Happy Friday, all!

Right now, I’m happily immersed in A Fatal Legacy, the fourth book in Charlotte Vassell’s DI Caius Beauchamp series, which just arrived for me from England.  (Note to U.S. publishers: make these available here again, please!  Also the Reverend Richard Coles’s Canon Clement novels.  Just saying.)  In this installment, the eccentric scion of a Victorian collector has been found poisoned with hemlock in the musty mansion devoted to his relative’s purloined curiosities (think shrunken heads and bits chiseled off the Parthenon– we’ve all been to that museum) and Caius is on the case.  If you haven’t read these yet, go back and start with The Other Half, which was my favorite book of two summers ago.

I finally read this year’s It Book, Yesteryear, and I will simply say that it was not the book for me– or perhaps I was not the reader for it.  I will confine my thoughts on this to my text chain with my best friend and leave it at that.

In happier reading, I cleared my palette with more vintage Mrs. Malory mysteries: Books 14 and 15, Death in Practice and The Silent Killer, in which the murderees are, respectively, a vet who is not at all James Herriot and an elderly World War II vet whose lifetime of bonhomie may not have been all that bonhominous.  Unlike some series which stale as they go along, I adore Mrs. Malory more with every successive installment.

Keeping to the vintage cozy theme, I finally picked up one of the few Charlotte MacLeods I hadn’t read yet: the turn of the century set King Devil in which poor relation Lavinia goes to visit her eccentric guardian at her newly purchased summer home and stumbles onto a murder mystery which will up-end her existence.  Of all the MacLeod stand alones, this one felt closest in tone to her Sarah Kelling books (I’m not sure why, but I love MacLeod’s series and tend to bounce off her stand alones), but I suspect it won’t be a reread for me.

What have you been reading this week?

p.s. as hard as it is to believe, my book tour travel kicks off just a week from today!  Find me next Friday (9/25) in Natchez and next Saturday (9/26) in Jackson where What Happens at Nightfall will be available for sale for the very first time….  It will still be a week before the official pub date of 10/6, but my publisher granted a special dispensation for the Mississippi Book Festival.  I can’t wait to share the new book with you!