Happy Friday, all!

So many excellent new books this week!  (Courtesy of two very long back to back flights to and from Arizona.)  I started with the new Claire Mackintosh, It’s Not What You Think, which was just as twisty as it sounds.  I loved her DI Ffion Morgan mysteries (for my fellow devotees of British police procedurals!), and have recently been branching out into her stand alones.  This last one– well, I don’t want to say anything because it really isn’t what you think.  I’ll just tell you that my third grader was very impressed by the initial plot twist when I told him all about it at the bus stop the other day because it was just that cool.  And that’s just the plot twist that happens a quarter of the way in!

Next up was Evelyn Clarke’s The Ending Writes Itself, about a disparate group of writers summoned to a retreat in a castle on a Scottish island reachable only by boat….  (Is this starting to sound familiar??)  There’s the crime writer, the YA writer, the horror writer, the romance writer, the newbie writer, all summoned by a Very Famous Mystery author to his private island.  Except the mystery writer is dead.  And their job is to compete to complete his unfinished final novel.  But how can they turn in their pages when someone seems intent on picking them off one by one?  This makes a great companion read to The Author’s Guide to Murder: industry satire, Scottish island, murder.  But they’re very different books and I enjoyed this one immensely.

Once that was done, it was off to The Cloak and Dagger Club.  Does anyone else remember the stories of the Detection Club, that storied gathering of Golden Age crime writers, featuring Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie…  I could go on and on. (And apparently it still exists and Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen has attended as a guest!  But I digress.)  The Cloak and Dagger Club bears a notable resemblance to that august institution…. In this historical mystery, crime writer Lucy is thrilled to be invited to the Cloak and Dagger Club, but less thrilled when their host is murdered after the meeting and her ex-fiance, a fellow mystery writer, is the prime suspect.  Together, the two crime writers have to figure out which of their friends dunnit.

I finished off the week revisiting an old friend: Elizabeth Peters’s Devil May Care, in which a vacation house-sitting job for Ellie’s wealthy and eccentric Aunt Kate is enlivened by a series of hauntings, stirring up old tensions and secrets in a small Virginia town.

What have you been reading this week?

In other news, I’m on the road!!  Join me tonight, 10/9, in Columbia, PA in conversation with Lindsay Hameroff (6:30 pm, Columbia Public Library) and next Thursday, 10/15, in Carmel, IN (2pm, Carmel Clay Public Library).