Tag: historical crime

Book of the Week, cozy crime, historical, mystery

Book of the Week: Deadly Summer Nights

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Happy Tuesday everyone and today’s pick is a first in series historical cozy crime that I picked up when I was spending that Waterstones gift card before Christmas.

Our setting for Deadly Summer Nights is a holiday resort in up state New York. It’s 1953 and it’s the second season that Elizabeth has been managing Haggerman’s Catskill’s Resort. Her mother is a former actress and dancer and inherited the resort – and although she’s using her connections to book entertainment acts for the resort, it’s her daughter who is doing all the hard work on the day to day. And because it’s the 1950s and she’s a woman, not everyone is pleased about that – or prepared to listen to her. The last thing they need is a dead body at the resorts, but that’s what they’ve got. And in the dead man’s cabin the chief of police finds a copy of The Communist Manifesto and suddenly everyone is claiming that the resort is a hotbed of communists. But Elizabeth isn’t convinced and sets out to try and figure out what happened herself.

I really, really enjoyed this. The setting is fun and a bit different – even if I was really annoyed on Elizabeth’s behalf at all of these useless men who wanted to dismiss her. I do like a historical murder mystery and I haven’t read a lot that are set in mid-century America outside of a big city like New York. And the resort setting is a lot of fun whether it’s modern or historical- I’ve read Kathi Daley’s series set on a resort and I would happily read more if they appear.

This is also my first Vicki Delaney novel – although I have read one of her books under her Eva Gates pen name. There is only one other book in this series so far – and I will try and get hold of it to see what happens next. This has the start of a promising love triangle going on and I hope there’ll be clues in that about whether there will be more – Delaney seems to have a lot of series going on under her various names and I don’t know enough to know which ones are still active.

My copy came from the lovely cozy crime bookshelf in Waterstones Piccadilly, and I think it’s going to be a special order if you want the paperback version. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

bingeable series, series

Series Update: New Flavia de Luce

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Yes it’s Friday, no this isn’t really a series post. Well it is, sort of. Let me explain. Back in May 2022 I wrote a series post for Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce books, and in it I said that as there hadn’t been a new book since 2019, I thought the series might be finished… but no! After a six year wait, we have an eleventh book, and it came out this week.

A quick recap for those who haven’t read any Flavia (or in fact my previous post about her). She’s still not quite in her teens yet and a prodigy when it comes to sciences, but in most other areas very much as mature as you would expect for her age, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. In this latest instalment, Flavia is still saddled with her even younger cousin Undine, who is desperate to be part of all of Flavia’s activities no matter how hard Flavia tries to stop her or put her off. When a village resident is found dead after eating poisoned mushrooms and Flavia’s own housekeeper is the prime suspect, it is only natural that Flavia starts to investigate herself, which leads her into areas that she could never have suspected.

The next thing to say is that you should not read this as your first book in the series. Alan Bradley writes lovely prose, and his descriptions are amazing, but this has got a lot of threads to it that call back to previous books in the series but also goes in a slightly different direction to the usual historical mystery vein of the series. I enjoyed reading it – it was great to be back in Flavia’s world – although I had to do a quick refresh of where we’d left her as it had been so long. And I would say as well that this doesn’t feel like it’s a final hurrah either. I mean it could be, but there are definitely options.

You can buy What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust on Kindle, Kobo and it should be in the shops too – but as I said, if you haven’t read any of the series before, don’t start here. The others are usually fairly easy to get hold of in bookstores, although they’re now on their third cover style (at least) with this new one so don’t expect to be able to get a matching set…

Have a great weekend everyone!

bingeable series, books, detective

Bingeable Series: Reverend Shaw mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with another series post and this is one that may not be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention to the lists the last few weeks.

These are a series of six books set in the 1930s following a clergyman who, in book one, is on a train where someone is murdered and finds himself drawn into the investigation. And then across the course of the next few books he finds himself again drawn into mysteries and murders of various kinds.

I read the first one of these a few years back and in my BotW review I said that it was really trying to make you think it was a British Library Crime Classic. They’ve updated the cover style since then although when you get A Third Class Murder it still has the original one – as you can see from the photo. It was a standalone title at the point that I read it and there are now another five – some of which are more towards the thriller, some are more straight up murder mysteries. If you have read a lot of Golden Age crime you can spot where some of the inspiration is coming from, but they’re basically very easy to read, enjoyable 1930s set mysteries that are perhaps a little derivative but that are also missing some of the problematic attitudes and language you find in the genuine article.

All six are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and I suspect a seventh will appear at some point – there is certainly the set up for it at the end of book six.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book of the Week, books

Book of the Week: The Darkest Sin

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I said yesterday I didn’t know what I was going to write about today, but it all became clear to me while I was trying to get to sleep last night, even if this is slightly rule breaking.

It’s rule breaking because The Darkest Sin is not the first book in the series – but I didn’t realise that when I bought it and I haven’t read the first in the series. I picked this off the shelf to take on holiday because it is set in Florence and we were going to Tuscany so it seemed fitting – and it was really good.

Cesare Aldo is an investigator at one of the criminal courts in Florence, a city full of factions, alliances and secrets. When he is sent to a convent to investigate reports of night-time intruders, he finds rivalries and secrets – and that’s even before the body of a naked man is found inside the convent. Alongside this, a constable of the same court finds the body of a missing colleague, that was pulled from the river near his childhood home. who would have dared kill a court officers – and if Carlo Strocchi can find out, it could secure him the promotion he yearns for. But Florence is dangerous and treacherous and the answers could prove a bigger problem than the mysteries.

Having not read the prior book in the series, I don’t know how much of the backstory in this had already been revealed in that – and what would have been a twist to a reader already familiar with Aldo. But going in blind, this was a twisty and page turning thriller with clever, well-drawn characters – not just in the main characters but in the supporting roles too. Sixteenth Century Florence is also a character in this – you can hear it and smell it and sense the danger lurking all around.

As I said yesterday, it was a doing and seeing sort of holiday not a lazing around one – so I was still finishing this on the plane home, and I was actually annoyed when the plane landed sooner than I expected and I had to leave it unfinished for a few hours while we made our way home. I’ll definitely be looking for more of these – I want to find out what the first book told you and see what happens next!

You can get The Darkest Sin on Kindle and Kobo and in paperback. There are three books in the series available now – with a fourth coming in the autumn.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, mystery

Book of the Week: The Three Dahlias

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I had a lovely week off last week and read some good stuff, but interests of not repeating myself, today’s pick is a book I finished on Monday. Yes I know it’s cheating, but the book is really good so I’m sure you’ll let me off!

The three Dahlias of the title are three actresses who have played or are about to play the same character – a legendary heroine of golden age detective fiction. They’re spending a weekend at a fan convention organised at the stately home the author lived in. But then there is a suspicious death and they have to work together to find the killer.

I mean could this be any more up my street? Honestly it ticks so many of boxes of things that I like: A murder mystery set in a country house! A classic crime connection! A group of actresses! A convention! It almost seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t. It was really, really good. I was 100 pages in before I even realised it. I really liked the way the narrative switched between folllowing the three different actresses and I think it did really well at making each of them seem distinct. I did have the murderer figured out (or at least narrowed down) but I couldn’t figure out why so it had me partly fooled.

I loved the golden age crime tie in – from what you can work out, Dalhia is a bit of 1930s Phryne Fisher type character – glamorous and rule breaking and with a police man in tow (but written at the time) – and like some of the Golden Age detectives, the series went on being written for many years, although wisely the books didn’t move through time at the same pace as the author! And each chapter starts with a quote from one of the books and it works really well – making you want to read a Dahlia book without really ever telling you much about their plots!

A sequel is coming later this – which is both excellent news and really interesting to see if the formula can work again! I will be keeping my eye out for it for sure.

My copy of The Three Dahlias was part of my post Christmas book buying spree, so I think it should be fairly easy to get hold of in your format of choice.

Happy Reading!

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!

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!

historical, mystery, series

Mystery series: Lady Hardcastle

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The new Lady Hardcastle book came out last week and I’ve just finished it so it seems like an ideal week to feature the series here!

These are Edwardian-set mysteries, following the widowed Lady Hardcastle and her lady’s maid. Lady Emily is in her forties and spent most of her marriage abroad with her husband who was in the diplomatic service. She moved to the countryside with the faithful Florence hoping for a quiet life – but they keep stumbling across murders! The books are written in the first person from Florence’s point of view and this gives you a fun perspective on the somewhat eccentric and very headstrong Emily. As you go through the series you discover more about what the two women got up to abroad, which explains why they’re good at solving murders. And the core duo get some regular assistants as the books go on too.

The duo live in the Gloucestershire and their village and the surrounding area provides the settings for the various murders so that it doesn’t seem like the Edwardian version of Midsummer! The series are fun, lightly comic, easy to read, very bingeable and the Edwardian setting makes a change from the various Victorian and 1920s series that are more common.

With the latest release, there are eight books in the series, with a ninth already planned for the autumn. As you can see from the picture, I own a couple and then they’re all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment – so perfect for a binge. And if you’re not in KU, they are somewhat of a bargain at the moment: books one and two are 99p (or free in Kindle Unlimited) A Quiet Life in the Country is the first and In the Market for Murder is the second.

Happy weekend!

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New Releases: January 20th

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Three books from my anticipated books post are out today – and for once I’m ahead of the game and have finished all of them. Why aren’t I saving one of to be in the running for a BotW post? Well one of them already has been and the other two are thrillery and have plots that I can’t really tell you too much about without ruining it

Covers of A Fatal Crossing, The Maid and The Christie Affair

Let’s start with Tom Hindle’s A Fatal Crossing, which I read in basically three sittings, it’s just they were spread across ten days because I got distracted by Ashes of London. I requested this from NetGalley because it’s a murder mystery on a 1920’s cruise ship and but it’s actually quite hard to explain what’s going on without spoiling it all. Many of the passengers are on their way to an art fair in New York and as well as the murder there is a stolen artwork to deal with. And on top of that, you see it all through the eyes of Timothy Birch, an officer on board the ship who is running away from a tragedy at home but can never quite escape it. This is page turning and atmospheric and I thought I knew where it was going, but i was wrong. I might have figured it out if I hadn’t been convinced of my rightness and had thought a bit harder about the other possible options! It’s hard to tell though once you know – even if you go back and read again, you can never read it again like you don’t know!

From the 1920s to the present day and The Maid by Nita Prose. Molly is a maid at an upmarket boutique hotel. She knows that she’s not like everyone else – but now her gran is gone she has no one to explain human behaviour to her any more. So now she throws herself into her job – where her obsession with cleaning and etiquette as an asset. But when she finds one of the guests dead in his penthouse suite, she finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation where her personality quirks mean the police think she’s their prime suspect. But soon some friends she didn’t know she had are helping her to clear her name. Molly is one of the most unique narrators I have recently come across – and it’s definitely one of those cases where the reader can see things that Molly can’t. I was quite infuriated early on in the book by the way that Molly had been treated, but never fear, her situation was much improved by the end of the book – and without her changing her essential Molly-ness. This is maybe my favourite of the three. But then it’s also the one that I read last, so it could just be recency bias. I do think that this is the easiest to recommend though – I can see why it’s had so much buzz and has been picked out by Good Morning America and the New York Times. I think it will appeal to readers across genres in the way that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Where’d You Go Bernadette did.

And finally, I have already written about The Christie Affair – it was last week’s book of the week and if you’ve already read that post, consider this your reminder to go and read a sample/buy a copy! If you’re only going to read one of two historical mystery picks, I’m struggling to decide which one to suggest, except that I think the Christie Affair is closer to the murder mysteries that it’s protagonist writes and A Fatal Crossing is less traditional in terms of genre rules when it comes to the resolution. So for me I found the Christie Affair more satisfying but a Fatal Crossing is potentially more thought provoking – or at least might generate more arguments at your book club!

But all three of these are good books and if it wasn’t January and we weren’t in the midst of an omicron wave I would say that all three would be the sort of book you could read on your sun lounger by the side of the pool. As it is, read them on your sofa wrapped in a blanket!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, detective, mystery

Book of the Week: A Third Class Murder

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I nearly broke away from the mystery theme of the last few weeks for today, and then I changed my mind. So much of my recent reading has been murder mysteries, that maybe I’ll end up doing mystery month. Although to be fair, a lot of them have been Inspector Littlejohn novels and that would get a little boring for you all!

When an antique dealer is murdered on a train, the police soon make an arrest. But Reverend Lucian Shaw was also on the train and soon becomes convinced that the police may have got the wrong man. When he starts to investigate he discovers that there may have been even more under currents in his parish than he knew about – although his wife could have filled him in on some of them!

A Third Class Murder really wants you to think that it’s a British Library Crime Classic, but it’s not. But don’t hold it against it,because it’s actually a nice, easy fun cozy crime novel that happens to be set in the 1930s. It’s not earth shattering or ground breaking, and yes I figured out who did it before the reveal but that’s fine – I wanted a murder mystery that I could enjoy and not have to think too hard about. Perfect lazy afternoon reading.

My copy came via my Kindle Unlimited Subscription, which means it’s only available on Kindle (at the moment at least).

Happy Reading!