A shorter BotW post this week, because you’ve already had three great books from my reading last week in my Summer Reading post! But I finished Picture Miss Seeton on Sunday afternoon and wanted to give it a mention.
I do love a stylised cover. As long as you can get a matching set!
A retired art teacher, Miss Seeton witnesses a murder after leaving a performance of Carmen. Despite only getting a shadowy view of the killer, she manages to draw a picture that enables Scotland Yard to identify him. Soon she’s facing peril in the rural cottage she’s just inherited, where the villagers are also taking an interest in the new arrival.
This really scratched my itch for cozy crime with added humour. Miss Seeton is a wonderful send up of elderly lady detectives. She’s impossible to shock, utterly unflappable and practises yoga in her free time. She’s always one step ahead of the police and always manages to be in the right place at the right time to pick up the vital clue. I found the switching points of view occasionally a bit jarring or confusing, but I forgave it because I was having so much fun reading about Miss S’s adventures. It was a perfect book to read while recovering from nightshifts.
I’m fairly sure I’ve seen some Miss Seeton’s at the library (or maybe in the discount bookshop) so I suspect I may be reading more of her adventures in the near future. Picture Miss Seeton is available on Kindle and Kobo and should be available (probably to order) from all the usual sources.
As you’ll have seen from yesterday’s Week in Books, I had a less productive week in reading last week, but that didn’t give me a problem when it came to picking a BotW – because after I read Lowcountry Bonfire, I went and bought myself another book in the series straight away.
I kinda like this cover – its simple but stylish.
Lowcountry Bonfire is the sixth book in the Liz Talbot cozy crime series. Liz and her partner Nate Andrews run a private investigation agency on an island in South Carolina. Their bread and butter cases are suspicious spouses and adultery cases. They’re not expecting Tammy Sue Lyerley’s case to be any different. But when her husband Zeke turns up dead in the boot of the car that Tammy Sue has just filled with his stuff and is trying to set alight, they end up smack bang in the middle of a murder investigation. Soon they’re trying to work out the truth behind Zeke’s tall tales and uncovering buried secrets.
After a disappointing run of cozy crime novels during my holiday*, this was a breath of fresh air. This is just the sort of cozy crime that I like – a great cast of characters, a quirky setting and a satisfying murder mystery. And to top that off, Liz is one of my favourite things – a sleuth who has a legitimate reason to be snooping around. The plot is perhaps a little bonkers at times, but the book is so pacey that you don’t really have time to think about that – which is exactly what you want really.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I liked this so much that I went off and bought myself the first book in the series so I could see how Liz got to where she is. I finished that on the train home on Monday afternoon and can report that that’s also a lot of fun – although the mystery and pacing isn’t quite as good as in Lowcountry Bonfire. Admittedly that may be partly because I could spot which townspeople were no longer about in book six and extrapolate some of the solution from that!
My copy of Lowcountry Bonfire came from NetGalley, but it’s out now and available on all the usual platforms, like Kindle and Kobo. But if you want to start at the beginning, Lowcountry Boil was £1.99 on Kindle and Kobo at time of writing, as was book two, Lowcountry Bombshell, (although only on Kindle) which I may have just bought myself. Naughty Verity!
Happy reading.
*Written in Dead Wax (in my book at least) is not a cozy crime. And even if it was, I read it at the start of the week – it was the mysteries afterwards that were a disappointment!
We had a lovely time on holiday last week and I read a lot of books. A lot. And the pick of the bunch was Andrew Cartmel’s first Vinyl Dectective novel, Written in Dead Wax. I’d had my eye on this for a while but finally managed to pick myself up a copy at Big Green Bookshop a few weeks back now.
My copy on the beach in Croatia last week. Lovely setting, made better with a good book!
The Vinyl Detective hunts down rare records. In fact he makes his living by selling the records that he finds while out and about in London. Then one day a mysterious woman shows up and asks him to find the unfindable – a priceless, impossibly rare jazz album. And so he sets off on an oddessy around the record shops, car boot sales and charity shops hunting for the elusive record. But soon it seems he has competition. Ruthless competition. He’s not a detective, but when people start turning up dead, he start trying to work out what’s going on.
This has a blurb on the front from Ben Aaronovitch – and Andrew Cartmel also co-writes the Rivers of London graphic novels so I thought that it might be right up my street and I was right. It was so much fun. There’s no magic here (apart from the magic of vinyl) but it definitely has some points of comparison with Rivers of London – there’s a similar sense of humour and wry way of looking at the world and it has the geekery that I love too – that makes you feel like you’re a member of a special club of people in the know – even if all you know about LPs is what you learned on your parent’s old record player* and what you’ve read in the book. The mystery is clever and twisty, there’s plenty of action and it’s really hard to figure out where it is going next.
If I had a problem with it, it was that the female characters weren’t always as three dimensional as they could be – but that was kind of in keeping with the Vinyl Detective’s record-centric world view: he’d be able to tell you (in depth) all the details about a rare record that he once saw, but he wouldn’t remember what you were wearing if you made him turn his back and describe your outfit to you! I tried to make myself read it slowly – and that worked for about 150 pages, and then I just needed to know what happened next and how it would all work out. Luckily it’s taken me so long to get around to reading this that book 2 is already out and so I can get another fix soon.
If you like PC Grant’s adventures, read this. And if you like this, then I think you might also like The Barista’s Guide to Espionage – which is really quite different but keeps coming into my mind when I was writing this review and trying to come up with if you like this then read thats. You should be able to get hold of Written in Dead Wax from any good bookshop – I’m planning a trip back to the Big Green Bookshop at the weekend to get hold of book 2 – or it’s also on Audible (you might need to be a member for this link to work), Kindle and Kobo. I don’t think you’ll regret it. I’ve already lent my copy to my dad…
Happy Reading!
*I spent parts of my childhood dancing around the dining room to a small selection of my parents’ records. A bit of ballet, the Beatles, some Carpenters, Stevie Wonder, and Tony Orlando and Dawn, the records I created routines too aren’t as cool as the ones the Vinyl Detective is looking for – but I still have my first LP (the Postman Pat soundtrack) even though I don’t have a record player plumbed in to play it on.
It’s election day in the UK tomorrow, and I’m gearing up for an all-nighter at work. So the natural way to prepare is to… read some nice relaxing cozy crime books that don’t feature any politics at all! Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed recently.
I’m working on making my collages neater… it might take a while
I think I’ve mentioned these before, but Donna Andrew’s Meg Langslow books are a lasting source of delight to me. They have some of the best punny titles in the genre (all based around birds) and are witty and fun. There was a slight mid series slump* (but hey where there are 20 books in a series that can happen) but they’re back on form now. Start at the beginning with Murder with Peacocks – I’ve recently read numbers 17 and 18 – the brilliantly titled The Good, the Bad and the Emus and The Nightingale before Christmas.
I’ve also got a serious soft spot for Cindy Brown’s Ivy Meadows series about a wannabe actress who is a trainee Private Investigator in her spare time. Each book is based around a different play or musical title – the fourth book has just come out, Ivy Get Your Gun, and I enjoyed it although I think the second book in the series The Sound of Murder is still my favourite.
I read my first book in Lyn Cahoon’s Tourist Trap series a few weeks ago and, although there were a few things that had me confused, I already have another one lined up on my Kindle so I must have liked it. This follows the trend for small business-owner detectives with a Bookshop-cum-coffee-shop proprietor in a small coastal town. I like a competent heroine and Jill is good at her day job – or at least she by the eighth book in the series Hospitality and Homicide and she at least has a credible reason for investigating the death. There’s an interesting supporting cast and a nice relationship to watch develop too. What more could you want?
I bought the Donna Andrews – and you can get them fairly easily (and for a sensible price) in the UK, but the other copies came to me via NetGalley, so it might be a case of adding them to your book wishlists and waiting for the price to drop, because I often find American cozies are too expensive for me soon after release, especially given how quickly I read them.
Happy Reading – and if you’re up watching the election result tomorrow night, think of me and my colleagues working probably the busiest nightshift of the year!
*SPOILER ALERT: The slump (for me at least) coincided with the period where Meg’s twins were very small. Once they got to toddling and the books had less feeding and naps, it all sorted itself out
This week’s BotW is another forgotten Golden Age crime novel which has been republished by the British Library. I picked this up at the book barge on Regents Canal, but it’s taken me a couple of months to get around to. The Sussex Downs Murder is the second story to feature Superintendent Meredith – there are a load more, and I already have another waiting for me on my Kindle now that I’ve read this.
Yes, I admit it, I read it on the train. Its such a useful handbag size!
John Rother and his brother William live and work together at a farm in the Sussex Downs. One night John leaves for a holiday and disappears, leaving his car and some worrying blood stains. Has he been kidnapped? Is he dead? Whatever has happened, William falls under suspicion as rumours had been circulating in the village that his wife was getting rather too friendly with John. Superintendent Meredith is called in to investigate, but events soon take a macabre turn when bones start turning up.
If you’ve read a lot of detective novels, you may suspect the solution to this one rather earlier than Meredith does, but it’s still a really enjoyable read. I suspect at the time, the solution would be a big gasp-inducing moment, but because there’s been 80 years of crime writing since, you may have come across plots like this before. It is a really well written and well crafted mystery, with plenty of interesting characters and lots of twists and turns. And if you’re a fan of Golden Age mysteries, it’s well worth reading because it has exactly the sort of vibe you get from a Sayers or a Christie – not too creepy, but totally engrossing.
I’ve read quite a lot of these British Library Crime Classic reissues and I’m struggling to think of one that I haven’t enjoyed. I’m always watching out for them, and I suspect that this will continue to be the case. It’s £2.99 on Kindle at time of writing, which is a bargain, or £1.89 on Kobo which is an even bigger bargain, but is for a slightly different edition. You should be able to get order the paperback from all the usual sources too.
So yesterday I took advantage of the last of my post-nightshift days off to go on a family jolly to Blenheim Palace. It’s less than an hour from home, but surprisingly I’d never been before – perhaps because it’s not National Trust or English Heritage so you have to pay. It was fabulous – and I got my day ticket converted into a year pass (which doesn’t cost any extra to do) so I can go back again and see some of the bits we didn’t have time for on Tuesday. Any how, after a day out at a country house, it got me thinking about books which feature amazing houses. So here’s a few for you for Recommendsday.
OK the sky wasn’t as blue as I was hoping, but at least we didn’t get rained on…
I know it’s totally the obvious choice, but I had to start with Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It’s not my favourite Waugh (that’s Vile Bodies) but I know I may be in the minority on that. I had a massive Waugh kick a couple of years ago and read a whole load of his novels back to back and for the most part they still really work. Brideshead tells of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains and their upper class and crazy world. The house is at the centre of it all as a character in and of itself. Well worth reading if you haven’t already. I definitely need to watch one or other of the TV/film versions soon. And read Vile Bodies too.
Next, if you haven’t read any Roderick Alleyn books (and why not?) the first in the series, A Man Lay Dead, is set around a weekend party at a country house where one of the guests ends up dead. Again, it’s not my favourite of the Alleyns (that’s Artists in Crime) but it’s a really good start to the series and a really good example of a country house murder mystery.
It feels like a while since I mentioned Rebecca on here, which is strange since the Du Maurier classic is one of my mum’s favourite books and I have a lovely Virago hardback copy which sits on my downstairs keeper shelf. It’s creepy and gothic and has one of the most famous opening lines in literature in “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again”. If you haven’t read it, why not and if you have go and reread it. You won’t regret it*.
Finally, if you want something funny, try PG Wodehouse’s Blandings series. The first one is Something Fresh, where you meet Lord Emsworth, his son Freddie and his secretary The Efficient Baxter and get a taste for the sort of high jinx that ensue. I think I like them better than the Jeeves and Wooster books, but again I think I’m in the minority there.
I could go on – I haven’t even mentioned I Capture the Castle, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or The Secret Garden..
All recommendations for more books with amazing houses gratefully received, in the meantime
Happy reading!
*Even if, spoiler alert, you never trust a housekeeper again.
This week’s BotW is Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop. I’ve had Crispin recommended to me several times recently and as I come to the end of my Inspector Alleyn marathon I’ve been looking for a new Golden Age author to binge on and I think Crispin could be it. The Case of the Gilded Fly is the first in the Gervase Fen series – but The Long Divorce has also been touted as a good one for me to start with, but I ended up reading The Moving Toyshop because it was available for 99p when I was looking! It’s taken me a few weeks to get around to it, but I’m very glad I did.
There appears to be a whole set of Crispin reissues underway, which is good news for the e-reader!
First published in 1946, The Moving Toyshop is the third book to feature Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford professor and amateur detective. In this book, he finds himself investigating a murder on behalf of a former schoolmate. Late one night on a trip to Oxford, Richard Cadogan stumbled across the body of a woman in a toyshop and is knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. But the next morning the toyshop is a grocers and the police don’t believe him. Gervase and Richard are soon racing around Oxford trying to work out exactly what happened.
This is so much to enjoy in this. The scene at the fairground is excellent, but so is the way it evokes the peculiarities and eccentricities of life in an Oxford college in this era. The mystery is utterly bonkers, but it rattles along so fast that you don’t really notice – or care. In some ways it reminded me a lot of The 39 Steps as much as it did of writers like Sayers and Christie. As promised in the blurb, there’s also a dash of Wodehouse here. They are quirky and something a little bit out of the ordinary run of Golden Age crime. There are a few word choices that are… infelicitous these days, but no more so than you find in many of the other books of the era.
I think I’ll be adding Crispin to my list of authors to look out for in second-hand bookshop, because I love old covers from this era, but if you want to get your hands on The Moving Toyshop now, it’s available on Kindle and Kobo as well as in a modern paperback edition from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones.
Another Recommendsday post, another crime novel. This time though it’s historical crime and the Dandy Gilver series by Catriona McPherson. I read number 11 in the series – Dandy Gilver and a Most Misleading Habit – at the weekend and was reminded how much I like this series. The previous book in the series was a joint BotW about 18 months ago, but perhaps didn’t get as much love as it deserved so this seemed like a good time to revisit it.
I’m trying not to hold the non-matching covers against them!
Dandy is an upper class lady turned private detective in the wilds of Scotland in the 1920s. She falls into detection when some diamonds are stolen at a ball and discovers that a) she enjoys it and b) she is really quite good at it. Soon she’s started her own detective agency with her friend Alec and the cases start coming in. Dandy’s husband is not keen, but is prepared to put up with it (and the money it brings in) as long as her activities are thrust in his face all the time. I think the series starts fairly slowly, but really hits its stride by book 5 when Dandy goes under cover as a lady’s maid for a case, although I like the second one, Bury Man’s Day a lot as well.
In …Most Misleading Habit, Dandy is investigating a death at a convent in an arson attack, while Alec, her partner in detection, is looking into a break out at an asylum nearby which happened on the same night. The two must be connected – but an old war chum of Alec’s is being blamed for it and Alec is convinced that he’s being framed. What really happened and who is it that’s still sneaking around the convent?
Dandy is often shelved with the cozy crime books – but it’s a bit darker than that. They do have their humorous moments, but the solutions often involve issues that you don’t come across very often in this sort of book. I’ve spoken before about the Daisy Dalrymple and Phryne Fisher series, and Dandy is definitely darker than Daisy and as dark as the darkest Phryne’s.
I’ve read all bar one of the series now – and they’re really worth your time. You don’t necessarily need to start at the beginning – and several of the installments are very competitively priced at the moment. I’ve just bought the missing one while writing this because it was only £1.99 on kindle – but a couple of them are only 99p and one of them – Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for a Murder is one of my favourites and gives a fairly good indication of what the series is like.
It was actually a really tough choice picking this weeks BotW partly because I didn’t read as much last week and partly because none of what I read was an absolute stand out for me. So in the end, I’ve settled on Tonya Kappes’ Southern Fried – a cozy crime mystery that comes out today, which has its issues, but overall was the book I had the most to say about of last week’s reading!
I like the cover – simple but actually relevant to the story.
This is the second in the Kenni Lowry series – about the sheriff of small town in Kentucky who is assisted on the job by the ghost of her grandfather (no, don’t walk away, it’s not quite as nutty as it seems) who was also the town’s sheriff. Kenni loves her job, but her mother isn’t best pleased about her daughter’s vocation – and neither are some of the townspeople as the local crime rate starts to rise. In Southern Fried, Kenni is investigating the death of a man found dead in the greenhouse of his former (as it turns out) employer in the run up to a cook off that they were both taking part in. In working out what happened, Kenni gets tangled up in family feuds and local intrigue just as election season is starting to get underway. As the danger mounts, Kenni, her dog Duke and her new (and handsome) deputy Finn must work out what’s going on before the rising death toll scuttles Kenni’s chances at holding on to her dream job before the voting even starts.
There’s a lot that I liked about this – I love the southern setting, the mystery is fast-paced and twisty with a potential slow burn romance running alongside. However as a Brit, I struggle to get my head around the idea of elected sheriffs and the hyper-local police forces and at times Kenni doesn’t help with this. In the first book in the series I found her spacey and not entirely convincing on police procedure (especially for a police academy graduate) but she seems much more competent in this one, which helped me cope with the fact that she’s taking advice from a ghost! Regular readers will know that I have a strange releationship with the supernatural and parnormal in books*, but in the main this works for me. There were still a couple of points where I raised my eyebrows at Kenni’s actions – an amateur detective can get away with a lot more than a sheriff can – but the book moves quick enough that you only notice this when you stop to think!
This book also made me muse on the role of the knowledgeable background character in cozy crimes. Kenni being the sheriff is a double-edged sword – it means that she has the right to be investigating crimes (and indeed is likely to come across them) in a way that many of the sleuths in cozies don’t, but it also rules out an important source of information and means that at times the sleuth can come across as not being very good at her job. there’s a couple of points in this where Finn the deputy seems like he knows what he’s doing more than Kenni does. But this is only book two in the series and is a big step on from book one so there is lots of potential for development and improvement as the series goes on.
My copy came from NetGalley, but you can buy Southern Fried on Kindle or in paperback from Amazon from today.
Happy Reading.
* As in sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn’t but I can never work out in advance what I’m going to like and what I’m going to hate!
So you’ve read my interview with the fabulous Duncan MacMaster, now you want to know what I thought of the book don’t you?
As mentioned yesterday, Hack tells the story of Jake Mooney, a ghost-writer who lands the biggest job of his career, writing the autobiogaphy of 80s TV star Rick Rendell. But when he arrives on Rick’s luxury paradise to start work, people start trying to kill him. Suddenly the most lucrative job of his career could also be his last one. But Jake’s used to dealing with scandal and he’s not going to go down without a fight. What is it that’s in Rick’s past that people are willing to kill to keep under wraps?
The cover of Hack by Duncan MacMaster
This is so much fun. Rick was the star of a (fictional) rival of Miami Vice and the book is paying homage to that like mad and it’s great. Jake is trapped in glamorous locations with glamorous people but someone keeps trying to murder him. As the book goes on he gets more and more battered and bruised, but some how manages to keep getting up and carrying on chasing down the bad guys. As Duncan said in his interview with me, Jake is a rank amateur, with no sleuthing skills at all – and that makes him great fun to read as he bumbles and crashes his way around the island stumbling upon clues and trying to stay alive.
Hack is very different from Duncan MacMaster’s first book for Fahrenheit Press, A Mint Condition Corpse. As Duncan said in the interview, in that Kirby’s a Holmesy, Poiroty type of sleuth – who can make great leaps of deduction out of nowhere and who has staff and piles of money to help him along the way. Jake is emphatically not that. But the two books do (perhaps unsurprisingly) share the same sense of humour and a wry look at the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of people, even if the lead characters and settings are very different.
There’s also a great cast of supporting characters – including Rick’s ex-wife who is an aging and faded star who is trying to revive her career in all the wrong ways, and Rick’s daughter who improbably seems to be falling for Jake – despite his terrible Hawaiian shirts, paunch and increasing injury count.
If you’re in need of a dose of sunshine to escape the grey of the weather at the moment, Hack will do that for you – and make you laugh and take you away from whatever’s bothering you. I got my advance copy from Mr Fahrenheit* who took pity on me and my twitter moanings during my last batch of nightshifts and sent me this to cheer me up. And it worked. I was reading it in my lunch break (at 3am), I was reading it on the train home – and if I hadn’t got to the end just as I was arriving into my station, I would have stayed up to finish it. And I really like my bed after nightshifts. And I nearly raved about it in Book of the Week that week – but it would have been cruel to taunt you by telling you about it when you couldn’t read it.
Hack is out now – and you can get a copy if you click here. And if you missed the interview, you should definitely check it out by clicking here.
Happy Reading!
*OK, so his name is Chris, but he is Fahrenheit Press, so in my head he’s Mr Fahrenheit à la Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 