Weekly Reading Round-Up

Happy Friday, all!

I started out the week with an oldie but goodie, Helen MacInnes’s The Venetian Affair, a Cold War thriller in which ordinary people find themselves swept up in startling conspiracies with repercussions for the fate of the free world.  This might possibly be my favorite MacInnes yet.

I’m on double deadline right now with both my own book and the Team W book, so after a rather tough and exhausting few months, it seemed like a good time to revert to comfort reads, in this case chain-reading Charlotte MacLeod’s Janet and Madoc Rhys mysteries set in 1970s Canada, the first in a small town where an elderly woman is poisoned with a bottle of deliberately badly canned snap beans and the second at a Christmas house party at a faux baronial house out in the middle of nowhere where the seemingly light-hearted pranks might just be anything but.

Feeling like I really ought to try something new, I skimmed this month’s Reese’s Book Club pick, The House in the Pines, but I think I have hit my personal limit on thrillers involving substance-abusing unreliable narrators who must return to their hometown to track down the killer of the best friend who was murdered in the summer before college.

What have you been reading this week?

6 Comments

  1. DJl on January 6, 2023 at 11:20 am

    Whipped through the first 2 volumes of graphic novel Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe (a re-telling of the Hades & Persephone myth, with the Gods of Olympus transformed into high powered businessmen and socialites in what looks like present day NYC). Amusing. Will likely pick up volume 3 tonight.

  2. Becky on January 6, 2023 at 11:35 am

    Shelly Noble’s Ask Me No Questions and Tell Me No Lies!

  3. Joan on January 6, 2023 at 11:59 am

    I just finished Holiday By Gaslight by Mimi Matthews. I know Christmas is over but this was a very charming victorian novella (very North And South) and really enjoyed it.

  4. Rachel Adrianna on January 6, 2023 at 3:27 pm

    “unreliable narrators who must return to their hometown to track down the killer of the best friend who was murdered in the summer before college”… the Netflix sequel to “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window”?!

    • Elizabeth (AKA Miss Eliza) on January 6, 2023 at 7:07 pm

      I love that Kristen Bell parody, it hit all the right crazy notes of that genre!

  5. Elizabeth (AKA Miss Eliza) on January 6, 2023 at 7:08 pm

    I went on a pulp graphic novel binge with the whole Ethan Reckless series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, if you’re a fan of L.A. Confidential that this series is for you. Now I’m debating delaying starting my book club book for the month or some more locked room holiday murder fun…

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