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…

Happy Friday, all! The win of this week for me was Clare Mackintosh’s The Butler, which I picked up partly because I loved her Ffion Morgan series and partly because Library Journal described it as an homage to Christie and Poirot.  The Christie comparison was spot on.  Even though the book was set in Cannes…

Happy Friday, all! This week started out with a whimper for me when I bounced hard off two recent, high buzz thrillers (no, I’m not naming either– that’s between me and my local librarians who see my summer reading log).  There went this week’s reading plan…. But then I landed on B.K. Borison’s Lovelight Farms,…

Happy Friday, all! It’s been a new book bonanza!  This week, true to my promise to read books that have come out this decade, I started out with Ashley Winstead’s This Book Will Bury Me, about a college student who falls down the rabbit hole of internet true crime sleuthing after grief over her father’s…

Happy Friday, all! This week I retreated back into the village of Taviscombe with Mrs. Malory, the Jessica Fletcher of 1990s England.  I am ridiculously addicted to these vintage cozy mysteries, although I’ve been trying to pace myself so I don’t read them all up too quickly.  This week, it was Superfluous Death, involving dodgy…

Happy Friday, all! I started the week with a recent thriller: Sarah Vaughn’s Based on a True Story, in which an elderly and beloved children’s book author summons her family, friends, and colleagues for a 70th birthday bash at her newly purchased (and, of course, isolated and cliffside) estate in Cornwall, while a BBC documentary…

Happy Friday, all! My surprise hit this week was Emma Garman’s The Kindness of Strangers.  A murder in a boarding house in 1950s London….  I’d been lukewarm on the premise, but I wound up gobbling up the book in one marathon late night session.  The characters might sound like stock figures: the boarding house owner,…

Happy Friday, all! There’s something very special about getting to read, in all its shiny bookish glory, a book you saw in progress.  I was lucky to be a member of the magical Deer Mountain Writers Retreat a couple of years ago (fighting my way through the early chapters of What Happens at Nightfall).  One…

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…

Happy Friday, all! After a whirlwind couple of weeks on the road for The Author’s Guide to Murder I’m finally back at my computer– and I promise to share a tour round-up here soon!  It’s been a marvelous blur of bagpipers, plaid, prosecco, and haggis hors d’oeuvres.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined…