After a break last week for a book that wasn’t strictly a mystery, this week I’m firmly back in the mystery world – not just with today’s pick but with basically everything in tomorrow’s Quick Reviews too. Because basically almost everything I haven’t already told you about from last month is murder mystery because that’s the sort of month it was, and June continues the same way (I finished this on Sunday!)
The Second World War is over, and on Oxford preparations are underway for the first postwar production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. It is not a happy company because one of the singers, Edwin Shorthouse, was already unpopular before he started throwing his weight around and behaving badly at rehearsals. So when he is found dead, few of the company are upset, until it starts to look like it may be murder and not a suicide and one of their number may be responsible. Gervase Fen has a challenge on his hands.
I am slowly (and out of order) working my way through Edmund Crispin’s series about the eccentric Oxford Don, and this is a really good one. I love a theatre-set mystery and this is a perplexing locked room puzzle, and those are always good too. This has a dash of the absurd about it as well as the eccentricities of Fen and it’s very easy to read and the solution fits with that.
This is available in all the usual ways including Kindle and Kobo and there have been enough recent editions that you maybe able to pick it up second hand too.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 