Top Ten Tuesday: Cozy Mysteries

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

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 Cozy Reads. My list is of Cozy Mysteries, all of which I’ve read or have waiting to-be-read*. A  cozy mystery is a mystery that doesn’t usually have any bad language, sex scenes, or gruesome details about the killing, and the main character is often an amateur detective.

Betrayed in Cornwall by Janie Bolitho – the fourth book in the Rose Trevelyan series. When a young man falls off a cliff in suspicious circumstances, Rose starts to make connections and things start to go terribly wrong. The characters are quickly drawn, but I still felt they were believable, the writing is fluent, and the Cornish location is superb.

The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett – the first in the Fethering Mysteries. It’s an easy read, set in a fictitious village on the south coast of England, where Carole Seddon has taken early retirement from her career at the Home Office. One morning she discovers a dead body on the beach, but by the time the police go to investigate it had disappeared.

Dying in the Wool by Frances Brody  – the first of the Kate Shackleton Mysteries set in Yorkshire in 1922, with flashbacks to 1916. Bridgestead is a peaceful mill village, until the day in 1916 when mill owner Joshua Braithwaite went missing after apparently trying to commit suicide.

Death at Wentwater Court by Carola Dunn – the first Daisy Dalrymple book, a quick and easy read, a mix of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, set in 1923 at the Earl of Wentwater’s country mansion, Wentwater Court. 

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham – a Midsomer Murder Mystery. I’ve enjoyed watching the TV series over the years. Midsomer is obviously a dangerous place to live with all those murders happening so regularly, but they are not the gory kind – it’s murder of a sanitised nature.

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood – easy to read and fast paced. Seventy-seven year old Judith, and her friends discover who killed Stefan, who was found dead in the Thames, with a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead. The first book in the Marlow Murder Club series.

The Heiress of Linn Hagh* by Karen Charlton – the first book in the Detective Lavender Mystery series. Northumberland, November 1809. A beautiful young heiress disappears from her locked bedchamber at Linn Hagh. The local constables are baffled and the townsfolk cry ‘witchcraft’.

Stealing the Crown* by T P Fielden – London, 1941: Major Edgar Brampton is found shot dead in his office in Buckingham Palace. All signs point towards a self-inflicted tragedy, but when Palace authorities hurry his body away and order staff to stay silent, fellow courtier Guy Harford’s suspicions are raised. The first book in the Guy Harford Mystery series,

Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House by M C Beaton – there are three deaths for Agatha to resolve when an old woman reports that her house is haunted and is later found murdered. More deaths follow. I thought this book was all rather silly and Agatha herself is a silly woman.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman – in a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved killings. This is quietly humorous in parts, not laugh out loud funny, but it did make me smile in a few places. The murder mystery element is over complicated with far too many twists and turns, suspects and false trails. It didn’t turn out to be as good as I’d hoped!

Two Novellas by Claire Keegan #NovNov22

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Week 4 in Novellas in November is Contemporary novellas (post 1980). It was only this year that I ‘discovered’ Claire Keegan’s work when her novella, Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. I liked the description, so I was eager to read it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So wanting to read more of her books I read Foster, another novella, which is the buddy read during the Novellas in November event.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (73 pages) 5*

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.

It won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, an award for outstanding novels and collections of short stories, first published in the UK or Ireland, that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative. It also won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2022.

Claire Keegan’s style of writing is a refreshing change from so many of the long and complicated books I so often read. It is precise, focused, and beautifully written bringing her characters to life – these are real, ordinary people, living ordinary lives in 1980s Ireland. And the detail is there too in all the particulars of everyday life – it packs a lot into its pages. Bill Furlong is happily married with five young daughters, but he still remembers his own childhood. He never knew who his father was, brought up by his mother and the widow for whom she worked. Life was hard then and his own childhood Christmases were not like his daughters’, and it is this, I think, that makes him such a kind and compassionate man. As he does his rounds delivering coal and wood, he goes to the local convent and is confronted with the cruelty meted out to the young girls living there.

Set in the weeks leading up to Christmas it contrasts the season of hope and joy at the birth of a child with the treatment of unmarried mothers received in the homes known as the Magdalen laundries – and at the end of the story Claire Keegan explains the history of those institutions that were run by the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish State until they were closed down in 1996. Small Things Like These demonstrates the courage and compassion needed to stand up to the power of the church and state.

Foster by Claire Keegan (101 pages) 5*

A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is.

I was amazed at the emotional depth Claire Keegan has instilled into such a few pages. She writes such clear sentences filled with poetic beauty. She shows how a young girl from an overcrowded and poverty stricken family blossomed whilst living with relatives of her mother, the Kinsellas, as her mother is about to give birth to yet another baby.

Yet it is not that straight forward. There is an undercurrent that hints of something that is not right, something that has happened that is never put into words. There is a sadness that pervades the story, along with kindness, caring and compassion. The girl knows she’ll return to her family, but she doesn’t know when, so the story is always told as it is happening. It’s in the present tense, which I never realised until I came to the ending. This is one of the rare instances for me that the use of the present tense seemed just right. The ending too could only happen the way it does. I absolutely loved Foster.

Book Beginnings & The Friday 56: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Published on by Margaret15 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’ve borrowed Demon Copperhead from the library and I’ve started reading it – even though I’m currently in the middle of two other books. As it’s had such good reviews, I’m a bit worried that it won’t live up to all the hype for me. It’s a retelling of David Copperfield, which I read earlier this year.

My Book Beginning:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

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:

Finally Miss Barks turned round with her elbow on the back of the seat and said let’s talk about where we are going. I’d be staying with a gentleman named Mr Crickson that took kids for short-term only. He had boys there now. The Cricksons had been regular fosters until his wife passed away, and now he just took in the odd hardship case.

So, I’m guessing Miss Barks and Mr Crickson are the equivalent characters of Mr Barkis and Mr Creakle in David Copperfield. I have a feeling I should not approach this book as a retelling of David Copperfield, or I’ll be forever comparing the two and not really reading it as a book in its own right, as it were.

Synopsis:

Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

~~~

What do you think? Have you read it, or are you going to read it? Do you like books that retell classics?

The Black Mountain by Kate Mosse #NovNov22

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

Week 4 in Novellas in November is Contemporary novellas (post 1980)

The Black Mountain by Kate Mosse (136 pages) 3*

This is a Quick Reads publication – a series of short books by bestselling authors and celebrities. They are designed to encourage adults who do not read often, or find reading difficult, to discover the joy of books. I like the long novels Kate Mosse writes, so I wondered what this short novel would be like.

It is historical fiction set in May 1706 on the northern part of the island of Tenerife, where Ana and her family live in the shadow of a volcano, known locally as the Black Mountain. It’s also a murder mystery – Ana’s father Tomas had apparently committed suicide, but Anna just can’t accept that and reading the letter he’d left she is convinced it was murder. She is determined to find out the truth.

Legend says the mountain has the devil living inside it and when the devil was angry he sent fire and rocks up into the sky. However, there has been no eruption for thousands of years and no one believes it is a threat. Sometimes the earth trembled and shook but the sky never turned red. Until, that is two days after Tomas’ death. He had seen the signs that the mountain was about to erupt and had tried to warn people – but they didn’t want to know. When more tremors occur, and grey ash starts falling Ana realises the danger signs are increasing and she needs to warn people that they must flee before the volcano erupts and destroys their world.

I enjoyed this novella, reading it quickly, feeling almost as though I was also in danger as the Black Mountain threatens to erupt and wondering if Ana would discover the truth about her father’s death in time for her to escape.

The Black Mountain is based on a real historical event. The town of Garachio erupted from May 4 to 5, 1706, which was disastrous not only for the town but also for the entire archipelago. Its port concentrated a large part of the international trade that linked the island with Europe, Africa and America.

~~~

I’ve read a few of the Quick Reads. Here’s a list of all the available titles.

Two Short Reviews: Coffin Road by Peter May and The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Two more short reviews as I try to catch up on the books I’ve been reading. Both are excellent books, each one with a great sense of location and descriptive writing bringing the scenes and characters vividly to life.

First, Coffin Road by Peter May, is a standalone novel, set on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I read it because I loved his Lewis trilogy. There are 3 strands to the story. There’s a mystery surrounding a man, washed up during a storm on a deserted beach on the Isle of Harris. He is wearing a life jacket, is battered and bruised – and has no idea who he is or where he is. The only clue to why he is living on Harris is a folded map of a path named the Coffin Road and following the route marked on the map he finds some hidden beehives that are familiar to him. In the second strand DS George Gunn investigates the murder of a bludgeoned corpse discovered on a remote rock twenty miles to west of the Outer Hebrides. And thirdly, a teenage girl in Edinburgh is desperate to discover the truth about her scientist father’s suicide.

It is fast-paced, almost impossible to put down, and full of intrigue and mystery. Each strand of the story kept me guessing, wondering what the connections between them were. It’s tense with the sense that time is running out for all the characters and I wasn’t sure whether any of them were reliable narrators or were who they appeared to be.

In addition the bees have a major role in the story. All the facts about the bees slot seamlessly into the story and I learned quite a lot about bees that I didn’t know before, especially their role in climate change.

The Wonder is a very strange story. It’s uncomfortable reading, but I felt I just had to read it. And although it moves at a slow pace I read it quickly in large chunks. It is tense, full of atmosphere and just like Coffin Road, I found it almost impossible to put it down, such is the power of Emma Donoghue’s storytelling.

The plot is simple: it is set in a small village in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s. Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, Lib Wright, trained in the Crimea by Florence Nightingale, and a nun, Sister Michael are hired by a committee of influential locals to spend two weeks observing her to make sure she is not being fed secretly.

Lib observes Anna in scrupulous detail, noting Anna’s symptoms. At first she seems a healthy little girl but as the two weeks go by she develops worrying symptoms – downy cheeks, scaly skin, blue fingertips, and swollen lower limbs and hands. Lib begins to realise that it is not just a question of how Anna is managing to exist without food, but also why. What is motivating Anna to persist in saying she is not hungry and doesn’t need to eat? The answer seems to lie in her religious beliefs, and maybe religious hysteria is playing a part as well as the clash between medical science and faith. But is there more to it? Lib wonders about the family’s relationships and the effect of Anna’s brother’s death just a few months before Anna stopped eating.

As Donoghue explains in her author’s note The Wonder is an invented story, inspired by almost fifty cases of so-called Fasting Girls in the British Isles, Western Europe and North America between the 16th and 20th centuries. A film of the book is available on Netflix, but I don’t think I could bear to watch it.

Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James #NovNov22

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Week 3 in Novellas in November is Short Nonfiction.

Faber & Faber| 2010| 160 pages| Paperback|My Own Copy| 4*

From the birth of crime writing with Wilkie Collins and Dostoevsky, through Conan Doyle to the golden age of crime, with the rise of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, P. D. James brings a lifetime of reading and writing crime fiction to bear on this personal history of the genre. There are chapters on great American crime writers – the likes of Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. James also discusses many of her favourite famous detectives, from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe.

P.D. James, the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and The Murder Room, presents a brief history of detective fiction and explores the literary techniques behind history’s best crime writing.

I do like reading books about books and as crime fiction is one of my favourite genres I wanted to read Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James. In December 2006 she was asked to write the book by the Bodleian Publishing House, in aid of the Library. It’s a personal account and being a short book doesn’t go into much detail about any of the writers. It’s an overview of mostly British authors, with just one chapter, entitled Soft-centred and Hard-boiled in which she writes about the differences between the hard-boiled school of American fiction and some of the Golden Age writers.

I’m familiar with the work of most of the authors in this book, but there are some James mentions I haven’t read, such as Dashiell Hammett, who wrote short stories featuring the Continental Op and Sam Spade, who also appears in one full-length novel, The Maltese Falcon. James’ favourite of the hard-boiled writers was Kenneth Millar, who wrote under the pseudonym of Ross Macdonald, novels featuring private detective Lew Archer. But she didn’t give the details of any of his books.

The structure of the book is rather loose and meandering. Although it is divided into eight chapters, the works of some, such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers appear in several chapters spread across the book as a whole. The book needs an index to draw the separate entries together! I think the parts I enjoyed the most are those in which James writes about her own methods of working, and the chapter on Telling the Story: Setting, Viewpoint and People.

There is a short bibliography and list of suggested reading at the end of the book. Throughout the book there are several cartoons, which add an amusing touch.

Finally, you need to be aware if you haven’t read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that without any warning, she gives away not just a little spoiler, but the identity of the murderer! I was amazed!