Happy weekend, all!  Apologies for being a bit late with the round up this week– I’m on deadline for the Cuba book and back in quarantine with one of the small people.  Which I suppose is strangely appropriate since the heroine of the Cuba book is also currently in quarantine?  At least we don’t have to worry about yellow fever….  (Silver linings!)

Meanwhile, despite all that, it’s been a wonderful reading week.  I started off with Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands, a wonderfully creepy late Victorian adventure in which a vicar-in-training, a bicycle-riding female journalist, and an embittered police inspector find themselves embroiled in a murder case that’s far more than it seems.  With its heightened late Victorian atmosphere and its whisper of the supernatural, this reminded me strongly of the recent tv series, The Nevers.

Then I followed another one of my best friend’s book recommendations (recommending the best books since 1982!), and gobbled up the first in Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious series, a boarding school mystery with strong echoes of The Westing Game, in which a true crime buff wins admission to a school for eccentrics founded by an idiosyncratic millionaire whose family was the target of a murderer in the 1930s in a famous case that has never been properly solved.  Can Stevie solve that very cold case– and find the murderer in their own midst?  I particularly loved the heroine’s voice, which feels very like T. Kingfisher.  And a bit like my own Eloise in the Pink books.

Speaking of Pink books….  I have the second Truly Devious queued up and I’m dying to jump into it, but first I need to re-read The Garden Intrigue for the latest installment of the Pink Carnation Read Along, meeting up this coming Tuesday with super special guest host Lynda Loigman! If you haven’t signed up already, you can register here.  The event is free, virtual, and open to anyone anywhere.

What have you been reading this week?