Tag: murder mystery

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Wyndham Case

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It’s Tuesday again and I’m continuing my pattern of picking a mystery for Book of the Week fifty percent of the time this year! I was going to say every other week, but it’s not strictly every other week, it does go in patches – a couple of mysteries, a couple of romances, one mystery, one romance – you get the pictures. Anyway: The Wyndham Case.

St Agatha’s College, Cambridge has a collection of books donated to them in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately the books are now completely uninteresting to scholars and come with a lot of strings attached. And on this particular morning they also have a dead body lying in front of them. Imogen Quy is one of the first on the scene in her role as college nurse and isn’t convinced with the idea that it was suicide – or that the dead student was stealing books. And then another student is found dead in the college fountain.

I have been wanting to read the Imogen Quy series for a while, after enjoying Jill Paton Walsh’s Wimsey continuations and during my wanderings post-Word on the Water last week (more on this on Saturday) I bought this. And I’m so glad I did because I really enjoyed it and it was a proper one sitting read for me. In the introduction to that first Wimsey continuation, Paton Walsh mentions that Gaudy Night was one of the reasons why she wanted to go to Oxford and she’s done a really good job in this of creating her on fictional college, this time in Cambridge (which is where she lived). The mystery is pretty good and the collection of students that you encounter feels pretty realistic for the time that it was written (early 1990s). My mum was a solicitor at one point in her life – and she’s done a lot of fundraising over the years, so the complicated bequest of the Wyndham collection was particularly appealing to me as well.

There are four books in this series – and the bad news for the to-read pile is that I know that the bookshop I bought this from has the next two in the series, and it’s pretty easy for me to get back there in the not to distant future! I’m not telling you which bookshop it is in case you get there before me, because I don’t think they’re strictly in print anymore but they seem to be fairly easy to get second hand. And they’re also in Kindle, Kobo and on audio too.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, first in series, mystery

Book of the Week: How to Solve Your Own Murder

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Normal service has been resumed here – I’m back at work after the holiday and once again I’m picking a murder mystery book for my BotW. This was actually a book I finished after we got back from Greece rather than a holiday read – but there are three of my sunlounger books coming up tomorrow.

Cover of How to Solve Your Own Murder

It’s 1965 and Frances is visiting a fair with her friends when a fortune teller predicts that Frances will be murdered. That prediction – and figuring out who might want to murder her – becomes the driving obsession of Frances’s life. In the present day, Annie Adams has been summoned to meet her reclusive Aunt Frances at her country estate. But when she arrives, she finds Frances dead. Annie sets out to solve the murder – but can Annie keep herself safe while trying to work out who made the fortune teller’s prediction come true.

This is told in a split narrative between Annie’s present day and diary entries from Frances in the 1960s. Annie is an interesting heroine and knows next to nothing about Frances’s life for reasons that become clear as the book goes on and so also has no idea who the various personalities are that she’s meeting and who to trust. And because she doesn’t know Frances either it means that she doesn’t know how reliable a narrator Frances is. This makes for a deliciously discombobulating time for Annie as she races against time to solve the puzzle of her aunt’s death.

This is the first of what is now three books and the third, How to Cheat Your Own Death, is actually out today which sort of makes me topical for once even if reading this has taken me a year from buying this one to actually getting around to reading it. Which given my track record actually isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things.

This should be really easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it (and the second in the series) in all the bookshops and it’s on Kindle and Kobo as well.

Happy Reading!

Book previews, new releases

Bonus review: Second Novel Detective book

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A mini bonus review for you this week as A Death in the Dark, the second book in the Novel Detectives series came out and I have read it already! This sees Annie and Fletcher investigating after the high school’s track coach comes into their offices covered in blood and claiming not to remember the previous evening. When the body of his assistant coach is found, it becomes a murder investigation and Annie and Fletcher find themselves digging into a tangled web of secrets among the staff at the high school to try and work out who the killer is. I had the murderer pegged pretty early on, but there were enough twists and turns going on to keep me guessing about whether I really was right! I like the set up and the characters, although because the series has a running story going on in the background I find that the actual murder-of-the-week is perhaps less complex than other series. However, I do want to find the answer to the long running backstory so I will definitely keep reading them!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Sky High

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It’s Tuesday so so here I am with another Book of the Week – and I’m back with the British Library’s Crime Classics series this week, making it two (albeit very different) murder mysteries in a row for my picks.

Cover of Sky High

Brimberley is a peaceful village, where everyone knows everyone else and very little happens. That is until the lead tenor in the village choir is killed by an explosion at his house. Choir leader Liz, her son Tim (a former commando) and a retired general are soon investigating to try and work out what’s happened. This was first published in 1955 and the post-World War Two world is very evident here – there are lots of ex military men of various types and vintages who may or may not be involved in the murder – and may or may not still be involved with the military. Some of my favourite of the Miss Marple plots revolve around issues thrown up by the aftermath of the war – I’m thinking of Brian Eastley in 4.50 from Paddington or the food rationing and bartering in A Murder is Announced that mean people can’t tell the police everything they are up to (and also a mega plot spoiler that I can’t explain) – which may be why this worked so well for me despite feeling a bit far-fetched at times!

This was a Janurary 2026 release in the BLCC series and I was pleased to see it pop up in Kindle Unlimited already. I read and enjoyed Michael Gilbert’s Smallbone, Deceased a year or two back which drew on Gilbert’s experience as a solicitor, while this one captures small village life in the 1950s with classic murder mystery mixing with spy thriller in a really pleasing way. I’ve got another of Gilbert’s books on the shelf and I’m moving it up the list now because I enjoyed this so much.

As I mentioned, this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment which means it isn’t on Kobo right now, but it is available in paperback from the British Library online shop where once again they are running their three for two offer.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, first in series

Book of the Week: The French Bookshop Murder

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I said yesterday that I wasn’t sure what I was going to pick today and it turns out it’s actually a book I finished on Monday. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Zoe Pascal has relocated from her life in England to a small village in southern France where she is going to run a bookshop. But when she arrives in Sainte Catherine the locals are strangely hostile and there’s an undercurrent in the village that she just doesn’t understand. Then the body of a tourist is found in the local church – not long after she was due to meet Zoe. Suddenly Zoe finds herself under even more suspicion – from the gendarmes now as well as the locals. So she sets to to try and undercover the killer and the mystery at the heart of the village.

This is a lot of fun, with a really good puzzle as well as the murder mystery. I had a few bits figured out, but not all of it and I really enjoyed the village setting and the cast of characters. I could really picture the historic houses and Provençal countryside. There appears to be a tie in going on with a prior series by Greg Mosse, which I will be tempted to pick up – but there is a sequel to this to read first!

This is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, but it’s also still available on Kobo and there is a paperback too, although as only one of the London Waterstones‘ has it on click and collect you may have to have a bit of a hunt for it.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Murder at Gulls Nest

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Happy Tuesday everyone I’m back with the offers post tomorrow, but for today I’m back with in the mystery realm with a book from the to-read pile. I really am trying to reduce the size of that. Not least because the overspill is currently on my jigsaw table and I have two that I got for Christmas that I want to do… Anyway, to the book:

In Murder at Gulls Nest it’s 1954 and Nora Breen has asked to be released from the monastery where she has lived for the last thirty or so years to try and find out what has happened to a former novice whose letters have abruptly stopped. Nora heads to Gore-on-Sea on the south coast and to the very boarding house where Frieda was living to investigate. When she arrives there she hides her connection to Frieda and starts to dig. But when another resident is found dead, she starts to worry that Frieda may have found herself caught up in something even more worrying than Nora feared.

Nora is a great character and I really like the way that she is rediscovering the world and herself as we go through the book. The world has changed while she has been cloistered away and she has decades of habits to break as well. And then the mystery is really good. I think that boarding houses are great settings for mystery books because it’s a way that hugely different people can be forced into proximity and they can feel very claustrophobic. They are also places where there are rules – and rules are something that Nora is used to, just in a different context. Inspector Rideout, who is the police officer that she comes into contact with, also makes for a great foil for Nora to bounce off, but he has depth and complexity of his own too.

This was one of my Christmas books, and there is a second book featuring Nora coming out next month which I’ve already started thanks to the wonders of NetGalley, which just shows how much I enjoyed this first installment. I hadn’t read anything by Jess Kidd before, but it seems like this was a bit of a departure from her previous writing and I’m really glad that she went in this direction because I enjoyed it a lot.

This one should be pretty easy to get hold of – I’ve seen the hardback in a bunch of stores and the paperback is out towards the end of March too. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too where I’m expecting the price to drop when the paperback comes out.

Happy Reading!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Edwardian-set mysteries

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Happy Wednesday everyone and I have a bunch of Edwardian-set mysteries for you today. This came about because there is a new Veronica Speedwell out this week and I have a persistent misremembering thing I do where I think that Veronica Speedwell is set in the Edwardian era when actually is late Victorian and she’s just *connected* to the future Edward VII. Don’t ask. My brain is a strange place. Anyway, the first decade or so of the twentieth century is as popular with authors as the period between the two wars and while nothing is quite like Veronica – in terms of the humour of Deanna Raybourn’s writing mostly – there are still a fair few books for those who want them.

Hardback

The most obvious books for me to mention here are the two Gabriel Ward books which made my best books of the year posts for 2025. There is a third book coming apparently, but I’m/we’re going to have to wait a while for that – although it’s up for pre-order (and believe me I have pre-ordered it) it doesn’t have a title yet and the release date is currently late January 2027.

M C Beaton was a prolific writer under many pseudonyms and one of her lesser known series (from the pre-Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raison era) are the Harry Cartwright books, which Goodreads helpfully calls “Edwardian Mystery series”. Harry is a Boer War veteran who now helps society fix or solve difficult situations. There are four books in the series and like a lot of Beaton’s books if you read them too close together you begin to spot the formula a bit too much for comfort, but if you space them out more they’re much more fun.

I’ve only just finished The Housekeepers by Alex Hay* but I wanted to throw it in because it’s sort of tangentially related even though it’s not a mystery story per se. This is a heist story set in 1905 when Mrs King has just been dismissed from her position as housekeeper at a grand mansion in Mayfair. She decides to take her revenge, and because of her background in a shady world of con artists and thieves, she’s got the connections to do it. So she gathers a group of women around her to help her carry out an audacious plan to rob the house of all its contents during a costume ball. But as they work to carry out their plan, they discover that the house may be hiding even more secrets than they thought. This was a bit slower paced than I liked, and the comeuppance at the end happened pretty quickly, but I do like a story set in a big house – and the upstairs downstairs of this was good too. I’ve had this on the pile for ages – so long in fact that Hay’s third book is out later this year and I have been picking up the second (another crime caper) and being tempted by it only to remember that I hadn’t read the one I already had!

Lets end with the series that I’ve already written about – there’s the Lady Hardcastle books by T E Kinsey about the widow of a diplomat who makes her home in the Costwolds with her faithful maid and keeps stumbling across mysteries. Then there’s Edward Marston’s Ocean Liner series about George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Mansfield, who meet in the first book when they are on board the same ship and it all goes from there. And if you read middle grade or young adult books, there are the two connected Katherine Woodfine series – the Sinclair Mysteries and the Taylor and Rose mysteries

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, first in series, mystery

Book of the Week: Hattie Brings Down the House

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Happy Tuesday everyone, and as I mentioned in last week’s BotW post that this was in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, I don’t think it’s going to be a massive surprise to you that I’ve picked this for my BotW today, taking full advantage of the fact that even though Hattie Steals the Show was one of my favourite books of last year it wasn’t actually a Book of the Week – it was in a Recommendsday, so I’m not really breaking any rules even though that Recommensday was only in October!

Cover of Hattie brings down the house

Hattie is a stage manager, who’s currently cobbling together a living by teaching wannabe stage managers and behind the scenes workers and also working at the Tavistock, a theatre behind a pub. The Tavistock’s long time patron has just died, and the artistic director is trying to keep the theatre going by staging a Shakespeare play directed by a buzzy avant garde director. There’s a valuable mask in the mix as well as conflict between the artistic team – but all that pales in comparison to the dead actress that Hattie finds in the dressing room. As the stage manager is the designated problem solver of a production crew, Hattie finds herself investigating while still trying to keep the show on track to open on time.

The mystery is good and has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. And I really, really love all the backstage information that Patrick Gleeson has put into this. As you all know, I go to the theatre a lot but I’m not in any way an actress and the closest I’ve got to being in an actual production of anything was when I played clarinet in the school musical version of Cabaret in my first year of secondary school and was the prompter for the university pantomime in my final year, which is to say I know next to nothing about this and am delighted to be learning a bit more about it. There’s lots of detail here – but it’s neatly woven in and not info dumped to you in the narrative.

This is the first book in the series, so I’m reading out of order – and I know what the issue is in Hattie’s background that means that she’s wary of the police and perhaps not getting the work that she would like. But if you were reading this first you wouldn’t and I think you might find that a little perplexing – however the reveal in book two is worth it. I’m really glad that I discovered this series and I’m not sure I would have done if I hadn’t found it in the Notting Hill Bookshop last autumn because sometimes you need a smaller, curated selection of books to discover something new rather than a massive shop where you can get overwhelmed and end up just looking for stuff that you already know that you want to read.

This is in Kindle Unlimited and suprisingly it is still available on Kobo. And even better is the fact that Waterstones say they have stock of both this and the second book in all of their central London stores so hopefully you should be able to find physical copies in stores fairly easily.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: Beattie Cavendish and the Highland Hideaway

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Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m back with a Book of the Week pick after last week’s skip, although I have a slight issue, because although NetGalley says it was out last week, none of the sites seem to have it as out until the middle of February. But as it was the best thing I read last week, I’m still writing about it. Sorry, not sorry. I’ll try and remember to remind you when it comes out.

It’s 1949 and Beattie Cavendish works for GCHQ. Officially she works in admin and training secretaries, but actually she’s a covert operative. When her bosses send her to Scotland to investigate a disappearance at a a listening station. The staff there are suspicious of her, and she has a job on her hands to find out what is going on. Her uncle lives near the station but when she goes to visit, she discovers that his cottage is empty and looks like it was left in a hurry. Beattie becomes convinced that the two things are related and starts to dig in to what is going on in the Highlands with the help of private investigator Patrick Corrigan, who is all to happy to leave London for a bit after having caught the attention of some Russian gangsters.

This is actually the second book featuring Beattie, and although I haven’t read the first it didn’t really cause me too many problems with the plot. There are some throwbacks to that previous novel but enough is explained that you can follow along – although it did make me interested in reading that earlier book. This is the first book by Mary-Jane Riley that I’ve read but also the first Cold War set historical mystery that I’ve read in quite a long while. And this is specifically Cold War (rather than generic 1950s) because of Beattie’s work and all the circumstances of the mystery. And I enjoyed it a lot.

There are some commonalities in Beattie’s back story with other characters that I have liked in inter-war-set mysteries – I can’t really tell you what because it’s spoilers – and it makes for an interesting character. I’m also interested in the friendship with Corrigan and the context around that – this is where I did feel that I was missing some context – he has a fiancée and without having read the first novel I wasn’t sure if I was meant to be rooting for him to break it off with her for Beattie or not – because from the information given his fiancée had helped in that previous mystery even if her actions in this one seemed to be slightly against what Patrick wants in terms of his future. So definitely up for reading a third book to see what happens there.

My copy came from NetGalley, as I said at the top it’s not out until February 19th. You can however pre-order in Kindle or Kobo. There is also apparently a paperback edition coming in the autumn.

Happy Reading!

Book previews, cozy crime, detective, first in series, new releases, reviews

Bonus Review: A Very Novel Murder

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Cover of A Very Novel Murder

I have an extra review this week because A Very Novel Murder came out on Tuesday and I have already read it – back in December in fact. This is Elllie Alexander’s new series which is itself a spin-off of her Secret Bookcase series. So if you’ve read that you’ll already be familiar with our heroine Annie, who is now opening her own private dectective agency with her friend Fletcher, as well as continuing to run the Secret Bookcase bookshop. I can’t really say any more about the backstory than that, because if I do, I’m spoiling the previous series for those who haven’t read it – but you can find my post about the series here.

Anyway in this first in the new series, Annie and Fletch take on their first case when an elderly woman asks them to investigate the death of her neighbour, a promising surfer whose death the police think was either accidental or suicide. There is also a new running story for the series, in the same way that the thread that ran through the Secret Bookcase was Annie’s quest to find out who had murdered her best friend.

I enjoyed this – it’s got some set up going on for the series, but because it’s an established group of characters from the previous series Alexander hasn’t felt the need to go overboard there (also it would have been spoilery!). I had the culprit for the murder pegged relatively early, but there were enough side twists that I didn’t mind too much when I did turn out to be right. My issue with the final Secret Bookcase was that the running plot meant that the mystery of the week (so to speak) got less complex to allow time for that, this was better than the last couple there, so hopefully we won’t see the same thing again in this series. I’m looking forward to reading the next one.

I got my copy via NetGalley, but it’s out now and in Kindle Unlimited, which of course means it’s not on Kobo at the moment except for as an audiobook. I’ve never seen these in the shops, but Amazon claims it’s available in Paperback (and that that came out in November) so who knows.

Happy Reading!