Happy Friday, all!

My surprise hit this week was Emma Garman’s The Kindness of Strangers.  A murder in a boarding house in 1950s London….  I’d been lukewarm on the premise, but I wound up gobbling up the book in one marathon late night session.  The characters might sound like stock figures: the boarding house owner, the fallen debutante, the writer, the shop girl, the refugee, but just when you think you have a sense of them, there they are, developing new depths.

The book opens with the murder, so you know who’s died and that they’re all in on it right from the beginning.  But the why?  That’s the fun part.  And much, much twistier than I’d imagined.

After that it was a Maureen Johnson I’d somehow missed: Death at Morning House, a stand alone set on an island in upstate New York.  (Credit to Miss Eliza for letting me know there’s a new one coming out, which made me go check to see if I’d missed any!)  This one reminded me a great deal of the first Truly Devious book with the back and forth between present day high school students and a tragedy in a mansion owned by an eccentric millionaire in the 1930s.

Then it was back to the comforting world of Mrs. Malory, with an unexpected excursion into American academia as Mrs. Malory heads to Pennsylvania for a stint as a visiting professor teaching overlooked Victorian women writers in Murder on Campus.  Confession: this is probably my least favorite Mrs. Malory so far.  It was entertaining getting to revisit 1990s academe (deconstructionism!), but I prefer Mrs. Malory on her own ground.  I’m looking forward to returning to Taviscombe with her in Superfluous Death….  But, first, I have a few more new books lined up to read.

What have you been reading this week?