Category: 20 Books of Summer

20 Books of Summer 2024 Reading Challenge

Published on by Margaret20 Comments

Cathy over at 746Books is hosting her 20 Books of Summer challenge for the tenth year. You can choose to read 20, 15 or 10 books from your TBR shelves and the challenge begins on Saturday 1 June and finishes on Sunday 1 September. You can find the rules and sign up details for this year here.

I first took part in 2015 and I have done it most years since then although not last year as I wasn’t well. Part of the pleasure in taking on this challenge is compiling the list of books I’d like to read and looking through my unread books.

And here are the books I may read – because the ‘rules’ of this challenge allow you to swap any book if you want to, change your list half way through, or decide to drop your goal from 20 to 15 or 10! And I expect I’ll be doing some changes as I’m very good at listing the books I want to read and very bad at sticking to the list.

  1. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
  2. Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde
  3. The Children’s Book by A S Byatt
  4. The Black Tulip by Alexander Dumas
  5. Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
  6. The Innocent by Matthew Hall
  7. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
  8. Killing the Lawyers by Reginald Hill
  9. Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz
  10. The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
  11. I’ll Never Be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier
  12. Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell
  13. Unnatural Death by Dorothy L Sayers
  14. The Silence Between Breaths by Cath Staincliffe
  15. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale
  16. Where Water Lies by Hilary Tailor
  17. Black Roses by Jane Thynne
  18. Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton
  19. A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett
  20. The Lady of Sorrows by Anne Zouroudi

20 Books of Summer 2023

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer Challenge 2023 has ended. There were options to read 10 or 15 books instead of the full 20. And you could swap a book, or change the list half way through if you wanted. And you could drop your goal from 20 to 15 or 10 if you wanted to.

As I’ve not been well since last year I’ve not been reading as many books as I usually do, so I dropped my goal to 15 books and I did read all 15. But it is only a partial success as I only managed to review five of them.

These are the books I read, the first five are linked to my reviews.

  1. A Sea of Troubles by Donna Leon
  2. Loch Down Abbey by Beth Cowan-Erskine
  3. The Midnight Hour by Elly Griffiths
  4. Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister
  5. Empire by Conn Iggulden
  6. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
  7. The Birthday Girl by Sarah Ward
  8. The Vanishing Tide by Hilary Taylor
  9. Death is Now My Neighbour by Colin Dexter
  10. The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths
  11. The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths
  12. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
  13. Lady’s Well by L J Ross
  14. The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre
  15. A Dirty Death by Rebecca Tope

The Midnight Hour by Elly Griffiths

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Brighton, 1965

When theatrical impresario Bert Billington is found dead in his retirement home, no one suspects foul play. But when the postmortem reveals that he was poisoned, suspicion falls on his wife, eccentric ex-Music Hall star Verity Malone.

Frustrated by the police response to Bert’s death and determined to prove her innocence, Verity calls in private detective duo Emma Holmes and Sam Collins. This is their first real case, but as luck would have it they have a friend on the inside: Max Mephisto is filming a remake of Dracula, starring Seth Billington, Bert’s son. But when they question Max, they feel he isn’t telling them the whole story.

Emma and Sam must vie with the police to untangle the case and bring the killer to justice. They’re sure the answers must lie in Bert’s dark past and in the glamorous, occasionally deadly, days of Music Hall. But the closer they get to the truth, the more danger they find themselves in…

The Midnight Hour is the sixth book in the DI Edgar Stephens and Max Mephisto series. Known as the ‘Magic Men’ they had been part of a top-secret espionage unit during the War. These books are historical crime fiction, beginning with The Zig Zag Girl set in 1950. Now, with The Midnight Hour, fifteen years have gone by and DI Stephens’ wife, Emma formerly a policewoman is now a private detective working with Sam (Samantha) Collins, formerly an investigative reporter.

There’s a lot going on as both Edgar’s team and Emma and Sam investigate Bert’s death, at first in competition and then they combine forces. Bert’s son Aaron thinks his mother, Verity, killed Bert, who has a very shady past, with plenty of affairs with other women. And there are other suspects with a motive to want him dead.

It provides an insight into what life was like in the mid 1960s, particularly for women. There was plenty of sexism, with, for example, married women being forced to retire from the police force. Married women were not allowed to drive panda cars, and were largely employed to make tea and do the paperwork. Women were expected to stay at home looking after the home and their children.

I enjoy the Dr. Ruth Galloway series, with the forensic archaeological details, despite wishing they weren’t written in the present tense. I also find the theatrical elements of this series fascinating and much prefer the fact that they are written in the past tense. I really liked the glimpses of Max and Seth Bellington, Bert’s son, filming a remake of Dracula in Whitby.

You can read this as a standalone as there is a guide to the main characters and their back stories at the end of the book, but it helps if you read at least some of the earlier books to have a sense of who everyone is and the character progression.

Rating: 4 out of 5.