Tag: Australian-set mysteries

Book previews

Out This Week: Final Corinna Chapman book

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Back in March when I was writing about Murder in the Cathedral I said that I was sad because it was going to be the last new Kerry Greenwood book we were going to have. Well I was wrong – there is just one more and it came out this week. I found out about this a couple of months ago from Kerry’s facebook page, where The Duty Wombat said “We’ve had a lot of edits, and I have helped. This will be noted in the actual books, for reasons of transparency.” But I wasn’t expecting this to be published anywhere near this fast – but I think they’ve gone double speed on it to get it out for the Australian Summer holidays (Christmas!).

Anyway, this is the eighth in the Corinna Chapman series which is set in the modern day. The blurb says that it’s autumn in Melbourne and Insula, the building where Corinna lives and works comes to the attention of some real estate developers and they will need to fight to survive. Elsewhere Daniel, Corinna’s private detective lover is investigating some missing boys. I really like the Corinna books – and I’ll be interested to see the notes about which of the edits are post-Kerry (so to speak). Hopefully I’ll get my hands on a copy relatively soon – and I’m pretty sure I’ll read it as soon as I do!

Authors I love, bingeable series, Book of the Week, detective, mystery

Book of the Week: Murder and Mendelssohn

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So a slightly cheaty pick this week, as it’s not a book I haven’t read before, but as I finished the Phryne reread last week, I’m going to let myself break the rules!

Murder and Mendelssohn is the twentieth book in Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series and has a lot of the key threads in the series running through it. Inspector Jack Robinson asks Phryne for help investigating the murder of an unpopular conductor. Jack thinks the killer may come from among the choir he has been rehearsing so Phryne decides to infiltrate the choir and find out. But at the same time, one of her old friends from World War One is in town and needs her help keeping a mathematical genius alive.

My favourite Phrynes are the ones with a large cast of suspects, a love interest and a historical connection – and this has all of that. The full Fisher menage is here – with the exception of Lin Chung, and it has has Greenwood’s take on Sherlock Holmes in Rupert Sheffield, former codebreaker and current irritant to all around him except John Wilson.

I wouldn’t suggest you start the series here, because you’ll miss all the fun of getting to this point, but if you do make this your first taste of Miss Fisher, then it will give you a pretty good flavour of what everything is all about. One last thing – a warning: if you’ve watched the TV show, don’t expect this to be the same. I’ve enjoyed the series, but it’s a teatime drama and they have adapted the series to fit that – which means they’ve done a few things to Phryne’s love life, added some running plot strands that don’t exist in the book and reduced the size of the Fisher household somewhat. So treat them as separate entities if you can.

You can get Murder and Mendelssohn in all the usual ebook formats – Kindle, Kobo and the rest – and that’s probably the easiest way to get hold of them.

Happy reading!