Happy Friday– and happy December!

I ended the old month– and my Victoria Holt kick– by bouncing hard off the second half of The India Fan, which takes place during the rising of 1857.  I was with her for the English village drama in the first half of the book, but the second half did not age well.

As a palette cleanser, I dipped into my emergency Jenny Colgan supply (I always like to have a few unread floating around, in case of emergency) with Sunrise by the Sea, in which a woman suffering from debilitating grief and anxiety finds confidence and a new life in a remote Cornish village.  Also a friendly puffin.  This is the fourth book in the Little Beach Street Bakery series.  Little Beach Street Bakery was my very first Jenny Colgan, which set off a massive Colgan-a-thon roughly four years ago, so it was lovely to revisit those characters (and puffin).

From the seaside to the mountains, I finally got to the latest Ruth Ware, One by One, in which the contentious leadership of a snazzy music app start-up goes on a corporate ski retreat– and begin to be picked off one by one, to the horror of the chalet housekeeper, who has secrets and fears of her own.  (Where is Hercule Poirot when you need him?)

Now, after a rather miserable couple of days with a sick kiddo, I’ve gone full on comfort read with Charlotte MacLeod’s A Pint of Murder, the first in her Janet and Madoc Rhys mystery series, circa the late 70s or early 80s, in which a woman is bumped off with deliberately badly canned snap beans in a small New Brunswick town and Mountie Madoc Rhys is called in– and finds Janet as well as a murderer.  These were the books I used to read when I was feeling exhausted or ill back in law school, and they still feel like a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea.

What have you been reading this week?