Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.
Today the topic is Top 5 books with a pronoun in the title – Find all of your he, she, they, we or you books and then shout them from the rooftops!! Or just on your blog page.
They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie. This is not one of Agatha Christie’s detective novels – no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot – just Victoria Jones, a short-hand typist, a courageous girl with a ‘natural leaning towards adventure’ and a tendency to tell lies. Set in 1950 this is a story about international espionage and conspiracy.
I Found You by Lisa Jewell. This is the mystery of the identity of the man Alice Lake found sitting on the beach at Ridinghouse Bay (a fictional seaside resort) in the pouring rain. He can’t remember who he is, or how or why he is sitting there.
Then She Vanishes by Claire Douglas. The opening is dramatic as a killer calmly and coolly considers which house harbours the victim and then enters and shoots first a man and then an older woman. Who are they and why were they killed in cold blood?
His and Hers by Alice Feeney. When a woman is murdered in Blackdown village, newsreader Anna Andrews is reluctant to cover the case. Anna’s ex-husband, DCI Jack Harper, is suspicious of her involvement, until he becomes a suspect in his own murder investigation.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, a weirdly wonderful book. Mary Katherine Blackwood is nicknamed Merricat. But she is anything but merry and as the book opens she is eighteen, living with her sister Constance. Everyone else in her family is dead. How they died is explored in the rest of the book. It’s a macabre tale, with its portrayal of fear, resentment, hostility and the persecution of its disturbed and damaged characters.
Yesterday saw the beginning of the Reading Wales Month 2025, now hosted by Karen at BookerTalk , formerly by Paula at BookJotter. March is a very busy reading month as it’s also Reading Ireland Month2025 hosted by Cathy 746 Books. Both are now running between Friday 1 and Sunday 31 March 2025. For both events you just need to read what you want, when you want as long as the author is Welsh or Irish! And then add the links to your blog posts to the host blogs.
These are books I have in mind to read – at least one book for each event, more if time permits. I’ve listed them randomly as I discovered they are by Welsh or Irish authors – I don’t choose books based on the authors’ nationality. I had no idea I had so many to choose from. And there may be more hidden on my shelves.
For Wales:
Resistance by Owen Sheers – I. It’s an alternative history novel by Welsh poet and author Owen Sheers. The plot centres on the inhabitants of a valley near Abergavenny in Wales in 1944–45, shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German counterinvasion of Great Britain.
The Amorous Nightingale by Edward Marston
The Repentant Rake by Edward Marston
Winter of the World by Ken Follett
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett
World Without End by Ken Follett
The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
For Ireland:
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy
Inspector Tom Reynolds Mystery books 1-4 and 6 and Six Wicked Reasons by Jo Spain
Dublin Murder Squad books 2 – 3, 5 – 6 by Tana French
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Night of the Lightbringer by Peter Tremayne
The Watch House by Bernie McGill
Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor
The House by the Churchyard by J Sheridan Le Fanu
What You Did by Claire McGowan
The Olive Tree by Lucinda Riley
The Light Behind the Window by Lucinda Riley
The Sun Sister books by Lucinda Riley – still not read The Pearl Sister, The Sun Sister, The Missing Sister
It’s time again for Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate atBooks 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 we start with Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the Booker Prize in 2023. It’s set in a dystopic Ireland as it’s in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.
I haven’t read Prophet Song so I decided to start my chain by linking to the word song in the title.
My first link is The Hangman’s Song by James Oswald, the third in his Inspector McLean series set in Edinburgh. a dark, tense book; crime fiction with elements of the supernatural and parapsychology thrown in. McLean is working on two separate cases – one investigating a group of prostitutes and the subsequent death of their pimp, Malky Jennings, who was beaten to death – and the second, two suicides, which he and his DC, MacBride consider to be suspicious. Digging deeper, McLean finds answers something terrifying stalking the city streets.
My second link is Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie, one in a collection of short stories, featuring Hercule Poirot. At first it looks as though a young widow, Mrs Allen has committed suicide, but as the doctor pointed out the pistol is in her right hand and the wound was close to her head just above the left ear, so it’s obvious that someone else shot her and tried to make it look like suicide. The plot is tightly constructed, with a few red herrings to misguide Poirot and Inspector Japp and a moral question at the end.
For my third link is a book I read just before Murder in the Mews – The Frozen Shroud by Martin Edwards. It’s the sixth book in his Lake District Mystery series. It begins at Halloween in Ravenbank, an isolated community on the shores of Ullswater. Gertrude Smith who was murdered on Hallowe’en, just before the First World War was found, battered to death, her face reduced to a pulp and covered with a woollen blanket like a shroud. Her murderer wasn’t hanged and the story goes that her tormented spirit
I enjoyed the previous five, featuring historian Daniel Kind and DCI Hannah Scarlett, head of the Cold Case Review Team and this one is no exception; it kept me guessing almost to the end.
My fourth link is The Shroud Maker by Kate Ellis, the 18th Wesley Peterson Mystery.
It’s the Palkin Festival in Tradmouth, a town in Devon, when the body of a strangled women is discovered floating out to sea in a dinghy. A year earlier Jenny Bercival had disappeared from the festival and her mother returns to look for her bringing with her anonymous letters claiming she is still alive. DI Wesley Peterson and his boss DCI Gerry Heffernan are investigating the two cases. Are they connected and is there a link to a fantasy website called ‘Shipworld’ which features the 14th century mayor and privateer of Tradmouth, Palkin as a supernatural hero with a sinister, faceless nemesis called the ‘Shroud Maker’?
My fifth link is to another book set in Devon, Murder in the Mill Race by E R C Lorac, a Chief Inspector Robert Macdonald book.
A few months after the Dr Raymond Ferens’ arrival at Milham in the Moor in North Devon Sister Monica, the warden of a children’s home, is found drowned in the mill race, the stream leading into the water mill. Everyone says that Sister Monica is a saint – but is she? Chief Inspector Macdonald faces one of his most difficult cases in a village determined not to betray its dark secrets to a stranger.
My final link is to Once Upon a River by Dianne Setterfield, in which a drowned body is also found, this time it’s that of a little child in the River Thames.It’s mystifying as hours later the dead child, miraculously it seems, takes a breath, and returns to life. The mystery is enhanced by folklore, by science that appears to be magic, and by romance and superstition. It is a beautifully and lyrically told story, and cleverly plotted so that I was not completely sure at times what it was that I was reading. It’s historical fiction with a touch of magic that completely beguiled me.
What is in your chain, I wonder?
Next month (April 5, 2025), we’ll start with Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Knife.
BooksPlease 