Books

Mainly crime this last week or so.

Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles - the first book featuring Hercule Poirot. A classic poisoning mystery.

Stephanie McAfee - Diary of a Mad Fat Girl - Graciella (Ace) and friends try to free Chloe from her abusive marriage. Interesting plot and rather too many swear words and American expressions but I thought it was an interesting read.

Georgette Heyer - Lady of Quality - one of my favourites - set in Bath with an older heroine and an abrupt but humorous hero.

M C Beaton - Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage - Agatha is going to marry her neighbour, James Lacey, but is her husband Jimmy Raisin actually dead?

Maggie Sefton - Knit One, Kill Two - detective story with knitting interruptions set in Colorado. Good light read but not as good as some.

M C Beaton - Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist - set in Cyprus where Agatha goes to try and woo James Lacey. I think this is one of the best in the series.

Christina Hopkinson - The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs - about the niggly things which annoy everyone about living with someone else. I could not get on with this and abandoned it after 100 pages. It is fiction but could equally have been factual. I just did not warm to the characters at all. I usually read all of a book but this one had me beaten.

Books and a good web site for crime novels

M C Beaton's Death of a Poison Pen - a Hamish Macbeth story. Poison pen letters lead to a suicide or is it murder? I wasn't sure about this series at first but I was sufficiently interested to keep reading and it is definitely growing on me.

Rebecca Tope - A Cotswold Killing - the first in her series about Thea Osbourne - a widow - who takes on house sitting assignments and gets involved in investigating murders. The second in the series is A Cotswold Ordeal. I seem to remember reading one of this series some years ago and wasn't keen but I have gone back to them and found them interesting. Thea is growing on me as a character and the plots are nice and complicated.

Currently reading:

Polly Samson - Perfect Lives - this is a book which has been in the news recently because of some Amazon reviews which were less than favourable. I'm not sure I would have bought it myself but it is quite good. It is a book of interlinked short stories and the writing is a little too self conscious for my taste. I shall persevere and hope when I post a review on Amazon it doesn't attract too much criticism.

Rebecca Tope - Death in the Cotswolds - the third in the series and narrated by someone in the village where Thea Osbourne goes to stay with Phil Hollis - a police superintendent. Pagan undertones, village life and the plot centres round a prehistoric barrow and the pagan festival of Samhain.

Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - a very long book about magic in the 19th century with pictures and footnotes. I have mixed feelings about this but I will persevere with it.

Web site - for those of us who like cozy mysteries - www.cozy-mystery.com For the uninitiated - cozy (or cosy if you prefer) are crime or mystery novels which have very little violence and usually feature every day situations and characters often with a theme - such as candlemaking, cooking, knitting etc.. All the above crime novels fall into this category. It is a genre which is perhaps more popular in America than here. The Golden Age authors fall into this category - Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L Sayers.

Patricia Wentworth

I have never read any of Patricia Wentworth's crime novels. She writes about Miss Maud Silver - a private detective from much the same stable as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Miss Silver, though, is a private detective and runs her own business. I've just read The Silent Pool which falls into the sub genre of country house mystery. Miss Silver is consulted by Adriana Ford - a retired actress - who thinks someone may be trying to murder her. Having unburdened herself to Miss Silver about certain worrying incidents she feels better and decides not to call in Miss Silver professionally - until a guest in her home is murdered. Then Miss Silver pays a visit.

I thoroughly enjoyed this low key mystery with its interesting characters and intriguing plot - and I liked Miss Silver herself. I think I shall be reading more by this author and I wonder why I have never read any before?

Books books and more books

Are books and reading addictive? I'm sure they are. The only time in my life when I didn't read very much was the 4 years from 1996 to 2000 when I used to spend a lot of time doing cross stitch instead - but even then I used to read embroidery magazines, use the Internet and read the occasional book. Since 2000 I've gone back to reading - helped by the fact that for 5 years I was working away from home and had a great deal of time to read in hotels in the evenings.

Now I have even more time to read which I am really enjoying. I've never understood why some people think it's sad to read and you really should get out more. I think that's something people have said to me from when I first learnt to read! I always used to take out the maximum number of books from the library even as a child. When I was about 11 or 12 we lived about 5 minutes walk from the library and in school holidays I used to walk there nearly every day to get out my maximum of two books.

Then when I was in my late teens I can remember reading my way through the whole of Agatha Christie one summer holiday. I would call in at the library when it opened and then spend the day on the beach at the north end of Lowestoft among the sand dunes. Bliss!