Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday– and happy December!
As we launch into the festive season, I treated myself to the most recent book in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, which was just as wonderful and warm-hearted and twisty as the previous installments, but at times made me very weepy. (If you’ve read it, you’ll know why.) It’s rare feat to keep a series going in which the characters continue to develop and the story doesn’t collapse under its own accumulated weight, but these books do it.
After that, it was really hard to think of anything to read that would live up to it, other than going back and reading the earlier books in the series, so I went back to Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn books, which I’ve been zigzagging through, out of order, whenever I can’t think of anything else to read. This time it was Died in the Wool, a New Zealand-set installment, in which Alleyn, over on government business in World War II, winds up solving the year old murder of a politician murdered and hidden in a wool press. What made this one unusual was that the first half of the book was all different characters’ testimony in retrospect– which made me think of Josephine Tey and The Daughter of Time. (So, of course, now I need to read some Tey! Should I go with Franchise Affair or Miss Pym Disposes?)
What have you been reading this week?
I 100% agree about The Last Devil to Die! I was weeping on vacation while reading it, even though I loved it.
I just read an ARC of The Curse of Penryth Hall. Loved it! Reminded me of gothic Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart books of long ago. This heroine (it’s post-Great War) is snarky, jaded, and world weary. But throws a great party!
I have been all over the place with my reading, mainly because a whole bunch of my holds came in at the library. I read Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree which was wonderfully cozy and low stakes, a perfect Thanksgiving read, and I don’t even like coffee! Now I’m on the newest Jennifer Lynn Barnes Inheritance Games book, The Brothers Hawthorne, which see Jameson and Grayson taking over in dueling narratives. But now I’m conflicted, because I JUST got the new Elly Griffiths in the mail (had to order it from England as who knows when the newest Magic Men will be released here) but then I got an ARC of the sequel to Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey, Red Side Story, which I’ve literally been waiting for since December 2009…
The Franchise Affair, always