Tag: Mystery

Dead Lions (Slough House #2) by Mick Herron

Good tho, to a certain extent, I enjoyed Slow Horses better because that one was undoubtedly a win for our agents. This one… well, it’s complicated. See, an old spy is found dead on a bus he didn’t have a ticket for, and no one seems to care except Jackson Lamb, who worked with the …

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The Case of the Missing Marquess (Enola Holmes #1) by Nancy Springer

A surprisingly unsentimental view of life in Victorian England, far removed from romance and riches. Our heroine, Enola Holmes, does start out moneyed, after a fashion: she lives on her ancestral estate with her mother, but Nancy Springer is quick to point out that the women aren’t rich in their own right, as all their …

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Slow Horses (Slough House #1) by Mick Herron

It’s a bit weird coming to this book after reading the author’s excellent, bleak Nobody Walks. At about the halfway mark of Slow Horses, I felt an uneasy stirring of familiarity, much like I had upon reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd after her excellent, bleak Endless Night. While the plot twist in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/09/slow-horses-slough-house-1-by-mick-herron/

The Snowman (Harry Hole #7) by Jo Nesbø

Why, yes, I borrowed this in anticipation of the movie, and while I never got around to watching the latter (and likely never will,) I can safely say that it’s much smarter than those insipid trailers. Also, oddly, I kept picturing Daniel Craig as Harry Hole instead of Michael Fassbender, who is just too darn …

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Wrapping Up

Time for some short takes, to mostly clear the desk for the coming year. The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest. In the fourth of her five Clockwork Century novels, Priest takes a stab at telling her story mostly from the point of view of an unsympathetic narrator. Rector Sherman is an addict, hooked on the “sap,” …

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The Frangipani Tree Mystery (Crown Colony #1) by Ovidia Yu

So, full disclaimer, Ovidia Yu sent me this herself as we’ve developed a quite friendly professional relationship. I super love her Aunty Lee mystery series, feeling it’s gone from strength to strength as the series progresses, so I was quite thrilled to receive the first in Ms Yu’s new series. The setting is terrific — …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/16/the-frangipani-tree-mystery-crown-colony-1-by-ovidia-yu/

The Sinner by Petra Hammesfahr

Y’all that was messed up. I’m a fan of mysteries from way back and have read or watched nearly every type of depravity imaginable, and the reason why Cora Bender, innocuous middle-class housewife, slashes the throat of a stranger on a crowded beach still strikes me as fuuuuuuucked up, even as it is thoroughly convincing. …

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The Daughter of Time (Inspector Grant #5) by Josephine Tey

The premise of this novel is so inherently flawed that the fact that it convinced me of Richard III’s innocence by the end is quite the achievement. Essentially a re-examining of the history of one of England’s most vilified regents, it begins because a bedridden Inspector Grant refuses to believe that such a “sensitive” face …

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Bonfire by Krysten Ritter

I don’t think it’s weird of me to have a girl crush on Krysten Ritter after reading this book, given how phenomenally talented she is in the fields I care most about professionally: acting and writing (I would be completely unsurprised if she was also terrific at waitressing and corporate training, but then I’m just …

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Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain

I didn’t even know this existed till I stumbled across a free Kindle copy. It’s really a novella (about 80 pages) of what happens when Tom and Huck get entangled in a murder mystery, based on an actual case that Mark Twain freely admits to using in the opening paragraphs. It’s an entertaining story set …

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