It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month starts with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novella November 2023 (and it also made the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist!). Amazon describes it as A beautiful and moving novel about grief, sisterhood, squash and a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself.

1 – Saturday by Ian McEwan, which also has a squash player, a neuro surgeon. He is troubled by the impending war with Iraq, pessimistic after 9/11. On his way to his weekly squash match through London’s crowded street filled with anti-war demonstrators he gets into a quarrel with another motorist, Baxter, an aggressive young man.

2 Iraq is also the setting in Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie. It’s a Poirot mystery, but he doesn’t appear until about halfway. As the title tells you it is set in Mesopotamia, the area in the Middle East between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the area of present-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey).Her books set in the Middle East are based on the everyday life that she experienced on digs and on the people she met. In this one an archaeologist’s wife, Louise Leidner, the wife of the leader of the expedition, is found in her room, dead from a blow on her head, and suspicion falls on Louise’s first husband who had been sending her threatening letters, or so she had claimed.

3 The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths, the 9th Dr Ruth Galloway mystery – Ruth is a forensic archaeologist. It centres on the plight of homeless people and the maze of tunnels under Norfolk. Bones are found during the excavations when an underground restaurant in one of the tunnels is proposed. It becomes a murder mystery when two of the homeless, ‘Aftershave Eddie’ and then ‘Bilbo’ are found dead, both stabbed. Then two local women go missing and it soon becomes clear that all these events are linked.

4 A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel is also set in Norfolk. It mixes the past and the present, moving seamlessly between the Eldred family’s current life (in the 1980s) in Norfolk, with their earlier life in Africa in the 1950s. The Eldreds were missionaries, first in South Africa, then in Beuchuanaland (Botswana) where a terrible and horrific event occurred and they returned to England.  However, their memories of these traumatic events refused to remain buried, eventually bringing their lives and those of their children into terrible turmoil.

5 Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is crime fiction set in South Africa, DI Benny Griessel has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the whole country. Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

6 Another book with thirteen in the title is The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie, a collection of short stories about the Tuesday Night club, whose members include Miss Marple. They tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries.

Well, I didn’t expect where this chain was going at all beginning with the starting book, but as usually happens in my chains it includes a number of murder mysteries.

Next month (December 2, 2023), we will start with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.