Back on the cozy crime for this week’s BotW with G M Malliet’s first St Just mystery. I’ve read a couple of Malliet’s Max Tudor series before – dishy vicar with a Past in rural village – which I’ve enjoyed so I was interested to read more from this author.
Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a best-selling mystery writer, who delights in tormenting his adult children by constantly rewriting his will. Then he announces his engagement and the whole family gathers to “celebrate”. But when his eldest son and heir turns up dead, suspicion, greed and malice run riot in the house. Detective Chief Inspector St Just and Sergeant Fear must try to track down the killer before someone else ends up dead.
The whole Beauclerk-Fisk family are hugely dislikeable and this adds a certain something as you read about their machinations (some subtler and cleverer than others). There’s also a lot of references to classic crime – so if you’ve read a lot of Christie you’ll enjoy that too. Sir Adrian has distinct Luther Crackenthorpe tendencies and is stuck writing books about a detecting spinster who he has grown to hate and tried to kill. His writing methods and plot accuracy (as described) also feel like a bit of a comment on someone too.
DCI St Just features less in this than I was expecting, so you don’t really get to know him massively, so I’d need to read another book in the series to make a proper judgement, but he comes across as quite well – fairly inoffensive, not overly flamboyant or extravagant – and obviously as a police officer he has a perfect right to be investigating the crime which was not the case in one of the other cozies I read recently which didn’t work anywhere near as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is a fun mystery with a good few twists before you find out who actually did it. Get your copy from Amazon or on Kindle. My copy was second hand – but I have seen some of Malliet’s books in store in The Works too.
This is a strange BotW post for me to write – as there were two other books that nearly beat The Murder Quadrille last week, and nothing that I liked as much as them this week. But I have a rule about not carrying over picks that weren’t used in a previous week. So Shawn Reilly Simmons’s Murder on the Half Shell gets the nod – but I enjoyed it more this paragraph implies. Trust me, keep reading!
Murder on the Half Shell is the second book in The Red Carpet Catering Mysteries. The plot: Penelope Sutherland runs a catering company that works on film sets, she’s on an island in Florida catering a movie – but it’s not all plain sailing. The director is difficult, the leading lady has a seafood allergy and it is hot, really hot. Then two of the waitresses she’s been using go missing after a crew party and Penelope’s former culinary school instructor turned celebrity chef is the prime suspect. But she’s sure he didn’t do it and starts to look into it herself.
Food-related cozies are such a massive trend at the moment. There’s a lot of cupcakes, bakers and coffee shops and so a catering company is a nice variant. One of the problems I often have with cozy series is that there’s a lot of murder going on in a very small area. I’m not sure how long a real cake shop/coffee shop/bakery would last if bodies kept turning up outside them and that does sometimes affect how I feel about a series as it goes on – depending obviously on how the author handles it. But the location catering idea means that there’s potential for the series to move around a bit. This of course makes it a little harder to maintain a large gang of supporting characters, but it does stop the Cabot Cove effect. The flipside is that with location moving around does it does mean that the murders might start to seem to be following the lead character around – the Jessica Fletcher effect. But there are ways and means of dealing with all of these issues – and we’ll see how Red Carpet Catering copes if the series continues.
Penelope is one of the more appealing heroines I’ve recently read in the genre too. She’s not too stupid to live (or at least not often), she’s not too obviously encroaching on police territory in a way that would get her arrested and she still manages to spend enough time at her business (or have staff manning it) that you can see that she’d stay solvent. I guess I’m trying to say that Murder on the Half Shell has a good premise, lead character and is solidly executed. I did think that some of the set-up and diversionary tactics were a little heavy-handed at times – the “obvious suspect” evidence particularly – but it wasn’t enough to annoy me. It’s not as humourous as my favourite books in the genre, but again, that’s not really a problem if the mystery is interesting – and this one is.
Murder on the Half Shell was a perfectly nice way to spend a couple of train journeys – my copy came from NetGalley and I liked it enough to go back and get the first book in the series from there too. If you fancy dipping your toe in the world of cozy crime on location, you can pick it up on Kindle (for £1.99 at time of writing).
As you may have noticed, I am a total binge reader when I discover an author I like and promptly buy up their back catalogue (or borrow it from the library) to fulfill my desperate craving for another fix. This does not help the state of the to-read pile or my bank balance and can make me look a little unhinged. So here – for your amusement – are my big obsessions of 2015 and a few examples of the ridiculous lengths I’ve gone to…
Janet Evanovich
Can it really be true that I only read my first Janet Evanovich novel in April? Goodreads assures me that it is so and thus it must be. Since my first taste (Wicked Business), I’ve read 18 Stephanie Plums – and all four between the numbers fill-ins, the other two Wicked books, two Full books, two Fox and O’Hares and a standalone romance. So that’s 30 Janet Evanovich novels in less than nine months. This is why people think I’ve got a bit of a book problem.
I’ve read so much Janet Evanovich this year, I’ve a whole shelf of her books – non-matching of course!
Deanna Raybourn
I read Silent in the Grave back in January – and since then I’ve read three more of the Lady Julia series – with a fourth waiting for me on the shelf. And the only reason that that has been waiting is because the price of the next one has been so expensive. And ditto her standalone novels. But in a piece of glorious serendipity, they’re all on offer on Amazon Kindle at the moment – so last night I spent just under £20 on 8 (!) books and novellas – buying up the rest of Lady Julia, the first Veronica Speedwell and two standalones and their prequel novellas. Now that is what I call obsession…
Only four of my Deanna Raybourn’s are here – Silent in the Grave is on loan to Little Sis!
Historical Romance
My love of historical romance has continued this year. In fact it’s turned into more of a quest – to find more authors who write my favourite sort of smart, witty, sexy romance novels. Because this is the problem with being a binge reader. You find someone that you like, you binge on their back catalogue and then you have to start following their publishing schedule like everyone else does – so you might have to wait a year before you can get another fix from them. So you need another author to read. In 2015 I’ve read some really good, some really bad and a lot of in between. Among the good were Sabrina Jeffries, Kerrigan Byrne, Johanna Shupe and Courtney Milan. I’m not going to mention the bad! There’s loads more I want to read – listening to the DBSA podcast each week will do that to you – but the prices of those sort of American-published romances are often really quite high over here – and fall into the same buying rules as the cozy crimes. So often I play roulette with NetGalley – requesting new releases there and hoping I like them. Sometimes it pays off – the aforementioned Byrne and Shupe for example – and sometimes it doesn’t…
Cozy Crime
I’ve always had a soft spot for the “lighter” end of the crime market, but I’ve really been rattling through various cozy murder mysteries this year. I’m still reading Donna Andrews (three of them this year) – but now I’m closer to the end of the series the books have got more expensive to buy and I have rules about what I’ll spend on a book that will only take me a couple of hours to read. So as a consequence my net has spread wider. Jenn McKinlay’s become firm favourite and there’s a bunch of other series I’ve dipped into too (again thanks to NetGalley) – to varying success. I feel more coming on in 2016.
All my Donna Andrews bar one are out on loan, but the McKinlay collection is growing!
Historical Crime
This is often the meeting of two of my other obsessions – Cozy crime and Historical romance. The Daisy Dalrymple and Phryne Fisher series were two of my discoveries of 2014 – and now I’ve read all of them, I’ve been searching for more – and not just those set in the 1920s and 1930s. That’s how I discovered Deanna Raybourn and started that obsession. But as well as Lady Julia, there’s Tasha Alexander’s Lady Emily and James Runcie’s Sidney Chambers. And then there’s the ones which are more crime-y and less romance – like Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver, Carola Dunn’s Eleanor Trewynn. And no romance at all – like Flavia de Luce (because she’s a child!). So many good books.
I thought the light shining behind them was a nice touch…
So there you are. My five big obsessions of the year. Of course some would argue that books in general are my biggest obsession of them all. And they’d be right. There’s nothing like sitting down with a book and being transported to another world to make life seem better. You can live so many different lives and visit so many different places by reading a book. And then there’s the friends that you can make – real people I mean – because of books and the book community. The ones that you chat to on Twitter, the ones you meet at author events and who turn into proper friends and everything in between. Long may my book obsession continue.
Happy 2016 everyone – and thank you for reading my bookish wafflings. I hope you’ve enjoyed them – and I’m sure that there’s more where they came from.
I am the person who gives everybody they possibly can a book for Christmas. My immediate family all get a book AND a “normal” Christmas present. I buy young relatives books as often as I can. I even gift myself a Christmas book. So I thought that I would give you suggestions for presents – on top of a post about Christmas-themed books. This is the first of four post which I hope cover all eventualities. Most of the links are to Amazon – because quite a few of the books mentioned across the various posts are in their 3 for £10 promotion, thus saving you money to use to buy yourself books on other things.
Non Fiction
Men can be tricky to buy for – or at least I find them hard. I often end up buying biographies of sportsmen. The Boy in my life is a massive petrol head – he devoured motorbike Guy Martin’s Autobiography this last weekend, which had been sitting on the shelf since last Christmas and is out now in paperback. He’s said he’d quite like Martin’s hardback, When You Dead, You Dead. Also on his Christmas list this year is ex-F1 driver turned World Endurance Champion Mark Webber’s book Aussie Grit. The annual Jeremy Clarkson book will have been a fixture on many people’s Christmas lists for years, but if you fancy a change, The Boy really wants And On That Bombshell – a behind the scenes look at Top Gear, written by Top Gear’s script editor Richard Porter, who I’ve been following on Twitter for years without knowing what his day job was!
I have had *such* headaches taking the photos for these posts. I could cry. Honestly I could.
Away from the motorsports books he’s a big Bill Bryson fan – so The Road to Little Dribbling may also turn up in his stocking. One of his favourite books this year has already featured here as a Book of the Week – but A Year of Living Danishly is so good that I think it deserves another mention – particularly as Hygge starts in January and moving to a new country is often one of those things that gets mentioned in New Year’s Resolutions.
Check out my attempts at artistic arrangements of the books. This was the best I could manage.
On the history front, I haven’t read Trumbo (yet) but it’s just been turned into a film and the McCarthy era is fascinating – particularly in the movie industry. I’ve also had quite a good hit-rate with Ben MacIntyre – my dad loved Operation Mincemeat, and Agent Zigzag and Double Cross have also gone down well with him and several other men of various ages that I buy for. His latest is A Spy Among Friends, about Kim Philby, which I haven’t read – but which may well end up in someone’s stocking this year.
Fiction
My Boy has got hooked (like me) on Janet Evanovich this year, so I’ve been on the lookout for pacey and fun thrillers for him. It’s tricky as it very often ends up with me buying books for me! I’m going to try and turn him onto the Fox and O’Hare series next – The Heist is the first one, The Scam is the latest. They’re basically Ocean’s 11 or White Collar but as a book. She’s an FBI agent, he’s a fraudster – but they have to work together to catch con-men.
Try not to look at the dents in the hardback spines, I know once you’ve noticed it’s hard to stop,but…
I’ve already mentioned The British Library Crime Classics series in the BotW post on Silent Night, but it bears repeating that there some really good titles in this attractive looking series which would make good gifts for an Agatha Christie fan looking for Golden Age Crime. And as the series is bring stuff back into print that’s been out of circulation for a long time, there’s much less risk that they’ll have read them already! On top of the ones I’ve already mentioned, try The Z Murders and Murder Underground. Speaking of Golden Age crime, Sophie Hannah’s Poirot continuation The Monogram Murders might also be worth a look.
Try and focus on the retro stylings of the book, and the shine of the table – which I polished specially
This is breaking my own rule about not mentioning stuff I’ve read for Novelicious before the review goes up there, but I’ve just finished reading TV historian Neil Oliver’s first novel Master of Shadows, and without preempting my review there too much, it is basically the novel version of one of those historical epic movies. Set in the fifteenth century. it follows a young man as he flees Scotland, becomes a mercenary and ends up entangled in the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire. It was too gruesome for me, but if you have a Game of Thrones fan in your life, this could be a great choice for them.
The pile of book effect is wearing thin? I know. And this has foil on the cover so its a photo nightmare
My Boy has also expressed an interest in Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back, which has been sitting in my Library book bag for ages. In case you’ve missed it, this was a massive best seller in Germany – and tells the story of what happened when Adolf Hitler wakes up in 2011 Berlin. It’s already been made into a movie in Germany and Radio 4 have dramatised it over here. It’s meant to be laugh-out loud funny, but disturbing.
And finally, I’m not big on scary, but The Boy has film director David Cronenberg’s debut novel on his to-read pile. I don’t like recommending books that I haven’t read (or that people around me haven’t read) but Consumed has a good review average on both Amazon and Goodreads and pull quotes from Stephen King and JJ Abrams, so strikes me as a fairly good punt in a genre I’m really not very fluent in.
Still, at least I had enough books for this post to make a stack. Just wait til tomorrow…
Miscellaneous
If you want to give bookish gifts that aren’t actually books, then may I point you in the direction of American company Out of Print. They do the most gorgeous clothes with book covers printed on them and for each purchase they donate a book to a community in need. I’ve gifted their t-shirts to several men at various points – including The Boy, who loves them and stares wistfully at their website every time he sees me looking at it, but tells me he has enough clothes. The tees are soft, the print isn’t crunchy (if you know what I mean) and they wash well and hold their shape. If you’re in the UK I think we’ve already missed the cheap shipping international deadline, although they say you can upgrade, but TruffleShuffle stock a few styles, as do Amazon.
So there you are, hopefully I’ve recommended something for most tastes or situations – or at least provided a jumping off point. Coming next: Books for Her.
This week’s BotW sees normal service well and true resumed with Silent Nights – a book of Golden Age detective short stories set at or around Christmas. This is one of the British Crime Library’s reissues – I’ve read quite a few now and have discovered some really good authors that I was previously unaware of and who help me with my cravings for “proper” classic crime.
As well as familiar names like Dorothy L Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle and lesser known but still in print authors like Margery Allingham, there are others I hadn’t heard of before and who I’ll now try and investigate. Some of them have had long out of print titles recently republished in the same series, some of them are even more obscure than that.
There’s also a really good variety of types of mystery. The Conan Doyle is a Sherlock Holmes, complete with leaps of deduction unfathomable to the normal person, The Sayers is a Wimsey locked room-esque short story about a missing necklace. There’s also really quite creepy suspense in the form of Ethel Lina White’s Waxworks, a story based around a chess problem, another which leaves you to work out who was arrested (with an explanation at the back of the book) and a poisoning with a really nasty old man.
I enjoyed all of the stories in Silent Nights. The weak point for me was the chess-based story, but that was because chess isn’t really my game. I also really appreciated the biographical notes about each of the authors at the start of the stories – complete with information about other notable titles.
If you’re looking for some Christmas reading, this might be a nice, bite-sized place to start, and equally it would make a nice present for any fan of classic crime – particularly those who haven’t ventured much beyond the obvious suspects. It’s also not violent or graphic so might work for the cozy-crime lover in your life too. Talking of Christmas present ideas, I have many more to share with you – and they’ll be posted very soon as I know this is prime Christmas shopping time!
My copy of Silent Nights came from NetGalley*, but you can the very pretty paperback from Amazon or I’ve seen it on the speciality Christmas displays in several Waterstones stores as well as Foyles in Charing Cross Road – so it may have made it into your local bookshop too. And the Kindle version is a bargain £2.99 at time of writing, so you could treat yourself to a bit of festive sleuthing without having too big an impact on your Christmas Present Buying Fund! Several of the other British Library Crime Classics are a similar price, I can recommend Mavis Doriel Hay – Her festive story Santa Klaus Murder as well as Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell are all under £3 at the moment – as well as books by J Jefferson Farjeon and Christopher Sprigg.**
* And as usual, I only feature books here that I genuinely like – I’ve read 25 books from NetGalley in the last quarter, but only a few of those have made it to a review on here (although they all get reviewed over on Goodreads).
** Back on full disclosure again – I bought Murder Underground and Death of the Cherwell for myself, but have read various Farjeons and Sprigg’s Death of an Airman via NetGalley over the last year.
If you were to make a study of my reading material, you would find that one of the genres that crops up the most is so-called “Cozy Crime”. I love me a murder mystery, but I don’t like too much gore, psychological stuff, horror etc. Basically what I’m saying is that I’m a golden age detective story fan and that’s the level of violence that I’m happy with. So here’s a few of my recent reads from cozy end of the genre.
Mrs Kaplan and the Matzoh Ball of Death by Mark Reutlinger – I read this in the book marathon on holiday in October, but have waited until now to review it because it is out on the 18th (thank you NetGalley for my super-advance copy!). Rose Kaplan is a resident at an old people’s home who suspected of a murder after a fellow resident chokes to death on a Matzoh ball made by Mrs K for the Passover seder. Rose and her best friend Ida decide to investigate who really was responsible. I loved this book when I read it on the beach. It’s not challenging reading, it’s not reinventing the wheel, but it is a nice way to spend a few hours – it feels like an American cross between Agatha Raisin and Miss Marple. Definitely worth a look.
Also out in the next couple of weeks is Death Comes to London by Catherine Lloyd. Now this is the second in a series – but I don’t think it’s going to ruin your enjoyment if you haven’t read the first one. In Death Comes to London, Miss Lucy Harrington and her sister Anna make a trip to London for The Season and their friend from the village Major Robert Kurland is also summoned to town. When the grandmother of one of Robert’s friends drops dead in a ballroom, Lucy and Robert end up investigating what could have caused her deaths. I really enjoyed this during some of my nightshift commutes – it reminded me of the better end of the M C Beaton/Marion Chesney Regency mysteries. In fact I’ve already treated myself to the first in the series to help fill the gap before the next book arrives!
Books Can Be Deceiving by Jenn McKinlay – Having enjoyed McKinlay’s Death of a Mad Hatter earlier in the year (review) I ordered the first in her Library Lovers series to see if it was a flash in the pan. Lindsay is the director of Briar Creek Public Library – and ends up trying to solve a murder after one of her employees is accused of killing her boyfriend. I didn’t see all the twists coming and I liked the characters. It felt a little bit like a younger Jessica Fletcher-who-runs-a-library-and-solves-murders. And when you’ve wiled away as many afternoons to Murder, She Wrote repeats as I have, that can only be a good thing.
Breaking my usual rules about only reading series in order, on a trip to the library recently I picked up book 6 of Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series – Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder. I quite enjoyed the first in the series, but hadn’t read any more because of the huge to-read pile and because they broke my rules on how much I’ll spend on an ebook (I have them on my wish list so I check periodically if they’re on offer!). I liked this book more than book 1 and although I’m fairly sure there are a few plot developments that I’ve missed it didn’t impair my enjoyment of the book. I didn’t work out the solution – which I had to read several times to get straight in my head, although whether that is because the cast of characters was huge, because the solution was complicated or because I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, I’m not sure!
Not really cozy crime per se, but I read E C Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case – which popped up in my Goodreads recommendations as being the forerunner of Sayers et al. It’s an Edwardian set murder mystery where an investigator working for a newspaper tries to work out who killed a wealthy financier. Now I didn’t enjoy it as much as my normal Golden Age fare, but I did enjoy it mostly to see the parallels between the later books which I love so much. One to read more because of its influence and its reputation rather than because it stands up brilliantly in my opinion.
Now I know that not everyone is like me in having a to-read pile a mile high, so if you’re in the market for some more reading material – here are some of my favourite bargain deals around at the moment.
If you haven’t read Jane Lovering’s Please Don’t Stop The Music yet – where have you been? It was the RNA’s Romantic Novel of the Year in 2012 and it’s only 99p on Kindle this month.
Christina Jones is another of my favourite authors – and the older parts of her back catalogue are being republished as e-books at the moment. My backlog is such that I haven’t managed to read them all yet – but I did really enjoy Tickled Pink a few weeks back – £1.53 on the Kindle at the moment
Previously reviewed on the blog, Trisha Ashley’s Every Woman for Herself is currently £1.49 for Kindle – I loved it, if you haven’t read any of Trisha’s books before, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start (although my favourite is still A Winter’s Tale which is a fairly bargainous £1.99). If you want a paperback Trisha fix, the paperback of Good Husband Material is available on sale for £2.99 on The Works’ site – which leads me nicely onto…
If you’re an M C Beaton fan, The Works have a selection of her books including Hamish Macbeth, Agatha Raisin and some of her historical romances for around £2 or £3 and a bundle of five Hamish books for £7.99 here.
Also on The Works website there are all three of Carola Dunn’s 1960s set Cornish mysteries for £2.99- ideal if you want a bit of cozy crime for your autumn nights – the first in the series is Manna from Hades.
I’m a big Lucy Dillon fan – and The Works have several of her books – not only A Hundred Pieces of Me – which I read and adored earlier in the year in the pre-blog era (you can see my rave review on Goodreads here) – but also Walking Back to Happiness and Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts – all for less than £3 each.
And the goodies just keep coming on the Works site (and they’re doing 6 for £10 so you can really splurge) with Laurie Graham’s A Humble Companion. I love her books – although my favourite Gone with the Windsors is hard to get hold of – and this was her 2012 book which is an insider look at the Royal Household during the time of George III. Well worth a look.
I’m hoping this list has something to tempt you – if you’re heading to the supermarket this weekend, I’m hoping some of the new releases I’ve reviewed recently will be in their deals – certainly Daisy Goodwin’s The Fortune Hunter should be. I did try to find out what the deals were this week in WH Smith, but drew a blank. If you spot any good bargains you think I might like – post them in the comments below!
Edited – I originally posted that Gone with the Windsors was out of print, I’ve since found some copies in some places – so I’ve upgraded it to hard to get hold of. It’s definitely not on Kindle though, which is a big loss.
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway (I know! Two giveaway reviews in a week! This doesn’t usually happen – I’ve only won three giveaways ever!) but that doesn’t influence what I write.
Back on more familiar territory for me here, with a fun murder mystery story from American author Jenn McKinlay. Death of a Mad Hatter is the second book in the Hat Shop Murder series (and is the first book I’ve read by this author) and centres around American Scarlett Parker and her cousin Vivian Tremont, who run a hat shop in London. As usual I’m trying to avoid spoilers in my synopsis, and I can’t say too much about the set up without giving away the plot of the first book (or at least I think I can’t!), so here goes: In Death of a Mad Hatter, an unpleasant man dies at a themed party which the girls have provided the hats for. When a trace of poison is found in the hat, the girls get involved in trying to track down who was really responsible.
I love it when you get some extras with a book!
This is a cozy murder mystery with a fun premise and an ingenious solution. The plot is well worked out, the dialogue snappy, the humour works and the characters are engaging. I was never bored and always wanted to know what was going to happen next. In fact the book almost seemed to wrap up too soon – although that’s not to say that the denouement was in anyway rushed, I just couldn’t believe that the book was nearly over (which is always a good sign). I read the book in a day and enjoyed it.
For me it ticks similar boxes as Donna Andrews’ Meg Langslow series, although this series is obviously set in the UK. And therein was my only problem with it – as a Brit there were a few things that jarred for me as being just not “right”. Now I know that this book is written for the US market – and in fact I don’t think it has been picked up by a publisher over here – so for the vast majority of people reading it, this won’t be an issue. Mainly the problems came with things that the British characters said that weren’t “right” – although as we have the NHS here the idea of a British family having a event to raise money to build a new wing at a hospital struck me as a bit odd – but hey, it could happen, after all Great Ormond Street Hospital’s charity is probably one of the most famous charities in the country!
Now this is me being really very nit-picking – because the “wrong” moments were my only problem with the whole book and it’s really a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things, because in the main the British characters and British bits were so well done that the bits that weren’t “right” bit surprised me! And I’ll still be looking out for more from Jenn McKinlay – from the cards and bookmarks that came with my copy I think her other series may be right up my street too!
Death of a Mad Hatter is presumably available all good bookshops and book retailers who stock Mass Market paperbacks in the US and over here in the UK you can get it from Foyles and Amazon (and presumably anyone else who’ll order in from the US). Jenn McKinlay’s website is jennmckinlay.com, she can be found on twitter as @JennMcKinlay and on Facebook
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 