Happy Friday, all!

First of all, why did it take me so very long to read The Murder of Mr. Wickham?  (Never mind: I know exactly why.  I’m always scared reading books where beloved characters are presented by someone other than the original author.)  Billed as Jane Austen meets Clue, the idea was sheer brilliance: a house party thrown by the Knightleys, attended by Marianne and Colonel Brandon, Catherine Tilney’s daughter, the Darcys and their eldest son, Captain and Mrs. Wentworth, and Fanny and Edmund at which Mr. Wickham is (deservedly, I think we can all agree) murdered.  The book lived up to the concept and the source material. It was a truly charming visit with so many old friends– and it helped that it centered on two new characters, Juliet Tilney and Jonathan Darcy.

I also had the fun of reading Jane Healey’s upcoming Goodnight from Paris (no cover yet, I’m afraid!), based on the true story of an American movie star in Paris at the start of World War II who found herself drawn into resistance work, smuggling American airmen out of Nazi-occupied France, as well as Lauren Belfer’s Ashton Hall, about an American who visits an ailing relative in the English stately home where he rents an apartment, finding herself drawn deep into the Elizabethan history of the house when her son discovers the body of a woman walled up in a secret room.

After so many new books, it was time for visiting with an old one: Agatha Christie’s The 4:50 from Paddington, in which one of Miss Marple’s chums sees a murder committed in a passing train.  Of course, Miss Marple is on the case.  I read all the Marples and Poirots in my teens, but then put them aside for a long time in favor of Sayers, Allingham, and Tey– so it’s such fun rediscovering them after all this time and realizing that they’re much better than I’d remembered.

What have you been reading this week?