Tag: mystery series

bingeable series, cozy crime, detective, series

Bingeable Series: Museum Mysteries

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Happy Friday everyone, I’m back with a cozy crime series that I blitzed my way through over a couple of months, and although I’m still annoyed that the final book is a different size to all the others, I enjoyed them enough that I’m trying to work past the issues it gives me for shelving them and writing about them anyway!

At the start of the series Nell Pratt is the chief fundraiser at the Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, when an archivist is found dead on the same day that it’s discovered that a collection of letters from George Washington is missing. Of course she starts to investigate – this is a cozy crime series after all – and thus a series of museum/antique related mysteries is underway. Like most similar series, Nell develops a group of friends and colleagues who help out with the investigation and there’s a running romantic subplot through the series too.

I bought the second in the series at Bristol this summer – and once I’d read it, I went off and started buying up the others and then read them in order. I really liked the set up of the museum and philanthropic community around Philadelphia – it felt like something a bit different after a lot of small business related cozies. I don’t know a lot about the way the museum sector works behind the scenes in the UK, let alone in the US so I have no criticisms to make on that front – I just enjoyed the mysteries and the characters and let it all unroll!

I haven’t read any other Sheila Connolly – and I was sad to see when I was digging around into her writing to find that she died in 2020. But she has other series that I will happily work my way through should the opportunity present itself.

This is another of those times where most of a cozy crime series isn’t available on Kindle – only the last one is in ebook format, and I didn’t realise when I ordered the paperback it that it was going to be a non-matching size – if I had I might have gone with the ebook.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

bingeable series

Bingeable series: Lily Bard

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The last couple of years I’ve reread some Charlaine Harris around Halloween, and this year it was the turn of Lily Bard, which is closer to Aurora Teagarden in feel than Sookie Stackhouse, but still has a similar feel in a way.

Lily Bard lives in the small town of Shakespeare in Arkansas. She moved to the town to escape a traumatic event in her past and has built herself a small, protected life as a cleaning lady whilst also honing her martial arts skills at the local gym. In the first book she sees a body being dumped near her house and after anonymously tipping off the police tries hard to stay out of it – until people start to suspect that she is the killer. And off we go for a five book series where Lily unravels a series of murders in her small town.

In some ways these are like other cozy crime novels: small town, female heroine who runs her own business etc, except that Lily’s life has been darker and more traumatic than most usual cozy heroines and her world view is pretty dark and cynical. The first time I read this series, I read them out of order and had a bit of a mixed response. But this time, reading them in order I could watch Lily develop and grow as she slowly breaks down the walls she has built around herself and starts living life rather than just existing. And yes I’ve hedged around what happened to her – because it’s a spoiler, it’s not in the blurbs, but it’s sexual violence and it’s bad. So be warned.

A few of the reviews of the books have some issues with the way that Lily views other women and her attitudes towards them, whereas if you read them in order, I interpreted it as it Lily knowing that she wasn’t doing anything wrong when she was attacked and so she can’t see why anyone would be so trusting as to let themselves be vulnerable. But these are definitely darker murder mysteries than Aurora, there’s a lot less sex than Sookie, which I guess makes them Harper Connolly but without the ability to see deadbodies – and there are people that have problems with that series too so maybe it is pretty apt!

Anyway, I bought the Kindle omnibus edition this time because I didn’t have them all in paperback to start with and I’m not sure I still have any of them any more (I couldn’t find them anyway) even if I wasn’t mostly binging through them while staying away from home. Kobo only seems to have the individual books. I’m not sure how easy they are to find in the shops atm – Charlaine Harris is a bit of a weird one on that front. They’ve definitely had a cover redesign since I last read them.

Have a great weekend!

Book of the Week, cozy crime

Book of the Week: A Dark and Stormy Murder

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This week I’m back in the cozy crime genre for my pick, and with a first in a series so I’m abiding by the rules (yes, those rules I set myself!).

And so the plot: Lena’s just landed a job as the assistant to her favourite writer, Camilla Graham and moved to a small town in Indiana. Lena has always wanted to be a writer and now she gets to learn from her idol. Lena’s best friend already lives in Blue Lake – in fact she’s the one who met Camilla first, but Lena quickly gets stuck into small town life and meeting the locals – including a notorious recluse and the chief detective. But when a body turns up on her boss’s land, and strange things start happening at the house Lena can’t help but start investigating…

This has a fairly classic cozy crime set up in many ways – small town, two potential love interests for the heroine and a developing group of friends. But the writing as a profession is fun and the actual murder plot is good and allows the development of Lena and Camilla’s working relationship as well as doing some world building work too. There’s also a secondary investigation going on that is setting up more for the series, so it feels quite action packed – and I mean that in a good way. At the moment Lena seems to be picking my least favourite of the two love interests but there’s plenty of scope for either him to grow on me or for her to change her mind. This is my first book by Julia Buckley, and there another five in this series and she has a couple of other series too so that’s something to look forward to, if I can just get the tbr under control…

I read this one in paperback, but it’s also available on Kindle and Kobo.

Happy Reading!

mystery, series

Mystery Series: Agatha Raisin

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The 35th in Agatha Raisin series came out yesterday in the UK – and the first nine are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so it seemed like a good time to write about M C Beaton’s Cotswold-based mystery series.

Agatha is a middle-aged public relations agent, who at the start of the series sells her Mayfair firm so she can retire early and move to the Cotswolds. She soon finds herself caught up in a murder investigation – after she tries to ensure that she’ll win a baking competition by buying in her entry only for one of the judges to drop dead after eating it and she has to clear her name. Soon she’s stumbling over murders where ever she goes and gaining a reputation for her detective work, until in the fifteenth book she sets up her own private investigations agency.

Agatha is originally from Birmingham where her parents lived in a tower block in a slum and she has dragged herself up through her own efforts. She’s prickly, she doesn’t really understand the countryside and she hides her vulnerability under a hard shell that very few people actually see through. There is a regular cast of characters alongside her who help to smooth her path – and smooth off her edges. From the local police force there is Bill Wong, who is the first friend that she makes after moving, then there is Mrs Bloxby the vicar’s wife who helps her navigate the village, Roy Silver who used to work with Agatha in London and who pops up from time to time and then James Lacey, Agatha’s handsome next door neighbour and Sir Charles Fraith a rich but stingy friend – both of whom are love interests of sorts at various points.

Agatha is 53 in the first book in the series and has remained “in her early 50s” throughout the whole series – they’re another series that I would describe as existing in the floating “now”* where time has moved on but the characters have remained the same age. Aside from the detective agency development, Agatha’s life remains fairly similar through the series – even if some times you think things are changing!

I originally read the first dozen or so back in the early 2000s, and then after reading too many of them in a row started to get a bit fed up with the formula (see above!) – which I’ve found is very much a thing with M C Beaton books as I have the same issue with Hamish Macbeth but also her historical romances. But as long as you read them well spaced out there’re a lot of fun – as are the radio versions with Penelope Keith. The TV series – which has Ashley Jensen as Agatha – is quite a different beast to the books and I suggest if you do do both then you may be need to separate them off from each other in your head, much the way I did with the Phryne Fisher books vs the TV series.

M C Beaton – aka Marion Chesney – died in 2019, but the series has continued – with book 31 onward being credited as “with R W Green”. I need to read some of the latest ones to see if/how the series has changed at all – the most recent one I’ve read is book 28 (and I’ve read all bar about two of the series up to that point) which probably takes you up until the point where the libraries closed for Covid, because that’s how I used to read them. I would go and borrow some more – but we all know how big The Pile is at the moment. But if you haven’t read any of them, do try the early bit of the series out via Kindle Unlimited.

Happy Reading!

*See also Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series in a way, where the first book was written in the 1970s and the last book in the mid 2008s, where the settings remain fairly close to the time that they are written in, but Vicky remains about the same age.

Book News

New H M The Queen Investigates coming!

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Now while I was writing yesterday’s Kindle offers post and discovering that there’s a Her Majesty the Queen investigates book on offer this month, I also discovered that there’s a fifth in the series coming! The Queen who came in from the Cold is out in the UK in hardback first (and Kindle) on Feb 6th. The blurb says the Queen is planning her trip to Italy on the Royal Yacht Britannia when someone claims to have seen a brutal murder on the Royal Train. The Queen and her private secretary get to work – and as the title suggests there are meant to be spies and Cold War skullduggery. I can’t wait!

series

Series Redux: Lady Emily mysteries

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The eighteenth in the Lady Emily series came out this week, so it’s an ideal time for me to point you back at my series post about Tasha Alexander’s (very) late Victorian and early Edwardian sleuth and ancient history enthusiast. I’m still a couple of books behind – I’ve actually only read one more than I had back when I wrote that last post, because the later books remain a right pain to try and get hold of and mostly in hardback to boot an you know the state of my to-read pile so you can see my issue. Anyway, book 18 sees Emily and Colin in the Bavarian Alps, staying within sight of Mad King Ludwig’s castle and solving a mystery with its roots in the past.

detective, series

Mystery series: Alan Grant

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I’ve written about Nicola Upson’s series about Josephine Tey, and this week it’s the turn of Tey’s actual mystery series to feature on the blog, because I’ve finally read all of them after picking up the last one at Book Con the other week. Yes I know. Book Con is doing me quite well on the reading front.

Our detective is Alan Grant, a police inspector at Scotland Yard although his cases take him all over England and Scotland. I’ve read these severely out of order and over a period of about 20 years because I’m fairly sure I read Daughter of Time when I was studying my History A Level and doing Henry VII, because when I read it the other week it seemed very familiar. They’re also very varied in the sort of stories they tell – which aren’t always murders, or at least not recent murders. The aforementioned Daughter of Time is an examination of whether Richard III was really guilty of the murder of the princes in the tower and also of how history is put together and how historical myths come into being. It’s regularly voted as one of the best detective stories of all time. Alan Grant is only slightly in The Franchise Affair, but that is a kidnapping and abduction type plot – which is cleverly put together although it displays some somewhat dated social attitudes.

As you know, I love a good Golden Age mystery and these can be pretty good. Josephine Tey is actually one of a number of pen names used by Elizabeth McKintosh – in fact the first in this series was originally published under the name of Gordon Daviot, under which name she was a successful playwright. My favourite of Tey’s books are the ones where she’s using her knowledge of the theatre scene that she was a part of (and which Upson also uses in her books). A Shilling For Candles, about the murder of a film star was turned into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock – albeit with a fair few changes, including the removal of Grant himself!

These are fairly easy to get hold of – Arrow did paperback editions a few years back, and second hand copies of various ages are fairly easy to come buy too. And they’re all on Kindle too, some times in multiple editions at different price points because that’s the sort of age they are. So good luck with that and hard copies may be your most reliable source!

Happy Reading

bingeable series, series

Series Update: New Flavia de Luce

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

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

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

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

Have a great weekend everyone!

bingeable series

Bingeable Series: Darling Deli

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After blitzing my way through Patti Benning’s Real Estate Rescue series earlier this year, I’ve now done the same thing with her Darling Deli series, and now I’ve made it to the end – and I think this series is completed – it’s time to talk about it.

Our heroine is Moira Darling. She’s a single mum with a just about adult daughter and owns and runs a deli in a small town near Lake Michigan. In the first book of the series the owner of one of the rival businesses in the town is found dead and Moira finds herself suspected of killing him. Over the course of the next 32 books she continues to stumble across an improbably high number of bodies and help solve the crimes, with the help of her daughter, a handsome local private investigator and an increasing group of friends. The locations expand to include a nearby town where her daughter opens her own business and the occasional trip to other parts of the country.

Like the Real Estate Rescue series, these are not the longest books, or the most complicated on the plot front. This is an earlier series, so at times the writing is a bit clunkier, but they’re basically the perfect length to read on my commute to work – which means that I don’t often read more than one in a sitting (although you’ve seen that I’ve often done more than one in a week) so you don’t notice the issues as much. The main one being that if you think too hard about how many bodies Moira is finding, and in such a short space of time, you realise that she’s a bigger curse than Jessica Fletcher and Maple Creek has a higher homicide rate than Cabot Cove! But they’re a nice easy read – and it’s not always the new character who has just been introduced who gets murdered, so that makes a change too.

These are all available in Kindle Unlimited – if you’re a KU subscriber they’re a good deal, but given their length (usually around 120 pages) I’m not sure they’re worth the non-KU price.

Have a great weekend!

books, Series I love

Series redux: Campion

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BBC Four showed one of the Peter Davidson Campion adaptations the other week, so I thought this Friday was a good time to remind you about Margery Allingham’s Golden Age series. I’ve re listened to a lot of them on audiobook as well as having read all bar one I think of the original nineteen novels featuring her response to Lord Peter Wimsey. They are dated in patches – some novels much more than others – but so are some of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. If you’re interested in the Queens of Crime and you haven’t read any of these, you should. And you can read my much longer thoughts here.