I’ve been reading Julie Mulhern’s 1970s-set Country Club Murders series whenever they drop into a price band that I can justify, but this week she’s got a new book out which is the first in a new 1920s set series. Murder in Manhattan features Freddie, a female journalist in Prohibition New York who finds herself caught up in a murder investigation when someone she wrote about in her magazine column is found dead. The blurb says it’s inspired by the first female reporter at The New Yorker and also drops a load of famous names from the period so this could be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to reading it.
After talking about the new H M The Queen Investigates book a couple of weeks ago, today it’s the turn of another Royal-related historical mystery series – Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness books which has reached number 19 – with From Cradle to Grave – which came out on Tuesday. I remain surprised and delighted that Bowen continues to find more set ups for murders for Georgie to solve, but also that she’s continuing to put out multiple books a year despite being in her 80s. Anyway the blurb for this latest installment has nanny problems (more accurately sister in law problems) as well as a string of deaths which may threaten Georgie’s beloved husband Darcy. I am up to date with this series – and always wonder if the next book will be the last but surely Bowen wouldn’t finish on a strange number like 19 when 20 is right there? Right?
In Wednesday’s Recommendsday, I wrote about From Russia With Love which is a spy adventure with the Cold War and Russia as a key protagonist. This week also saw the release of the latest H M The Queen Investigates novel which is also venturing into Cold War spying Territory – with a title that evokes John Le Carré. I mentioned The Queen Who Came in from the Cold back in January in my series releases post, and I think it’s the last book from that post to be released (that hasn’t been bumped back into 2025*). In this book it’s 1961 and the Royal Yacht is heading for Italy for a state visit, but on board the Queen and her private secretary are investigating a possible murder that someone thinks they saw from the Royal Train. I really like this series as you know and I’ve been looking forward to this for more than a year so I’m hoping it will live up to that. I think it’s a sensible decision to move the series back in time, but I remain sceptical about how many scenarios there actually are to keep this series going. But given that I thought similar about the Royal Spyness books and they’re still going I may be surprised! If you haven’t read any of this series, do go back and check out my series post about them – the first is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and the other three are at sensible prices on Kindle as well.
*there are two of them that have slid back into 2026 – the final Thursday Next book which should have been this month but which I sort of half expected to slide given how long we’ve been waiting already and the now final Phryne Fisher book, which presumably was slowed down by Kerry Greenwood‘s final illness.
It’s Tuesday and I’m back with this week’s Book of the Week – which is actually a book that came out last week. I’m even topical. Go me!
The year is 1910 and Haley’s Comet is passing over the earth. On a tidal island of Cornwall, a Viscount is preparing for the apocalypse. But when the staff of Tithe Hall unseal their rooms the next morning, Lord Conrad Stockingham Welt is dead in his office and a murder investigation gets underway. Straight into the police’s crosshairs is Stephen Pike, who arrived at the house fresh from Borstal the day before the murder. But Stephen knows he didn’t do it – he was looking after the elderly aunt of the victim Miss Decima Stockingham, who is foul mouthed, but very, very smart. Soon the two of them are trying to work out who did commit the murder as the policeman in charge of the case makes wild claims to try and pin it onto one of the servants.
This has got such a great premise – I love a cantankerous older woman heroine and the pairing of Miss Decima and Stephen is really entertaining and makes a great use of the above stairs-below stairs nature of the plot. And it’s really quite humorous at times too. I will admit I had the solution worked out well before they did though – but forgive them because there is world building and setting up going on here for a sequel and I am very much here for that when it happens.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it’s out now in Kindle and Kobo as well as in hardback. I’ll be watching out for it in the shops.
It’s Halloween week, and so today’s Book of the Week has ghost in the title, even if it’s not so much spooky or scary as mysterious. You’re welcome.
It’s the end of 1914 and Alma Timperley has just found out that she had an aunt that she didn’t know about, but also that her aunt has died and left her a hotel in her will. The Timperley Spiritualist Hotel is in Cornwall, and caters to a very specific clientele – those who wish to communicate with the dead. And as the first Christmas of the war approaches, there are more people than ever looking for comfort in hearing from their recently departed loved ones. As if that wasn’t enough, soon after Alma’s arrival at the hotel, one of the maids is found dead and there are suggestions that there is a German spy in town. And then there is the fact that Alma can talk to the dead, just like her aunt could.
The spiritualist craze that happened during and after the Great War pops up in a few books – notably (in my reading life anyway) in Dorothy L Sayers’ Strong Poison, where Miss Climpson uses her experience of fraudulent mediums to help Peter Wimsey – but in this case, the mediums (or some of them at least) really can talk to the other side. And in terms of the mystery that needs solving, as a newcomer Alma is able to ask plenty of questions about the hotel and it’s inhabitants without arousing too much suspicion. I have a somewhat mixed relationship with books with supernatural elements as you all probably know by now, but I really, really enjoyed this – it’s a great idea and an interesting twist on a wartime spy mystery and not too heavy on the actual ghosts – I wouldn’t even really say it was haunted. This is F H Petford’s first novel (at least as far as I can find) and the end of the book suggests that there is the possibility of a sequel – which I would read with great pleasure.
My copy of A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Murder came via NetGalley, but it is out now in Kindle and Kobo, where it is £1.99 at time of writing, as well as in paperback.
Yes, I’m breaking one of my own rules this week and writing about a book that’s a long way into a series. No I don’t really care. Last week was one of those weeks, and anything that wasn’t rule breaking wasn’t something that I really felt inspired enough to write about. So here we are.
This is the eighteenth in Rhys Bowen’s series about Georgiana, a fictious granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who is facing all sorts of troubles in the loose orbit of the Royal Family of the 1930s. As I said in my post when this book was released in November, in this book we have finally reached the winter of 1936 and crunch time for Georgie’s cousin David when it comes to choosing between the Crown and Wallis Simpson. And of course Georgie and her husband Darcy are caught up in it with the woman in question hiding away at their estate. As if that wasn’t enough, Georgie’s former stepfather, who owns the house, arrives home unexpectedly and with a film crew in tow to film scenes in the grounds. And on top of all this Georgie’s brother, his wife and their two children have also invited themselves to stay. And did I mention that she’s a new mum?
There is a murder in this, but it actually happens quite a long way through. But there is a lot going on to get to that point, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out on a mystery plot – in fact if i hadn’t read the blurb to know there was going to be one, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there hadn’t been one, although this is obviously a mystery series.
For the last few books I have been wondering if we were nearing the end of the series, especially as there have been a couple of big moments coming up where it would have been possible for Bowen to sign off from Georgie and leave on a satisfying note, but there is a nineteen book coming in the autumn, so it looks like we’re going to be following Georgie and the family into the reign of George VI as the world hurtles towards World War Two. And without giving you any spoilers, there are still a few hanging threads left to tie up, and as long as Bowen can keep coming up with new adventures for Georgie, I’m happy to read them!
This series used to be published in UK paperback editions, but I haven’t seen any of them for some time. So your best bet for this is Kindle or Kobo, although I have a seen some of them occasionally in the Cozy Crime Mass Market shelves at Waterstones Gower Street and Waterstones Piccadilly, but it is a totally lottery which one it is.
Another mystery book this week, this time a new to me author writing mysteries set in the 1930s.
In Death and the Conjurer, a celebrity psychiatrist is found murdered in his study – but the door was locked and there seems to have been no way for anyone to have committed the crime. The Scotland Yard detective calls in magician turned sleuth Joseph Spector to help solve a seemingly impossible murder.
And this really does seem to be an impossible one. The solution when it comes is clever and well worked out and as the book says the clues are there, even if I didn’t believe it when the book said that! Inspector Flint and Spector are a good duo – they both have their strengths so it feels like a pretty equal relationship rather than a stupid cop and a brilliant amateur. It’s also the first of three so there are two more for me to read now too.
This one is in Kindle unlimited at the moment and so if you’ve got a membership it’s worth a look.
So I said yesterday that I had plans for some of the other books that I read last week – and one of them inspired this post. So here I am delivering on my promise that you’d hear more about some of last week’s reading and not just the BotW! This post is about mystery books that feature real people as the detectives.
So lets start with the book that inspired this: The Mystery at Rake Hall by Maureen Paton. This new mystery novel came out earlier this month (I got my copy via NetGalley) and is set in post-war Oxford and features C S Lewis – known as Jack – getting drawn into a mystery after one of his brightest pupils stops coming to her tutorials. Susan it turns out is at Rake Hall, a seemingly respectable hostel for unmarried mothers. But there’s more to it than meets the eye and along with Lucy, one of Susan’s friends and the daughter of a college servant, Jack starts to investigate. I don’t know a lot about the real C S Lewis, but this is a good mystery in a great setting. I love Gaudy Night, and that world of scouts and bulldogs is very much still in evidence here a decade or more after Sayers’ novel – and Sayers herself makes an appearance here too.
From one golden age author to another – and Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series. I’ve written about these before, but they’re probably the most well known of the fictionalised real person solves crimes books. Because of the circles that Tey moved in, this also features people like Alfred Hitchcock and Daphne Du Maurier in the stories as Upson weaves the mysteries around the real events of Tey’s life. There are eleven books in the series, and I don’t remember feeling like it was all wrapped up when I finished Shot With Crimson – but that came out in 2023 and there hasn’t been another yet. And although Upson has a new book listed on Amazon, it seems to be a standalone Christmas mystery set in 1943 (which I will definitely be looking out for) rather than another Tey novel but details are sketchy so we will see. Margery Allingham makes an appearance in one of the Upson novels – and I’m pretty sure there’s a mystery series featuring Agatha Christie doing the detecting as well, so only Ngaio Marsh to go to complete the set of Queens of Crime!
It’s been a few years since I read them, but there is also Gyles Brandreth’s series of Oscar Wilde murder mysteries which also feature Arthur Conan Doyle and Wordsworth’s great grandson Robert Sherard. There are seven in this series, and I’ve read the first three and book five (I used to get them from the library, but my local library closed down for: reasons and I’ve not been a library regular since) but they’re clever mysteries with a dash of wit – although obviously you are heading towards Wilde’s eventual imprisonment (which is part of book six) and some of the foreshadowing of that can be a bit… clunky. But if you see them around, they’re worth a look.
And finally a slightly tangential one – and one where I’ve only read two of them. Jessica Fellowes’s Mitford Murder mysteries. I say they’re tangential because they’re set in the Mitford household, but its one of the staff who is doing the actual mystery solving. Louisa is nursery maid to the younger children and chaperone to the older ones (at least to start with), and this means that she has a ringside seat to the events of the Mitford sisters’ eventful lives. I will say that I thought the first one didn’t quite live up to the promise that it had in the blurb, and the second one had more of the stuff that I didn’t like about them and so I haven’t read any more of them – but the fact that they got to six in the series and I see various of them in paperback in the crime sections of the big bookshops fairly regularly suggests that other people liked them more than me!
That’s your lot for this week – hopefully there’s something here for you – but also, don’t forget I’ve got a whole post about Novelised Real People (in books that aren’t mysteries) from back in 2021.
After reading Catriona McPherson’s new book last week, I went back and checked where I was at with the Dandy Gilver series – and lo and behold there was a sixteenth book in the series out in paperback for me to read to complete the set. It’s been three years since I last wrote about Dandy – at which point I was one down on the then fifteen books in the series. We’ve now followed Dandy’s adventures from 1923 all the way through until 1939 and seen her go from a bored wife at home with her boys away at school through to a grandmother worrying about the likelihood of her sons being killed up to fight in another war. And given that there are a bunch of throwbacks her first case in this one, it does feel like this could be the last book in the series, but who knows. I would definitely read about Dandy taking on the Home Front, but I don’t want her boys to be killed – so maybe it’s best to stop? Anyway, you can go back and read my previouspostsabout the series – consistently darker than you expect them to be, and with far too many different cover designs!
I’m breaking a couple of rules this week because somewhere along the line I had managed to miss that Catriona McPherson had started a new series – and that we were on to the second book in it. But as The Edinburgh Murders came out last week I am at least timely!
It’s 1948 and Helen Crowther is a welfare almoner for the newly formed NHS in Edinburgh. It’s not an easy or a popular job, and her home life isn’t simple either but she keeps on going. While she’s at the bath house with one of her clients, the body of a man is found boiled to death in one of the cubicles. And then another couple of bodies turn up and Helen finds herself investigating because she’s noticed a few things that are worryingly close to home.
This has a great setting and a cleverly put together mystery to solve. I found Helen a really interesting character, and her job gives her an excellent excuse to be sticking her nose into other people’s lives. There aren’t as many historical mystery series set in the immediate post war period as there are set in the 1930s so that make a really nice change as well as the Edinburgh setting. I’m pretty sure this will work best for you if you’ve already read the first book, but I haven’t and I still enjoyed it! Like with McPherson’s Dandy Gilver series, the mystery is darker than you often find in historical mysteries, but it’s not too graphic although there are a couple of gruesome moments its more implied than right there on the page.
My copy came via NetGalley, but it’s out now in the UK on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback. I couldn’t find the first one of these in the shops last week when I was looking, so I don’t know how easy the hardcover version of this is going to be to find though.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 