#1040: The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (2023) by Janice Hallett

Alperton Angels

star filledstar filledstar filledstar filledstars
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?

Continue reading

#1037: Catt Out of the Bag (1939) by Clifford Witting

Catt Out of the Bag

star filledstar filledstar filledstar filledstars
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…

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

Miss Pinkerton

star filledstarsstarsstarsstars
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.

Continue reading