Category: Crime Fiction

The Red Lacquer Case by Patricia Wentworth

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Dean Street Press| 2016| 224 pages| e-book|2*

This month, Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home is hosting another Dean Street Press December. I decided to read The Red Lacquer Case by Patricia Wentworth for this event. It was originally published in 1924. This new edition published by Dean Street Press features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

Description from Amazon:

There was a hand pressed against the window, a large hand that looked unnaturally white, the blood driven from it by the pressure of a man’s weight. The light showed the pale fingers—and the still paler palm crossed by a dark, jagged scar.

Young Sally Meredith is distracted from her jam recipes by a visit from uncle Fritzi, who is accompanied by a mysterious red lacquer case containing a deadly secret. A band of unscrupulous international agents are close behind, and when the eccentric uncle disappears into the night the lacquer case is stolen. But Sally is now the only person who knows how to open the case – she is kidnapped, her life in terrible danger.

Meanwhile Bill Armitage, formerly Sally’s fiancé and still in love with her, begins with the aid of Scotland Yard to search for her. The ending of this clever detective story is, unexpected and piquantly, in high contrast to the preceding terrors.

Previously I’ve read two books by Patricia Wentworth, The Girl in the Cellar, the last of her Miss Silver books, which I didn’t think was very convincing, and The Brading Collection, the 17th Miss Silver book,which I thought was much better. So, I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Red Lacquer Case: A Golden Age Mystery. It’s a romance/spy thriller, very much in the same vein as Agatha Christie’s first Thomas and Tuppence novel, The Secret Adversary, a spy/detective story that is fast and furious with Tommy and Tuppence landing themselves in all sorts of dangerous situations.

In The Red Lacquer Case, Sally, a former suffragette, finds herself in danger when her uncle Fritzi shows her how to open the red lacquer case, a cigar case, in which he has placed his formula for a deadly gas that he thinks enemy agents are determined to get from him. The case has a pattern of raised roses and fishes with goggling eyes. Her tells her

You touch here and here, pressing, and, with the other hand, touching this flower on one side and this on the other, you pull.

But, he tells her, if you try to open it without knowing the correct sequence it will release enough acid to destroy the formula inside.

Over night the case is stolen, thus setting in motion a sequence of events that sees Sally being kidnapped and in terrible danger as the kidnappers try to get her to open the case. Sally is plucky and feisty, able to withstand whatever they try, but she is also naive. Meanwhile Bill Armitage, formerly Sally’s fiance and still in love with her, begins with the aid of Scotland Yard to search for her. At this point the narrative becomes very repetitive and irritating and my interest flagged to the point where I couldn’t wait for the book to end. Sadly, after many twists and turns, the ending, in one final twist, was just irritating and unbelievable. It left me feeling exasperated. I think this book began well, setting up an interesting mystery, but then became tedious reading, and ended, I thought, in such a disappointing way.

I have one more book by Patricia Wentworth to read, Who Pays the Piper? and I’m hoping it will be better than this one.

Six Degrees of Separation from Sandwich by Catherine Newman to A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

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 Sandwich by Catherine Newman, a book set in Cape Cod, described as a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

My first link is The Widow’s War by Sally Gunning. This is historical fiction set in 1761 about a whaler’s wife, Lyddie, in the Cape Cod village of Satucket in Massachusetts, living with the daily uncertainty that her husband Edward will simply not return. And when her worst fear is realised, she finds herself doubly cursed. She is overwhelmed by grief, and her property and rights are now legally in the hands of her nearest male relative: her daughter’s overbearing husband, whom Lyddie cannot abide. She decides to challenge both law and custom for control of her destiny, but she soon discovers the price of her bold “war” for personal freedom to be heartbreakingly dear.

My second link is a book about another widow, The Widow’s Tale by Mick Jackson. It’s narrated by the widow and is rather rambling as befits a woman in her sixties on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her husband has died, she’s taken it badly, and goes to live in a rented cottage on the bleak Norfolk coast, shunning other people. She drinks to forget herself, sits in pubs alone, doing the crossword and reading a book to pass the time. She drives out to places she once knew, goes for solitary walks,  gets stuck in the saltmarshes, and is definitely quirky and obsessional.

Elly Griffith’s character, archaeologist Ruth Galloway also lives in a cottage on the Norfolk coast. So, My third link is The Janus Stone. Ruth is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich, uncover the skeleton of a child – minus the skull – beneath a doorway. Is it some ritual sacrifice or just plain straightforward murder? The house was once a children’s home. When DCI Harry Nelson meets the Catholic priest who used to run it he tells him that two children did go missing forty years before – a boy and a girl. They were never found. When carbon dating proves that the child’s bones predate the children’s home, Ruth is drawn more deeply into the case. But as spring turns to summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the scent by frightening her half to death…

More missing children are the subject of My fourth link. It’s On Beulah Height by Reginald Hill. When a child goes missing during one long, hot dry summer it reminds Dalziel of the three little girls who had gone missing 15 years earlier from the village of Dendale in Yorkshire just before it was flooded to provide a new reservoir. No bodies were ever found. Once again during another hot summer the waters of the reservoir recede and the old village re-emerges from the depths.

This book is tightly plotted with many twists that made me change my mind so many times I gave up trying to work out who the murderer was and just read for the pleasure of reading. Hill’s descriptive writing is rich and full of imagery.

There is a bird on the cover of On Beulah Height, so My fifth link is to another book with a bird on the cover – The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, the first Vera book. Rachael, Anne and Grace are all staying at Baikie’s an isolated cottage on the North Pennines whilst they carry out an environmental survey. When Rachael arrives at the cottage she is confronted by the body of her friend Bella Furness, who it appears has committed suicide. Then Grace is found dead and the mystery really begins and it is down to DI Vera Stanhope, to get to the bottom of the mystery. Vera is a great character and even though I do like Brenda Blethyn’s portrayal of her in the TV series, I prefer her as she is in the books –  a woman in her fifties, who looks like a bag lady. 

My final link is A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey in which Inspector Alan Grant also investigates an apparent suicide. A young and beautiful film star, Christine Clay was found dead beneath the cliffs of the south coast. But he soon discovers that it was in fact murder as a coat button was found twisted in her hair and he suspects a young man, Robin Tisdall who had been staying with Christine in a remote cottage near the beach, especially when it is revealed that she has named him as a beneficiary in her will. Tisdall has lost his coat and so the search is on to find it to prove either his innocence or guilt.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (January 4, 2025), we’ll start with the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Top 5:Books:Book Covers

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

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 October to December, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Book Covers: What are some of your favourite covers that you have seen this year? Maybe these were reprints, redesigns or alternate covers that came out this year, or maybe they are brand new books!!

These are books I’ve read this year – one new and the rest books that were on my TBR shelves. I love them for their combination of colours, and the scenery.

Where Water Lies by Hilary Tailor – her second novel published in June this year.

Every morning is the same for Eliza: she swims in Hampstead Ponds, diving into her memories, reliving the heady days of her teenage friendship with Eric and Maggie. The obsession, the adoration, and the sense of belonging she always craved was perfect, until everything was destroyed in a single afternoon. With guilt never far from the surface, she still asks herself: what really happened that day?

Then one morning, on a street corner, the past collides with the present. Eliza is now a respected member of the community and the carefully constructed life she has built comes crashing down. Should she track down the one person who may be able to forgive her? Or should she keep the past where it belongs?

Soon Eliza begins to wonder: will learning the truth set her free – or will it only drag her down deeper?

The Children’s Book by A S Byatt

From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war, revolution and unbelievable change — for the generation that came of age before 1914 and, most of all, for their children.

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world – but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.

They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them.

Into the Tangled BanK: Discover the Quirks, Habits and Foibles of How We Experience Nature by Lev Parikian

This is non fiction about nature. It’s easy reading, Parikian writes with humour, in a chatty style, but also richly descriptive. I loved it, it is compulsive reading. He is a storyteller, so there are lots of anecdotes and stories, plus his thoughts on nature and how we view it. Amongst many other topics he ponders about the ethics of zoos – something that puzzles me too – and wonders if the definition of a nature lover is becoming that of one who loves nature programmes. There’s a lot packed into this book.

Great Meadow by Dirk Bogarde, first published in 1992, Great Meadow is volume five of Bogarde’s best-selling memoirs.

A recollection of his childhood, from 1927 to 1934 when he was a 19 year old, living in a remote cottage in the Sussex Downs with his sister Elizabeth and their strict but loving nanny, Lally. For the children it was an idyllic time of joy and adventure: of gleaning at the end of summer, of oil lamps and wells, of harvests and harvest mice in the Great Meadow.

With great sensitivity and poignancy, this memoir captures the sounds and scents, the love and gentleness that surrounded the young boy as the outside world prepared to go to war.

The Hog’s Bank Mystery by Freeman Wills Croft

This is a British Library Crime Classic, first published in 1933, during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. Dr James Earle and his wife live near the Hog’s Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. At first he suspects a simple domestic intrigue – and then begins to uncover a web of romantic entanglements beneath the couple’s peaceful rural life.

Dean Street December

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

DeanStreetDecember is hosted by Liz @ Adventures in reading, running and working from home. Dean Street Press is a publisher devoted to republishing lost gems of vintage literature, from Golden Age Detective novels to middlebrow novels by twentieth century women writers. Read from DSP, review the book(s) you’ve read and link them up on the post on Liz’s blog.

These are the Dean Street Press books I have on my Kindle ready to read – I’m aiming to read at least some of these:

  1. Arrest the Bishop? by Winifred Peck
  2. The Draycott Murder Mystery by Molly Thynne
  3. Evenfield by Rachel Ferguson
  4. A Harp in Lowndes Square by Rachel Ferguson
  5. A House on the Rhine by Francis Faviell
  6. The Other Side of the Moon: David Niven by Sheridon Morley
  7. The Red Lacquer Case by Patricia Wentworth
  8. Thalia by Francis Faviell
  9. There’s a Reason for Everything by E.R. Punshon
  10. Who Pays the Piper? by Patricia Wentworth

Six Degrees of Separation from  Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to White Nights

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

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 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I haven’t read this book, so this is the description on Amazon UK:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair and possibility – a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

My first link is Thin Air, a novel by Michelle Paver also about two brothers. Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face. Their story is narrated by medic, Dr. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding.

My second link is a book that also has ‘air’ in the title – Coming Up For Air, Sarah Leipciger’s second novel. It is a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel it is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth. There is grief and loss and despair in each story, but above all, it is about love, and the desire to live. I think Sarah Leipciger is a great storyteller. It is an inspiring book, beautifully written, which emphasises the importance of the air we breathe and the desire to live. I read this book in June 2021.

My third link is An Officer and a Spy, historical fiction by Robert Harris, another book I read in June 2021. It is a gripping book about the Dreyfus affair in 1890s France. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, was convicted of treason by passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island. It’s narrated by Colonel George Picquart, who became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent. Harris goes into meticulous detail in staying accurate to the actual events, but even so this is a gripping book and I was completely absorbed by it from start to finish.

My fourth link is The Count of Monte Cristo, historical fiction by Alexandre Dumas, in which the main character is also wrongly imprisoned on an island. It begins in 1815 when Edmond Dantès, a sailor, having returned to Marseilles is wrongly accused of being a Bonapartist and imprisoned in the Chateau d’If on the Isle of Monte Cristo, for fourteen years. It’s a great story, action-packed, and full of high drama and emotion. Montecristo is a real island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, part of the Tuscan Archipelago, and administered by the municipality of Portoferraio in the province of Livorno.

So My fifth link is also set on a real island, that of the isolated island of Elliðaey off the coast of Iceland in Ragnar Jónasson’s novel The Island, a murder mystery with elements of horror. Four friends visit the island ten years after the murder of a fifth friend, Katla, but only three of them return. One of them, Klara, fell to her death from a cliff – but did she jump or was she pushed? Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is sent to investigate. A suspect had been charged, but had committed suicide before the verdict was announced and the case had been closed. But are the two murders connected, even though they are ten years apart? This book is the second in Jónasson’s Hidden Iceland series.

My final link is also the second book in a series, that is White Nights by Ann Cleeve, the second in her Shetland Quartet, featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. It’s set mainly in the village of Biddista, when Kenny Thomson finds a man’s body hanging in the hut where the boat owners of the village keep their lines and pots. At first it looks as though the man, his face covered by a clown’s mask, has committed suicide, but he’d been dead before he was strung up. As well as the mystery of who killed the man in the clown mask and why, there is also the disappearance 15 years earlier of Kenny’s older brother Lawrence. It was thought that he left the island after Bella had broken his heart. Kenny hadn’t heard from him since and at first thought the dead man could be him.

The books in my chain are mainly a mix of crime and historical fiction. And the chain has become a circle with the last book connecting to the starting book and the first book, all containing two brothers.

What is in your chain, I wonder?

Next month (December 7, 2024), we’ll start with a beach read – Sandwich by Catherine Newman.

Dead Man’s Time by Peter James: Book Beginnings & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret2 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 Dead Man’s Time by Peter James, his 9th Roy Grace crime fiction thriller. It’s one of my TBRs. I started reading it a few days ago.

Brooklyn, February 1922

The boy’s father kissed him goodnight for the last time – although neither of them knew that.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. 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.

‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

Description from Amazon UK

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is haunted by the past in his latest case, and his private life, in Dead Man’s Time, by award winning crime writer Peter James.

A vicious robbery at a secluded Brighton mansion leaves its elderly occupant fighting for her life. Millions of pounds’ worth of valuables have been stolen.

Within days, Grace is racing against the clock, following a murderous trail that leads him from the shady antiques world of England, across Europe and all the way back to the New York waterfront’s gang struggles of 1922, chasing a killer driven by the force of one man’s greed and another man’s fury.

Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Dead Man’s Time is the ninth gripping title in the bestselling series. Enjoy more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Want You Dead and You Are Dead.