What We’re Reading

LUCY BURDETTE: Ok Reds, time to restock the TBR piles! The past month has been so hectic, with a cross country trip to visit the new grandbaby, lots of Friends of the Key West Library work, and my own work too. I have been reading though–especially on that plane trip. (It kept my mind off the prospect of virus particles circulating…). In the department of Francophile lit, I enjoyed THE KEEPER OF HAPPY ENDINGS by Barbara Davis about a family of women who made magical wedding gowns, and LOVE AMONG THE RECIPES by Carol M. Cram, Paris and food–what else to say?

I also finished Mia Manansala’s ARSENIC AND ADOBO, a charming foodie cozy set in the restaurant of a Filipino family, and at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, BLACKTOP WASTELAND by S. A. Cosby. That book is a wow–the tension, the pace, the violence, the writing! Our pal Barbara Ross interviewed Sean for our Friends’ speaker series–you’ll want to listen in!

At the moment, I’m reading THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE, by Richard Osman. I’m late to this phenomenon–what a hoot! (You'll also see some upcoming reads in that stack of mine.)

HALLIE EPHRON: I loved THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE. So very clever. 

Next up in my TBR pile are books my daughters gave me for Christmas. Looking forward to Elizabeth Strout’s OH WILLIAM! (her OLIVE KITTERIDGE is one of my favorites of all time) and Susan Orleans essay collection ON ANIMALS. 

Then moving on to Lee McIntyre’s THE ART OF GOOD AND EVIL. I read an early version of this book years ago and I am really looking forward to seeing it newly polished. Lee is a philosopher and the questions he raises in his writing set his mysteries in a class by themselves. Is crime ever justified?  I can’t wait to see what he does with that fundamental question.

RHYS BOWEN: I haven’t had much time for reading, recovering from fifteen guests for Christmas and then proof reads for one book, polishing the next Royal Spyness and then starting on the next stand alone. Then the reading I’ve done is almost all blurbs—one of which I thought was fantastic. It’s called Widowland by C J Carey (who also wrote a Berlin series as Jane Thynne that was really good). It has been published in UK but will be released here in May, I believe. 

The story has the same feel as The Handmaid’s Tale—dystopia, women suffering. The premise is that England surrendered to Germany in WWII and now life is regulated with awful punishments. Widows are at the bottom rung of society because they are no longer useful. But maybe they are cleverly plotting against the government. Great tension and lots to think about!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I am on such a run of incredible books!  I just finished Adele Parks’ WOMAN LAST SEEN–Adele is amazing. Brilliant book.  Another definite absolute must read is Janice Hallett’s THE APPEAL. One of the cleverest most intriguing books I have ever read–it’s all in emails and documents, and my first thought was “NO I am NOT reading this.” But I had to, to do an interview with the author, and I am still thinking about it. She is a genius, and completely deconstructs the way we look at storytelling. It’s almost–interactive. Read it, you’ll see what I mean. And I cannot wait for her next book, The Twyford Code. 

I am now in the happy midst of THE DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS by Eva Jurzyk. And as you can tell by the title, it’s sort of quirky Agatha Christie meets The Midnight Library. I love it. And: do not miss THE MAID  by Nita Prose. So so so good! A locked room mystery in a grand hotel–and the main character is the most charmingly unique person ever.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm afraid I'm writing writing writing so am hardly reading at all at the moment. My treat at the end of the day is a chapter or two of Rhys's GOD REST YE ROYAL GENTLEMEN, which I saved for a Christmas read and am just now getting to! Such fun!

Next up in my to-read stack are Karen Odden's DOWN A DARK RIVER and Richard Osman's THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB. And I have on order the new Charles Todd Ian Rutledge novel, A GAME OF FEAR, the new Stephanie Barron Jane Austen, JANE AND THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER (out Tuesday!), and the new Elly Griffith's Ruth Galloway book, THE LOCKED ROOM, which is just out in the UK. It doesn't publish in the US until June and I didn't want to wait, so ordered it from the UK.

JENN McKINLAY: SO many great books! I’m listening to PROJECT HAIL MARY by Andy Weir - it’s brilliant - the narrator makes the story so incredibly engaging. I’m reading LOVE HYPOTHESIS by Ali Hazelwood and so far it’s ridiculously charming, THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO by Taylor Jenkins Reid and, as always, I am blown away by her writing, and rounding it all out, I just started Hot and Sour Suspects by Vivien Chien and it is perfection because Vivien is just that good.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I need to subscribe to some publisher’s newsletters or something, because I am hopelessly behind on what mysteries and thrillers are coming out and when. Right now, my nonfiction read is THE BRIGHT AGES: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry. It’s a fascinating, well-told survey of the recent scholarship which reveals Europe in the Middle Ages was far more sophisticated and globally connected than we’ve all been told. My fiction right now is a re-read: MURDER IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE by my friend Jessica Ellicott. If you like Rhys’s Lady Georgie books or Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple mysteries, you will love Jess’s Beryl and Edwina series. Finally, my audiobook is DEEP WORK by Cal Newport, pursuant to my word of the year, which was DEEP!

How about you Reds, what are you reading?

The Midnight Hour--Elly Griffiths

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Every so often on Jungle Red we get to have fan girl moments and today is one of mine. I have devoured Elly Griffiths' books from the very first Ruth Galloway, and although I came a bit late to The Stranger Diaries, I loved that, too, and the subsequent novel featuring DS Harbinder Kaur. So how had I somehow missed The Brighton Mysteries?

I can only plead "too many books in the to-read pile." But a couple of months ago I discovered the first Brighton book, The Zig Zag Girl, in my Audible library, and once I started it, I was absolutely hooked. Of course the good thing about starting a series behind is that you can binge on the available books, and binge I did! I listened to the first five books (the narrator, James Langton, is wonderful) one right after the other and I felt bereft when I finished the fifth book. I love these characters, I love the Brighton in the fifties (and then the sixties) setting, and I love the glimpse into the world of magic and Variety. 

But what, I wondered, drew Elly from Ruth the contemporary archeologist and Harbinder the contemporary detective to post-war theater? The answer is as fascinating as the books, and here is Elly to explain.

ELLY GRIFFITHS: My grandfather, Frederick Goodwin, was born in 1897 in Hastings, England. Along with his two best friends, all three called Freddie, he lied about his age to join up in the First World War. They thought the war would be over by Christmas but, by December 1914, the other two Freddies were dead. Grandad fought on, first in the trenches and then in the newly-formed Royal Flying Corps. He ended the war, aged only twenty-two, as an Acting Major in the RFC.  Like a lot of veterans Grandad didn’t talk about his service, but the one thing he did say has stayed in my mind. ‘After everything I saw in the war, there was only one job I could do. Become a comedian.’

    So Frederick Goodwin became Dennis Lawes. Grandad said it was because the shorter name looked bigger on the playbills but I wonder if he just wanted to leave his old life behind him.

     Grandad was a Variety entertainer, sometimes called Vaudeville in the US. He travelled around the country, performing in a different town every week. Sunday was changeover day and, at certain train junctions, like the tea rooms on Crewe station, the performers would meet and swap stories. I have described this world in the opening pages of The Midnight Hour.

    Somehow, during this peripatetic life, Grandad met and married his first wife, my Grandmother. She died when I was young but I will never forget her name: Ellen (Elly) Griffiths. Ellen and Dennis had one child, my mother Sheila. For reasons of her own, Ellen left her husband and baby when Sheila was only two. Grandad then brought up his daughter on his own, taking her with him from show to show, staying in theatrical digs. My mum had lots of memories of this time: tap dancing on the empty stage, Grandad trying to darn her socks, friendly landladies and scary ventriloquists. She also remembered quite a few chorus girl ‘aunties’. I should say that Grandad married three times and all his wives were dancers. 

    When mum was ten, Grandad sent her to boarding school. It’s hard to know what else he could have done but Mum found the adjustment hard. She’d never been to school before and her companions were acrobats and sword-swallowers, not children her own age. But she made good friends at Heath House and her memories of that time became my children’s series, A Girl Called Justice. 

    In the holidays, Mum would join her father wherever he was performing. She would get on a train and travel, on her own, from Surrey to Blackpool, Glasgow or Scarborough. ‘When you got there, how did you know where the theatre was?’ I asked once. ‘In any town,’ said Mum, ‘I could always find the theatre.’

    I was very close to my Grandad. He died when I was fifteen and left me his playbills in his will. I didn’t really appreciate this at the time but, about ten years ago, my sister had some of them framed for me. I began to be obsessed with the names. Stephen Lang: not quite himself. Roy Dexter: novelty comedian. Dorothy Gray and Brother (why doesn’t he even get a name? maybe she had lots of brothers and rotated them in the act?). The Two Konyots (?). And, especially, Lou Lenny and Her Unrideable Mule. Was it a real animal or two people inside a mule costume? In either case, it’s easy to see why it was unrideable.

    Grandad was also on the bill with Jasper Maskelyne, the magician who famously put together the Second World War espionage group, The Magic Gang. They created dummy tanks and fake soldiers. They were meant to have made the Suez Canal disappear, through deployment of ‘dazzle lights’. I began to think of a story about a magician called Max Mephisto. He would have been involved in a similar group along with his friend, Edgar Stephens, who later became a police officer. That idea became The Zig Zag Girl, the first of the Brighton Mysteries. 

    The Midnight Hour is the sixth in the series. It’s set in 1965 and the world of entertainment is changing. But I still haven’t worked out the secret of the unrideable mule.

DEBS: Elly's grandfather Dennis Lawes looks just how I imagine her magician character, the dashing Max Mephisto.

Here's more about The Midnight Hour.

September 1965
When theatrical impresario Bert Billington is found dead in his retirement home in Rottingdean, an idyllic village outside Brighton, at first no-one thinks it’s suspicious. But when he is found to have been poisoned,  suspicion falls on his wife, ex Variety star Verity Malone.  But it’s 1965 and Verity has been reading Betty Friedan. She insists on being interviewed by a woman police officer and employs private detectives Emma Holmes and Sam Collins to clear her name.

WPC Meg Connolly finds herself caught between the PIs (one of whom is her boss’s wife) and her sometimes offensive colleagues. The resulting chase takes them to Whitby – where Max Mephisto is playing Dracula’s father – and into the Bert Billington’s dark past in the early days of Music Hall. It becomes clear that the murderer is someone who knows him very well indeed.

Elly Griffiths wrote four novels under her own name (Domenica de Rosa) before turning to crime with The Crossing Places, the first novel featuring forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway. The Crossing Places won the Mary Higgins Clark award and three novels in the series have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. The Night Hawks (Ruth #13, published in February 2021) was number two in the  Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers list. Elly also writes the Brighton Mysteries, set in the theatrical world of the 1950s. In 2016 Elly was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library for her body of work. Her first standalone mystery, The Stranger Diaries, won the 2020 Edgar award for Best Crime Novel. The second, The Postscript Murders, has recently been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Elly also writes A Girl Called Justice, a mystery series for children. 

DEBS: Needless to say I have The Midnight Hour pre-ordered and cannot wait to find out what is happening in Brighton!

REDS and readers, do you follow authors from series to series, or standalone to standalone, even though the setting and even the time period may be quite different?  Who are some of your favorite series-shifting authors?

                                               
 

Deborah Crombie--It Takes a Village

DEBORAH CROMBIE: In mid-July I'm doing this fabulous panel at the virtual Malice Domestic, MORE THAN MALICE, with four of my very favorite authors, Elly Griffiths, Ann Cleeves, Peter Robinson, and Michael Nava. 

 

We all have series novels under our belts, and in the case of Ann and Elly, more than one series. (I am in awe!) We'll be moderated by the fabulous Oline Cogdill, and we'll be chatting about those subsidiary characters who fill out our novels and help bring our canvases depth and interest. I know that in all these authors' works I love the secondary characters as much as the primary protagonists.

But with every new book, we always hope to bring new readers into the series, and feeding in the backstories of this varied cast can be a challenge. Longtime readers of a series may need a little refresher as well--I know I sometimes do myself!

In this scene from the book in progress, the 19th Kincaid/James, Duncan is going to see the Howards, the mother and son who were first introduced way back in AND JUSTICE THERE IS NONE, the eighth book in the series, and who have appeared regularly in the subsequent books. Here, they have a personal connection to the victim in the murder Duncan and his team are investigating.

Just to set the scene, here's the Sun in Splendour pub, just at dusk, on a much nicer day than Duncan's.

Less than half an hour later, Kincaid emerged at Notting Hill Gate and hailed another taxi. It was already getting dark, the twilight accelerated by the overcast sky and intermittent drizzle. The market would be breaking down, and as they passed the end of Portobello Road he could see the throngs of shoppers heading back towards the tube station. Light shone cheerfully from the big windows of the Sun in Splendour on the corner.

The taxi trundled down Pembridge Crescent, avoiding Portobello which would be chock-a-block with stall holders’ vans as well as tourists. It snaked around Powis Square, where their vet, Bryony Poole, lived, then passed the Tabernacle, where Toby had been rehearsing for the ballet—a rehearsal which Kincaid had once again missed. Well, maybe he could go some way towards making that up if he asked Toby to show him his part tonight.

At Westbourne Park Kincaid got out, paid his fare, and stood gazing up at the multi-hued terraced houses. It seemed every other one was covered with scaffolding these days. The properties were scooped up by investors, renovated, then resold for amounts no one but hedge fund managers could afford. But Betty Howard and her son Wesley had so far managed to hold on to their third-floor flat, which had been in Betty’s family since her parents had emigrated from Trinidad in the days when the notorious slumlord Peter Rachman had controlled many of the tenements in Notting Hill. Betty’s parents had eventually managed to buy their flat, and after their deaths, Betty and her late husband had raised their children here. The five girls all now had families of their own and only Wesley, the youngest and only boy, still lived in the flat with Betty.

Now, glancing up, he saw that all the flat’s windows were lit. The Howards were home. With a last glance at his watch, Kincaid rang the bell.

You can tell I'm missing Notting Hill here! 

Readers, do you like having little reminders of who recurring characters are and how they fit into the series? And how much information is too much?

 

 

What We're Reading

INGRID THOFT
It's time for another edition of "What We're Reading" here at Jungle Reds.  I always love to hear what the other Reds and all of you are enjoying; my TBR pile threatens to topple over after getting so many terrific suggestions!

I just finished MONUMENT ROAD by Michael Wiley, which is a terrific, unique novel featuring an investigator in Florida.  Michael will be my guest on Wednesday, and I'll let him tell you more about the book.  WILD FIRE the final Jimmy Perez book by Ann Cleeves is off to  strong start, although I suspect I won't want it to end.  I'm looking forward to the latest Jodi Picoult, A SPARK OF LIGHT and I'm saving the new Robert Galbraith, LETHAL WHITE for an upcoming vacation.  I gave in and will be reading that one electronically; if I were to drop the hardcover on my face when drowsy, I might break my nose!

How about you, Reds?  What are you enjoying in the book department these days?

LUCY BURDETTE: What we're reading can never come too often for me! I finished HOW TO FIND LOVE IN A BOOKSHOP by Veronica Henry and loved it. It's perfect for readers who are desperate for some happy endings after difficult life events (like me!) I also loved Juliet Blackwell's THE LOST CAROUSEL OF PROVENCE, with multiple strands from two periods in the past and one in the present and lots of French countryside and chateau viewings. And I've just started Joshilyn Jackson's GODS IN ALABAMA and Hemingway's MOVEABLE FEAST, which I'm chagrined not to have read before!

HALLIE EPHRON: I'm reading THE CHILD by Fiona Barton. Just started it but intrigued by the multiple viewpoint and the SECRET... which I'm sure will be revealed. Also reading Ellen Byron's latest, MARDI GRAS MURDER. And Amy Stewart's GIRL WAITS WITH A GUN. I'm *watching* SCOTT AND BAILEY on Amazon. That show is so smart and so character-driven, it's like reading a many chaptered superb novel.

RHYS BOWEN: I just finished THE STRANGER DIARIES by Elly Griffiths. I'm not sure when it's going to be released in the States but I think it's out in UK now. It's terrific--gothic, multiple narrators, a creepy school, an old story...not usually my cup of tea but it's well written. And now I've also just started a Juliet Blackwell: THE PARIS KEY. I've had such a stressful time recently that I needed a Paris fix.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I love "What We're Reading!" Last week I read LETHAL WHITE, the new Robert Galbraith, which I loved. But it did take me a week! I'm behind on everything else, though. I just finished THE CHALK PIT by Elly Griffiths, so now need to read the newest Ruth Galloway, THE DARK ANGEL, to see what happens next. I've been hearing a lot of good buzz about the Elly Griffiths standalone, THE STRANGER DIARIES so have that on my list. I seem to have read Ann Cleeves' Shetland books in bits and pieces, so would like to go back and start the series from the beginning before I read WILD FIRE. I will be reading a good bit on my Kindle the next month, as on Tuesday I fly to the UK for three and a half weeks. Of course, I suspect there will be some book shop finds there, too!

On the watching front, I discovered the UK TV adaptation of the Cormoran Strike books (Robert Galbraith/aka JK Rowling) which are available on Amazon Prime for a couple of bucks an episode. These are so good that I'm sad I only have one episode left. I'm hoping that LETHAL WHITE will air in the UK while I'm there.

INGRID: I loved the STRIKE TV series, Debs.  I'm jealous you might get to see the newest installment while in the UK!

JENN MCKINLAY: Currently, I am on deadline with a book due Nov 1, galleys due Oct 23, and revisions due Oct 30. There is little to no reading happening for me. LOL! I am, however, listening to ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE while I walk my dogs every day and, interestingly (to me), I don't think I would like this book nearly as much as I do if not for the incredible narration by Cathleen McCarron. She is absolutely brilliant. I'm not a big fan of unlikable protagonists but the narration, hearing Eleanor in my head like this, is making me reluctantly fond of her. I'm halfway through so we'll see how it wraps up.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  I am reading for a contest, so I can’t tell you everything :-) but out of the contest  (not eligible) THE 71/2 DEATH OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE.  It is an amazing tour de force of point of view, and I am loving it.   I also read  Katy Tur’s UNBELIEVABLE,  her chronicle of covering the election of 2016. It is absolutely wonderfully riveting.  And I just finished Louise Candlish’s OUR HOUSE ,  that was also terrific! One of those ideas that you think… Wow.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Raving about Joshilyn Jackson made me check her website, and sure enough, I missed a book last summer. Just downloaded ALMOST SISTERS. I bought and read THE CONSUMING FIRE, the second novel in John Scalzi's Interdependency series, in one night. So good, and I continue to steer people who are SF curious to Scalzi. Very approachable writing that values characters over technological whiz-bang.

Audio book in the car is non-fiction: HERE IS WHERE: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History. The author, Andrew Carroll, traveled all over the country looking for the spots where significant historical events have happened - and then forgotten.  I'm loving it, and it's perfect for the car or brief periods of reading.

What about all of you?  Please add to our already toppling TBR piles!