The "I am currently reading" thread

[metalman]

February's crop of crime, mainly.

 

Robert Thorogood - Death comes to Marlow. Pensioner Judith Potts and her colleagues in the Marlow Murder Club are back, investigating when the Mayor is crushed under a heavy shelf in his study during a garden party. Richard Osman fans will love it, and I thought it was better structured than the first. An enjoyable cosy read.

Harry Stephen Keeler - The murdered mathematician. In order to inherit his father's estate, 7ft 6in giant Quiribus Brown has to solve a mathematically-related murder before the end of the month. And what do you know, such a murder has just happened... As bonkers as ever, but this is another later Keeler so it's not so good as the earlier ones. OK though. Would have been better if he'd got the maths right for a start.

Elly Griffiths - The night hawks. A group of nocturnal metal detectorists find a body on a Norfolk beach. Dr Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson tie it in with another murder on a farm.

Elly Griffiths - The locked room. During the first Covid lockdown, DCI Nelson investigates a series of apparent suicides.

Elly Griffiths - The last remains. Body discovered walled up in a Kings Lynn cafe. This is the 15th and for now last book in the series so I thought I'd finish off the last three together. They all display the same strengths of incidental detail, humour, and relationships, but also in differing extents the same weaknesses (plotting, daft motives, Ruth usually ending up trapped by the murderer at the end). Overall though a series well worth reading, even though occasionally it seems to veer alarmingly towards chick lit rather than crime.

Freeman Wills Crofts - The end of Andrew Harrison. Now this is more of a proper classical detective story, with clues and actual detection. Harrison, a financier who gives everyone around him plenty of reason to hate him, is murdered on his houseboat at Henley. Inspector French investigates in his usual methodical and meticulous way. Absolutely brilliant.

Rebecca Rego Barry - Rare books uncovered. This month's odd one out. Examples of how bibliophiles who know what they're looking for (or at) have managed to find copies of rare books at yard sales, charity shops, in skips and so on. Inspiring and depressing in equal measure.

Bruno Fischer - Croaked the raven. Grocer Sam Tree has problems: his secretive wife, her two ex-husbands (one a crook, the other a gambler), and a man with a gun who wants twenty thousand dollars. A good pulpy hardboiled thriller.

C.H.B. Kitchin - Crime at Christmas. Malcolm Warren is spending Christmas with friends but on Christmas morning he finds the body of a fellow guest impaled on his balcony railings. Nicely written witty detective story.

 

[wearysmith]

Took me over two months to finish this. I just couldn't get into it. I have dozens of King books and generally come away satisfied. With this one, no.

Two thirds of the way in I still didn't care less who got eaten and whether the villains were caught or not.

 

Only thing that did get my attention was the "A millionaire walks into a bar...." coda running through the book. I might have packed it in as a bad job halfway through if it hadn't have been for that story tangent. 

 

[metalman]

Another month, another selection of mainly crime and science fiction...

 

David Mitchell - Black Swan Green. A year in the life of Jason Taylor, 13, growing up in a Worcestershire village at the time of the Falklands War. This was Mitchell's semi-autobiographical novel, as he did grow up in such a village (in a neat touch, the names of some real Worcestershire villages are used as the surnames of some of the characters). Excellent.

Peter Robinson - Wednesday's child. The sixth in the Inspector Banks series. A child is abducted by fake social workers, and a man is knifed to death at a mine; the seemingly separate cases turn out to be linked. Another really good one.

Ross Macdonald - The ivory grin. Hired to find a missing nurse, Lew Archer soon finds himself caught up in murder and the search for a kidnapped socialite. As good as the rest of the series.

Leo Bruce - Case with ropes and rings. Sergeant Beef, who got the better of some thinly-disguised more famous detectives in 'Case for Three detectives', and his snobbish chronicler Lionel Townsend, investigate when a boy is found hanged in the gym at a public school. Beef's methods involve drinking lots of beer and playing darts, but he gets there in the end. 

Leo Bruce - Cold Blood. Sergeant Beef is on the case again when a millionaire is bashed over the head with a croquet mallet. I really like this series; it's high time someone reprinted them. 

Poul Anderson - Tau zero. A starship develops a fault which means it has to keep accelerating. I remember reading this in the early 70s and being suitably mind-boggled by it, and I thought it was still pretty good now.

Edith-Jane Bahr - Help please. Stopped at a traffic light in a snowstorm, a woman sees a girl in the neighbouring car mouthing these words. When the girl is found murdered, she realises she could be in danger too. Good.

John Buxton Hilton - Dead-Nettle. Inspector Brunt investigates a woman's murder in a Derbyshire lead-mining village in 1905. Lots of local and period detail, but a decent mystery too.

'BB' - A child alone. Denys Watkins-Pitchford's autobiographical account of his early years growing up in a rectory in Northamptonshire. A naturalist of the old school (hunting, shooting, fishing, birds-egg collecting), he wrote all his books under that pseudonym, but illustrated them under his own name (leading one reviewer to say it was as though the artist could see into the author's head). 

Cordwainer Smith - Quest of the three worlds. For about ten years spanning the 1950s and 60s, Smith was one of the most original SF writers around. This short novel is actually a fix-up of four shorter works, and while not his best, it's still got the same magic. Sadly he died at the early age of 53 in 1966, thus depriving the field of a major talent.

Stephen Booth - Dead and buried. Finally got back to the Cooper and Fry series after a few months gap. Wildfire arson and murder at an isolated pub in the Peak District. Excellent.

[ukdobby]

Mandy,probably funniest thing on tv at the moment though not much to beat.

[ukdobby]

2 minutes ago, ukdobby said:

Mandy,probably funniest thing on tv at the moment though not much to beat.

Wrong thread,should be on what am I watching on tv.

[Derby]

The Kings's  Assassin.

[feargal]

Just finished That Bonesetter Woman by Frances Quinn. Very enjoyable.

[metalman]

Mostly crime again this month.

 

Leo Bruce - Death on All Hallowe'en. This isn't a Sergeant Beef story, instead it features Bruce's other recurring sleuth, schoolmaster Carolus Deene, here investigating the death of a boy in a superstitious village. The Deene books tend to be more serious in tone than the Beef ones. It was OK but I prefer the latter.

Jonathan Meades - Filthy English. Over the course of a few short stories, Meades manages to cover almost every sort of perversion known to man. Despite which, they were cleverly written and enjoyable.

Anne Blaisdell - Strange felony. A selection of cases for Hollywood detective Ivor Maddox and his squad. If this sounds very similar to the Luis Mendoza series by Dell Shannon, that's because the authors were the same person and really, if you changed the names, it could easily be a Mendoza book instead. Not bad though.

John Sherwood - The limericks of Lachasse. Hapless Englishman sent to manage a chemical plant on the German-Swiss border investigates the demise of his predecessor. Good.

Frank Parrish - Caught in the birdlime. I thought I'd read all of these mysteries featuring poacher Dan Mallett but here's another one. Not bad, but perhaps not as good as earlier ones in the series.

Jeff Noon - Automated Alice. Lewis Carroll's Alice steps into a clock and is transplanted through time to 1990s Manchester. Pretty good this one, with plenty of amusing wordplay.

J. S. Fletcher - Murder in the Squire's Pew. Called in to investigate a church theft, detectives Camberwell & Chaney soon find a man's body in a box pew. Unusually for the era, it takes the combined efforts of them and the police to solve the mystery. It's a typical Fletcher novel in that the leisurely journey to the solution is followed by a bit of a rushed ending, but as a traditional detective story, it wasn't bad.

Alasdair Gray - Mavis Belfrage. A short novel and some short stories. Gray was all the rage in the 90s but since his death he seems to have slipped out of public consciousness. Very good in his usual slightly nihilistic way.

Ross Macdonald - Find a victim. Private eye Lew Archer does exactly that, picking up a dying man on the side of the road. Before long he is caught up in a complex web of murder (it goes without saying). I thought this was one of the better ones, but the standard of the whole series is excellent.

Kate Ellis - The merchant's house

Kate Ellis - The Armada boy. Like Elly Griffiths, Kate Ellis writes a series where a police investigation is linked with archaeology and events in the past; these were the first two. In this case the main character is DS Wesley Peterson, a black Londoner transplanted to the Devon coast (a thinly disguised Dartmouth) who has a degree in archaeology. In the first one, a kidnapped boy and a woman murdered on a clifftop turn out to reflect the events in the title establishment in the 17th century. In the second, an American GI on a reunion trip is murdered, with parallels to events in 1588 when Spanish sailors got ashore after their ship sank. First impressions: Ellis is a better writer and a better plotter than Griffiths, so I think I'm going to enjoy this series if she keeps it up (there are about 20 in the series by now).

 

[wearysmith]

Simply the best 30p a week a growing lad could spend on a Thursday. Wish I'd saved more. They're still a fun read.

 

[wearysmith]

This was hard to put down. 'Compelling' turned out to be true, not just some random blurb placed on the cover to sell it.

 

If I had an issue it was flipping through time periods, back and forwards. It's an overused device in modern-day storytelling.

 

As an aside, the 'Alex Evens' character is from the North. His workmates even nickname him Stainless Steel because of his Yorkshire grit. What made me smile was the way the author had written in that as he was from Yorkshire and knew cold, he'd be able to cope in Finland two weeks before Christmas. Ha! I felt I had to put 2 jumpers and a coat to read it at times.