Category: Crime Fiction

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Man With No Face by Peter May

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring another book by Peter May this week – The Man With No Face. This was first published in 1981. He made ‘some very minor changes’, before it was republished in 2018.

Kale watched the train through the rain-spattered glass and thought, this time will be the last. But even as the thought formed in his mind it clotted and he knew he would kill again.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

They took their first sips in silence before Bannerman said, ‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘There’s not much to tell.

‘Now why do people always say that?

‘Maybe because it’s true.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Everyone’s got a story to tell.’

Description from Goodreads:

A POWERFUL AND PRESCIENT THRILLER FROM THE MILLION-SELLING AUTHOR OF I’LL KEEP YOU SAFE, COFFIN ROAD AND THE BLACKHOUSE.

A REPORTER WITH NO FEAR

Jaded Edinburgh journalist Neil Bannerman is sent to Brussels, intent on digging up dirt. Yet it is danger he discovers, when two British men are found murdered.

A CHILD WITH NO FATHER

One victim is a journalist, the other a Cabinet Minister: the double-assassination witnessed by the former’s autistic daughter. This girl recalls every detail about her father’s killer – except for one.

THE MAN WITH NO FACE

With the city rocked by the tragedy, Bannerman is compelled to follow his instincts. He is now fighting to expose a murderous conspiracy, protect a helpless child, and unmask a remorseless killer.

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56: A Winter Grave by Peter May

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

A Winter Grave is the last book I bought and is Peter May’s latest novel. I’ve enjoyed the other books of his I’ve read, so I’m hoping this one will be just as good. It is cli-fi, about the effects of climate change on human society, set in 2051.

Cli-fi, short for climate fiction, is  a form of fiction literature that features a changed or changing climate. It is rooted in science fiction, but also draws on realism and the supernatural.


Little will heighten your sense of mortality more than a confrontation with death. But right now such an encounter is the furthest thing from Addie’s mind, and so she is unprepared for what is to come.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

In the early photos, when Addie was just a baby, Mel had been happy and radiant, and he lingered over them. But the increasingly haunted face she presented to the world in later years made him scroll more quickly by.

Description from Amazon:

A TOMB OF ICE

A young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station in Kinlochleven discovers the body of a missing man entombed in ice.

A DYING DETECTIVE

Cameron Brodie, a Glasgow detective, sets out on a hazardous journey to the isolated and ice-bound village. He has his own reasons for wanting to investigate a murder case so far from his beat.

AN AGONIZING RECKONING

Brodie must face up to the ghosts of his past and to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that his investigation threatens to expose.

Set against a backdrop of a frighteningly plausible near-future, A WINTER GRAVE is Peter May at his page-turning, passionate and provocative best.

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

Catching Up

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This year has been a good time for reading books, but not a good time as far as writing reviews goes and I am way behind. This is my third set of mini reviews in an attempt to catch up with the backlog.

The Close by Jane Casey 2*

I read The Close because I’ve read and previously enjoyed Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan books. Maeve is a Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police – in the first six books she was a detective constable. She and her boss Detective Inspector Josh Derwent are the two main characters. They have a confrontational working relationship and their spiky relationship is a recurring theme in the books.  They are all police procedurals, fast-paced novels, with intriguing and complex plots. I thought that the Maeve/Josh relationship took a significant turn in the 9th book and I wondered what would happen next!

But it was simply disappointing. Maeve and Josh went undercover, carrying out surveillance in Jellicoe Close, whilst posing as a couple. As the synopsis describes it there are some dark secrets behind the neat front doors, and hidden dangers that include a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing. What I really did not expect was that this would result in their relationship becoming such an abusive one.

Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson 4*

I really enjoyed this book, the 16th Inspector Banks, but I think it reads well as a standalone book. This is the summary from Amazon:

As volunteers clean up after a huge outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire in 1969, they discover the body of a young woman wrapped in a sleeping bag.

She has been brutally murdered. The detective assigned to the case, Stanley Chadwick, is a hard-headed, strait-laced veteran of the Second World War. He could not have less in common with – or less regard for – young, disrespectful, long-haired hippies, smoking marijuana and listening to the pulsing sounds of rock and roll. But he has a murder to solve, and it looks as if the victim was somehow associated with the up-and-coming psychedelic pastoral band the Mad Hatters.

In the present, Inspector Alan Banks is investigating the murder of a freelance music journalist who was working on a feature about the Mad Hatters for MOJO magazine. This is not the first time that the Mad Hatters, now aging rock superstars, have been brushed by tragedy.

Banks finds he has to delve into the past to find out exactly what hornets’ nest the journalist inadvertently stirred up.

This must be one of the longest of the Inspector Banks books, helped along by Robinson’s descriptive writing of the countryside which I love, and also details of the music Banks listens to (in this case a lot of 1960s music). He also goes into detail describing what each character looks like and the clothes they are wearing. I liked the movement between the two time periods, which highlights the differences in police procedure.

The Driftwood Girls by Mark Douglas-Home 4*

This is the synopsis on Goodreads:

Kate and Flora have always been haunted by a mystery – their mother, Christine, vanished without trace when they were children. But now Kate has a more urgent problem: Flora has disappeared too. In desperation, she searches Flora’s house, and finds a scrap of paper with a name scribbled on it: Cal McGill.

Cal is a ‘sea detective’: an expert in the winds and the tides, and consequently adept at finding lost things – and lost people. Can Cal find Flora?

And might he even know the secret of what happened to their mother, all those years ago . . . ?

My thoughts:

I enjoyed reading the first three Sea Detective novels, my favourite being The Malice of Waves, the 3rd book. So I was expecting to enjoy The Driftwood Girls, the 4th book. Cal McGill is an oceanographer who tracks floating objects, including dead bodies, using his knowledge of tides, winds and currents to solve mysteries no-one else can. I was disappointed as the sea detection plays only a small part in this book. It’s unevenly paced, introducing several seemingly unconnected characters and for a while I found it difficult to distinguish between them, having to keep checking back who was who. In the earlier books I noted that Cal is a strong independent character, but in this he seems to have become even more of a loner in this book, even more remote and withdrawn.

It certainly isn’t as gripping as the other books, but I did want to find out how it would end. It was only in the second part of the book that I began to get an idea of what was happening with each set of characters and how they could be connected. Thus the plot consists of several stories interwoven and told through several points of view. It is complicated and convoluted and as the plot unfolds it all ties together too neatly, in my opinion, with too many coincidences and improbabilities.

The settings are the best parts as it has a great sense of location, whether it is in Scotland or Texel, the most southerly and largest of the West Frisian Islands lying off the Dutch mainland between the North and Wadden Seas. The characters on Texel, particularly Olaf, are the most intriguing and for most of the book I had no idea how they were relevant to the rest of the characters. Olaf, like Cal is a loner, spending his days beachcombing and making driftwood figures with no mouths from the flotsam washed up on the beach.


Mini Reviews

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

This year has been a good time for reading books, but not a good time as far as writing reviews goes and I am way behind. This is the second set of mini reviews in an attempt to catch up with the backlog.

Give Unto Others by Donna Leon 3*

I read this because I’ve read just a few of the Commissario Guido Brunetti crime fiction novels and enjoyed them. This one is described on Goodreads as follows:

The gifted Venetian detective returns in his 31st case – this time, investigating the Janus-faced nature of yet another Italian institution. Brunetti will have to once again face the blurred line that runs between the criminal and the non-criminal, bending police rules, and his own character, to help an acquaintance in danger.

This is an unusual mystery, slow to begin with then gradually gathering pace, as Brunetti unofficially agrees to do Elisabetta Foscarini, an ex-neighbour a favour. She is worried about her daughter’s husband, Enrico Fenzo an accountant, who she fears is in danger. Brunetti enlists the help of his colleagues Griffoni, Vianello, and Signorina Elettra with his investigations. What they uncover is a tangled web surrounding a South American charity that Fenzo had helped Elisabetta’s husband set up, the Belize nel Cuore, providing a hospital and medical services to the poor.

It was entertaining and I enjoyed the descriptions of Venice, just opening up to tourists again after the pandemic. I thought it would have been better as an official police investigation. But it does give an insight into the way charities are set up and can be misused. And there’s a particularly disturbing picture of what dementia can do to a person.

Not Dead Yet by Peter James 4*

I really enjoyed this book, the 8th Roy Grace book. If you’ve been watching the TV adaptation this story was the last one they produced, as usual with adaptations, with several differences from the book. As I’ve said before I prefer the books and this one was very good. This is the summary from Amazon:

The return of a Brighton girl turned movie star spells nothing but trouble for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace in the gripping crime novel Not Dead Yet, by award winning author Peter James.

Gaia Lafayette has a movie to shoot back home and Grace is in charge of her security. Yet when a vicious gangster is released from prison and an unidentifiable headless torso is found, a nightmare unfolds before Grace’s eyes.

An obsessed stalker is after Gaia – and Grace knows that they may be at large in his city, waiting, watching, planning . . .

It’s fast paced, complicated and totally gripping. I loved all the details of the scenes of the filming in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and also the ongoing story of Roy’s missing wife. Now I’m looking forward to reading the 9th book in the series, Dead Man’s Time.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks 2*

This is the synopsis on Goodreads:

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

Sweeping across Europe as it recovers from one war and hides its face from the coming of another, SNOW COUNTRY is a landmark novel of exquisite yearnings, dreams of youth and the sanctity of hope. In elegant, shimmering prose, Sebastian Faulks has produced a work of timeless resonance.

My thoughts:

I was disappointed by this novel, mainly because I found it quite dull in places, which I hadn’t expected from the synopsis or the 5 and 4 star reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads. The best defined character is Lena, but the others seem rather flat – one dimensional and hard to distinguish. This may, of course, be down to me as I found it rather muddled and I had to keep recapping just to clarify who they were. So, I struggled to read it and eventually lost interest. But I did finish it.

Mini Reviews

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

This year has been a good time for reading books, but not a good time as far as writing reviews goes and I am way behind. So before I forget about them here are some notes about four of the backlog:

On the Beach by Nevil Shute 5*

I read this because I loved A Town Like Alice. It’s described on Goodreads as follows:

After the war is over, a radioactive cloud begins to sweep southwards on the winds, gradually poisoning everything in its path. An American submarine captain is among the survivors left sheltering in Australia, preparing with the locals for the inevitable. Despite his memories of his wife, he becomes close to a young woman struggling to accept the harsh realities of their situation. Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from the United States and the submarine must set sail through the bleak ocean to search for signs of life. On the Beach is Nevil Shute’s most powerful novel. Both gripping and intensely moving, its impact is unforgettable.

I think this is a terrifying and incredibly sad book, and yet it all seems low key. People go about their everyday lives but set against the background that the world is about to end. It was first published in 1957 and is set sometime in the early 1960s about a group of people living in Melbourne and on the USS submarine, Scorpion, as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war the previous year. It is slow moving, focusing on the individual characters and on the differing ways they deny or accept what is happening. How will they live the remaining few months ahead of them and how will they face the end of their lives? It’s a powerful book, well written and full of fascinating characters.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus 4*

I enjoyed this book but not as much as I’d expected. It’s described on Goodreads as ‘Laugh-out-loud funny, shrewdly observant, and studded with a dazzling cast of supporting characters‘. But although I found parts of it amusing I didn’t laugh out loud. It’s about Elizabeth Zott, covering her life from the early 1950s through to the 1960s. She is a scientist, an independent single mother, who having lost her job, found herself as ‘the star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.‘

I found Elizabeth quite an unlike able character and couldn’t warm to her. The book is full of exaggeration and hyperbole – examples are Elizabeth’s daughter Madeleine who at the age of four could read Nabakov and Six Thirty, the dog who was so clever and kind, worrying about Elizabeth and Madeleine. I don’t think we’re meant to take this as realistic – it’s a larger-than-life world with a semi-magic-realist strand and all just that bit over the top. In a complete contrast to the whimsy there’s a brutal rape, the death of Calvin, Elizabeth’s husband, abuse, abandonment, bullying and sexism thrown into the mix. Then there’s Elizabeth’s TV cookery show – I enjoyed the details of this more than the rest of the book. The ending is a bit of a let down and a bit rushed.

The Summer That Never Was by Peter Robinson 4*

This is crime fiction, the 13th Inspector Banks book. I’m gradually reading through the whole series. This is Goodread’s description:

A skeleton has been unearthed. Soon the body is identified, and the horrific discovery hits the headlines . . .

Fourteen-year-old Graham Marshall went missing during his paper round in 1965. The police found no trace of him. His disappearance left his family shattered, and his best friend, Alan Banks, full of guilt . . .

That friend has now become Chief Inspector Alan Banks, and he is determined to bring justice for Graham. But he soon realises that in this case, the boundary between victim and perpetrator, between law-guardian and law-breaker, is becoming more and more blurred . . .

What I particularly liked about this one is that it gives an insight into Banks’s childhood, as he investigates the murder of his childhood friend. The book alternates between this case and that of a present day case, that of the disappearance of another schoolboy, Luke Armitage, the son of an ex-football player. DI Annie Cabbot is in charge of that investigation. Although this can be read as a stand-alone novel, part of the enjoyment in reading the series in order is that you see the development of the main characters and their relationships over the years. There are now 27 books in the series with the 28th, Standing in the Shadows, due to be published in June 2023.

The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves 5*

More crime fiction, this is the 10th Vera Stanhope mystery novel. I love the Vera books and this one is no exception. Ann Cleeves is a superb storyteller. Her books are deceptively easy to read,  moving swiftly along as the tension rises. They are layered, cleverly plotted and above all convincing.

The Rising Tide is set on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a tidal island just off the coast of Northumberland, only accessible across a causeway when the tide is out. Ann Cleeves explains whilst the background to the novel is real any specific places on the island or the nearby coast are fictional. I’ve visited the island several times and know just how fast the tide comes in over the causeway. If you’ve watched the TV series it shows Vera crossing the causeway in her Land Rover in the opening titles.

It has a complex plot and plenty of twists and turns as DCI Vera Stanhope and her team investigate the death of Rick Kelsall who was discovered hanged from the rafters of his small bedroom on Holy Island. He is one of a group of friends who have met for a reunion each year on the island for the past fifty years. It appears to be suicide but Vera is convinced that it is murder and that the clue to his death lies in the past. I was kept guessing almost to the end as the secrets from the past are revealed.

These notes don’t do just justice to the books but I enjoyed all of them, even Lessons in Chemistry. My favourite though is The Rising Tide and I wish I’d written more detail about it just after I read it!

Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Asking for the Moon is described on the cover as a Dalziel and Pascoe novel, but it is actually a collection of four novellas. According to Wikipedia the collection was first published in 1996 in hardback by HarperCollins.

The first story is The Last National Service Man which tells how Dalziel and Pascoe first met. Neither of them are impressed by the other. Dalziel thinks Pascoe is everything he dislikes – a graduate, well spoken, and a Southerner from south of Sheffield. Pascoe thinks Dalziel is an archetypical bruiser who got results by kicking down doors and beating out questions in Morse code on a suspect’s head. When Dalziel and Pascoe are kidnapped by a madman with a serious and justifiable grudge against the Superintendent. They need to get over their differences and work together to escape their jailer.

The next two stories both feature ‘ghosts’ – Pascoe’s Ghost and then Dalziel’s Ghost (both first published in 1979 in another collection of short stories). In Pascoe’s Ghost a man whose wife has been missing for a year gets some strange phone calls—as well as a visit from Detective Inspector Pascoe—in a novella that pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe, with each chapter headed with a quotation from Poe’s poetical works. This is the longest story and reminded me of Agatha Christie’es Golden Age Mysteries as Pascoe interviews the suspects in the library

Dalziel’s Ghost is a brief and rather odd story in which the two detectives keep a nightly vigil in Sandstone Rigg farmhouse, an isolated house that had been renovated, apparently disturbing a ghost. In Dalziel’s experience there are three main causes of ghosts – ‘One: bad cooking. Two: bad ventilation and Three – bad conscience.’ Things aren’t what they seem and Dalziel is once again his devious self. But I think this one is the least convincing of the four stories.

One Small Step, was originally published in 1990 by Collins Crime Club.The story is set in 2010, when a French astronaut, one of an international space team from the Federated States of Europe, became the first man to be murdered on the moon. Retired Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, suffering from gout and Peter Pascoe, now Commissioner of Eurofed Justice are called upon to investigate – on board the space ship. In his Foreword I gather that Hill wrote this to celebrate the twenty years he’d been writing the Dalziel and Pascoe novels.

I think the best story in the book is the first one, The Last National Service Man.

If you haven’t read any of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, don’t start with this one. It’s not the best, but still an enjoyable 3* book for me.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: The Close by Jane Casey

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

One of the books I’m currently reading is The Close by Jane Casey, the 10th Maeve Kerrigan book, one of my favourite detective series. I’ve been looking forward to reading this as I’ve read all the earlier books.

They are police procedurals, fast-paced novels, with intriguing and complex plots that also develop the relationship between the main characters, Maeve and her boss, Detective Inspector Josh Derwent. They have a confrontational working relationship and this is a recurring theme in the books. In the 9th book, The Cutting Place, it seemed to me that their relationship took a significant turn. So, I can’t wait to find out what will happen next.


All murder investigations were different and yet all of them began the same way, at least for me: standing in silence near a body, trying to catch the faintest echo of what had happened.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, where you grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Page 56:

‘You don’t want to look as if you’re patrolling the place. It’s a small community and we’ll stick out anyway. You’ll be attracting plenty of attention, believe me, so you need to look as if you don’t mind it. Start from now. Loosen up. Let your hair down.’

‘Literally?’ I kept my hair tied back at work, always.

‘Why not? And while you’re at it, don’t be so guarded all the time. You’re constantly on the defensive with me.’

Description from Amazon:

At first glance, Jellicoe Close seems to be a perfect suburban street – well-kept houses with pristine lawns, neighbours chatting over garden fences, children playing together.

But there are dark secrets behind the neat front doors, hidden dangers that include a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing.

It’s up to DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent to uncover the truth. Posing as a couple, they move into the Close, blurring the lines between professional and personal as never before.

And while Maeve and Josh try to gather the evidence they need, they have no idea of the danger they face – because someone in Jellicoe Close has murder on their mind.

~~~

What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?

WWW Wednesday: 5 April 2023

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I’m reading four books:

The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. I started this in February and am taking it slowly. It spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centres around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves. I’m still not very far into this book (chapter 7). I’m also reading Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman, a beautiful book my son bought me for Mother’s Day. It’s a collection of his essays and I’m dipping into it choosing an essay at random. The third book I’m reading is Asking for the Moon by Reginald Hill, four novellas about Dalziel and Pascoe. I’ve read the first one, The Last National Service Man which is about their first meeting. And the final book is The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson, a follow-up to his Notes from a Small Island, seeing how Britain had changed twenty years later. I’m nearing the end of this book

The last book I read (on Kindle) is Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks, set mainly in Austria from the years before the First World War to 1933. I found parts of it very slow with too much about Freud. Anton and Lena are the main characters and I much preferred Lena’s story. I may write about it in more detail later on.

Next I’ll be reading – Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck, my Spin book for the Classics Club.

Although this is a weekly meme I’m only taking part occasionally.

Book Notes: Trying to Catch Up

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

It’s been too long since I read these books to write detailed reviews, so here are a few notes them.

The Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randel 3* – historical fiction set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, this is a World War Two romance, the story of Aiyi Shao, a young heiress and the owner of a glamorous Shanghai nightclub and Ernest Reismann, a penniless Jewish refugee who had fled from Germany. I loved the beginning of this book but the rest of the book was not so good – too much ‘telling’ and I’d have liked less focus on the romance, which to me was barely believable So, 5* for the first 40%, 2* for the rest, so 3* overall. But plenty of other readers love this book.

Shroud of Darkness by E C R Lorac 4* – a Golden Age crime fiction beginning with five passengers on a train from Cornwall to London. When it arrives at Paddington Station in thick fog, one of the passengers is brutally attacked and left for dead. Chief Inspector MacDonald first has to identify the victim, whose pockets had been rifled, and then discover why he was attacked and who did it. Another book I really enjoyed, trying to work out what had happened and failed – I was completely baffled, as much in the dark as the fog-bound passengers.

A Death in Tuscany by Michele Giuttari 4* – crime fiction, set in Florence and the surrounding area. It’s a detailed police procedural, the second in a series of seven detective novels featuring Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara. It’s written with authenticity, as Michele Guittari is a former Florence police chief 1995-2003), where he was responsible for re-opening the ‘Monster of Florence’ case and jailing several key Mafia figures. It’s not a quick read, because of the detail but I was fascinated first of all by the Italian police structure and the division of responsibilities and jurisdiction, which seemed to hamper Ferrara rather than help him. But despite that it is a page turner. He’s investigating the death of a young girl found dead by the edge of a wood on the road above Scandicci. There are drugs involved, the Mafia, and also the disappearance of his best friend, accused of murder for him to investigate. See also this post about the beginning of the book and an extract from page 56.

Top Ten Tuesday: TTT Rewind: Books On My Spring 2019 TBR Updated

Published on by Margaret26 Comments
top-ten-tuesday-new

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

This week’s topic is TTT Rewind (Pick a previous topic that you missed or would like to re-do/update) So, I’m updating my post Books On My Spring 2019 TBR, first posted on 19th March 2019.

I read three of them!

Broken Ground by Val McDermid, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, which I read only this year and have yet to write a review, and The Island by Ragnar Jónasson.

This leaves me with seven left to read:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote – Capote reconstructs the crime and the investigation into the murders of the four members of the Clutter family on November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas.

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – a story of life in a mining community in rural South Wales as Huw Morgan is preparing to leave the valley where he had grown up. He tells of life before the First World War.

Iris and Ruby by Rosie Thomas – the story of a teenage girl, Ruby, who runs away from home to live with her grandmother, Iris in Cairo.

Here Be Dragons by Sharon Penman – set in 13th century Wales this is the story of Llewelyn, the Prince of North Wales, and his rise to power and fame and his love for Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of King John. 

A Beautiful Corpse by Christi Daugherty – crime reporter Harper McClain unravels a tangled story of obsession and jealousy after a beautiful law student is shot in Savannah, Georgia.

A Snapshot of Murder by Frances Brody – set in Yorkshire in 1928, when  amateur detective, Kate Shackleton investigates a crime in Brontë country.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – on the day of Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary, Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true.