Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy September, all!
It’s been so long since I’ve posted one of these that I’m not going to even try to recap what I read over the summer. So let’s start fresh and plunge right in with this week!
On the recommendation of the brilliant Robin Agnew, I picked up The Clutter Corpse, the first in Simon Brett’s Decluttering Mysteries series, about a woman with a decluttering business who finds herself a suspect in a murder– and, of course, has to get to the bottom of it. It was absolutely charming. I’d forgotten that I’d read and enjoyed his Mrs. Pargeter mysteries a few years ago, but this had a very different feel from those, with a first person narrator, and some heavy personal issues that gave the story heft.
There was the excitement of a new Jennifer Crusie/Bob Mayer collaboration, on the heels of last year’s Lavender’s Blue series (which I loved). The new one, also the first in a series, is called Rocky Start, about a small town that isn’t at all what it seems, as the single mom heroine is about to discover when her employer/mentor dies and suddenly everything goes haywire, as it does in Crusie novels. This had definite vintage Crusie vibes (for other Crusie readers, I’m not sure why, but it made me think a little about Don’t Look Down and a lot about Fast Women).
Because it’s September, and we’re moving into what now seems to be termed Spooky Season, it felt like time to haul out the vintage Simone St. James (hi, Simone!), starting with one I hadn’t re-read in a while, An Inquiry Into Love and Death, in which an Oxford student is called to a seaside town to identify her ghost-hunter uncle’s corpse and finds herself confronting danger both human and supernatural. No one writes ghosts or that post World War I period quite like Simone St. James.
What have you been reading this week?
I love Simon Brett, but I hadn’t read him in so long I thought maybe he was dead. I’ll definitely look for this one.
And it’s the first in a series! I think there may be four already?
She’s baaaaaaaaaaaaack! *wild applause*
I had a e-ARC of Marie Benedict’s Feb 2025 book, The Queens of Crime, and it was amazing! Ruth Ware killed it (pun intended) with The Perfect Couple, and a novel/memoir in translation from French, The Postcard, by Anne Berest, was heavy but so well written.
I’ve been doing some re-reading this summer. I’ve gone back to several of my favorites, starting with Stephanie Laurens’ Cynster books (wonderful reads, all) and Mary Balogh’s Survivor’s Club series, about a group of severely damaged (body and mind) soldiers from the Peninsular battles against Napoleon’s forces. These are stories filled with redemption of both body and spirit. I think we sometimes think that PTSD is a new thing, but it is as old as war itself.
I remember binge reading those Baloghs my first year of grad school!
I’ve become oddly dragon or dragon adjacent obsessed this summer… I fell in love with Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, dragon riders and so much death. Then I’ve followed that up with finally finishing Lev Grossman’s The Magicians series. Just about to finish up the third volume. Years ago I couldn’t get into the snark level, which is odd, but right now it’s just perfect.
It’s funny how that works with books, with the not right for right now. There are so many books I put down years ago that I wonder if I should try again.
I know! I feel bad for books I hated in the past because maybe they’d be awesome now…