A bit of variety this month, and some really excellent reads - hope you find something to your taste!
P.G. Wodehouse, Meet Mr. Mulliner: I do like a bit of Wodehouse
and I picked up two in a giveaway. I hadn’t read any Mr. Mulliner ones before,
and the general theme is how all members of the Mulliner family are both clever
and fortunate, and everything works out for them in the end in illustration of
Mr. Mulliner’s own theories of life. I particularly liked the one where the
young man is locked under the stairs by his old nanny, but the last one is also
very good, where a writer of dark crime fiction inherits a house from a
romantic novelist and finds its atmosphere affecting his own writing, with
almost disastrous results. Very witty, and a good, cheering, episodic read.
Patricia Finney, Do We NotBleed?: I very much enjoy this author’s Sir Robert Carey series, and Sir
Robert’s name appears in this book – as does Shakespeare’s, or Bald Will. The
period setting is very natural and the main character’s problems switching back
and forth between appearing as a widowed, scarred woman and the woman’s
‘brother’ are both realistic and funny, and you can just see Shakespeare taking
notes. Nevertheless, the murders are tragic and horrific.
Barbara Stevenson, The Clockmaker of Perth: The lead character of
this book, indeed the eponymous character, is wonderfully horrible – a man who
has locked his first wife in an asylum and pretended she is dead, is having an
affair with a second woman with whom he is plotting to kill the first wife, and
living with a third woman who believes herself lawfully married to him – and
then takes up with a fourth woman masquerading as his shop assistant. The
stress of building a clock to fit inside a fantastical casing for a grand Perth
hotel, along with other events both tragic and happy, begins to knock him over
the edge, and his carefully constructed life starts to fall apart. Ironically,
the only woman he seems to care for and respect in this whole shambles is his
first wife. Will he find redemption there, or will he get everything his
selfish, self-centredness deserves?
Irina Shapiro, The Highgate Cemetery Murder: American spellings
and emphasis (not to mention a boy called Hank, which is possibly fine in a
Jason Vail book but not in a Victorian one), and a bit of a misunderstanding of
the 1832 Anatomy Act. Hyoid is Greek, not Latin. I wish people would not
confuse envision and envisage. But the atmosphere is good and the sense of
period is quite convincing so far, aside from the American usages.
Lexi Revellian, Remix: I had not read one of this Lexi’s books
for years, but her Ice Diaries had stuck with me along with a couple of very
funny books. This one drew me in quickly and the heroine is a maker and mender
of rocking horses, which has to be a first for me for a mystery. I enjoyed the
fairly gentle thriller with its humour and romance – and it’s made me want to
read more of Lexi’s quite mixed oeuvre.
Marty Wingate, A Body on the Doorstep: Homburg? Why did she go
to the front door as a servant? And more Americanisms, many of them
class-related, though the main character began to grow a little on me. The
police activity is rather American, too – when a body is found, they hear
distant sirens (not bells) and several police vehicles turn up, rather than a
bobby and maybe one car with an inspector. I didn't care much about most of the characters, but it made a reasonable light read.
David Gatward, Death Springs: The next in the Gordy Haig series,
and I think it’s finding its feet nicely. There are some good twists and turns
here and just a touch of the supernatural, and though I haven’t yet warmed to
the team here as much as to the one in Yorkshire, it’s coming along.
Rhys Dylan, No One Near: Thoroughly readable next installment in
this series, as Christmas looms and the team try to fit in an investigation of
a particularly nasty murder around it.
Aline Templeton, Death on Skye: I really enjoyed this. It’s a new
writer to me and I can’t work out (a) how I came across her and (b) how I haven’t
come across her before. I’ve read a few other books set on Skye but this one
somehow brought the place across to me more than the other ones did. The
characters were nicely judged, sometimes easy to sympathise with, sometimes
easy to detest, sometimes both together. For once I bought the next in series
straight away – looking forward to it.
Andrew James Greig, The Bone Clock: I’m not sure what it was that
put me off this one, as I’ve enjoyed other books by the same author. Eventually
I made myself go back to it, and was drawn in to a good mystery. Unfortunately
again there’s the well-worn trope of brutal nuns hiding the bodies, and I was a
little muddled over the minister who seemed to be a priest or vice versa – don’t
meddle with the church if you can’t get the terms right! But the characters were
quite well drawn. It was a little confusing to read two books concurrently
where the main detective was recently widowed, but that’s my own fault and I just
had to get on with it. I wasn’t really convinced by the cover-up for some minor
peer and his cronies, though, nor by the confusion of Sir Reginald and Lord
Lagan – which was he? And really, the peers with money these days tend to be
the non-hereditary ones. However, in the end the solution was fairly satisfying
and most of the clues had been laid out for the reader.
Abir Mukharjee, Hunted: What a superb book. It’s not my kind of
read, an American terrorist thriller, but once I got into it it was very hard
to put it down and I found I was thinking about it even when not reading it. It’s
a twisty, turny kind of plot and in places very emotional – two parents who
have ‘mislaid’ children who have apparently joined an Islamic terrorist plot
join forces, and are in turn suspected by the FBI of being terrorists
themselves. The FBI agent goes through a journey of her own before the end,
trying to work out who to trust and how to cope with her family who seem to
love her despite her. Jump in, pay attention and enjoy.
Val McDermid, How the Dead Speak: I’ve leapt to a later episode
in this odd series, but enjoyed it better than some of the earlier ones I’ve
read. There are a few threads here but they are all quite enticing, though the
old one of abusive nuns is perhaps a bit overdone (that’s not to say it didn’t
happen in real life in some instances, but it has become a well-worn feature in
crime fiction). Very well written, as always, with complex characters and, in
the end, an interesting plot.
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