Spell the Month in Books – August 2023

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted by Jana on Reviews From the Stacks on the second 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 theme this month is Series – Books that are part of a series, or the name of the series itself.

These are all books I’ve enjoyed – the links to my reviews are in the titles of each book.

A is for Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie, a Poirot murder mystery.

This is set in the Middle East, where the Boyntons and Dr Gerard are travelling through the Judean desert to Petra. Also in the group are Jonathan Cope, a family friend, Sarah King, a newly qualified doctor, Lady Westholme, a member of Parliament and Miss Annabel Pierce, a former nursery governess. The beginning of the book is taken up with relating their journey to Petra and the complicated relationships between the characters. It comes to a climax when Mrs Boynton is found dead.

This is a quick, easy read, with a lot of dialogue in a relatively short book (less than 200 pages) in which Poirot, through questions, analysis and psychological reasoning, identifies the murderer.

U is for Underworld by Reginald Hill, the 10th Dalziel and Pascoe novel, set in the small mining town of Burrthorpe (a fictional town) in Yorkshire. There are two mysteries facing Dalziel and Pascoe. One is current when a man is found dead in the mine, and the other is a case that had appeared to have been resolved several years earlier, when Tracy Pedley, a young girl disappeared. Her body was never discovered.

Dalziel brings a touch of humour to the book as his down to earth approach to the miners gets more results than Pascoe’s middle class attempts to understand them.

G is for Gallows Court by Martin Edwards, the first in the Rachel Savernake Golden Age Mystery series. It’s set in London in 1930. A headless corpse; an apparent suicide in a locked room; a man burned alive during an illusionist’s show in front of thousands of people. Scotland Yard is baffled by the sequence of ghastly murders unfolding across the city and at the centre of it all is mysterious heiress Rachel Savernake. Daughter of a grand judge, Rachel is as glamorous as she is elusive.

U is for An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P D James, the first in the Cordelia Gray series. This is Cordelia’s first assignment on her own after the suicide of Bernie Pryde, her partner in Pryde’s Detective Agency. People assume she won’t carry on the Agency on her own as, of course, “it isn’t a suitable job for a woman”. Cordelia has other ideas and takes on an assignment from Sir Ronald Callander, a famous scientist, to investigate the death of his son, Mark who had been found hanged in suspicious circumstances. It soon becomes clear to her that this is not suicide, but something much more sinister – murder. 

S is for The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz, the second Hawthorne book. Daniel Hawthorne is an ex-policeman, now a private investigator, who the police call in to help when they have a case they call a ‘sticker’. This is a clever and a different type of murder mystery in which Horowitz, himself plays a major role, recruited by Hawthorne to write books about him and the cases he investigates. Divorce lawyer When Richard Pryce is found dead in his home, there are several clues and many suspects in this entertaining and perplexing murder mystery.

T is for Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham, the first book in the Fiona Griffiths crime thriller series. Fiona is Welsh, single and at the start of the book is aged 26, being interviewed for a job with the South Wales Police in Cardiff. Fiona does not play by the rules and when she is asked to help with the investigation of the brutal murders of Janet Mancini, a part-time prostitute, and April, Janet’s 6 year old daughter she doesn’t hesitate to use her initiative. 

But there is a problem as she has a two year gap in her CV around the time of her A Levels and she doesn’t want to talk about it. Fiona is desperate to put the past behind her but as more gruesome killings follow, the case leads her inexorably back into those dark places in her own mind.

The next link up will be on September 2, 2023 when the theme will be: From your TBR list.

Recent Additions from Barter Books

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

We went to Barter Books in Alnwick yesterday, for the first time since last October. It was absolutely packed as it was a Bank Holiday and the school holidays. There was a long queue for the Station Buffet and then a 30 minute wait after we’d ordered our food.

Despite the crowds of people I found these books and left a lot behind. :)

From the bottom to the top they are:

Execution by S J Parris, Book 6 in the Giordano Bruno series of historical thrillers.  I’ve read the second book, Prophecy which I really enjoyed. This one is set in 1586 about the Babington plot to assassinate the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. I vaguely remember the Babington plot from history lessons at school. I just hope I’m not going to find it’s too long

The Fallen Angel by Tracy Borman, the final book in the Frances Gorges Historical Trilogy. I have the first one, The King’s Witch, but I haven’t read it yet. On the back cover it says this can be read entirely on its own. It covers the final years of James I’s reign when his new favourite was George Villiers, later the Duke of Buckingham

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood. Charmaine sees an advertisement for a project called Positron that promises you a job, a place to live, a bed to sleep in – imagine how appealing that would be if you were working in a dive bar and living in your car. She and her husband, Stan, apply at once. The only catch is that once you’re in there, you can’t get out.

The Golden One by Elizabeth Peters, the 17th Amelia Peabody Egypt murder mystery featuring Amelia Peabody. I haven’t read any of the other books and there are 20 in total. Amelia and her family arrive at their home in Luxor to learn of a new royal tomb ransacked by thieves. Soon an even more disturbing outrage concerns the intrepid clan of archaeologists: the freshly and savagely slain corpse of a thief defiling the ancient burial site.

Trace Elements by Donna Leon, the 29th in her Commissario Brunetti Mysteries series. ‘They killed him. It was bad money.‘ A dying hospice patient gasps these cryptic words about her recently-deceased husband, who lost his life in a motorcycle accident. But what appears to be a private family tragedy turns into a bigger enigma when Brunetti discovers the victim’s ties to Venice’s water supply. With the help of Questura secretary, Elettra Sorzi, Brunetti will unveil the secret that lies behind the dying woman’s accusation – one that threatens the health of the entire region.

If you’ve read any of these books I’d love to know what you think of them.

Six Degrees of Separation from Romantic Comedy to The Daughter of Time

Published on by Margaret22 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.

The starting book this month is Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfield a book I haven’t read. Amazon describes it thus: A TV script writer thinks she’s over romance, until an unlikely love interest upends all her assumptions: a humorous, subversive and tender-hearted novel from the bestselling author of Rodham, American Wife and Prep.

I don’t often read romantic comedy, or romance novels so I couldn’t immediately think of where to start my chain. And then I remembered that in 2006, before I began my blog, I enjoyed reading The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella. It’s a romantic comedy about Samantha who leaves her job as a high-powered London lawyer and, mistaken for another woman, she finds herself employed as a housekeeper without a clue how to cook or keep house.

One of the characters in The Undomestic Goddess is Nathaniel, a hunky gardener, so my second link is to another gardener in Mr MacGregor by Alan Titchmarsh, another romantic comedy. It’s about Rob MacGregor, who is hired to recapture the declining audience for a daytime gardening programme, and quickly becomes Britain’s latest heartthrob. It’s not as funny as The Undomestic Goddess.

Moving away from romantic comedy my third link is to Deadheads (my review) by Reginald Hill in which a rose garden is the setting for a murder. Life is on the up for Patrick Aldermann: his Great Aunt Florence has collapsed into her rose bed leaving him Rosemont House with its splendid gardens. Or was she murdered?

Using ‘rose’ as my fourth link takes the chain to The Sunne in Splendour (my review) by Sharon Penman historical fiction based on the War of the Roses, the conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England. It tells the story of Richard III from his childhood to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. 

My fifth link is to another book about Richard III – Alison Weir’s non-fiction about The Princes in the Tower, which examined the available evidence. She concluded that Richard III was responsible for the deaths of his nephews, the young Princes.

Much has been written about Richard, from the time of his death onwards and he remains a controversial figure. My final link is to Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time, which also investigates Richard’s role in the death of his nephews and his own death at the Battle of Bosworth and concluded that Richard hadn’t murdered his nephews.

My chain includes romantic comedy, crime and historical fiction and non fiction. I’ve read all six books.

Next month (2 September 2023), we’ll start with Wifedom by by Anna Funder.

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre

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 The Cut by Christopher Brookmyre, a book I’ve read recently and have yet to review.

Book Beginning – from the Prologue:

Jerry crouched alongside Millicent’s bed and checked again for a pulse. There was nothing.

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:

He kept his head down as the others filed past. He clocked a few eyes on his T-shirt, a Machine Head one today. Metal tees worked like an invisibility cloak: people had a cursory glance and then knew not to pay you any further attention. Phillipa seemed to hover longer than anyone else, but he kept his eyes to the carpet.

Description from Goodreads:

Millie Spark can kill anyone.

A special effects make-up artist, her talent is to create realistic scenes of bloody violence.

Then, one day, she wakes to find her lover dead in her bed.

Twenty-five years later, her sentence for murder served, Millicent is ready to give up on her broken life – until she meets troubled film student and reluctant petty thief Jerry.

Together, they begin to discover that all was not what it seemed on that fateful night . . . and someone doesn’t want them to find out why.

~~~

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

Just Another Missing Person by Gillian McAllister

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Penguin Michael Joseph| 3 August 2023| 369 pages| Review copy| 5*

OLIVIA.
22 years old.
Last seen on CCTV, entering a dead-end alley.
And not coming back out again.
Missing for one day and counting . . .

Julia is the detective heading up the case. She knows what to expect. A desperate family, a ticking clock, and long hours away from her husband and daughter. But Julia has no idea how close to home it’s going to get. Because there’s a man out there. And his weapon isn’t a gun, or a knife: it’s a secret. Her worst one. He tells her that her family’s safety depends on one thing: Julia must NOT find out what happened to Olivia – and must frame somebody else for her murder . . .

Just Another Missing Person is the fifth book by Gillian McAllister that I’ve read. They have all been excellent books, tense, tightly plotted and completely compelling reading. But this one surpasses them all.

Needless to say but I was totally gripped and baffled – how could Olivia just disappear from a dead-end alley without being seen coming back out? The investigating police officer is DCI Julia Day, a detective with a passion for solving things, piecing things together and helping people to get to the truth. But she has come up against what seems to be an impossible crime and to make matters worse she has her hands tied because she has a secret. And one person knows what she did and is threatening to reveal it unless she frames someone for Olivia’s disappearance.

It’s very readable and well written, with clearly defined and believable characters, and a complex plot with plenty of twists and turns. There are two major twists – the first one that shocked me and took me completely by surprise, whilst the second one, also surprising, I’d figured out but only just before it happened. The pace is quite slow to start off, but soon ratchets up as the tension rises. It really is a book that keeps you on your toes. You need to concentrate, paying close attention to details. It’s told mainly from Julia’s perspective with further insight from the other characters’ points of view.

Just Another Missing Person is simply excellent, written with assurance and with great insight into human nature. It is without doubt one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Many thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Published on by Margaret5 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 The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood this week. It’s the second in the Maccadam trilogy. According to Wikipedia this book focuses on a religious sect called the God’s Gardeners, a small community of survivors of the same biological catastrophe depicted in Atwood’s earlier novel Oryx and Crake, which I read soon after it was first published in 2003. 

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the top of the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, and if she slips and topples there won’t be anyone to pick her up.

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:

‘Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long’. When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God’s.

Description from Goodreads:

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. The air smells faintly of burning. The waterless flood – a manmade plague – has ended the world.

But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club (the cleanest dirty girls in town); and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden.

Is anyone else out there?

~~~

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