Susan Elia MacNeal: The Hollywood Spy

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Susan Elia MacNeal somehow manages to write about incredibly dark topics – WWII, the Blitz, Nazis – with a non-heavy hand.  She visits the darkness but there’s room in the world of her heroine, Maggie Hope, for light.  The last novel, The King’s Justice, saw Maggie truly struggling with the many things she’s seen and experienced since the start of the war.  It was a crie de Coeur. In this novel, while she’s about to encounter more terrors, she’s out in Hollywood enjoying the sunshine and the availability of food and drink not seen in England since the war began. read more

Guest essay: Susan Elia MacNeal on The Hollywood Spy

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Today I’m really pleased to welcome Susan Elia MacNeal, author of the beloved Maggie Hope series.  Best news for readers – the new addition to this great series, The Hollywood Spy, will be published on July 6.  Susan agreed to give readers an advance look at what promises to be another great read.  You can pre-order it here.

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Lassie Who? Meet Tallulah, the newest star of The Hollywood Spy.

 The Hollywood Spy has a wide range of characters—there’s Maggie Hope, of course, and her ballerina friend Sarah Sanderson, who’s in Los Angeles to dance in the film, Star Spangled Canteen. There’s Maggie’s former fiancé, John Sterling, a wounded RAF pilot now working for Walt Disney. And there are cameos from historic figures—Cab Calloway, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, and Lena Horne, among others. read more

Clara McKenna: Murder at Keyhaven Castle

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Murder at Keyhaven Castle is the third book in Clara McKenna’s Stella and Lyndy mysteries, set in the New Forest area of England in 1905.  I had not read the two previous books, but McKenna gives the reader enough background that I had no problem getting into the book, and I enjoyed it so much that it made me want to read the others.

Stella Kendrick is the daughter of a wealthy horse farmer from Kentucky.  Her overbearing, social-climbing father, who had never shown her any love, had taken her to England, ostensibly to buy horses, but really to marry her off to Viscount “Lyndy” Lyndhurst.  Lyndy’s aristocratic family has lost their fortune.  I was never sure exactly why, and that was probably explained in the earlier books, but it is suggested that Lyndy’s father wasted the family’s money.  Stella’s father wants the social connections an aristocratic title would bring.  Needless to say, neither of the young people was consulted at the time their fathers planned their engagement.  Luckily for them, they fall in love with each other, even though Lyndy’s snobbish, traditionally-minded parents disapprove of Stella’s unconventional ways.  Stella and Lyndy share a love of horses and, as it turns out, crime solving. read more

July & August Book Clubs

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July Book Club will meet in person on Sunday, July 18, 2pm at my home.  We’ll also be meeting via zoom on Wednesday, July 21, at 7pm.  Please message me if you’d like to attend either iteration and you don’t have the relevant details or zoom link.  We’ll be discussing Sarah Stewart Taylor’s wonderful novel, The Mountains Wild.

August book club will meet in person on Sunday, August 22 at 2p.m and via zoom on Wednesday, August 25 at 7pm.  We’ll be reading Caroline B. Cooney’s Edgar nominee, Before She Was Helen. read more

Elly Griffiths: The Night Hawks

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Elly Griffiths is playing to her strengths with this (seemingly) effortless, blast to read entry in her Ruth Galloway series.  Ruth is back home where she belongs, having broken it off with the unfortunate Frank, and she and Nelson are once again having fated and tense encounters.  Ruth is now head of the archaeology department at her university, discovering the paperwork and supervision headaches that come with being in charge.  She’s especially annoyed by the “new Ruth”, David, the know-it-all older lecturer she herself has hired.  He seems to be tagging along everywhere she goes and trying to tell her what to do. read more

Sarah Stewart Taylor: A Distant Grave

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The second in Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series follows her elegiac first outing, The Mountains Wild, my favorite read of 2020.  Maggie is a Long Island homicide cop, but as the first novel explored, she has deep roots in Ireland.  In the first novel she searches for her long lost cousin’s killer; in the second novel, the crime occurs up the street from her home, but the roots of the story again take her back to Ireland.

She’s left behind a new-old flame in Ireland and has been planning a long vacation there with her daughter to visit him, but she catches a homicide case two days before they plan to leave.  When it turns out the victim was Irish, she figures she can combine business and pleasure, and her boss gives her leave to take off. read more

Murder on the Beach: A Destination Murders Short Story Anthology

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This is a perfect summer read – short stories are the perfect thing for waits in the car, on a line, at an airport or yes – on the beach before you drift into a sun infused nap.  They are even perfect for lunch breaks at the office.  Have lunch, read a whole story.  Stories are kind of like poetry in that they can’t waste words, are, as the description tells the reader, short, and really must pack a punch and a memory into a short space of time.

These were all fun reads, all set on different beaches from the east coast to Cabo San Lucas (a yummy destination to read about in Eleanor Cawood Jones’ Cabo San Loco).  In keeping with the summer theme these were all on the lighter side, some of the stories not even involving a murder.  One of the most successful stories, A Tale of Two Sisters by Barb Goffman, has no murder, just some petty theft. read more

Phyllis M. Betz: Reading the Cozy Mystery: Critical Essays on an Underappreciated Subgenre

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This review comes to us courtesy of Jonathan Wilkins, a poet and cozy aficionado.  I’m delighted that the cozy mystery is being taken seriously – as it should be!  For more on cozies, you can read my essay here. 

For most of us our introduction to the crime fiction genre was through the cozy mystery, and at last we have a critical approach to that almost ignored genre. Ignored because it has not been taken seriously in the past.  The advent of Nordic Noir and now Domestic Noir seems to have pushed it further back. Time for the cozy crime to fight back and show its value to the literary world. read more

Allison Montclair: A Rogue’s Company

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This has very quickly become one of my favorite and most anticipated series.  Set in London just post war, the main characters are Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge, two opposites who work like clockwork together.  Iris is single and Gwen is a widowed mother living with her in-laws, and the two run a marriage bureau called the “Right Sort”.  Each book opens with the approach of a client, and that sets off whatever delightful chain of events Montclair has in store for her reader.

Iris and Gwen have expanded their business a bit, and now boast a two-room office suite as well as a secretary.  The approach of their first African customer throws them off a tiny bit, but the ladies rally and agree to help find proper, polite Mr. Daile a match.  The book opens with a scene in Africa. It’s brief though memorable, as a boat sinks and many are lost.  Certainly, you will be thinking to yourself, Mr. Daile is connected to this tragedy.  The cagey Montclair reveals no secrets before her time, though. Three books in, I was more than content to leave it in her capable hands and feel certain the link would be made clear.  (Reader, it was). read more

June & July Book clubs

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In June, we’ll meet on Sunday, June 13 at 2 p.m. to discuss Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders.  This book is available for purchase on our website.  From the  publisher: Years ago, bookseller and mystery aficionado Malcolm Kershaw compiled a list of the genre’s most unsolvable murders, those that are almost impossible to crack—which he titled “Eight Perfect Murders”—chosen from among the best of the best including Agatha Christie’s A. B. C. Murders, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Ira Levin’s Death Trap, A. A. Milne’s Red House Mystery, Anthony Berkeley Cox’s Malice Aforethought, James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, John D. Macdonald’s The Drowner, and Donna Tartt’s A Secret History. read more