Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
This has been a multi-book vortex week for me: copy edits on the new Team W book (coming autumn 2024!), editing the massive historical note for the Manhattan Well Murder book (coming January 2025!), and research for my next book after that (coming autumn 2025!), about which I’ll tell you very soon, I promise, but is really Something Completely Different and not at all what I had originally intended to write.
In the midst of all that, the standout read for me was Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, set in 1634 in the heyday of the Dutch East India Company as the (fictional) governor general of the Dutch colony of Batavia sails back to Amsterdam with his wife, daughter, mistress, and a deadly scourge on board. Is the ship haunted by an evil spirit called Old Tom? Or is human agency behind the seeming work of the devil? It’s less a historical novel and more a thriller/mystery with a quasi-historical background, and I found it tremendously compelling.
After that, I moved from the Dutch to Denmark with Elizabeth Peters’s The Copenhagen Connection, which had the virtue of being a Peters I hadn’t reread in a while. I’ve always read Peters more for her prose than her plots, so even with her lesser books, where the story is a little thin, it’s always nice to be back in the familiar bustle and banter.
What have you been reading this week?
I love Stuart Turton so much, his writing is just next level. I’ve snagged an arc of his next book, The Last Murder at the End of the World, and hope to get to that after I finish From Hell (damn, the historical detail is amazing even if I 100% disagree in the whole Queen Victoria/Freemasons angle) and then I have John Dickson Carr’s The Plague Court Murders, which sounds wonderfully Gothic and Halloweeny and then sets up his second book set at Christmas which is part of my Christmas TBR pile.
Iron Flame! I’ve been stretching it out for several days so enjoy it longer 🙂