Happy Friday, all!

Having started the series the wrong way round, I went back and read the first in M.J. Robotham’s engaging Cold War spy series, Mrs. Spy, and it was just as good as the second book.  With a wardrobe full of disguises, forty-five year old Maggie Flynn is one of MI 5’s donkeys: the Watchers who do the grunt work for the Secret Service.  That is, when she’s not dealing with her Beatles-obsessed teenage daughter or her flinging-off-the-shackles-of-convention self-reinventing mother.  But the discovery of a major secret in her dead husband’s past sends Maggie on a dangerous hunt for the truth.  For those other Mrs. Polifax fans out there, I suspect Maggie and Mrs. Polifax would have gotten along.

I moved up in time from 1960s Britain to the present day with J.D. Brinkworth’s The Pie and Mash Detective Agency, in which Jane Pye and Simon Mash get sucked into a mysterious series of unsolved disappearances while taking a course on how to be a private investigator.  Who is Nellie Thorne and why does she keep disappearing, generation after generation?  Is she a real woman?  A ghost?  A suburban legend?  Leave it to Pye and Mash to discover the truth!  I can’t remember if I saw this compared to Tommy and Tuppence or if I just thought that and then ascribed it to someone else, but it has the same sort of charm as Agatha Christie’s crime-solving duo.

Then I popped back my Patricia Wentworth-a-thon for I’ve-lost-track-of-what-number, The Silent Pool, in which an aging stage legend recruits Miss Silver when she suspects someone in her household might be trying to murder her.

What have you been reading this week?