Happy Friday, all! I was utterly absorbed by Julia London’s Rules for Aging and Larceny, about four best friends who reunite in their seventies for one last heist.  Recommended for fans of The Thursday Murder Club and Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age.  The book was so engrossing that I gulped it up in…

Happy Friday, all! This week I started out with Melissa Albert’s The Children, which cleverly isn’t quite what you think it’s going to be.  The story involves the children of the author of a beloved series of children’s books (the author tragically dead young, the books unfinished) in which they played the starring roles.  So……

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:…

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,…