Weekly Reading Round-Up

Happy Friday, all!

I have been deep in the double-deadline vortex, finishing up the new Team W book and fighting my way through the middle of the Cuba book, so I went back to my favorite sort of comfort read: British mysteries, both new and old.

Does anyone else out there read Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series?  It follows a forensic archaeologist who is quite frequently drawn into police investigations (with a long-running, very complicated relationship with one policeman in particular).  I can’t remember what number in the series we’re up to now, but I’ve been saving her latest, The Night Hawks, for a time of need, and if ever there was a time of need, it’s while writing a chapter a day for two different books.

From there, it was on to Patricia Wentworth’s Fear by Night, which is a classic Wentworth in that the description sounds like utter nonsense, you read the blurb and think it’s too absolutely ridiculous to ever work, but the characters and the dialogue are such fun that somehow it does.  There are very few authors who can pull that off (Susan Elizabeth Philips’s Nobody’s Baby But Mine also falls into that category for me), but Wentworth is brilliant at making the absurd plausible.  There’s even a Scottish sea serpent!  (Given that there was Baskerville-esque hound of doom in Night Hawks, this felt very thematically appropriate.)

Then it was back to Elly Griffiths with the first in her Brighton mysteries series, The Zig Zag Girl, because it suddenly occurred to me that instead of just waiting for the next Ruth Galloway or stand alone, there was a whole series I had been missing out on, and that’s just plain wasteful.  This one is set in the post-war years, in the resort town of Brighton, as Britain fries up its spam fritters, licks its wounds, and tries to figure out what the new normal is– and I’m really enjoying it so far.  Think vaguely Endeavour-esque….

What have you been reading this week?

7 Comments

  1. Ann Stebbins on August 6, 2021 at 11:03 am

    I have read all of the Ruth Galloway series and just started reading the Night Hawks. My youngest daughter is working on her Masters degree in Anthropology and I started reading this series when she was earning her BS in Anthropology. Elly Griffiths also has another series that starts with the Postscript Murders.

    • Joanne Mielczarski on August 6, 2021 at 3:21 pm

      I love all of Elly Griffiths books. This week I have been reading The Summer I Met Jack by Michelle Gable.

  2. Tiffany on August 6, 2021 at 1:28 pm

    Hi Lauren,
    Did you finished Susanna Kearsley’s newest book (The Vanished Days)? I was wondering what you thought!
    Thank you,
    Tiffany

    • Lauren Willig on April 20, 2022 at 11:07 am

      I did! I really loved it– it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  3. Elizabeth (AKA Miss Eliza) on August 6, 2021 at 5:04 pm

    I’ve been reading my very first Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask, AKA if Nancy Mitford wrote an episode of The Avengers. Should finish this off today, have the next one on my list at the library, but there are people before me in the queue, how rude! So I’m planning on binging the Enola Holmes books because there’s a new one coming out at the end of the month and I’m on the blog tour!

  4. Karen on August 6, 2021 at 11:46 pm

    So excited that one of my favorite authors also enjoys another of my favorites- Elly Griffiths!

  5. Sarah on August 8, 2021 at 4:45 pm

    I am finishing up A Special Place for Women and am hotly anticipating The Show Girl by Nicola Harrison, releasing this week.

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