Happy Friday, all!

The absolute stand out book of this week for me was a 1990s British cozy mystery, recommended by one of my favorite book gurus, Robin Agnew of Aunt Agatha’s, Hazel Holt’s Gone Away.  The heroine is a widow in her fifties in a small English village (also an esteemed literary critic, although she doesn’t let that get in the way of making marmalade and baking cakes for the bring and buy), and I cannot overstate how much I adore her.  Basically, she’s Joyce from the Thursday Murder Club if you had a whole book of Joyce and only Joyce.  And there are twenty-one books in the series!

In new books (I try to read at least one new book a week, so I don’t disappear entirely into an English village), I read Murder at the Hotel Orient, which was clever and unexpected in all sorts of ways.  The heroine is a concierge at a– shall we call it a hotel of assignations?– in Vienna and finds herself assisting the police after the murder of one of her former lovers at the hotel turns her into both a suspect and an amateur detective with an expertise in the seedier side of Vienna’s nightlife.

After that, I went back– well, not to an English village, but to the next closest thing: the Englishwoman abroad, revisiting M.M. Kaye’s Death In books.  In my teens and early twenties, back in the days when you could only read what you could find at the bookstore or library, and there weren’t backlists constantly available, I’d practically memorized some of the Death In books (the spines have cracked and detached on my copies of Death in Cyprus and Death in the Andamans), but others I’d only got my hands on as a one time inter-library loan.  So Death in Kashmir and Death in Berlin were practically new books for me!  (Isn’t it wonderful when you don’t remember whodunnit and get to read it fresh?)

Now, of course, I’m off to get the second Hazel Holt book….

What have you been reading this week?