Tag: crime series

Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow

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I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to writing a Series I Love post about one of my favourite series, but here we are. I had planned this for December, but when I went back to read the first in the series again in preparation for this post it started the massive binge that you’ve seen evidence off in all the week in books and stats posts ever since and so this has had to wait until I finished that, because it’s only fair.

Meg Langslow is a blacksmith based in Virginia. When we meet her in book one, Murder with Peacocks, she’s living in Yorktown, but she moves to the fictional town of Caerphilly fairly early in the series where there is much more scope for Donna Andrews to create plots and drama! The first book sees Meg and her notebook that tells her when to breathe trying to organise three weddings at the same time, including her brother’s. The murder side of the book is very good, but also so is the world building which seems Andrews introduce the core of the regular characters who appear throughout the series. There is Meg’s bossy mum, her murder mystery obsessed retired doctor father, her creative but scatty brother Rob and Michael, the son of the dressmaker in charge of all the dresses. As we go through the series the regular crew gets bigger as the world expands.

There are now 32 books in the series, with a thirty third coming in summer 2023, and having reread them all basically back to back, what has impressed me is the consistency of Donna Andrews’ world building. Yes there are a few little fudges here and there, but if you weren’t binging the lot at once you wouldn’t notice them. And you don’t get fed up of the characters, or notice that there’s a formula the way you do with some other series that have run this long.

Looking back, I think that one of the smartest moves Andrews made was not marrying Meg and Michael off too quickly and then giving them a house that allowed plenty of options in terms of plot and house guests. Not every book is based in Caerphilly, but even when they are, there are enough different locations (and reasons for Meg being there) that it doesn’t feel like Meg is the problem (I’m looking at you Jessica Fletcher) or that she’s meddling unnecessarily. And because she has several different professional hats, you don’t worry how she’s stayed in business with all these bodies piling up!

Having read them all again, I think my favourites are probably Owls Well that Ends Well, Some Like It Hawk, The Nightingale Before Christmas and maybe Murder Most Fowl. But it’s hard to decide because they’re all good and it turns out they repay rereading. I’ve already written about a few of the others elsewhere as well – Terns of Endearment in the Cruise Ship post, Gone Gull was a BotW, Gift of the Magpie was in a Christmas round-up as was How the Finch Stole Christmas.

If you want to read them, the good news is that the first one is now available in ebook (it wasn’t when I started reading the series) so that is much easier to get hold of than you might expect for a 20 year old cozy crime book, but the next one after that that is on Kindle is the 9th book. Luckily, Murder with Peacocks is that rare thing – a first in series cozy crime that sets up a world very well and has a good mystery. You can find the link to the Kindle books here, the Kobo ones here and they’re also available in Apple books too. Try not to look at how much it would cost you to buy them all!

Happy Reading!

binge reads, series

Bingeable series: Her Majesty The Queen Investigates

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The latest of these came out last week and as I recently binge read the three books I thought it would be a good time to make a post about them.

So the premise – as the series name suggests – is that the (late) Queen subtly helps solve some murders that have occurred in her vicinity. Set a few years back – when she was in her early 90s, she uses her assistant Rozie to do the investigating she can’t do. In the first in the series, The Windsor Knot, the victim is an overnight guest at Windsor and it’s a bit of a closed group sort of thing. In the second, our the victim is a staff member, found dead by the side of the Buckingham Palace swimming pools. And in the third it’s the brother of a neighbouring aristo to the Sandringham estate.

I think the first book and the third book are stronger than the second, but given that I binge read the series I can’t say that the issues with the second book put me off. For me these work best when the problems they are solving seem the most organic – I can’t quite work out why but the second book felt much more contrived and complicated than the first one – and the third one, for all that the third is out and about all over Norfolk.

But they are all easy to read, with nice details about the royal residences involved (there really is a swimming pool at Buckingham palace – who knew?!) and enough real bits and bobs about the Queen’s life and family to feel like the person you think you know through the media. I did wonder what would happen now that Elizabeth II has died, but they are set in the mid 2010s and at the end of book three it says there is a fourth book coming so there will be one more at least, and I will be looking out for it.

As I said earlier, the new book is out now in hardback – in fact as I write this Amazon has the hardback as a Black Friday deal. I do think you need to read them in order though – but the good news is that the first in the series is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment – so if you’re a member you can read it for free. The second one has a different title in the US – so be careful of that because it’s easy to think it might be a fourth one you haven’t spotted, but the actual fourth one isn’t out until early 2024. But if you’ve enjoyed things like the Royal Spyness series, this might be the contemporary cozy crime equivalent you have been looking for.

Happy reading!

bingeable series, historical, mystery

Mystery series: Grantchester Chronicles

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Hot off the heels of the vicar mystery recommendsday post, here is another historical mystery series featuring a vicar, written by someone with a clerical connection. James Runcie’s father was the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time when Richard Coles’ novel is set!

The Grantchester of the series title is the village just outside Cambridge where Sidney Chambers is vicar. The books start in 1953 and move through towards the changes of the 1960s. Sidney is a bachelor in his early thirties and Grantchester is his first parish of his own. His best friend in the village is the detective Geordie Keating and the two of them solve mysteries together. The books usually feature a series of smaller mysteries alongside Sidney’s attempts to balance his calling and his previous life. There is also a romantic thread to the series – there are several women who Sidney is interested in at various points, although of course their relationships have to follow the rules because: vicar in the 1950s. In fact the fact that he is ordained is one of the major obstacles to his romantic life. The other major characters in the series are his housekeeper and then a few years in, his curate.

The books have been made into a TV series, which is now onto its third or fourth vicar of Grantchester, still solving crimes with Geordie after they ran out of the plot from the books with Sidney…

historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Guy Harford

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Happy Friday everyone. Here I am with another Friday series post about a historical mystery series, although as there are only three books so far, it’s more of a trilogy…

So T P Fielden’s three Guy Harford books follow an artist who is reluctantly drawn into the orbit of the Royal Family during World War Two. Guy finds himself in London after an Incident in Tangier. Officially he’s employed by the Foreign Office, but in reality he’s mostly doing the bidding of Buckingham Palace. Across the course of the three books, he solves murders and travels at home and abroad as he tries to find the killers.

Now there are several series that do something similar to this – royal-adjacent Second World War mysteries – but what makes these particularly interesting is that T P Fielden is the pen name of Christopher Wilson, who is a noted royal biographer and commentator. Now admittedly most of his books focus on the more modern royals, but the serial about the household make these something a bit different. And he also wrote the 1950s-set Miss Dimont mysteries which I have also really enjoyed.

There are only three of these so far, but we haven’t yet reached the end of the war, so there may still be more. I think I got the first of these as a Kindle First Reads pick, but they’re all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so if you’re a subscriber you can read them very easily. And if you like them, you have the option of Miss Dimont to follow on with!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Series I love

Series I Love: Maisie Dobbs

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It’s been nearly five years since the first in the Maisie Dobbs series was my BotW and as the seventeenth in the series can out recently, it seemed like an opportune time to feature the series here.

At the start of the series it’s 1929 and Maisie is setting up a private investigation firm in London. As I said in my review at the time, the mystery in that book is slighter than you expect because the book is also doing a lot of heavy work in the set up for the series itself. Over the course of the rest of the series Maisie has carried out all sorts of different types of investigations – some murder, some not – but a lot of them using her experiences and contacts made during the Great War. Time moves by as the series goes on (yes, I know that sounds obvious but it’s not always the case!) and by book 17 we’ve reached 1942. This passage of time has enabled a huge variety of different set ups as well as meaning that historical events can be woven into what’s going on. And of course there have been developments in Maisie’s personal life.

This is one of my favourite series to dip into. They’re basically very easy to read historical mystery novels. They don’t have the hint of humour that you get from Royal Spyness or Daisy Dalrymple, but they’re not gruesome-gruesome either. I think there’s bits of it that need to be read in order, but I certainly haven’t done that – at the moment I’ve read 13 of the series – but the books I haven’t read are 9, 14, 15 and the newest one and I’ve read some of the others in the wrong order too! If you don’t read them in order you will get spoilers for Maisie’s personal life, but to be honest that may not necessarily be a bad thing. If you read them you’ll understand, but anything else I say will be a spoiler!

In terms of getting hold of them, it should be fairly easy – I’ve seen them in bookshops (new and used), libraries (physical and virtual) and they’re all on kindle and Kobo too. And because of all the factors mentioned above, if you want to see if you like them, you could just start with whichever one you can get hold of easiest. As I write this the cheapest on Kindle and Kobo are books 11 and 12 weirdly.

Happy Friday!

Bonus picture: Fitzroy Square on Thursday morning – the location of Maisie’s office.

Book of the Week, cozy crime, crime, detective, Forgotten books, mystery

Book of the Week: These Names Make Clues

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I mean I would say that this is slightly cheating but you know that already because I told you yesterday that I hadn’t quite finished this because I went to see Jools Holland, so you already know that I finished this on Monday. But I did read most of it last week and it is my favourite thing I (mostly) read last week so it’s fair game for this.

These Names Makes Clues is a classic closed group mystery. Detective Inspector MacDonald is invited to a treasure hunt at the house of a well-known publisher. Along the other guests are writers of mysteries, romances and other books all with pseudonyms to hide their identities as part of the game. But before the night is over, one of the guests has been found dead in the telephone room and MacDonald is suddenly involved in an investigation filled with fake names and complicated alibis.

I really enjoyed this. I’ve recommended some books by E C R Lorac before and this is right up there. There are plenty of mysteries among the cast of suspects, even though some of them are revealed quite late on which is verging on cheating for the rules of Golden Age mystery writing but I forgave it because it’s a proper thrill ride towards the end as it all unravels. If you have kindle unlimited this is definitely worth a look as it’s currently in the rotation of British Library Crime Classics included in your membership in the UK.

My copy of These Names Make Clues came from the British Library bookshop during my book buying spree on my London trip in mid-October, but as mentioned above it’s available on Kindle Unlimited at the moment – which means I can’t find it on other ebook vendors, but when the unlimited period ends it may well pop up on Kobo again.

Happy reading!

Book of the Week, crime, detective

Book of the Week: Sick as a Parrot

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A big of week in reading last week, with some Christmas stuff you’ll hear about anon. Or at least I hope you will. Anyway, back to some old school crime this week for my BotW pick.

Copy of Sick as a Parrot on the Crime bookshelf

Sick as a Parrot is the fifth book in Liz Evans’s series featuring somewhat unconventional private investigator and ex-cop Grace Smith. Grace’s latest client is Hannah Conti, a young woman who has recently discovers that she is adopted and that her natural mother was convicted of murder. Hannah wants Grace to clear her mother’s name. And so Grace is drawn into the very messy murder of a school teacher two decades ago that no one wants re-examining. Meanwhile Grace is also pet-sitting a neurotic parrot and despite all her best efforts she also has an incredibly unreconstructed former colleague sleeping in her spare room.

This is the second book in this series that I’ve read (the other one being Who Killed Marilyn Monroe, the first in the series) and they’re both on the edge of gritty with an enjoyable side of black humour. They were written in the mid 2000s and that gives them an enjoyably low tech and low fi edge. Grace is a fun heroine – enjoyably flawed and smart in someways – but not in others. There are some common threads in this book from the first one too which have clearly been developing nicely in the interim which I’d like to go back for. And there’s an interesting romantic thread in this that means I really want to read the sixth and final book in the series.

So this is where it gets tricky. This is an older book which I picked it up secondhand, I think at a National Trust book stall. So you’ll have to hunt for it. But you never know, you might find one of the other books in the series while you’re at it. Some of the series have been republished on Kindle with new titles – you can find the box set of the first three here and some of them are even in Kindle Unlimited, if that’s a thing you have. Who Killed Marilyn Monroe is available on Kobo, but it’s the only one I could find there sadly.

Happy Reading!

detective, Fantasy, Series I love

Series I Love: Rivers of London

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So while I was writing about nice escapist reading from the ‘rona, I realised that even though I’ve talked about it a lot, I haven’t written a Series I Love post about one of my favourites: Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant/Rivers of London series. Back in the early days of the blog, I wrote about the first book, Rivers of London (or Midnight Riot if you’re in the US) but sticking to my rule about not recommending later books in series, even though there’s a lot of five star ratings on my Goodreads for them, I haven’t revisited the series properly. Even though my bonus picture for one of the last weeks before the lockdown was me at a Ben Aaronovitch event for the new book – and I enjoyed it so much I had a ticket for another one which got cancelled because of said lockdown. Anyway, now I’ve read that latest instalment in the series, here goes:

Rivers of London series

We meet Peter Grant in the first book as a rookie police officer in the Met, about to get assigned to a dead end department until he sees a ghost. Yes that’s right, a ghost. That leads him into a hidden world of magic and encounters The Folly – or the magic department. This means the series is what I have described as Grown Up Hogwarts but in the Police. Over the course of the subsequent eight books (so far), two novellas, an audiobook exclusive and a line of graphic novels, he and the gang have investigated in Soho, in the Underground, in a brutalist estate, in Herefordshire and in Mayfair and so much more as he’s learned about the world of magic, River Gods and so much more.

I don’t want to go into too much of the plots, because really that spoils everything, but I will say that you do need to read these in order – there is an overarching story that weaves in around the cases of the week (so to speak), which builds over time to a crescendo that puts everything else into second place. Peter doesn’t know that magic exists until he sees the ghost in the first book – but once he’s involved and has met Inspector Nightingale (the last wizard in England) things are slowly revealed to him. Ben Aaronovitch used to write for Dr Who and I think it really shows in his skill at building a complete and fully formed world – even if he insists he didn’t have all the rules sorted out when he first started writing the series.

Now, some of you might be reading this and thinking that you don’t really do books like this, but please don’t be so hasty or so judgemental.*  If you’ve read Harry Potter, then this is nothing more “hard” fantasy than that is really. Ditto if you’ve read Terry Pratchett – this is closer to “real life” than he is. If you read police procedurals as your main thing (and hello, lovely to see you if you do, but not sure how you got here) then this is really one step small away from reality – the jargon of the police force is there – down to the brand name of their walkie talkies. So go on, give it a go. I honestly don’t think anyone who I’ve recommended them to and who actually read one has told me they didn’t like them.

As I said, start at the beginning with Rivers of London. These have sold a tonne of copies, so if you’re somewhere where you can get to a bookshop, then I would be surprised if they don’t have a copy in stock. And if they’re not open, then call your local and see if they have a copy they can send you. I’m sure Big Green Books will oblige if he can too. Equally your local library (and their digital collection) should carry them – mine does. They’re also on Kindle and Kobo. The audiobook versions are read by the silky-voiced Kobna Holdbrook-Smith** and I own most of those as well. The eagle-eyed may have noticed in the photo of my shelf that I’m missing one of the novellas and that’s because before that event at Foyles, I waited for them to come out in paperback. I’ve broken that duck now, so who knows what will happen – They’ve already changed the paperback style so that furthest station and Lies Sleeping don’t quite match the previous ones, so all bets are off. Will I mix it up? Will I buy another copy of False Value when it comes out in paperback so they match?

Anyway, go forth and enjoy and when London’s reopened after all this, hopefully you’l have enjoyed the series so much that you’ll be planning a walking tour of all the various locations.

Happy Reading!

Ben Aaronovitch talking to Temi Oh at the Foyles event for False Value
Here is that picture of the Foyles event again!

*If you’re a romance reader who is fed up of people being rude about your genre of choice, then stop now and have a good hard think about what you’re saying and how much you hate it when people do that about romance. And if you need more persuading: Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches has mentioned (more than once) on her podcast how much she enjoys them.

**The observant of voice may recognise him from Paddington 2 where he plays the warder, but he’s been all over various bits of TV for years – and also won an Olivier award for playing Ike Turner in the original cast of Tina! (Which I’m still annoyed that I didn’t manage to see)

mystery, Series I love

Series I love: Charles Paris

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Now you may have noticed from the Week in Reading posts, but I’ve been tearing through Simon Brett’s Charles Paris murder mystery series.  The first book was a BotW back in November (in the heady days of my American odyssey!) and I finished the latest one the other week – after reading all 20 in just under three months. I’ve loved reading them (and listening to some of them) and though I really ought to tell you more about it.

Our sleuth is a middle-aged, struggling actor.  He’s got a fairly useless agent and drinks too much whiskey and it’s sometimes hard to work out which one of these is holding his career back more.  He’s also got an estranged wife, Frances, who he still holds a bit of a torch for (although not enough to manage to stay out of other women’s beds or stay off the bottle) and a grown-up daughter Juliet who is married and has children of her own.  Across the course of the series we follow Charles from job to job, where bodies and mysteries invariably turn up and he tries to work out what is going on – with varying degrees of success.

Cover of A Deadly Habit

The first Paris novel was published in 1975 and the latest in 2018 and time has moved on in the series – at the start Charles is living in a bed sitter with a shared payphone in the hall, these days he’s living in a studio flat and has a smart phone (although he doesn’t do anything with it beyond texting and calling).  He hasn’t aged along with the 40 years (or he’d be in his 90s!) but unless you read them all back to back (like me) you probably won’t notice! Charles is one of those characters who you really don’t want to like – he’s drunk, he’s unfaithful, he’s more than a bit disreputable at times – but somehow you really do.  Sometime he’ll make you scream with rage as he messes up an opportunity or backslides in his promises, but you always hope that next time he’ll do better.

Over the course of the series Charles works in pretty much every branch of the acting profession which means that there’s plenty of variety and helps stop the series feeling same-y.  Simon Brett was a radio and television producer before he became a fulltime writer in the late 70s and – particularly in those early novels – his experience of the industry shines through.  Regular readers will know that I’m a journalist in my day job and worked in radio before moving behind the scenes in TV and online video and I really got a kick out of comparing how things used to be to how things are now.  There’s a lot less drinking than there used to be – but I did recognise a few gripes that I still hear around the industry today.

A couple of the novels have also been adapted for radio – some back when they first came out, but more recently with Bill Nighy playing Charles – which is totally inspired casting. I think I’ve listened to all of them – and  Jeremy Front, who adapts them for radio, has tweeted that a new series has been completed and will be coming up soon, which is going to be a total treat.  I am waiting with bated breath.

I really enjoyed reading these – as you can tell by the pace that I went through them – and am hoping there’ll be another one or two yet.  The good news for me though is that Simon Brett has written more than a hundred books so there are several more series from him for me to try out yet.  If you want to try some Charles Paris, you may need to check your local library because the early ones are out of print physically, but they are all available as ebooks or you can try secondhand.  Here’s a link to the search results on Amazon to help you on your way.

Happy reading – and I’ll try and remind you all when the new radio plays are due to go out on Radio Four!

Authors I love, detective, mystery, Series I love

Series I love: Roderick Alleyn

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Now I’ve written about Albert Campion as well as Peter Wimsey, it would be remiss of me not to write about Ngaio Marsh’s brilliant creation, not least because I spend as much time re-reading or re-listening to the Roderick Alleyn mysteries and watching the BBC TV versions while I iron as I do revisiting Wimsey or watching Miss Marple.  And as I have now finished reading the series, having treated myself to the last omnibus in the January sales, this is an even better time to write about them!

Shelf of Ngaio Marsh omnibuses
Omnibus two is on loan to my dad. I think. I hope.

In some ways, Roderick Alleyn is another of the gentlemen detectives so popular in Golden Age detective fiction – he’s a well-educated younger son of a baronet, born in the 1890s and who served in the First World War – but with one major difference: Alleyn is actually a police officer.  At the start of the series, in A Man Lay Dead he’s a Detective Chief Inspector, by the end he is a Chief Superintendent.  A Man Lay Dead was published in 1934, the final novel came out in 1982 and the setting of the series moves with the time period – although Alleyn’s age… doesn’t really.  At the start of the series Alleyn is single, but later marries artist Agatha Troy, who he first met during the course of the case in the sixth book.  Troy, and later their son Ricky, pop up in several more cases, but by no means all of them -his regular companions are Inspector Fox and xxx Bailey.

Most of the books are set in and around London and the south of England, but there are several novels set in Marsh’s native New Zealand.  Marsh was passionate about the theatre and the arts and several of the novels are feature actors as well as the Unicorn Theatre in London and artists and artistic circles.  This means there’s a really nice variety of settings, and combined with the fact that Alleyn is a police detective, helps avoid the series seeming repetitive of like bodies are following Roderick around.  Alleyn is also a more peripheral figure in some of the novels than many of the other Golden Age detectives are.  In A Man Lay Dead, most of the story is mostly told from the perspective of Nigel Bathgate, friend of Alleyn and a guest at the party where a man has been really killed during a game of Murder, A Surfeit of Lampreys is seen through the eyes of Roberta Grey, visiting a family of penniless and eccentric aristocrats when their uncle is killed in a lift and there are more.

As I mentioned at the start, I’ve read all the books now, but I’ve watched the early 90s TV adaptation so many times that I’ve had to go back and do some actual re-reading of the novels as the TV versions are colouring my memories of the novels slightly.  There are eight TV Alleyns – and there are a few differences from the book.  The most obvious is probably that Troy is in almost all of them, with the relationship between the two their relationship builds over the course of the series.  The second is the condensing and moving of the timeline – while the series starts before the Second World War and continues in the post-war period, the TV series specifically sets the first case in 1948 and moves on from there.

There are also fairly major alterations to the plots – some have less victims than their book equivalent, others have characters removed and replaced, others have extra subplots added in and others taken out. The other obvious difference for the viewer is that two different actors play Alleyn – Simon Williams in Artists in Crime, the pilot episode and the story where Alleyn meets Troy, and Patrick Malahide in all the others.  Williams’ Alleyn is also a slightly different character – he’s said to have had a difficult war and is seen having some emotional difficulty with the resonpsibilty of the job – generally more Wimsey-ish than when Malahide plays him in the subsequent episodes.  I have reminder set on my TiVo box to record The Alleyn Mysteries and generally have two or three saved at a time for watching while ironing.  My favourites are – bizarrely – the aforementioned pilot and Dead Water  In fact if you fancy it, Alibi are showing two Alleyn’s this weekend and another two the week after.  They all have the added bonus that if you’ve watched any other murder mysteries (or costume dramas to be honest) of the same sort of vintage, you can spot the same people popping up all over the place – particularly the Joan Hickson Miss Marples: Emily Pride in Dead Water is played by Margaret Tyzack who plays Clotilde Bradbury Scott in Nemesis; in Artists in Crime, Rory’s mother Lady Alleyn is played by Ursula Howells who is Miss Blacklock in A Murder Is Announced.  They are not the only ones, but they’re probably the most obvious*.  There’s also cross over with Campion and Poirot as well as the BBC TV Narnia adaptations…

Audible screengrab showing Ngaio Marsh novels

Several of the Alleyn mysteries are on fairly heavy rotation in my audiobook library.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I am Very Bad With Silence and often listen to audiobooks to go to sleep to while I’m away from home.  And the audiobook fan is particularly lucky with this series – there’s abridged and unabridged versions of many of the novels with a variety of different narrators.  Benedict Cumberbatch has done shortened versions of three of them – Artists in Crime, Scales of Justice and Death in a White Tie – but I also like Anton Lesser (who is particularly good at accents).  And if you want something even shorter there are also a few radio plays available on Audible.  My favourites on audiobook are probably the Cumberbatch Scales of Justice and then Lesser’s  Opening Night and James Saxon’s unabridged Final Curtain.

If you fancy trying some Inspector Alleyn, you should be able to get hold of them fairly easily – they are available as ebooks, or as the three novel omnibuses that I have and they’re often in secondhand bookshops (although not usually charity shops, the most recent editions are a bit too old).  I started at the beginning and worked my way through (over the course of just under five years) but I don’t think you need to read them in order to enjoy them.  There is also an unfinished Alleyn, recently finished by Stella Duffy, which is out in paperback next month and which I have on my to read pile to get to sooner rather than later now that I’ve finished the series proper.  If you’re an Alleyn fan, let me know which your favourites are in the comments – and if you’ve read the “new” one let me know what you thought!

Happy Reading!

*Keen Marple readers/viewers will spot what those two characters have in common, which is why they sprung to mind!

Cover of Money in the Morgue by Ngaio Marsh and Stella Duffy