Happy Friday, all!

The win of this week for me was Clare Mackintosh’s The Butler, which I picked up partly because I loved her Ffion Morgan series and partly because Library Journal described it as an homage to Christie and Poirot.  The Christie comparison was spot on.  Even though the book was set in Cannes in summer, the book reminded me of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas: an unpleasant patriarch exercising his authority through his wallet and a house full of unhappy guests, all with a motive for murder, only this time it’s expensive watches and polo shirts in a Cannes villa rather than bias cut gowns in an English country estate.  In this case, the butler investigated it….

Switching from Cannes to the farthest reaches of Scotland and from thriller to women’s fiction, another win was Jenny Colgan’s Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages.  I do love authors who grow with you.  When I was in my 20s, Jenny Colgan was writing chick lit; in my 30s, as I sat in the nursery chair with my babies, I read about her characters snuggling their babies (although theirs slept better than mine, which was slightly irksome); and now I’m loving her latest about a fifty-something mother dealing with middle-age and her grown children (admittedly, mine aren’t that grown yet, but I am right with this heroine on graying roots, thinning hair, and thickening waist).   In Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages, ambitious twenty-something Essie loses her high flying finance job in Edinburgh and has to move back in with her mother in their tiny seaside town.  But the real heroine of this book is her mother, Janey, trying to figure out what life looks post-fifty, now complicated by the addition of a grumpy adult daughter who doesn’t want to be there.

After that, it was back to the village of Taviscombe with another of my favorite fifty-something heroines, Mrs. Malory, in Mrs. Malory and the Lilies that Fester, in which Mrs. Malory’s son’s fiancee is accused of murder and it’s up to Mrs. Malory to clear her future daughter-in-law’s name.  Have I mentioned recently how much I love libraries in general and the mid-Hudson Library system in particular?  Many of the Mrs. Malory books are long since out of print and several haven’t been digitized– but Desmond-Fish Library in Garrison and Grinnell Library in Wappingers have kept me in Mrs. Malory all this summer and I couldn’t be more grateful.

I do have some new books waiting, but I couldn’t resist returning to the Miss Silver marathon I began in early June.  Back in the dark days of lockdown, I binge read Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series, classic golden age mysteries about a governess turned private detective– but I binged them out of order.  So it seemed like a good idea to go back and read them in order, except for the first two, which felt less like mysteries and more like the sort of thrillers Dorothy Sayers made fun of in her books.  I re-read books three through twenty back in June before being distracted by other books, but this week I went back to it, with books twenty-one and twenty-two: The Watersplash and Ladies Bane, both set in small English villages where Miss Silver comes to the rescue, discovering the guilty and exonerating the innocent.  I’m not sure why I find the Miss Silver books so deeply addictive, but it’s like those old Pringles commercials, once you pop, you can’t stop.

What have you been reading this week?