Our June book club read is David Downing’s The Dark Clouds Shining, set in 1921 London. Ex-secret service spy Jack McColl is in prison, but his ex boss offers him an assignment in Russia to get out of jail time. Join us on Thursday, June 27 at 6 p.m. at the Classic Cup Cafe. 4389 Jackson Rd. for dinner & discussion. All are welcome. Purchase a copy at our online store here See you in June!
This book will be available May 28, 2019.
The first book in the Stella and Lyndy series, Murder at Morrington Hall, is not your typical rich-American-heiress-marries-broke-English-aristocrat story. Kentuckian Stella Kendrick loves horses more than anything in the world. It’s 1905, and she’s excited to journey with her father to deliver thoroughbreds to an English Earl. Upon arrival at Morrington Hall, the Earl and his Countess are appalled at Stella’s straightforward America manners and her lack of understanding of their aristocratic titles and way of life. Their son, Viscount “Lyndy” Lundhurst is utterly charmed.
The second book in Christine Trent’s Florence Nightingale series is even more gripping than the first. The story opens with a friend of Florence’s innocently heading to the British Museum with her father and on the way, their carriage is attacked and their driver is killed. Because Florence’s friend is married to the secretary of war, the family wants discretion, and they ask Florence to investigate rather than the police.
Of course Florence is no lady of leisure – she’s running a hospital (the center of the action in the first novel) and in this novel, she’s asked to consult when cholera breaks out in the Soho section of London, a notoriously poor and miserable part of the city. She does agree to take on the investigation though. When another of her friend’s servants turns up at her hospital suffering with cholera, she’s on a tear.
As Elly Griffiths pens her eleventh Ruth Galloway novel, she comes – appropriately, given the title – almost full circle, back to her first novel. Cast your mind back to Ruth’s teacher Eric and the henge discovered on the saltmarsh and move forward ten years, and Ruth is now dealing with Eric’s son, Leif, who is in town to look at a newly discovered henge. Just like 10 years ago, two bodies are discovered on the site, one ancient, and one not so ancient.
Somehow Griffiths’ storytelling style is not only plot oriented, it’s character oriented, so she’s taking into account the many happenings in her character’s lives over the past 10 years. Ruth is the mother of a 10 year old, thanks to a one night stand with the father, Detective Nelson. Nelson’s wife is expecting a late in life baby at any moment, which may or may not be Nelson’s – she’d been having an affair. Their older daughters are unaware that Kate, Ruth and Nelson’s daughter, is their sister.
This book was a non stop read of the creepy psychological variety. The book opens with Lauren and her husband Patrick in the hospital as Lauren gives birth to twin boys, Riley and Morgan. While initially Lauren is afraid she won’t love them, that fear is quickly dispelled, but it’s replaced by a more disturbing fear: someone is trying to take the babies.
There’s an epigraph at the beginning of each chapter that grounds the book in the idea of the changeling, an ancient folkloric concept that the real baby is taken and replaced by an elf baby or an ice baby or in Lauren’s case, a river baby. And if this was the straight up thrust of the novel, it would have been almost a cliché.
Peter Lovesey has written some of my very favorite detective novels – The False Inspector Dew(1982), Rough Cider (1986) and The Reaper (2000), not to mention his long and delightful Peter Diamond series. One of the things Lovesey is the very absolute best at is simply plot. In his novels, these can be longer and more complex affairs, but in this collection of short stories, the plots are deadly little masterpieces of wit and style.
Short stories are a tricky medium. In a short span of pages, an author needs to draw the reader in, make them care about at least one person in the narrative, and tell a completely contained story, soup to nuts. Lovesey’s elegant writing and humor serve him well, as story after story in this collection, reprinted here by the venerable Crippen & Landru, are both memorable and concise.
This is a banner week for us as we add two new reviewers! The second is our daughter Margaret. who unsurprisingly is a big mystery fan, and one of her favorites is Elly Griffiths. Welcome, Margaret!
Elly Griffiths, author of two mystery series, takes a stab at stand alone fiction with The Stranger Diaries. This novel brings us a modern-day gothic horror story while keeping solidly grounded in tradition. Instead of a castle or drafty mansion, there is an old school with secrets. Instead of a threatening lord of the manor, characters are menaced by fellow teachers and students. There is a ghost story in the background of the novel, and a mystery concerning the true identity of someone long dead. Delightfully, the novel’s three heroines are not quite so traditional.
Like many True Crime books, Murder by the Book starts with a bloody crime, a man with his throat cut in his own bed. London in 1840 was a pretty grim place, but the reason this crime became a veritable national sensation didn’t have much to do with the gore of the thing or the apparent brazenness of it, but the simple fact that it happened to a member of the uppermost crust, Lord William Russell. Forget the miserable and dangerous lives of the poor, when an aristocrat got murdered, the new consort, Prince Albert, and the old general, the Duke of Wellington, wanted to see the matter cleared up as soon as possible.
Sophie Hannah’s books are police procedurals, and technically a series, but she seems always more interested in plot than in the coppers making the deductions. That’s not a bad thing, but there’s no Inspector Dalgleish or Rebus or Banks to love. Instead, the reader gets the messier – and no doubt far more realistic – interchange of police at all different levels and abilities. In the case in this novel, the group have a very puzzling crime to solve.
Hannah diffuses her narrative with different narrators, newspaper columns, emails, and a host of other devices that keep the reader guessing along with the detectives. There’s the straight up procedural story where the police are trying to solve a string of four murders that look to be paired murders of best friends, though carried out at different times and in different locations, and then there’s the story of the various characters in the novel.
When we closed the store and no longer felt Amazon breathing down our necks, we went ahead and subscribed to Amazon Prime so we could catch up on things like Bosch, which customers had been telling us frequently they enjoyed. (And Bosch is excellent, very true to the books though not an exact replica).
Prime’s The ABC Murders is not an exact replica of Christie’s enjoyable, early serial killer novel either. First there’s the casting of John Malkovich as Poirot. He doesn’t look like everyone’s mental picture of Poirot – that would be David Suchet – he’s instead an older, defeated Poirot, scraping along without his faithful valet, George, and his nightly hot chocolate.