Well, it took seven-and-a-half years and over one thousand posts, but it’s finally happened: I have read a book about which I can find nothing to say.
Continue reading#1042: Minor Felonies – The Good Turn (2022) by Sharna Jackson
#1041: Sisters Are Doin’ it for Themselves in Enola Holmes (2020) [Scr. Jack Thorne, Dir. Harry Bradbeer]
#1040: The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (2023) by Janice Hallett
Belial. Behemoth. Beelzebub. Asmodeus. Satanas. Lucifer. The Antichrist has had many names in many cultures, and taken many forms, such as 18 years ago when a young woman gave birth to the Prince of Darkness. Thankfully, she was identified by a small group of angels who had taken human form and who knew that the baby had to be killed during a particular cosmic alignment in order to stop it simply being reborn over and over. What happened to that young woman, and to the angels who saved her, has been the subject of intense speculation ever since, and now true crime writer Amanda Bailey is going to dig into the case of the Alperton Angels and get to the bottom of all the nonsense. Because it was all nonsense. Right?
#1039: Minor Felonies – The Case of the Missing Marquess (2006) by Nancy Springer
I think I’ve been dimly aware of Nancy Springer’s series centred on Enola Holmes, much younger sister of the more famous Sherlock and Mycroft, for a number of years, but it was only the recent(ish) filming of the first book which brought the series more firmly into my orbit.
Continue reading#1038: A Little Help for my Friends – Finding a Modern Locked Room Mystery for TomCat Attempt #21: Murder at Black Oaks (2022) by Phillip Margolin
Listen, if I was a lawyer and someone had built a replica of a house cursed by werewolves in an isolated location called Solitude Mountain, there’s no hourly rate in the world that would get me driving there for a spooky weekend.
Continue reading#1037: Catt Out of the Bag (1939) by Clifford Witting
On the evening of 21st December, a group of carollers — or “waits”, a turn of phrase that was new to me — organised by the formidable Mrs. de Frayne are stopping and singing at prime spots in the small town of Paulsfield while collectors go door-to-door to raise money for the local hospital. Already struggling to keep to their strict timetable, things are frustrated further when Mr. Vavasour, one of the collectors, does not return from his allocated stretch of road, and so the party moves on without him, assuming that he has gone home. And later that evening, Mrs. Vavasour phones the De Fraynes to enquire after her husband, worried because he has not yet come home from the carolling…
#1036: Minor Felonies – This Book Kills (2023) by Ravena Guron
Another exclusive boarding school, another murderer on the loose — if mysteries for younger readers are anything to go by, put your kids in the local comp to keep them safe.
Continue reading#1035: “Our guest has a problem and I direct him to favour us with it.” – Tales of the Black Widowers [ss] (1974) by Isaac Asimov
“Twelve mystery masterpieces by the maestro” promises the back cover of Tales of the Black Widowers (1974), the first collection featuring Isaac Asimov’s puzzle-solving dining club, and given that Asimov says in the introduction that his “detective ideal is Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells” it seems like it might not be an empty promise…
Continue reading#1034: Miss Pinkerton, a.k.a. The Double Alibi (1932) by Mary Roberts Rinehart
I’ve probably, at some point in this blog, been less invested in the outcome of a mystery than I was while reading Miss Pinkerton (1932) by Mary Roberts Rinehart, but rarely have I dreaded the oncoming pages as much as I did here. When the second death occurs at the two-thirds point, I felt my heart sink when I realised that approximately 486,000 pages of this 237-page novel remained and that, as much as I admired the pluck of Miss Hilda Adams, a private nurse called in by Inspector Patton to keep an eye on suspects in a murder case whenever the police aren’t able to be quite so free in their investigations, I just didn’t care any more and probably never had.
The Invisible Event 