Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Readerwhere 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 The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre, which was published yesterday. My full review will follow shortly.
ChapterOne:
There was a body in the chapel of Saint Bride’s.
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.
‘Does your being an LAPD office help us here?’ ‘Not up the coast. And not while I’m under suspension. So I need you to understand that we might have to break a few rules. This could involve theft, fraud, trespass, or all three.’
Description
FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THIS IS NOT THAT CRIME NOVEL
You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.
You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.
Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.
A cross-genre hybrid of Agatha Christie and Michael Connelly, The Cracked Mirror is the most imaginative and entertaining crime novel of the year, a genre-splicing rollercoaster with a poignantly emotional heart.
~~~
What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stackson the first Saturday of each month. The goal is to spell the current month with the first letter of book titles, excluding articles such as ‘the’ and ‘a’ as needed. That’s all there is to it! Some months there are optional theme challenges, such as “books with an orange cover” or books of a particular genre, but for the most part, any book you want to use is fair game!
The optional theme this month is Stars/Sky. All these book covers include the sky in different weather conditions, and one also has stars.
Forensics expert Ruth Galloway 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 of just plain straightforward murder?
I like the mix of archaeology, mystery and crime fiction in Elly Griffiths’s books. This one has a double dose, with mythology and Catholicism running through the narrative as well as the police procedures. Ruth is an interesting character, not your usual detective, she’s overweight, self-reliant but also feisty and tough. She has to be with everything that’s thrown at her and as her investigations lead her into great danger.
U is for Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
In this book the author describes how she bought and renovated an abandoned villa. It’s full of the pleasures of living in Tuscany – the sun, the food, the wine and the local people. It makes me want to do the same! It’s nothing like the film they made of it – the book is much better. Bella Tuscany is the follow up book with more details about the restoration of the villa and its garden, plus recipes.
I used this book in June’s Spell the Month in Books, but I’m using it again because it’s perfect for the theme of Sky/Stars this month!
This is the story of Tom, a lighthouse keeper on an isolated island, Janus Rock, and his wife Isabel. Janus Rock )a fictional island) is nearly half a day’s journey from the coast of Australia, where the Indian Ocean washes into the Great Southern Ocean. When a boat washes up on the shore of the island it holds a dead man – and a crying baby. Tom and his wife have a devastating decision to make.
I’ve watched the TV series and loved it. This book is one of four books by Peter Wright, telling his life story, charting his working relationship with the famous ‘James Herriot’, from work experience with him as a lad, to taking over his practice in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.
Packed full of laugh-out loud moments, heartbreaking stories and transporting tales of his love for the animals and people of this breathtaking part of the country. Covering his bucolic childhood growing up on a farm right through to the heady days of his successful Channel 5 TV series, Peter’s warm nature and professional attitude shine through every page.
The next link up will be on August 3, 2024 when the optional theme will be Water.
Close to Death is the fifth in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery series. I have read all the earlier books, and I think it really is best if you read these books in order to fully understand the main characters and their relationship. Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-policeman, is now a private investigator, who the police call in to help with their more complicated cases. Anthony Horowitz himself appears as a fictional character, recruited by Hawthorne to write a book about him and the cases he investigates. It’s one of the books on my 20 Books of Summer list.
Book Beginnings quote:
It was four o’clock in the morning, that strange interval between night and morning when both seem to be fighting each other for control of the day ahead.
Friday 56 quote:
‘We’re not going to let them get away with it,’ Roderick exclaimed. ‘Someone should do something about him! Someone should … I don’t know! Ever since he came here, he’s been nothing but trouble.’
Synopsis from Goodreads:
In New York Times–bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s ingenious fifth literary whodunit in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Detective Hawthorne is once again called upon to solve an unsolvable case—a gruesome murder in an idyllic gated community in which suspects abound.
Riverside Close is a picture-perfect community. The six exclusive and attractive houses are tucked far away from the noise and grime of city life, allowing the residents to enjoy beautiful gardens, pleasant birdsong and tranquillity from behind the security of a locked gate.
It is the perfect idyll until the Kenworthy family arrives, with their four giant, gas-guzzling cars, a gaggle of shrieking children and plans for a garish swimming pool in the backyard. Obvious outsiders, the Kenworthys do not belong in Riverside Close, and they quickly offend every last one of their neighbours.
When Giles Kenworthy is found dead on his own doorstep, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest, Detective Hawthorne is the only investigator that can be called on to solve the case. Because how do you solve a murder when everyone is a suspect?
My Review:
In the earlier books Horowitz works with Hawthorne on current murders. In this book he is looking back at one of Hawthorne’s earlier cases, using Hawthorne’s case notes and recordings. Set in Riverside Close, a gated community, this is a variation on the locked room type of mystery, with all the residents being suspects for the murder of Giles Kenworthy who had been found dead, shot with a crossbow. He and his family had disrupted the peaceful lives of all the residents in one way or another, when they moved into the largest property in the Close.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, with interesting and believable characters, two of whom own a bookshop/cafe, The Tea Cosy, which specialised in the Golden Age of Crime detective stories, or modern novels that reimagined it. This link to the Golden Age of Crime novels reminded me not only of Agatha Christie’s novels, and in particular Murder on the Orient Express, which is also a version of a locked room mystery, but also of John Bude’s The Cheltenham Square Murder in which one of the residents of the Square is also killed with a bolt shot from a crossbow. Needless to say, really, there are plenty of twists and turns, numerous complications and red herrings before Horowitz gets to the bottom of the case.
Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the opening quote from the book.The Friday 56 is hosted by Anne@ MyHeadisFullof Books. Find a quote from page 56.
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 starts with Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Kairos is the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024. An intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. Translated from German by Michael Hofmann.
Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.
My first link is another novel translated from German, Perfume:the story of a murderer by Patrick Süskind, translated from German by John E Woods. It is an extraordinary novel, a Gothic work in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe, or Oscar Wilde’s ThePicture of Dorian Grey. It depicts the strange life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and is a book of smells. This is a horror story, one that made me not want to read it and yet also want to read it to the bitter end.
My second link is Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, which is a collection of Poe’s best stories containing all the terrifying and bewildering tales that characterise his work. As well as the Gothic horror of such famous stories as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘The Premature Burial’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, all of Poe’s Auguste Dupin stories are included.
These are the first modern detective stories and include ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’.
My third link stays on the theme of tales of horror with Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson, which are published in my copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It consists of two short stories, both written for the Christmas “crawler” tradition in 1884 and 1885. Christmas was a season traditionally associated with supernatural and creepy tales. The Body Snatcher is very much a traditional Christmas ghost story, beginning with four men gathered in an inn on a dark winter’s night telling tales round the fireside of grisly deeds. The other story is Olalla, a Gothic tale, set in an ancient Spanish castle surrounded by deep woodland, about a young man recovering from his war wounds and to “renew his blood”, who finds himself living with a strange family.
My fourth link moves away from horror stories to crime fiction, linked by the word ‘tales’ in the title. It is Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves, a book I have read but I didn’t write a review. It’s the 2nd of her Vera Stanhope series in which the residents of an East Yorkshire village are revisited with the nightmare of a murder that happened 10 years before. There was some doubt about the guilty verdict passed on Jeanie Long and now it would seem that the killer is still at large. Inspector Vera Stanhope builds up a picture of a community afraid of itself and of outsiders.
My fifth link is On Beulah Height, Reginald Hill’s 17th Dalziel and Pascoe novel. It’s also set in a Yorkshire village, Dendale. Three little girls had gone missing from the village one summer. Their bodies were never found, and the best suspect, a strange lad named Benny Lightfoot, was held for a time, then released. Fifteen years later another little girl, Lorraine, aged seven went out for a walk one morning with her dog before her parents got up and didn’t return home, reviving memories of the missing children from fifteen years earlier.
My final link is to a another book featuring a character called Benny – The One I Was by Eliza Graham – historical fiction split between the present and the past following the lives of Benny Gault and Rosamund Hunter. Benny first came to Fairfleet in 1939, having fled Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train. As an adult he bought the house and now he is dying of cancer. Rosamund returns to Fairfleet, her childhood home, to nurse Benny. I was totally engrossed in both their life stories as the various strands of the story eventually combined.
Half of my chain consists of horror stories, not a genre I often read and the other half is made up of crime fiction novels, as usual.
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.
The topic this week is Books with My Favourite Colour on the Cover. Here they are in various shades of red:
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz – a prime example of a puzzle-type of crime fiction combining elements of the vintage-style golden age crime novel with word-play and cryptic clues and allusions to Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s also a novel within a novel, with mystery piled upon mystery. I loved it.
The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz – the second book in the Hawthorne and HorowitzMystery series in which Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-policeman, now a private investigator, who the police call in to help when they have a case they call a ‘sticker’. What I found particularly interesting was the way that Anthony Horowitz inserted himself into the fiction, recruited by Hawthorne to write a book about him and the cases he investigates.
Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz – the fifth literary whodunit in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series, Detective Hawthorne is once again called upon to solve an unsolvable case—a gruesome murder in an idyllic gated community in which suspects abound, aided by Horowitz, as a fictional character.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – historical fiction, the story of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith, and his political rise, set against the background of Henry VIII’s England and his struggle with the Pope over his desire to marry Anne Boleyn. This is the first in the Wolf Hall trilogy, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485-1540), who rose from obscurity to become chief minister of King Henry VIII of England.
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie, a pre-Second World War crime fiction novel. It shows Agatha Christie’s interest in Egypt and archaeology and also reflects much of the flavour and social nuances of the pre-war period. In it she sets a puzzle to solve – who shot Linnet Doyle, the wealthy American heiress? Although the novel is set in Egypt, an exotic location, it is essentially a ‘locked room mystery’.
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Chistie in which Poirot investigates the death of Simeon Lee, the head of the Lee family. None of his family like him, in fact most of them hate him and there are plenty of suspects for his murder. He is found dead with his throat cut in a locked room – locked from the inside.
Wild Fire by Ann Cleeves, the 8th and last book in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series. I have loved this series ever since I read the first book, Raven Black, back in 2010. And because I began reading the books before they were televised my picture of Inspector Jimmy Perez is drawn from them rather than from the dramatisations. There are some significant changes between the TV dramatisations and the books. I love the books, but still enjoyed the TV adaptions.
Red Bones by Ann Cleeves, the third book in her Shetland Quartet. It’s set on Whalsay, where two young archaeologists, excavating a site on Mima Williams’s land, discover human bones. They are sent away for testing – are they an ancient find or are the bones more contemporary?
Blacklands by Belinda Bauer, crime fiction. This is an absolutely gripping battle of wits between Stephen aged twelve and serial killer Arnold Avery as they exchange letters about the whereabouts of Stephen’s uncle’s body.
The Sun Sister by Lucinda Riley – the only book on this list that I haven’t yet read. It’s the sixth book in The Sven Sisters series, the storyof love and loss, inspired by the mythology of the famous star constellation. It’s one of my TBRs only because I’m reading the series in order and so far I’ve read the first three books.
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.
The topic this week is Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2024. I don’t own any of these books – but I do fancy reading them:
To be published 2 July 2024:
The Moonlight Market by Joanne Harris, a ‘modern fairy tale’ about a secret market that appears only in moonlight, where charms and spells are bought with memories.
To be published 18 July 2024:
A Refiner’s Fire by Donna Leon, the 33rd Commissario Guido Brunetti in which he confronts a present-day Venetian menace and the ghosts of a heroism that never was.
City of Woe by A.J. Mackenzie, the 2nd Simon Merrivale mystery. Florence, 1342. A city on the brink of chaos. Restored to favour at court, King’s Messenger Simon Merrivale accompanies an English delegation to Florence, to negotiate a loan to offset KingEdward III’s chronic debt.
To be published 22 August 2024:
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker, the 3rd book in the Troy series, historical fiction, the follow-up to The Women of Troy and The Silence of the Girls.
Precipice by Robert Harris, historical fiction, summer 1914, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age.
Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers, a novel about love, family and the joy of freedom.
To be published 12 September 2024:
The Black Loch by Peter May, the return of Fin Macleod, hero of the Lewis Trilogy. A body is found abandoned on a remote beach at the head of An Loch Dubh – the Black Loch – on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis.
To be published 10 October 2024:
Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin, a John Rebus thriller. John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh’s most deadly criminals behind bars. Now, he’s joined them…
To be published 24 October 2024:
Silent Bones by Val McDermid. Book 8 in the Karen Pirie series. At the moment there is little information about this book, but as I’ve read a lot of the earlier books I’m expecting this one to be good. ‘The ingeniousplot kept me guessing all the way through. It delivers on every level‘ MARIAN KEYES
BooksPlease 