Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
When someone sends you an advance copy of Maureen Johnson’s latest Truly Devious mystery, what is one to do but drop everything and read it immediately? In The Velvet Knife, Stevie, broken-hearted after the end of the last book (no, if you haven’t read it, I’m not telling you), heads to my own hometown of NYC for the holidays, where the Summer of Love meets Only Murders in the Building when not one but two people in the apartment building where Stevie is staying die mysteriously, leaving a trail back to a Mount Holyoke drop out and a commune upstate fifty years before. Of course, I read it in one sitting (or as close to one sitting as you can get while snapping at kids that you’re reading), and now the only question is– will Stevie be back for another mystery after this one?
Remember in the old days when you’d read series out of order because you’d stumble on one in a bookstore, not realizing there were others? That just happened to me with The Spy and the Snake, about a middle-aged Englishwoman working on the very low rungs of MI5 in the 1960s. I was about two chapters in when it dawned on me that so much backstory probably meant an actual back story, but by then I was so committed to this particular story that I couldn’t make myself abandon it and find the first book first. Even without having read the first book, I adored Maggie Flynn’s second adventure, having to spirit a defector out of Cold War Hungary. For my fellow Mrs. Polifax fans, think Mrs. Polifax in her forties and British, but just as marvelous.
After that, it was linguistic conundrums and murder with Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition. The staff of the Oxford-based CED (the Clarendon English Dictionary, clearly no relation at all to the OED in any way) forms an unlikely crime-solving team as a series of anonymous letters directs them via Shakespeare and riddles to the decade old disappearance of one of the CED’s employees, Charlie Thornhill, a brilliant but problematic PhD student. There’s just one problem: any one of them might have dunnit. (Except Safi, the junior on staff, who was ten when it happened.) Come for the obscure historical words; stay to find out just what happened to Charlie Thornhill and why.
After bouncing hard off a book that had been billed to me as the next Rivers of London, but felt just a little too gritty for my taste (too many drug dealers, not enough whimsy), I went back to the safety of my Miss Silver-a-thon, with Out of the Past, Book 23 in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver mystery series, in which the return of the family bad apple after three years abroad leads to… murder. (Surprise!) It’s a classic Miss Silver: the young couple caught in the cross hairs, the return of the prodigal creating chaos, secrets from the past, and Miss Silver knitting a pink coatee for her latest great-niece.
What have you been reading this week?
All my library holds seemed to come available at once in these last couple weeks, which was both awesome (yay! I can finally read this!) and terrible (oh no, what if I don’t have time to read this one before it has to go back?)
Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter was wonderful and cozy.
Ashley Poston’s young adult Star Wars romance (yup) Eyes Like Stars was good (it was interesting to see her writing in a universe with such established canon, vs. her Geekerella series, which was a love letter to fandom itself).
Then I had to put even library holds on hold and read Jennifer Ashley’s newest Below Stairs release, Murder in Blackfriars. The protagonist Kat Holloway is a cook in late Victorian England, and in this installment is attempting to assist her beau Daniel to discover more about his past. The only problem with the Below Stairs books is that I always end up craving whatever pastry delights Mrs. Holloway creates (in between her detection activities)!