In keeping with the spring season, I’ve had a clear out of ongoing books this week – jettisoning a couple of lingerers that I just couldn’t get on with. Hey ho. Not as much new stuff read this week as I would like – I’ve been re-reading a couple of childhood favourites alongside the new stuff and got a bit side tracked. I wish I could add the Chalet School and Richenda to this list, but I know that first read it in about 1995!
Read:
Bikinis in Paradise by Kathi Daley
The Good, the Bad and the Emus by Donna Andrew
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
Good Dog McTavish by Meg Rosoff
Started:
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
A Dangerous Crossing by Rachel Rhys
Still reading:
Big City Heat by David Burnsworth
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The May Queen by Helen Irene Young
Three ebooks bought in various Bank Holiday sales – but one of them was an e-copy of a book I already have in hardback – and one print book. So not too bad.
This week’s BotW is Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop. I’ve had Crispin recommended to me several times recently and as I come to the end of my Inspector Alleyn marathon I’ve been looking for a new Golden Age author to binge on and I think Crispin could be it. The Case of the Gilded Fly is the first in the Gervase Fen series – but The Long Divorce has also been touted as a good one for me to start with, but I ended up reading The Moving Toyshop because it was available for 99p when I was looking! It’s taken me a few weeks to get around to it, but I’m very glad I did.
There appears to be a whole set of Crispin reissues underway, which is good news for the e-reader!
First published in 1946, The Moving Toyshop is the third book to feature Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford professor and amateur detective. In this book, he finds himself investigating a murder on behalf of a former schoolmate. Late one night on a trip to Oxford, Richard Cadogan stumbled across the body of a woman in a toyshop and is knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. But the next morning the toyshop is a grocers and the police don’t believe him. Gervase and Richard are soon racing around Oxford trying to work out exactly what happened.
This is so much to enjoy in this. The scene at the fairground is excellent, but so is the way it evokes the peculiarities and eccentricities of life in an Oxford college in this era. The mystery is utterly bonkers, but it rattles along so fast that you don’t really notice – or care. In some ways it reminded me a lot of The 39 Steps as much as it did of writers like Sayers and Christie. As promised in the blurb, there’s also a dash of Wodehouse here. They are quirky and something a little bit out of the ordinary run of Golden Age crime. There are a few word choices that are… infelicitous these days, but no more so than you find in many of the other books of the era.
I think I’ll be adding Crispin to my list of authors to look out for in second-hand bookshop, because I love old covers from this era, but if you want to get your hands on The Moving Toyshop now, it’s available on Kindle and Kobo as well as in a modern paperback edition from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones.
This week’s BotW is Roxane Gay’s short story collection Difficult Women. I’ve been reading this as my bedtime book for a few weeks (which is where short story collections often end up in my house!) and have really enjoyed reading.
My copy of Difficult Women
Difficult Women is a collection of stories about very different women, all of whom might be termed “difficult”. The term “difficult women” conjures images of angry or confrontational women, but that’s not necessarily who these women are. These are women who don’t fit into neat categories. They’re women who have had bad experiences. There’s abuse, violence and infidelity and a whole host of trigger warnings here, but no two women are the same. There’s poverty and privilege, there are single women, married women, violent women and women who are in fish out of water situations and there’s some sci fi too.
Some of the stories are sad. But somehow this is not a sad book. It’s thought provoking and clever and really beautifully written. There were women that liked, women I didn’t like and women who had life experiences a million miles from mine but there was always something in the story to make you feel empathy with the women, no matter how terribly they were behaving.
The last short story collection I raved about on here was American Housewife (I think) which is totally different to this, but both reminded me that when done well short story collections can be as satisfying as 500 page novels. I’ve been following Roxane Gay on Twitter for ages and have heard people raving about her but until now I’d only read odd stories in isolation or her essays. I know I’ll be going out and finding more of her writing after reading this.
Not as much read as I wanted this week – it all got a little bit busy. If you’re still looking for something to read this Bank Holiday Monday, check out my Easter reading recommendations.
Read:
A Night of No Return by Sarah Morgan
The Apple Orchard by Veronica Henry
Masquerade by Victoria Vale
Death of a Dumb Bunny by Melanie Jackson
Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit by Catriona McPherson
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Started:
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
Still reading:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
Big City Heat by David Burnsworth
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
There were some really good deals for the bank holiday weekend (see earlier post) so I ended up buying two ebooks.
As you may have gathered from yesterday’s Week in Books post and Saturday’s bonus post, I was on nights last week, which means a steady diet of romance and crime novels through the week. And so it will probably be no surprise that this week’s BotW is a crime novel and, like last week’s pick Southern Fried, it’s from Henery Press who really do do a good line in this sort of novel.
I think the cover has it sorted: pirates, parrots, treasure and a corpse!
Treasure in Paradise is the seventh book in Kathi Daley’s Tj Jenson series. This installment see’s high school teacher Tj and her young half-sisters decamp to the Gull Island to help a family friend with renovations at his holiday resort after the friend is taken ill. But when they arrive at his house, they discover a body in the attic. The corpse turns out to be a local treasure hunter, who had grown obsessed with a local legend that there was pirate treasure hidden nearby. Soon Tj is trying to hunt down the killer herself, after the local deputy rules the death an accident. And it turns out there are lots of secrets hidden on Gull Island as well as a developer sniffing around the resort to boot.
This exactly suited my mood last week. It’s fast-paced and easy to read with a cast of engaging characters. Tj is her siblings’ guardian after their mother died in an accident and there is an extended family which works really well to provide interest and subplots beyond the main mystery. I’d read one book in this series before – the first one – and jumping back in at book seven wasn’t a problem – the characters have moved on in their lives since the first book but no so much that I couldn’t follow. And the holiday (vacation) location works really nicely as well – Tj is away from home, but not out of her comfort zone because she’s visited the island before and because her family owns a resort as well.
I’ll be looking out for more books in the series – new ones and the ones that I’ve missed. You can get Treasure in Paradise in paperback or Kindle from Amazon, or you can go back and start from the beginning with Pumpkins in Paradise. At time of writing the cheapest in the series is Bikinis in Paradise – which I may have just treated myself to for 99p!
A busy week of nightshifts – and then sleeping them off. So not as much read as I was hoping, but there was some good stuff in there.
Read:
Somebody’s Baby by Donna Alward
The Whole Art of Detection by Lynsday Faye
Treasure in Paradise by Kathi Daley
The Best of Adam Sharp by Graeme Simsion
Beyond Shame by Kit Rocha
The Rising of the Larks by Cris Johnson
Started:
Big City Heat by David Burnsworth
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Still reading:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
But on the brightside, I didn’t buy any books – which is *really* unusual for nightshifts. Really unusual. I had to check twice to make sure I hadn’t succumbed to the urge to buy books in the early hours. But I didn’t. I really didn’t!
It was actually a really tough choice picking this weeks BotW partly because I didn’t read as much last week and partly because none of what I read was an absolute stand out for me. So in the end, I’ve settled on Tonya Kappes’ Southern Fried – a cozy crime mystery that comes out today, which has its issues, but overall was the book I had the most to say about of last week’s reading!
I like the cover – simple but actually relevant to the story.
This is the second in the Kenni Lowry series – about the sheriff of small town in Kentucky who is assisted on the job by the ghost of her grandfather (no, don’t walk away, it’s not quite as nutty as it seems) who was also the town’s sheriff. Kenni loves her job, but her mother isn’t best pleased about her daughter’s vocation – and neither are some of the townspeople as the local crime rate starts to rise. In Southern Fried, Kenni is investigating the death of a man found dead in the greenhouse of his former (as it turns out) employer in the run up to a cook off that they were both taking part in. In working out what happened, Kenni gets tangled up in family feuds and local intrigue just as election season is starting to get underway. As the danger mounts, Kenni, her dog Duke and her new (and handsome) deputy Finn must work out what’s going on before the rising death toll scuttles Kenni’s chances at holding on to her dream job before the voting even starts.
There’s a lot that I liked about this – I love the southern setting, the mystery is fast-paced and twisty with a potential slow burn romance running alongside. However as a Brit, I struggle to get my head around the idea of elected sheriffs and the hyper-local police forces and at times Kenni doesn’t help with this. In the first book in the series I found her spacey and not entirely convincing on police procedure (especially for a police academy graduate) but she seems much more competent in this one, which helped me cope with the fact that she’s taking advice from a ghost! Regular readers will know that I have a strange releationship with the supernatural and parnormal in books*, but in the main this works for me. There were still a couple of points where I raised my eyebrows at Kenni’s actions – an amateur detective can get away with a lot more than a sheriff can – but the book moves quick enough that you only notice this when you stop to think!
This book also made me muse on the role of the knowledgeable background character in cozy crimes. Kenni being the sheriff is a double-edged sword – it means that she has the right to be investigating crimes (and indeed is likely to come across them) in a way that many of the sleuths in cozies don’t, but it also rules out an important source of information and means that at times the sleuth can come across as not being very good at her job. there’s a couple of points in this where Finn the deputy seems like he knows what he’s doing more than Kenni does. But this is only book two in the series and is a big step on from book one so there is lots of potential for development and improvement as the series goes on.
My copy came from NetGalley, but you can buy Southern Fried on Kindle or in paperback from Amazon from today.
Happy Reading.
* As in sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn’t but I can never work out in advance what I’m going to like and what I’m going to hate!
A more normal/typical week this week – back at work, rushed off my feet and exhausted (I know, so soon after my holiday) so everything was fairly easy on my brain. And the dreaded nightshifts have started (fingers crossed I’m asleep when this publishes or I won’t be worth knowing at work tonight), so I don’t see this situation changing at all in the next seven days.
Read:
House at the Corner by Enid Blyton
Southern Fried by Tonya Kappes
The Six Bad Boys by Enid Blyton
The Decorator Who Knew Too Much by Diane Vallere
American Gods: Shadows 1 by Neil Gaiman, Scott Hampton et al
Royal Flush by Rhys Bowen
Started:
Siracusa by Delia Ephron
Still reading:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Beyond Shame by Kit Rocha
The Whole Art of Detection by Lynsday Faye
On the brightside, I didn’t buy anything. Check me.
