine and a body that is found in the church. Initially the locals are hostile to Zoe but as the books have gone on she’s gathered a group of friends in the village who have become regular characters.

The second book, Murder at the Chateau is set in a dilapidated chateau where Zoe staying visiting an old friend when a death happens. In The French Market Murder we’re back in Sainte-Catherine where Zoe discovers a body in an abandoned house during a bank holiday weekend. And finally we have the new book The Vineyard Murder, where Zoe is helping her friend Marcel with his grape harvest when she discovers a body in among the vines when she is arriving in the early morning. But when she returns with the local police officer the body has disappeared. The reader knows that Zoe wasn’t wrong, but she doesn’t and carries on with the harvest and getting to know the other people who have come to work on the grape harvest who are a very mixed bunch to say the least. This has got surprisingly little murder in it until very late on, but there’s still a lot of mystery going on. I think Zoe’s inquisitiveness is at it’s most unattractive in this book – I’m not sure whether you would actually like her if you only read this book, but I did like the way it dug into the personalities and rivalries of the characters. Plus it has some Ngaio Marsh references and I’m a sucker for that because you all know how much I love Inspector Alleyn!

I really love Sainte-Catherine as a setting and the descriptions of the countryside and the lifestyle of Provence are really good. I also like that Zoe is an older protagonist. She’s not retired or as obviously old as the protagonists of the Thursday Murder Club or its imitators but she isn’t a naieve twenty-something and she has a past that influences here. As I mentioned in the BotW review of the first one there seems to be a link to an earlier Greg Mosse series which I am still trying to get around to reading. Book four suggests that there may some sort of romantic thread coming towards us if the series carries on, but I actually thing it probably needs ot have another book set somewhere away from Sainte-Catherine next because there’s a limit to how many murders one small hilltop village can have and still attract tourists! That said, Zoe is already feeling anxious about the number of bodies she’s discovering, so I’m not sure stumbling across them elsewhere is going to help her with that!

Anyway – these are a nice way of passing a few hours even if they will give you a yearning for some good French food! The first three are also in Kindle Unlimited so they’re very low risk if you’re in that scheme. They’re also available on Kobo.

Have a great weekend!

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 of the Week, Fantasy, romance

Book of the Week: Swordheart

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This was a really easy pick today. Yes I read books last week that are out this week, but actually this was my favourite thing I read AND it has a sequel out today, which I’m going to have to sit on my hands not to buy straightaway because I loved this so much. And you can hear about one of this week’s new releases tomorrow, because I wrote a Recommendsday for three of the new August books that I’ve read and you can thank me for that later.

Halla has been housekeeper to her great uncle since her husband died. But now Uncle Silas is dead, she’s inherited his property and her cousin and his mother have locked her in her room until she’ll agree to marry him. She’d rather die than marry clammy handed Alver, so after a few days imprisonment and increasingly desparate she takes the sword that’s mounted on the wall in its scabbard to see if she might be able to use it to commit suicide. But when she unsheathes it, a man appears. Sarkis is an immortal warrior trapped inside the enchanted sword. He is usually fighting battles or carrying out assassinations but now he’s bound to protect Halla. What follows is a journey back and forth across the land to try and secure Halla’s safety and her inheritance and an experience quite unlike anything Sarkis has had in the centuries since he was trapped in the sword.

I really, really enjoyed this. It’s got great characters, a good central problem to solve and brilliant world building that is never info-dumped on you. This is set in the same world as some of Kingfishers other series but I haven’t read any of them (yet!) and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I’m on a big run of cozy fantasy at the moment and this was exactly what I was hoping it might be. I’ve written before about my patchy record with fantasy and also with knowing what I’m going to like in the genre, but this hit smack into my reading wheelhouse and was just what I needed after a distinctly mixed week in some of my other reading. It was a brilliant palate cleanser after a book that I really, really disliked and I would happily have followed Halla and Sarkis around for another hundred pages – and it’s already a 400 page book.

I picked this up in The Spicy Librarian after seeing it in various shops for ages – including reading the first few pages in Foyles a year or so back and enjoying it but not being able to justify buying it at the time – and seeing various people in my bookish communities raving about them for a while. On the one hand, I regret not reading this sooner, on the other, as I said at the top I now don’t have to wait to read the next in the series- and for people who read this when it first came out it’s been an eight year wait! The new one is called Daggerbound, and it’s about The Dervish, one of Sarkis’s comrades – and there’s a third one coming next year about Angharad. I’m already very excited.

Swordheart should be super easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it in almost every bookshop with a fantasy or romantasy section for the last year or so – and it’s in Kindle and Kobo. I had been waiting for it to go on offer since I read the start in Foyles, but I hadn’t spotted it happening yet, so maybe the new one will be the moment for an offer?

Happy Reading!

mystery, series

Mystery Series: St Just Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone and today for the series post I’m writing about G M Malliet’s St Just books. I’ve already written about her Max Tudor series, most recently back when I did a spy-themed week a couple of months back. But this week I finished the last book in the series I hadn’t read (reading severely out of order!) and so now I can tell you about then.

Our detective is Arthur St Just, a police Detective Chief Inspector and the crimes are Christie or Golden age-esque. Many of them are set around rich families, authors or Oxbridge colleges, or some combination of the above. St Just is from Cornwall but primarily based in Cambridge but Oxford also makes an appearance or two. St Just is a widower but does acquire a fiancée later in the series for some continuity of running characters as well as the fact that is it even a mystery series without a love interest?

It is very much a series of two halves as there was a decade or so gap (and a change of publishers) between book three and book four, and in fact I hadn’t realised that the series had restarted until I saw Death and the Final Cut on NetGalley last autumn. I read that then and now I’ve filled in the gaps with books four to six. And I’m pretty sure I’ve enjoyed these later ones more than I liked the earlier ones. My reviews of those on Goodreads from around a decade or so ago (I read them after having already started on the Max Tudors) are short but very much in the ok to fine sort of area.

Books three to six are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I actually think these are a pretty good place to start or at least test out series. They all have interesting characters, but the earlier books are more in the dislikeable mode than the later ones, and three to six particularly have good pacing and interesting mysteries. Seven isn’t quite as good, but it clearly wasn’t enough to put me off going back for the rest when I got a chance or to make a note to keep an eye for any more appearing.

Have a great weekend!

crime, detective, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: First in mystery series 2

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Happy Wednesday everyone, and I’m back today with another post of first books in mystery series, to follow on from last year’s dedicated mystery series post and to a lesser extent this post which does at least have a non mystery in it too. As you know I’m always looking for my next bingeable series to add to my lists as other series finish, which can go either way (I’ve read – or tried to read – some real dross over the years) but with all of today’s series I’ve read at least one more in the series already.

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

This is the first in a (now long-running) series about Guido Brunetti, a Commisario of police in Venice. This was actually written in the early 1990s – but it doesn’t feel dated in style or the actual mystery, it’s just the lack of mobile phones and references to lire, marks and a character who may or may not have been an actual Nazi that remind you that this is thirty years old. Anyway, in this first in the series, Brunetti is investigating the death of a renowned conductor who dies in his dressing room of cyanide poisoning in the interval of a performance of an opera that he was conducting. I really loved the portrait of Venice in the book (this was written a few years before I visited Venice as a child and I loved that) and the characters are all really well drawn and developed. It’s perhaps a little bit darker than the sunny orange cover and mass market mystery size would have you believe – but not so grim that I wouldn’t read more of them if they came my way. I picked this up in Judd Books by the way, which is a total example of what I meant in that post about discovering something completely new to you.

Murder at the Fitzwilliam by Jim Eldridge

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This is the first in a mystery series set in the 1890s, where our detective is former Detective Inspector Daniel Wilson, who helped investigate the Jack the Ripper murders when he was a police officer. Now retired, he’s working as a private enquiry agent and is called in to investigate after a body is found in the Egyptian collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. As well as a hostile police officer, he also has to content with Abigail Fenton, an archaeologist who cataloguing the museum’s collection and found the body. This is a pretty easy read, there are a few twists to the mystery as the body count rises although I had the culprit worked out relatively early on. I would read more of these if they were in Kindle Unlimited – but at the moment only this one is.

Scot Free by Catriona McPherson

Cover of Scot Free

This is the first in a contemporary, American-set murder mystery series from Catriona McPherson, of Dandy Gilver fame. Our heroine is Lexy Campbell, a fish out of water transplant from Scotland to California. She made the move because she’d fallen in love but now, mere months later, she’s divorced and heading back home, just as soon as she clears one of her counselling clients of murdering her husband. This has a lighter and more humorous tone than her historical series – I think it’s aiming for Steph Plum sort of vibes. I’m not sure Lexy is a great counsellor, as she seems pretty clueless about her own personal life but it was fun enough that I’ve read the second one since reading this. How many more I read may depend on whether they turn up in Kindle Unlimited though!

Happy Humpday!

Children's books, children's books, series

Girl’s Own Series: Dimsie

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Happy Friday everyone. If all goes to plan I should be on my way to Book Con at the moment, so in honour of a long weekend of bookish delights focused on literature for school girls in the twentieth century I’ve got a Girl’s Own boarding school series for you this week.

Dimsie is Daphne Isobel Maitland and she is the heroine of nine stories – seven set at her school, The Jane Willard Foundation, and two at her family home. As you can see from the photo I’ve read six of the and the missing ones are on my purchase list for conference this weekend. The name Dimsie comes from her initials D I M in case you hadn’t realised and the books follow her from her first year at the school all the way through to her final year as Head Girl. There were originally seven books in the series, but the final two were written in response to reader requests and the final one is actual set during World War Two when Dimsie is married. They were published across a 20 year period starting in 1921, and as was often the case with school series in this era there were also short stories published in various annuals.

Dorita Fairlie Bruce is one of the names when it comes to Girl’s Own boarding school books for girls along with Angela Brazil, Elinor M Brent Dyer (Chalet School), Elsie Oxenham (the Abbey books) and depending on your point of view Enid Blyton. The Chalet School will always be my favourite (and in writing this I’ve astonishingly realised that I’ve never written a proper series post about them so I must rectify that at some point) because those are the ones that were still in print when I was little and so were the ones I could get hold of from the library or buy for myself (see also Drina and Sadlers Wells) but DFB is my favourite of the ohers, all of which I first read as an adult, which is obviously a different experience to when you’re seven or eight and you first come across the idea of a boarding school.

I wrote about Dimsie, Head Girl back when I first read that and it’s fair to say that Dimsie is, like many other a boarding school heroine, a girl that somehow manages to get away with things that others wouldn’t for: Reasons. Dimsie is able to talk to prefects on their level when she’s a junior and have conversations with teachers (and the head!) that others wouldn’t be able to get away with. And yet you still like her. She’s a good friend, she’s not annoyingly smart or talented, and she cares about people. The thing you will have heard of from Dimsie (if you have heard of anything that is) is the Anti-Soppists League – which is Dimsie and her friends in league to not to go soppy over senior pupils or teachers or anyone. And the books follow the usual rules of boarding school – inter pupil drama, trouble with the juniors, trouble with a pupil who isn’t quite undertanding the rules of the school or is out for herself not the group, sports rivalries and illnesses, with the odd exceptional event thrown in – which are where they can be a bit bonkers. The Chalet School has handy mountains and lakes (and Nazis) to provide opportunities for drama, but being set in Britain, DFB has had to come up with her own ideas – which include stolen old masters and secret passages.

As ever there are some old fashioned stereotypes and language that isn’t acceptable today in here which means that I won’t be lending them to the young readers in my life, but they’re also unintentionally hilarious at times and I find them really really readable. This is another day when its not so much a suggestion to read if you’re not already interested in this sort of book, but if you are you really should try one. They’re miles better (to my mind) than Elsie Oxenham! Fingers crossed that I can lay my hands on the missing ones in the book sale.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book of the Week, crime, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: The Verdict of Twelve

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Happy Tuesday everyone, it’s due to be sweltering again today and it’s also the France v Spain semi final so I suspect nota lot of reading is going to be occurring. But I do have something from last week’s heat affected list to talk about.

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I’ve struggled with how to describe the plot of this because the blurb really doesn’t give anything away. So here is what the blurb says:

A woman is on trial for her life, accused of murder. The twelve members of the jury each carry their own secret burden of guilt and prejudice which could affect the outcome. In this extraordinary crime novel, we follow the trial through the eyes of the jurors as they hear the evidence and try to reach a unanimous verdict. Will they find the defendant guilty, or not guilty? And will the jurors’ decision be the correct one? Since its first publication in 1940, Verdict of Twelve has been widely hailed as a classic of British crime writing.

So as you can tell this is an unusual type of murder mystery. Postgate introduces you to each juror – their backgrounds and the things that might influence their opinions as they are sworn in, and then jumps to the events leading up to the crime (without telling you who did it) and then the trial itself.

This was originally published in 1940 and as the blurb says murder was still a capital crime, so the defendant’s life is in the hands of the jury. It’s really well written to give the reader plenty to think about as you’re reading the book and I found the ending really clever too. If I had one problem with it, it’s that in the Kindle edition I read, there seemed to be an element missing from the graphics in the deliberation section, but I need to go and look at a paperback copy to see if that’s an issue in those, or maybe even a deliberate thing. This actually came out nearly ten years ago, when the BLCC range was a lot smaller, and is one of the genuinely forgotten but deserving reprints.

It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means that the only version you can get through Kobo is the audiobook one, and of course it’s also in paperback and is one I’ve seen fairly regularly in stores. You can buy it directly from the British Library in their store at the library on the online one where it’s only £8.99 and is also in their 3 for 2 deal. Bargain.

Happy Reading!