Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
This week was a bonanza of new books as I caught up on some of my stack of new releases, starting with Megan Miranda’s latest, The Last to Vanish, a small town in the Appalachians with a reputation for mysterious disappearances. Is it coincidence? Natural causes? Or is there something sinister going on in Cutter’s Passage?
From Tennessee, I moved on to Norfolk with the latest (I’ve lost track of the number) Elly Griffiths Ruth Galloway book, The Locked Room, which takes place just as lockdown hits in March 2020. There was something very poignant about revisiting those early days of the pandemic with Ruth, Nelson, and the gang, with all the uncertainty, the fear, the sudden plunge into Zoom and homeschooling, all those things we take for granted now but were so new and strange then.
After that, I scuttled back to one of my favorite comfort reads authors, Patricia Wentworth, with one of her stand alones, Nothing Venture, in which the autocratic heir to an estate makes a hasty marriage with the secretary at his law office because his uncle’s will predicates his inheritance on being married by a certain date, and his fiancee dumps him two days before (coincidence? or a plot?). Although I do love a good marriage of convenience, it contains some of my least favorite Wentworth tropes, but it was still a fun palette cleanser.
What have you been reading this week?
I loved The Locked Room, and now going to embark on the rest of the series. I especially liked all the pandemic elements. I think this is the first contemporary I have read that included it. Most seem to avoid it completely, altho that may also have to do with the time it takes to write and publish a book.
Finished A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin which was a treat, old fashioned Regency with lots of witty ballroom banter.
Now reading The Plantagenets by Dan Jones and enjoying it, lots of familiar (and some new-to-me!) details on the lives & times of medieval English monarchs.
I have read The Chinese Shawl, The Clock Strikes 12, and Latter End which are some of the many Miss Silver mysteries. I think I prefer them to her non-series romance/suspense novels. The heroines don’t seen so incredibly silly.
Just finished “Another Time, Another Place” Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s series (You turned me on to that one…) and “The Paper Caper” the latest in Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile series set in San Francisco.
I’ve been ALL OVER THE PLACE with my reading this week because, birthday staycation means I stay in a chair and read whatever suits me. So I read arcs of the newest Mercy Thompson Book, ‘Soul Taken,’ proving that Patricia Briggs is an evil genius, and the newest Enola Holmes, ‘The Elegant Escapade,’ which was raucous, though weird with resurrectionists. I also started to re-read ‘The Sandman’ comics because it’s been so long and the Netflix adaptation has started. But I now have a recommendation for YOU! ‘Uncommon Charm’ by Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver. It’s only available in physical media and it’s short, a novella. But it’s basically if Nancy Mitford and Noel Coward wrote about Russian emigres who happened to be magicians with dark pasts.
I enjoyed The Last to Vanish–read it last week.
I am currently in the middle of the newest Ruth Ware book, The It Girl. So far, so good.