Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all! These past few weeks have been a crazy whirl of planes, trains, and bookstores, but I’m finally back at my computer and back to our regularly scheduled Weekly Reading Round-Ups (and the book I’m meant to be writing!).
Thank you so much to everyone who celebrated the launch of Two Wars and a Wedding with me! I’ll post some book tour photos later, but, in the meantime, here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I’ve been on the road….
— Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Finding Mrs. Ford, a twisty thriller set between Detroit, Watch Hill, and NYC, in which a woman’s carefully constructed life falls apart as her past comes to find her. (This was definitely of the “just one more chapter– wait, how is it 3am?” variety of read.)
— Sarah Caudwell’s The Sirens Sang of Murder, the third in her Hilary Tamar mystery series, which can best be described as “madcap Rumpole of the Bailey with murder”, in which an Oxford don avoids his studies by hanging about Lincoln’s Inn with a group of young barristers and invariably finds himself drawn into solving murders. I’d been obsessed with these in grad school and forgotten just how hilarious they are.
— P.D. James’s The Skull Beneath the Skin, in which a private investigator is hired to spend the weekend on a private island with a famous actress who has been receiving poisoned pen letters (this is not Dalgliesh, but P.D. James’s short-lived Cordelia Grey series).
— And right now I’m reading Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, a slice of life look at an affluent family in Brooklyn, as each character wrestles with her own ups and downs.
What have you been reading this week?
I read The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray (yes, that Mr. Wickham, from Pride and Prejudice) in which Gray cleverly brings together main characters/couples from Austen’s most famous works as guests at a house party where Mr. Wickham shows up uninvited, is killed, and the question is… whodunnit? Great fun, and I felt like most of the characters were written very close to how I would imagine them in such a situation 🙂
Also, I hadn’t realized this was first in a series, and the 2nd actually releases next month (The Death of Mrs. Willoughby) which I am greatly looking forward to!
I just finished an ARC called The Second Ending by Michelle Hoffman. Loved it! A pianist coming out of self imposed “retirement” and a young twenty-ish Russian pianist are to meet on a televised dueling pianos show. Each really needs to win for various reasons. This is a case of how can both of them win because I really like them?
I just finished The Bowe’s Inheritance by Pam Lecky which is a mystery/romance set in victorian England. I enjoyed it very much. Also I just started Murder Most Pemberley by Jessica Berg and so far Im enjoying it.
We so need more Cordelia Grey in our lives. I wonder with the success of the new Dagliesh series if we might see a Cordelia Grey reboot… My reading is all over the place, Regency Magic goodness, Stephanie Burgis’s ‘Scales and Sensibility” which is a Regency Romp in a world without magic BUT with dragons. SUCH FUN! Now I’m reading Patricia Highsmith’s ‘The Price of Salt’ which is probably better known by the title ‘Carol.’ Not really that far into it, waiting to see where it goes.