Tag: murder mystery

mystery, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Mysteries set in theatres

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I’m back with a post of mysteries set in theatres because I’ve read a few of them recently. I did a post of theatre-set books a couple of years back and most of those were mysteries, but not all, but do take a look back at that too. There’s a bit of a theme here, because they’re all books in series, but they can all be read standalone without you missing anything crucial to follow the plots.

Hattie Steals the Show by Patrick Gleeson

This was my purchase at the Notting Hill Bookshop and turns out to be the second book featuring Hattie, which I didn’t realise at the time. Our plot is thus: Hattie is a stage manager, who has a job teaching at a stage school but it’s the summer holidays and has taken a couple of weeks cover work on a West End show for a friend. But when she turns up to shadow the job, they find a body in the theatre and one of Hattie’s old friends is the chief suspect. And so she starts to investigate, which leads her to a country house for a week long workshop of a new musical where a lot of the suspects will be. The author is a stage manager himself so I loved all the detail on that in the book, although I did have a couple of the plot twists worked out before they happened. But it’s got a lovely easy style about it and doesn’t info dump on you, to the extent that I really want to read the first book to see how much of the backstory was in that and how much was a new reveal in this. I really hope there are more too.

A Deadly Night at the Theatre by Katy Watson

This is the fifth book in the Three Dahlias series and sees two of the trio starring in (different) West End plays. But there is discord in the group as one of the stars of Caro’s show is Luke, an actor who has a history with Posy. Rosalind discovers this when she arrives in town to see the two shows, but then Like is found dead in Post’s dressing room everything lols on the verge of falling apart. While Posy holes up at her flat, Ros and Caro investigate, but are they really sure it wasn’t Posy? As you know I really like this series and i like the way that Katy Watson keeps finding them new settings for the Dahlias so it doesn’t feel obviously like one cursed literary franchise.

A Howl of Wolves by Judith Flanders

This is the fourth and final book in the Sam Clair series, and sees Sam and her boyfriend Jake at the theatre when a real body appears on the stage. As I said in my post about the series, Sam is a great character, but the supporting characters are also a joy, and in this one they are really front and centre – because the reason Sam is at the theatre is because her upstairs neighbours are in the play. There’s less of the publishing world detail in this one – or at least it’s less obviously publishing related, but we also get a good dose of Sam’s frighteningly efficient mum Helena. This is the hardest to get hold of of the series – it only came out in hardback and isn’t on Kindle (yet) but if you do spot a copy somewhere it’s worth it.

Murder at the Playhouses by Stuart Douglas

A slight theme is going on here as this is the second in the Lowe and Le Breton series, following on from Death at the Dress Rehearsal. This sees Edward and John taking on parts in a Shakespeare production in the gap between filming of series of Floggit and Leggit. They’ve been recruited because one of the company has been sacked for drunkenness. John is worried about the potential for Sir Nathaniel turning up to reclaim his job and making a scene – especially because he knows him – but then a body is found. This is fun, but it’s a little bit overlong and could have done with another editing pass because I spotted a continuity mistake in there (which really bugged me!) but I really like the characters and I hope we get a third one at some point.

Happy Humpday!

Christmas books, Series I love

Series I Love: Meg Langslow at Christmas

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Happy Friday everyone, and also happy New Meg Langslow week. Book 38 (!), Five Golden Wings, is out this week and so I’m taking the opportunity to write about why the Meg Christmas books are among my favourite festive themed novels – and in fact are some of the few festive related titles that I actively look forward to.

If you’ve missed my previous appreciations of the series, Meg Langslow is a blacksmith and town organiser in a small town in Virginia called Caerphilly. She has a retired-actor-turned-professor husband and a set of twins and an enormous and eccentric extended family. The series exists in what I call the Floating Now, where time does pass, but not at the same rate as it has passed in real life, but modern developments are incorporated as if there were there all along. See also Charles Paris who has been in his early 50s since the 1970s and is still in them now except that his bedsit is now a studio apartment and he has a smartphone tear her than an answer machine.

Donna Andrews is continuing to write two a year, and after 25 years they’re still great. And don’t get me wrong, I love the non-Christmas ones, but in a world where every year there are more Christmas themed books, be it murder mystery or romance, hers are a cut above. Whether it’s her family descending on her for the season, a storm, or another Caerphilly festive event, Andrews keeps managing to thing of festive scenarios to put the characters in for Meg to stumble across a corpse.

I try my hardest to save them and savour them, but it is hard. The good news is that compared to when I first started to buy them, they’re much easier to get hold of now because they’re on Kindle in the UK, which they weren’t back in 2013 when I first read Murder with Peacocks.

Anyway, my first festive read is still a few weeks away because I do try and get past Halloween before I start on them, but if you’re in the market for some tinsel already, then you could do a lot worse!

Have a great weekend!

bingeable series, series

Mystery Series: Miss Dimont

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Happy Friday everyone, it’s nearly the weekend, so nearly and I’m back with a post about a historical mystery series.

It’s the 1950s in the town of Temple Regis on the coast of Devon, where Judy Dimont is a reporter at the local newspaper, The Riviera Express. Across the course of the series she finds herself not just reporting on murders in the town, but also investigating them because the local police are inclined to play things down and rule every thing death they can as an accident to protect the resorts image and keep the tourist trippers flooding in.

The first book in the series was a Book of the Week back in 2017 and I stand by what I said then: Judy has an excuse to be rootling around in murder investigations and the portrait of an English seaside town with delusions of grandeur is excellent. Over the course of the four books the secondary characters are developed as well as Judy’s backstory, which involves mysterious doings in the Second World War. I read these out of order – with the second one in 2019 and then coming back through for the other two last month and neither the gap nor the out of order-ness messed with my enjoyment of the books. As it’s been six years since the last one, I think we can probably assume that this is a completed series now, which is a shame since I would happily read more of them.

I got the first and fourth from NetGalley but bought myself the middle two when they were on offer at some point in the unspecified past. You can get them in Kindle or Kobo and they did come out in paperback, but I suspect they’ll be hard to track down (new at least).

Have a great weekend everyone!

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

Book of the Week: The Last Supper

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It’s been more than a month since I picked a murder mystery for book of the week. Can you believe it? I can’t – and even when I went back and checked I still sort of didn’t believe it. But it’s true, so who says there’s no variety in my reading. And there’s more murder mysteries coming tomorrow in the Quick Reviews, but first let’s talk about The Last Supper.

Prudence Bulstrode is a retired TV chef. But when one of her former rivals is found dead in the garden of a house where she was catering a shooting weekend, Prudence is called in to replace her. Farleigh Manor is notorious for an unsolved murder from a century ago, but when Prudence arrives she is soon convinced that Deirdre’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but murder. And while her granddaughter, who she brought along to keep her out of getting into (even more) trouble starts investigating the old murder, Prudence sets out to solve the new one.

Rosemary Shrager is a chef who has been a semi regular on British TV for about 20 years now and before that she ran her own catering company, so the setting for this falls very much into her area of expertise and it shows. I personally have never been on a shooting weekend, but it very much felt like she had and all is those details really worked. I also found this quite humorous – with the tension and generation gap between Prudence and Suki, but couldn’t work whether that was deliberate or not. But does it matter if it was or wasn’t? The only disappointment to me was the eventual solution to the murder, which without giving spoilers about what precisely happened, I didn’t quite feel like the reader had all of the pieces for it to work as well as I wanted it to.

But it was a fun read that I finished in an afternoon and evening and I will definitely keep an eye out for the sequel (there are two now) to see if the humour was deliberate!

I bought my copy of The Last Supper secondhand and I’ve seen it in the shops fairly regularly. And it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

bingeable series, mystery, series

Mystery series: Sam Clair

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Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with another mystery series to talk about after I burned through three of the four books in this series a couple of weeks back, after having read the first one ages ago when it first came out and then forgetting to go back and follow up. Which, you know, is fairly typical for me given the state of the tbr pile…

Our amateur detective is Sam(antha) Clair, an editor for a small-ish publishing house who finds herself caught up in a string of murders across the course of the four books. The first book was a Murder of Magpies, where Sam’s caught up in a police investigation when someone decides that they really don’t want one of her books – a tell all about the fashion industry – to be published. In the second book, A Bed of Scorpions has one of Sam’s friends in trouble when his partner at the art gallery is found dead. In book three A Cast of Vultures Sam is caught up in neighbourhood drama when an house being used by squatters burns down and a body is found in the wreckage. And finally in A Howl of Wolves a trip to the opening night of a play, starring her friends from one of the other flats in her building, turns to tragedy when a real body appears hanging from the rafters instead of a dummy.

Sam is a great character – but she’s also surrounded by a cast of supporting characters who really make this sing. There’s her frighteningly clever and well connected solicitor mother, the handsome police inspector, Sam’s goth-y assistant and the various other people who live in the other flats in the converted house where she lives. I love a reoccurring character in murder mystery series and this has lots of really good ones. Sam hates conflict and will avoid (potentially) difficult conversations like the plague and means her relationship with Jake (sorry for the spoiler) the policeman who becomes her boyfriend has some real moments – where she should be telling him things and finds ways to avoid doing it.

Only three of these are available as e-books (although they are in Kobo plus in the UK at the moment if you’re a member there), the fourth is only available as a hardback, which I bought myself as soon as I finished reading book three because I really wanted to find out what happened next. These are Judith Flanders’s only novels as far as I can see, the rest of her writing is non-fiction history and while I’m sure they’re really good and interesting, it’s a shame because these are great and Sam is the sort of character you would like to have as a friend.

Have a great weekend!

not a book, streaming, tv

Not a Book: Death Valley

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Happy Sunday everyone. This week I’ve got a recommendation for you if you liked Ludwig and need some comedy murder mystery in your life. I’m a bit behind because the series finished a few weeks back on TV in the UK, but hey I’ve been very busy and there’s been a lot of motosport to keep up with.

Death Valley features a detecting duo of an actual police detective and an actor best known for playing a TV detective. Janie is somewhat socially awkward, still lives with her mum and has never really got over the death of her best friend back when they were students. John Chapel has retired from acting after his big role as Caesar and is basically hiding out in his home in Wales after the death of his wife. It’s got a mystery of the week format with a few running threads across the series as well.

We really enjoyed this – the episodes are only 45 minutes so don’t expect them to be super complicated – they’re just a light confection that you can watch without engaging your brain too much or being too terrified to go to sleep! They definitely lean into the comedy side of things – so your mileage may vary, but I definitely found them a lot more fun than when Death in Paradise leans into the comedy. And the cast is great. Timothy Spall is always a lot of fun to watch and Gwyneth Keyworth is really engaging as Janie and their fractious relationship makes for a really fun watch. We actually saw Keyworth in Twelfth Night at Stratford back at the start of the year and she was a great Viola/Cesario as well. There are lots of other familiar faces in the cast as well, including Steffan Rhodri, Melanie Walters and Jim Howick in the regular cast and people like Patricia Hodge among the guest stars.

This one is on the iPlayer and if you’re not in the UK, it’s on Britbox. I don’t think there is any official word on a series two, but series one did well in the ratings and that production of Twelfth Night I mentioned has announced a run at The Barbican over Christmas where it’s mentioned that Sam West and Freema Agyeman are reprising their roles – but not Gwyneth Keyworth (yet at any rate) so it could be that’s because they’re filming season 2 in the autumn. We can hope anyway…

books

Books in the Wild: BLCC display

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Not going to lie when I saw all of these in Waterstones Piccadilly it made me really quite happy. And of course it made me wonder how many of them I have read. And then I started writing it and realised there were a few more I had on the pile and a few I had read but not written about so if I could just do that the post would be better. And then suddenly it’s three months later. Ahem. Anyway after having finally finished and posted the BLCC roundup that that that started (slowed by several of them ending up as Books of the Week rather than round up post fodder), here we are.

And so here we go… One the wall from clockwise top right we have He Who Whispers (read but haven’t written about), The Lost Gallows – haven’t read, Capital Crimes, Murder in the Mill Race, The Hogs Back Mystery,then two more I haven’t read (yet) It Walks by Night and Miraculous Mysteries.

Let’s start on the back row and work left to right going forward: Guilty Creatures – which I haven’t read; The Ten Teacups, The Edinburgh Mystery – haven’t read, Murder in Vienna; Death of a Bookseller; Capital Crimes again, Murder as Fine Art and Post After Post-Mortem. One the second row: The Wheel Spins – which I haven’t read but which is the book the Hitchcock movie The Lady Vanishes is based on, Tour de Force, Metropolitan Mysteries, Blood on the Train, Quick Curtain, The Cornish Coast Mystery, The Notting Hill Mystery which is one of the very first murder mystery books and which I read nearly a decade ago and Crimes of Cymru which I haven’t read and doesn’t seem to be on Kindle which may explain why that is. And on the front row The Widow of Bath, Someone from the Past, The Lake District Murder, Castle Skull, The Corpse in the Waxworks (haven’t read), The Hogs Back Mystery (again), Murder Underground (one of the very first BLCC I read) and Tea on Sunday.

And there were even more… so here we go again with the table – this time just the ones I haven’t already mentioned: Port of London Murders, Who Killed Father Christmas, Dramatic Murder, Final Acts, Death of Anton, Murder at the Manor, London Particular, Serpents in Eden, The Mysterious Mr Badman, Family Matters, Surfeit of Suspects, and Murder by the Book.

And the other side of the table: Death on the Riviera, The Theft of the Iron Dogs, Quick Curtain, The Death of Mr Dodsley, The Sussex Downs Murder, The Chianti Flask and Seven Dead (read but not written about).

And finally – and this time just the front facing ones that I haven’t already mentioned: Continental Crimes, Settling Scores (read), The Port of London Murders, Crook O’Lune (read), The Z Murders (read but not written about), The Spoilt Kill, The Murder of My Aunt, The Santa Klaus Murder, Mr Pottermack’s Oversight, Scarweather, Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm, and Death of Anton.

Phew. Honestly, I’m pretty pleased with my hit rate on this front, but it has given me a shove to finish a few things off that I have had kicking around on the kindle and on the shelves and also made me aware of a bunch of books in the series that I didn’t know about. Expect a(nother) BLCC post in the near future I think….

Forgotten books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: British Library Crime Classics Summer 2025

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It’s been a few months so I’m back again with some more from the British Library Crime Classics series that I’ve read. I’m starting to lose count of how many posts about BLCC books I’ve done now – whether it’s round up posts like this or Book of the Week ones, but I do rea a lot of them – thanks to their rotation in and out of Kindle Unlimited and the fact that they often pop up in the charity shop book selections at sensible prices. And so here we are again. And this has taken me way longer than I was expected because I kept ending up picking candidates for this as Books of the Week. I can’t help myself.

Murder as a Fine Art by Carol Carnac

Carol Carnac aka E C R Lorac is probably one of the best forgotten authors brought back to prominence through the BLCC series. Or at least she is in my opinion, so I try to grab her books as soon as I see them in KU. Murder as a Fine Art sees a Civil Servant crushed to death by a marble statue at the new Ministry of Fine Art. The minister in charge of the department already had some concerns about events in his department and now has to contemplate the fact that one of his staff may be a murderer. Inspector Julian Rivers is called in to investigate and try and work out what is going on. This has a clever murder but also work rivalries and grievances all mixed up with the world of fine art and modern art. It’s clever and readable.

Metropolitan Mysteries ed Martin Edwards

This is another of the short story collections from the BLCC and as the title suggests features mysteries set in London. I can sometimes find the collections a bit patchy – but this is one of the stronger ones with one proviso: because it’s got a lot of well known authors in it you may have come across some of these stories before. I had definitely read the Peter Wimsey short story before and the Allingham also seemed familiar. But if you haven’t read as much of Sayers or Allingham’s work as I have you may not have done and it’s lovely to come across familiar (and reliable) authors. And there’s one very clever if somewhat improbable mystery in here that I was completely bamboozled by and if I didn’t quite believe the solution was possible, it was so much fun I didn’t mind.

Murder in Vienna by E C R Lorac

Yes, I can’t deny it, this is the second book from the same author in this list, just under that other (main) pseudonym. This is one of her novels featuring Inspector MacDonald, but takes him away from the UK to Vienna, where he is taking a holiday and visiting an old friend Dr Nagler. Also on board the flight is Elizabeth Le Vendre, on her way to Vienna to take up her new role as secretary to a British diplomat, Sir Walter Vanbrugh. But in Vienna Elizabeth goes missing and there are a series of violent events – including murder – affecting Nagler and Vanbrugh’s connections and MacDonald finds himself investigating. This isn’t my favourite of Lorac’s books, but it is a fascinating picture of the turbulant post war situation in Vienna.

That’s your lot today – Happy Humpday!

books

Recommendsday: Mysteries set on film sets

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A few weeks back I wrote about the 18th Royal Spyness mystery, which featured a movie being filmed at Georgie’s house, and that got me thinking about other mystery books that are set on or around movie sets.

Of course the most recent one that I’ve read is the latest Daniel Clement mystery, A Death on Location. This sees a movie crew take over Champton to film a historical epic and many of the locals sign up to appear as supporting artists – aka extras. But when one of them dies after filming a ball scene Daniel finds himself caught up in another murder investigation with Neil. I actually had the culprit for this one spotted early doors, but not the reason why so I enjoyed finding out the why of it all (and if I was right obviously). I continue to find this series very readable, but I’m not sure how many more scenarios Richard Coles will be able to come up to put Daniel in the way of bodies!

Going back to May, I read A Knife to Remember by Jill Churchill, which is the fifth book in the Jane Jeffries series, which is a 1990s written series. In this there’s a crew filming in the field behind Jane’s house and is using her backyard as part of the behind the scenes. The visitors seem to be riven with rivalries and then the set designer is found murdered and it goes from there. I really like this series, they are very easy reads and shorter than the average cozy these days which always leaves me wanting more. Unlike the Goldy Schulz series, these don’t seem to have been picked up for Kindle, so I’m having to resort to the second hand sellers to try and get some more at reasonable prices.

The fourth Flavia De Luce I am Half Sick of Shadows sees Flavia’s home invaded by a film crew in the run up to Christmas, and a snow storm trapping villagers there too. Flavia ends up investigating the death of one of the film contingent as well as whether Father Christmas really exists. I had a few moments with the early Flavia books, and I also read them out of order which I don’t think helped, but Flavia in this one is an engaging mix of innocence and omnipotence which works really well.

I’m sure there are more that I can’t remember at the moment, but that’s ok – I can always do a second post!

Forgotten books, mystery, Recommendsday

Book of the Week: Not to be Taken

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It’s been a few weeks since I had a British Library Crime Classic as the BotW: it was early May that I picked Tea on Sunday so I think I’m allowed another one now.

The victim in Not to be Taken is John Waterhouse, who dies after a gastric episode which all of his friends think is accidental. But his brother doesn’t agree and forces an exhumation. Further investigations show that he was killed by arsenical poisoning and the police set out to try and figure out who was responsible. We see the story from the point of view of one of the friends, Douglas, who is a country gentleman farmer. Over the course of the book we learn more about all the characters and the options for who might have killed John become wider and wider.

Not to Be Taken was originally published as a serialisation for readers themselves to solve, with a prize available for readers who could answer the question “who was the poisoner” correctly. This BLCC edition has the solution provided, after telling the reader that they should now be able to work it out. This is very twisty and very clever. I had some ideas, but like the readers at the time, none of them were totally accurate. I’ve read a couple of of Anthony Berkley’s other books, including Murder in the Basement which was also a BotW (four years ago!) but I think this is the first of his that I’ve read that doesn’t feature his regular detective, Roger Sheringham. It’s well worth a look – I’ve had a mixed run with the more recent BLCC releases, but this is a really good one.

It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means it isn’t on Kobo, but as I always say, these rotate through the various schemes and offers so add it to your watch list and it will come around soon I’m sure. And just to flag that for some reason the Kindle and paperback versions of this have some how ended up listed separately on Amazon, which is annoying but seems to be happening more than you would expect at the moment.

Happy Reading!