Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer

This 1941 detective novel has been republished recently under the title A Christmas Party, part of what I think is an attempt to capitalise on the popularity of classic crime novels for the festive season. As Heyer expert Jennifer Kloester explains here, this was a phrase that Heyer herself used to refer to the book during the writing process, so it's not an unjustified rebranding. (Heyer also considered several other titles, including Death Before Dinner and Without Enchantment.) However, I agree with her final choice: Envious Casca comes from Act III Scene II of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with the full quotation being "Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through. / See what a rent the envious Casca made." It encapsulates all of the principal elements of the book — surprise betrayal, death by stabbing, and theatricality. Although I can see why some readers might find this an unnecessarily obscure choice, as an ardent Sayers fan, when reading crime fiction I personally enjoy the process of tracking down a literary reference and pondering what the writer meant by its use.

My one quarrel with the switch to A Christmas Party and the snowy cover is that it sets expectations this book cannot meet. This is not a light-hearted or festive book in the least — nothing like other examples of late 1930s/early 1940s festive crime fiction such as Murder After Christmas or The Santa Klaus Murder. The family that Heyer gathers all hate each other, a dynamic made much worse by the insistence of one character that they play nice and be jolly for a Christmas celebration nobody wants. The relentless unpleasantness grows wearying for the reader and I was surprised to find that Heyer had chosen not to include much, if any, of her trademark witty dialogue or give us any clearly redeemable characters for respite. The arrival of the murder is a relief, because it channels the book's energy away from the sheer horribleness of its characters. It is well done, but it's not at all what you might expect if you pick up the cosy-looking reprint. One advantage of being so behind with these reading updates is that at the time of writing I've now read all of Heyer's detective fiction and I can now see that this book is, in a sense, a sketch for her 1943 novel Penhallow, which does far more interesting things with a highly toxic, isolated family. Look out for my thoughts on that book in November's reading post!

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk

I've been exploring Regency-set fantasy fiction lately, and this 2020 novel came up during my research. It's set in a world with something approximating a season and a marriage market to facilitate matches between elite families, but there is also a strong magical presence. Great skill with sorcery can translate into fortune, rank and success. But only men are permitted to study and practice magic, because it is believed that if women do so, they endanger their childbearing abilities.

The main character, Beatrice, is a magically-talented young woman trying to rebel against these gender norms. While publicly pursuing the advantageous society marriage her indebted family desperately needs, in secret she chases after the books and allies that will allow her to master her powers. It's all very promising and I largely enjoyed this book. I had two major quibbles with it, though. Firstly, the relationship between Beatrice and her love interest develops far too quickly — I wanted much more caution and tension to make the payoff feel more earned. And secondly, I found the physical world of this book blurry and indistinct. I appreciate that the writer was prioritising action and plot, but since this was obviously set in an invented place, I could have done with more physical description of it.

The Abbey Girls in Town by Elsie J. Oxenham

After my initial foray into the Abbey series last month, I just happened to come across another of the titles in a secondhand bookshop and so continued my exploration. I read both out of order, so a little bit of detective work was required to work out where I was in the chronology, but it wasn't too bad. In this tale, we meet two new girls, sisters, living together in a London flat, who have got to know the Abbey girls through country dancing (which they are all obsessed with, Cecil Sharp and the folk music revival being in full swing of course). The elder of the pair is keen to write but is suffering from what I suspect we would now call clinical depression. Her struggles to climb out of her mental darkness coupled with how she grapples with the insensitivities of those around her are portrayed in a nuanced and interesting way. And then there's also just lots of passages about women learning country dancing in the 1920s. If you're not a keen school story reader, this combination probably sounds bizarre, but I promise it works! I'm still not ready to commit to becoming a full-on Abbey collector, but I'll continue to pick them up when I come across them.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

Have I ever read the first Bridgerton novel before? I'm not sure that I have, so I picked it up for some light summer reading. Quinn is very good at moving her plot along at a brisk pace and I mostly had a good time, although some of the dialogue-heavy "banter" scenes between siblings dragged a little for me. This book did cause me to wonder whether the contemporary trend for more explicit historical romance makes it date faster. Sexual mores are so fluid! When this was first published in 2000, the central conflict between the romantic leads — which is concerned with their physical relationship — probably felt quite risqué or even groundbreaking, but now it's both unconvincing and a little icky.

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

This is now the fourth P.D. James book I've read — I think — and I've yet to fall under her spell. Which is a shame, because I really want to! A lot of people I trust and admire speak very highly of her work, and she was such a major figure in late twentieth century crime fiction that I've always felt that I must be missing out. I picked up this 2005 mystery in a charity shop and was charmed by its setting on a fictional island off the coast of Cornwall. After being privately owned by the same family for centuries, the island is now operated by a trust as a completely private retreat for high profile politicians and other people for whom security issues mean they can never relax.

The discovery of a body amidst this secretive atmosphere requires Adam Dalgliesh and his team to be choppered in to solve the crime. It's all very dramatic, with crashing waves and high cliffs. A promising premise indeed. But the mystery didn't play fair to my mind, nor were the motives or characters well established. The way the story was told felt very "of its time" in a moderately unpleasant way, as did some of the major plot elements, which is not something I usually find frustrating in a book published only twenty years ago. Unless I find a very compelling reason to do otherwise, I probably won't pick up another P.D. James book.

The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler

As someone who spends part of each year in Orkney, I've been to Skara Brae a fair few times. Every time a friend or family member comes to visit, in fact. If you're not familiar, this is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements in the world, a village built on a sandy beach in the west of the Orkney mainland. The dwellings are 5,000 years old and were preserved under sand dunes for thousands of years before a storm uncovered them in 1850. Although it is undoubtedly an exciting archaeological site and a well-run visitor experience, I've never really connected with it emotionally in the way I do with some historic sites. It's interesting but not imaginatively engrossing to me.

Then I picked up this book in a secondhand shop. Published in 1968 and intended for younger readers (probably what we would now call middle grade?), it's a story woven through what we know of the history of Skara Brae, focusing on a single family in the run up to the great storm that drove the people there to abandon their settlement. Suddenly, I found the history much more absorbing, especially since I recognised lots of the archaeological details — such as a broken string of beads — that had been given a fictional explanation in the story. Perhaps I need to find more patience for Neolithic things in glass cases (Orkney has a lot of these), but once I'd read this children's book about Skara Brae, I suddenly found the life people once lived there much more comprehensible.

Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare

This was the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen title for September, so as usual I was reading it a month ahead to be able to prepare the bonus episodes about it for members. It's a 1942 murder mystery based on the author's own experiences of being a judge's marshal (essentially a ceremonial bodyguard) for a circuit judge in the early days of WW2. The judge in question keeps receiving death threats and making questionable decisions in his personal life, and the marshal looks on, a bewildered amateur sleuth. The crime doesn't actually come until very late in the book, but Hare does such a good job of building up the tension that you don't mind. A very well-constructed whodunnit, rightly considered a classic and beloved by the legal profession.

Skipshock by Caroline O'Donaghue

I borrowed this from the library ebook service because I enjoyed the author's young adult fantasy series All Our Hidden Gifts. (She's better known these days for her literary/romantic fiction, though I've yet to explore that aspect of her output.) This book is also in the fantasy zone, but I think intended for adult or slightly older readers. It follows a wonderfully classic template, which I really enjoyed: main character Margo is on a train to Dublin when something strange happens and she slips into another dimension. A stranger called Moon helps her and explains that she is now in a world where time is everything — rich cities in this world have long days and in the poorer ones night comes in as little as six hours, radically reducing life expectancy and economic potential. A shadowy authority is tightly controlling movement between timezones, so that the time-poor cannot move to where the hours are more plentiful. In contrast to The Midnight Bargain, above, I did feel like the world was fully realised and described here, yet this addition didn't slow down the momentum of the plot. I'm realising that this balance is very important to me in fantasy books. Anyway, as the adventure continues, Margo and Moon get pulled into a resistance movement and become spies... Only for this book to end on a shocking cliffhanger because it's the first part of a duology. I will certainly be borrowing the other part when it is published.

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

By this point in my year of reading all of Heyer's detective fiction, I had become curious about her other (much more popular) work. This book in particular, a Regency romance set in 1818, had come up in a few secondary sources as being one of her best. So I grabbed it from the charity shop and devoured it in two sittings. It was great fun! I think today it would be called a "grumpy-sunshine" romance, because the personalities of the two lead characters fall on either side of that dichotomy. The title character is feisty but not irritatingly so, and her solution to the romantic problem that the plot sets up for her is clever and funny. I like how Heyer peppers her dialogue with Regency slang, too. On this evidence, I think I might like Heyer's non-crime fiction more than her crime fiction!

That was, belatedly, my reading for August: 9 books, bringing me up to 81 for the year to date. I'm a tiny bit ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

I know I said in January that one of my goals this year was to read more non-fiction and fiction in other genres but... that doesn't seem to who I am this year. I didn't read a single non-fiction book this month, and pretty much everything else was crime, romance or fantasy (or some combination thereof). I wasn't very well this month, so I think I gravitated towards the familiar.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there. I am trying to catch up with these reviews before the end of the year...

Some book links are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).

July is always a busy month for me, as I try to get ahead with work so I can take time off in August. I seem to have still done a lot of reading, though! One note of warning: I don't include plot spoilers in these reviews, but I do occasionally discuss the structure of the books I read. If knowing that sort of detail before you read something bothers you, this might not be for you.

All's Fair in Love and Pickleball by Kate Spencer

This is a grumpy-sunshine, enemies-to-lovers romance novel set at a racquet club in California. The protagonists are the owner of said club, a pickleball enthusiast, and an ageing tennis pro who despises this new upstart sport. Of course, they must pair up to win a local pickleball tournament so that the prize money can save the beloved club. Of course, as they work towards this goal, they will find that they actually don't hate each other at all...

My route to this book is a case study in parasocial connection. I have zero knowledge of or interest in pickleball, or indeed of racquet sports of any kind. I don't even typically read sports romances. But in 2020 I got very attached to this author because she co-hosted a podcast that made me feel a bit less lonely during the various lockdowns (she isn't on it any more, she quit in May 2024). Thanks to this residual regard, I have now read all three of her romance novels. The first was pretty good, the second was meh, and now this third one was really not for me. I'm not sure you can write a sports romance that all leads up to a climactic game of said sport and then just skip over that scene altogether, just saying what the result was afterwards in an epilogue? I don't even care about pickleball and I felt short-changed, so I'm sure actual fans and players would find it even more irritating.

Death on the Down Beat by Sebastian Farr

This 1941 mystery novel would be a perfect gift for the classical music nerd in your life (or for you, if that's you). I read this for my podcast episode about epistolary mysteries, and it was probably my favourite example of that "documentary" format. The story is mostly told via letters from the detective to his wife as he investigates the shooting of an orchestra conductor in a concert hall mid-performance. The shot was fired in such a way that only the members of the orchestra are viable suspects. As well as the letters, we get snatches of the Strauss score they were playing, diagrams of the stage and other pieces of evidence. This book made it feel like the weeks I spent cramming musical theory as a child were not wasted.

Rivers of London Vol. 5: Cry Fox

A new comic shop opened near me and I didn't want to leave empty handed on my first visit, so I grabbed this Rivers of London graphic novel. I've read most of the full-length novels before and am currently making my way slowly through the audiobooks, so this was a nice supplement to that. I will confess that I am still slightly unsure of myself when it comes to buying books in this format. This was quite pricey, given how slender it was, and I read it in an hour at a leisurely pace, with no desire to re-read it cropping up since. Perhaps I'm more of a library reader in this format, rather than a collector.

Maigret and the Hotel Majestic by Georges Simenon

This was my first time reading a Maigret novel and I approached it with some reluctance. Simenon is a big blind spot for me in my reading of twentieth century detective fiction. I know there are lots of discerning crime fiction fans who love his work, but for some reason I've never tried it. I think I caught some of a radio adaptation as a teenager that made it seem very bleak and I've been avoiding it ever since.

Without justification, it turns out. The mystery in this 1942 story set mostly in a Parisian hotel is not especially complex, but the atmosphere and the descriptions of the city are excellent. The opening follows a hotel worker on his cycle commute from the suburbs to his workplace on the Champs-Élysées and I thought this passage was so good I read it again before I carried on. I didn't develop any special affection for Maigret as a character but I also wasn't irked by him. I would read another of his cases if one crosses my path in future, even though Simenon's oeuvre is intimidatingly enormous and I don't know how to work out which ones are good.

Bodies in a Bookshop by R.T. Campbell

Last month, I read Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson because I was doing a Green Penguin Book Club episode about another of Ferguson's novels, The Man in the Dark. That's a murder mystery set in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road in London and, as I read, I realised that this was a setting I had encountered a fair few times in interwar mystery fiction. So I decided to make an entire podcast episode about this phenomenon. That meant scouring my shelves for any other novels that fit this theme. Bodies in a Bookshop by R.T. Campbell was the first that came to hand.

Also set in London, also concerning a bookseller found murdered in his own shop, this was probably the best novel I read in this little subgenre (as you'll see below, I went through quite a few bookshop mysteries in a short space of time). Two things elevated this one above the rest. Firstly, I really liked the detailed picture it paints of the London book trade in 1946, complete with obscenity and censorship laws, black market dealings, and the sheer proliferation of bookshops. Secondly, I appreciated the detecting duo of Professor John Stubbs, a botanist, and his assistant Max Boyle. Stubbs is large and enthusiastic and avuncular in a way that reminds me of G.K. Chesterton or Arthur Mee, while the much younger Boyle actively hates him but has to keep working for him. No fawning Watsons here. Boyle's constant sarcasm and rude asides are great and I would like to read more of this pair's sleuthing adventures.

Beginning with a Bash by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Another bookshop mystery, this one set in Boston in the 1930s. Much more of a ridiculous caper — it's full of shenanigans with rival gangs, car chases, shootings, disguises and close calls with the authorities. There's also a bit of a treasure hunt that the assembled Scooby gang of random book-shoppers and hangers-on must complete before a deadline to get an innocent man out of jail. Not my usual mystery fare, but quite jolly.

Death in a Bookstore by Augusto De Angelis

This one felt like a real find: a 1936 mystery by an Italian anti-fascist journalist, featuring a Milan-based police detective called Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi. Senator Magni, a well known and respected surgeon and politician, is found dead one morning in one of the city's antiquarian bookshops. A rare work of sixteenth-century erotica is also missing. De Vincenzi has to navigate the political niceties of investigating such a high-profile murder while still pursuing justice. He also has to quell his own scepticism and organise a seance in order to unmask the murderer. I go into lots more detail about this book/author in the podcast episode, so have a look at that if you're interested.

Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells

This American bookshop murder mystery, also from 1936, was probably my least favourite of the ones I read this month. It's more sensation fiction — with kidnappings and secret soundproof rooms galore — than detective fiction. Don't be fooled, as I was, by the cover of the 2018 reprint into thinking this is a golden age murder mystery!

The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale

I have mixed feelings about this book. It would be wrong to say that I enjoyed it, because I found the subject matter — the investigation, arrest and trial of the serial killer John Reginald Christie in London in the 1950s — extremely grim and the approach to telling the story somewhat frustrating. Yet I was compelled by the book, turning the pages rapidly and finishing it in less than two days.

I'm not an expert in the Christie case and I don't want to become one, so I can't comment on quality of the information relayed in this book. My main source of exasperation with the structure was Summerscale's manipulation of the information to provide a twist at the end. I know this is basically a requirement of the "serious" true crime book these days (mostly thanks to her own The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, actually) but it felt especially thin and forced in The Peepshow. The "revelation" was just one of many conflicting statements made by the accused, but without compelling additional evidence this one was removed from the chronology and shared late on to provide an extra thrill.

Where this book succeeds is in the choice to tell it from the perspectives of two observers, the crime reporter Harry Proctor and true crime writer F. Tennyson Jesse. Both were present for the trial, both published material about it at the time and afterwards, and both found themselves profoundly emotionally affected by it. Summerscale does a decent job of taking Proctor and Jesse's writings and weaving them into a cohesive narrative so that they feel like the primary sources for a bigger piece of work, rather than extracts of memoirs or articles. The sense of immediacy she achieves through this technique is impressive. I think with a better structure and without the insistence on forcing the eleventh-hour revelation, this could have been a good book.

Wilkie Collins: The BBC Radio Collection

Does this count as a book? It should — it's 24 hours long, altogether. I borrowed this chunky collection of Collins radio adaptions on my library app because I was making the aforementioned podcast episode about epistolary crime fiction and I wanted a way to revisit The Moonstone that didn't involve me having to physically read The Moonstone. Then I got hooked and kept listening — there are versions of The Woman in White, No Name and plenty of other novels and short stories included in this bundle. I am famously picky about narrators as well and found myself well pleased: Sophie Thompson, David Suchet and Toby Stephens all appear at various points and not once did I get annoyed and want to switch it off. If your library has this collection or you have an audiobook credit going spare, this is a lot of hours of entertainment for a single loan/purchase.

Small Bomb At Dimperley by Lissa Evans

This is a mostly-comic novel set in 1945 about a family of minor aristocrats grappling with the post-WW2 reality. Their peculiar hodge-podge of a country house desperately needs money spent on it that they don't have and all around them estates are being shuttered or sold off. The new baronet is 23, just back from the war and has little interest in any of it, while his mother is desperate to marry him off to a county girl with money in the bank so they don't have to sell. Meanwhile, a single mother named Zena has been living at Dimperley for the last few years of the war, acting as secretary to an eccentric uncle and quietly observing all that goes on. When an unexploded bomb is found, it ends up revealing secrets that nobody wanted out in the open.

There is something a little bit Eva Ibbotson, or maybe Barbara Pym, about this book, which is about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of fiction. It elevates ordinariness and unnoticed acts of generosity in a way that I find very charming. However, as I read I had the lingering feeling that it was only about 80 per cent as good as it could have been. Certain plot elements needed to be a little more intense and a little more ridiculous so that the eventual catharsis was fully satisfying. Still, because of my intense Ibbotson fandom, I'm hard to please; this is a good novel. More than anything, I'm so happy that fiction of this type — not high-flown "literary", nor strongly pulling from the tropes of a clearly-defined genre like mystery or what used to be called "book club" — is being published. Well-written, clever, interesting prose about undramatic yet meaningful events that happened to have occurred in the past, without murders or fairies or young women having traumatic affairs with much older men. What do we call that, these days?

No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer

This is the silliest Heyer detective novel I have read yet. It's all the better for its absurdity. Since I've been reading all of her crime stuff in order this year for a future podcast episode, I was getting a little tired of the template she followed in the last few (suburban or almost-rural setting, unpleasant family, everyone has a motive, and so on). This one has a murder method that, I have since learned, Heyer's husband Ronald Rougier devised and which she claimed to not really understand even after she had finished writing the book. There's also a fortune-hunting Russian prince and a young woman who treats the world as her perpetual stage, inventing a new and different character to portray in every conversation she has. Great fun.

Mrs. McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie

When I re-read a Christie novel, I rarely feel neutral about the experience. I tend to come away either disappointed or glowing with the realisation that the book in question was so much better than I remembered. This was an example of the latter effect. I don't recall having much to say in the past on this 1952 whodunnit about the brutal murder of a cleaning lady. Now, I think it might be a candidate for a list of the top ten Christies of all time.

Maid of the Abbey by Elsie J. Oxenham

I'm a Chalet School fan (listen to this for more on that) and since there are 58 novels in that series, I've never felt the need to dive into any of the other major twentieth century school story canons. I was aware of Elsie J. Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Angela Brazil, but had never read any of their work. Then I bought this book secondhand on a whim and now I'm falling down the rabbit-hole of another boarding school universe. It's a delicious feeling.

Oxenham is primarily known for the Abbey series, which has 38 books in its main arc and then another ~45 of what are called "Abbey Connectors" — that is, spin off or prequel series that intersect in some way with the main characters. The MCU has nothing on Elsie J. Oxenham. I really gave myself a challenge by starting with this, the 28th book in the main series, but thanks to the very comprehensive Wikipedia coverage and this equally exhaustive blog, I was able to get up to speed fairly quickly.

Unlike the Chalet School, the Abbey series isn't really centred around a boarding school so much as a Cistercian abbey. A loosely-connected group of girls and young women revolve around these romantic ruins. Some of them do go to school together early on, some of them are cousins, friends, neighbours, long-lost relations, etc. The important thing is that they believe in the spirit of this abbey and this causes them to hold themselves to high standards of public service and personal ethics. Oxenham also wove into the series her own interest in English folk dancing and folk music (I think she knew Cecil Sharp) as well as the American "Camp Fire" movement (a bit like Girl Guides??). If this all sounds random then you probably aren't a habitual reader of early twentieth century English school stories. It just somehow... works. At least for me. Now I have to restrain myself from going on eBay and buying all the others. I don't have space!

That was, belatedly, my reading for July: 14 books, bringing me up to 74 for the year to date. I'm a little ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

This month's reading was rather dominated by the bookshop mysteries, but I found some balance by adding in the Kate Summerscale non-fiction book (which, although crime-related, wasn't something I read specifically for the podcast) and the non-crime wonder that was Small Bomb at Dimperley. Discovering the Abbey series is probably going to end up as a highlight for the year, too.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.

I'm another step closer to being back up to doing real-time monthly reading updates. In June, I managed a lot more reading driven by pleasure and curiosity than last time, and I also varied my formats and genres a bit more, which is one of my overall reading goals for this year.

Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood

I consumed this as an audiobook, which I had decided by about a third of the way in was a mistake. I read Hazelwood's formulaic romances because I find them restful for an otherwise-busy brain. Unfortunately, the audio production here was too distractingly bad to make it a relaxing experience. The book is split between first person narration from Maya, an American twenty-something with a debilitating crush, and Conor, the Irish, thirty-something friend of her older brother who is the object of her affections. Two audiobook narrators take it turns to read the alternating viewpoints — a presentation style of which I approve.

However, the narrator voicing Conor seemed to have been recorded in a very different quality of studio to his counterpart. It might even have been a home recording booth or similar. In the audio world, we obsess over this thing called "room tone", which just means the sound of the room used for recording. If you're being very thorough, when you record someone you're supposed to capture a few minutes of just the room's ambient noise, no talking, so that you can make it blend in the edit with the other soundscapes in your final product. It's jarring and a bit tiring for a listener to be constantly adjusting to different levels and types of background noise within a single programme.

I'm probably oversensitive to this kind of thing because I've spent years editing podcasts for a living, but the constant switching between crystal clear studio audio for one character in this audiobook and then something echoey and muffled for the other was too much for me. I did finish, but I was cross.

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

This audiobook, by contrast, was perfect. This was my second time through this story; I first read it as a library ebook in July 2024. Travis Baldree, the author of two immaculately structured cosy fantasy books, is also a professional audiobook narrator as his day job and it's a true pleasure to hear him read his own work. If you are considering trying this story about an orc who gets into reading and helps save a struggling bookshop during her enforced convalescence from a battle injury, may I strongly suggested that you pick it up in audio form.

The Botanist's Assistant by Peggy Townsend

I chose this book on a whim from the many, many press releases I get sent by publishers, because there was something about the description of the protagonist — a talented, middle-aged botanist who lives alone in a small cabin in the woods and ends up solving her boss's murder — that spoke to me. I'm very glad I did, because I devoured this book within 24 hours and found it to be very well written and plotted. I did get an advance copy of it, though, and I'm afraid it's not on general release until 18th November. If you are curious, do consider giving the book a pre-order, adding it to your wishlist on your reading-tracking platform of choice, or requesting it at your library (all are good ways of supporting writers you would like to see keep on writing).

Margaret Finch is an oddball and a misfit who lives entirely according to her own habits, drives an ancient truck, and makes her own soap. She likes things just so, in a way that might be interpreted as being neurodiverse-adjacent, but which plays out via character description rather than a diagnosis being part of the plot. Margaret works as a research assistant in a lab where plant extracts are being used to make medical breakthroughs, until one day her boss, a charismatic and well-known scientist, is found dead in his office. Considered a suspect by the police and determined to carry on their research no matter what, Margaret teams up with the building's new janitor (a former investigative journalist) to solve the case. Her awkward personality traits, for which she has often been teased or bullied, turn out to be an asset when it comes to tracking down a murderer.

Publishing loves to describe books in the format X + Y = Z, and for this one I think that equation would be Lessons in Chemistry + the Ruth Galloway series = The Botanist's Assistant.

The Man in the Dark by John Ferguson

This was a completely unknown book to me, which I read for the Green Penguin Book Club strand of my podcast. My thoughts are available at much greater length in that episode, but in brief: I liked the foggy London opening, enjoyed the complications that came from a blind man witnessing a murder, found the abduction plot implausible, and thought that the ending was badly paced. I was sufficiently amused (and intrigued by Dorothy L. Sayers' positive reviews of his work) to acquire several more Ferguson books since reading this one, and will report back when I eventually get around to reading them.

I can't link to this book, incidentally, because it hasn't been republished anywhere in recent decades and is quite hard to get hold of. If you want to read it, your best chance is to hunt down the Penguin version from the 1930s.

Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane

I am a confirmed Mhairi McFarlane fan and a book by her that is about both podcasting and journalism was always odds on to be a winner with me. And so it proved. This fake dating, enemies to lovers story between two colleagues at a regional media office gets full marks for vivid, accurate descriptions of both Manchester and the industry. It has all the Mhairi trademarks: quippy dialogue full of smart pop culture references, genuinely heart-wrenching backstories, a romance that builds beautifully without cliché... I don't think this one has quite supplanted 2020's If I Never Met You as my favourite of hers, but it ranks pretty highly. Bonus points to any readers who recognise the inspiration for main character Bel's podcast in actual journalist Maeve McClenaghan real-life show The Tip Off (which is a great listen, by the way).

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

I don't think I would ever have read this 1950 novel if the Shedunnit Book Club hadn't selected it as our reading choice for July, but I'm incredibly glad I did. It's difficult to categorise: sort of a thriller, sort of literary fiction, sort of a comedy of errors, perhaps wholly something all of its own. The novel narrates the happenings in a chaotic seaside guest house in Cornwall day by day over a week in 1947, with plenty of unpleasant guests, overworked servants, hijinks with ration books, and complaining about post-war income tax. But we read about all of these happenings, minor and major, with a mounting sense of impending doom because the opening prologue has already told the reader that the whole place and everyone in it is going to be buried by a landslide at the end of the week. So in that sense, it is a page-turner with a sensational climax, albeit one with a subtle moral dimension. I loved this book and would highly recommend it.

Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife by Martin Edwards

I got to read Martin's new mystery fairly early, because we were making a podcast episode together about cluefinders and it needed to be recorded before summer proper (owing to my habit of removing myself to a remote northern island for weeks at a time). In the current timeline, it was just published last week. He gave himself a lot of constraints with this one: it's a contemporary standalone, set at Christmas, full of solve-along puzzles (I liked the opening Greek riddle) that has a small cast of suspects snowed in at a peculiar village in a remote area of the Pennines. A difficult technical challenge, which he pulled off with plenty of knowing winks to golden age mystery writing and proper clueing. I enjoyed it a lot.

Never Inconstant by Lyndsay Constable

I recently realised that my ongoing and futile quest to read every single Pride and Prejudice continuation in existence was too narrow, and I ought to expand it to include spin-offs of Austen's other novels too. This realisation led me to pick up this follow-on novel to Persuasion. It's written to be both largely epistolary and to have dual timelines, so that we see Anne and Frederick many years after the happy conclusion of the original book but also are taken back to the years of their separation via the discovery of a cache of letters that he furiously wrote but never sent while they were apart. I cannot speak at all to the accuracy of the naval details in this, but I found the narrative jogged along nicely and the characterisation was not egregiously bad. Which, in the Austen continuation world, is high praise indeed.

Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson

I read this 1937 bookshop mystery initially as part of the preparation for the episode about The Man in the Dark mentioned above (and it then became the inspiration for another one all about bookshop murders specifically). This was the only other John Ferguson novel that I could find in an easily-accessible edition (it was republished by British Library Crime Classics in 2023).

There are lots of things to like about this book. It has a dramatic opening scene in the Palace of Westminster, as MPs are enduring an all night sitting of the House of Commons and waiting for an important vote on a key amendment. Meanwhile, at a secondhand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, a bookseller named Mr Dodsley is being murdered while a drunk toff is giving two patrolling police officers the runaround on the street outside. There's even a cat that uncovers a key clue and a hand drawn map of the bookshop. All great fun.

Where this book fell short for me was in its pacing. After this promising start we spent what seemed like a very long time with a rather dull police inspector as he questions all the workers in the shop one by one, and this felt repetitive and rather redundant. The narrative momentum improved again later on as Ferguson's recurring sleuth, private investigator Francis McNab, was able to take more initiative in the case, but to my mind the book never wholly recover from its slow middle section. A mixed experience.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa

The explosion in cosy translated fiction (mostly from Japan) in recent years has rather passed me by — as previously mentioned, I've been reading fairly narrowly the past few years. I don't know if this is the title that kicked off the "gentle fiction set in a Japanese bookshop, restaurant or café" trend, but it's certainly a very successful example of it. And I can see why: Yagisawa's melancholy story about a young woman, Takako, who mends her broken heart by moving into her eccentric uncle's secondhand bookshop is both heartwarming and thought-provoking. I'm not sure I could read too much of this stuff together, though — it would get a bit saccharine — but as an occasional treat, I like it. I will hold the sequel, More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, for the next time I'm feeling down.

That was, belatedly, my reading for June: ten books, bringing me up to 60 for the first half of the year. I'm exactly at the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

I didn't read any non-fiction this month, but otherwise I was quite pleased with the variety — classic and contemporary crime fiction, literary fiction, fiction in translation, and a couple of audiobooks. If I could read like this all the time, I'd be delighted.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.

I'm still playing catch-up with the monthly reading updates. Thus, it is September and I'm still on May. Fingers crossed I meet myself in the present before the end of this year... This wasn't a month that particularly reflected my reading goals for 2025 — Reading A Lot, But Differently — but I hope you will find something interesting below nonetheless.

The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace

I read this in advance of a podcast episode about the book and enjoyed myself more than I expected. I think I had allowed what I knew about Wallace's difficulties publishing this book — he ran a write-in competition for the solution, but worded the prize conditions badly and ended up bankrupting himself – to colour my impression of the actual fiction. I was surprised to find that this fast-paced story about a trio of mysterious vigilantes who come to London to threaten a politician into reversing an extradition decision had some points to make about authoritarianism that felt rather relevant to today.

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen

I forget where I sourced this recommendation, but I borrowed this vastly popular TikTok romantasy novel from the library because I definitely read somewhere reputable that it did interesting things with Norse mythology. I regretted picking it up almost immediately, but kept going to the end partly because I'm stubborn and partly because I still had hope that it might improve. It did not. This is a garbled, badly structured story about a power struggle in a vaguely Viking world, in which warlords fight over certain characters who carry a drop of a particular Norse god/goddess's divine blood and thus have special powers.

I do feel like I understand the appeal of this genre a bit more after finishing this book, though, and that feels valuable. A Fate Inked In Blood is completely flat, with no narrative arc at all. It's just a sequence of set-piece incidents that happen one after another, breathlessly, without any raising of stakes or ratcheting up of tension. After the inciting incident in the first chapter, it feels like no character has time to sit down, sleep or draw breath, which made the pacing odd to me. It all feels very "and then and then and then". No building of suspense that is then released. I read the first Sarah J. Maas book a couple of years ago and found it to be the same. And I now think this is on purpose: I think these books are written to be consumed in the same way that a soap opera is, so that in each episode/fifty page stretch you get some dramatic events and it keeps drawing you onwards to the next batch. I don't make that comparison in order to diminish either artform (writing soaps is a skill like any form of screenwriting, to my mind) but it is a particular style of writing targeting a certain kind of consumption. And it's not for me! I had my period of intense Neighbours fandom, and I'm not currently looking to replace that with a version told via mediocre prose and set in maybe-Denmark.

Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead

I fear that I have become a curmudgeon about contemporary crime fiction that explicitly references the golden age of detective fiction. Because I have been disappointed so many times before by novels purportedly written by "the new Agatha Christie" (there was one in March), I now approach every book of this type the same way I do films full of jumpscares, ie with caution, grumpiness and plenty of peering through my fingers. That concern was not at all justified in the case of this book, which is excellent. Death and the Conjuror is written by someone who really knows their stuff when it comes to 1920s crime fiction and wears that knowledge lightly, deploying it to full effect in this original impossible crime story detective by a former stage magician. The author was my guest on the aforementioned episode about The Four Just Men and when I learned about Tom's passion for the work of John Dickson Carr and Edgar Wallace, his own fiction came into focus for me. I'll be continuing with his series whenever I have the opportunity.

Stranger than Fiction by Neil Clark

Again, read for my episode about The Four Just Men. This is a fairly functional biography of Wallace, which was usefully for checking names and dates. I don't know that I could recommend it as reading for pleasure, as it lacks a biographical interpretation or argument beyond "Edgar Wallace was a better writer than everyone thinks", which is a bit entry level.

Lady Molly Of Scotland Yard by Baroness Orczy

I first read this collection of short stories about an aristocratic woman detective at Scotland Yard many years ago, when I happened upon this nice pocket-sized edition in a secondhand bookshop. At the time, I mainly knew Orczy as the author of the Scarlet Pimpernel series and had no idea that she had been a founding member of the Detection Club (largely on the strength of Lady Molly and her "Old Man in the Corner" stories). You can absolutely tell that Lady Molly belongs to an earlier era of crime fiction — the book was first published in 1910, after all — but I remember enjoying them as sensational capers in the Conan Doyle vein.

I reread this book now in advance of it being the Shedunnit Book Club's selection for June, and was surprised to find it hard going. Lady Molly irritated me and the lack of actual detection in her adventures was irksome. I don't think this is a reflection of the book, necessarily, but rather an indication that it's not always that fun to be required to read things rather than choosing them when the right mood strikes.

The Wychford Poisoning Case by Anthony Berkeley

This book, rightly, has a bad reputation among enlightened fans of golden age detective fiction. It has several very unsavoury scenes where a young woman of nineteen is forcibly spanked in a drawing room by her older male cousin, in the presence of her parents, for "bad behaviour" that adds up to her having a languid manner and differing opinions about how to have fun from her elders. Berkeley was a peculiar and unpleasant man, but even he had the grace to note, later in life, that he regretted this one: "I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages," he said.

Those passages are all the more unwelcome because this is otherwise a really good novel. Berkeley takes the events of the 1889 Florence Maybrick poisoning case and transplants them to the mid 1920s (the book came out in 1926). A woman in a provincial English town has been accused of killing her husband with arsenic. He was a hypochondriac and their house was full of the stuff, so absolutely everybody believes she did it, but there's no direct evidence of guilt. Berkeley's sleuth Roger Sheringham is convinced of her innocence, in fact, because her motive and psychology are not that of a murderer. Berkeley was really early to considering the mental side of crime in fiction — most authors at this point were still preoccupied with secret passages, clever misdirection and unbreakable alibis — and I enjoyed seeing how he grappled with it.

Family Matters by Anthony Rolls

This, along with The Wychford Poisoning Case and Strong Poison (below), was read as research for my conversation with chemist Kathryn Harkup for this episode of Shedunnit about "poison books". I hadn't read any Anthony Rolls before, but it came up in research as being an interesting poisoning mystery so I dived in right before the deadline, planning on skimming it at great speed.

However, I really enjoyed this tale of a very unpleasant man who is so horrible that two people try separately to poison him at the same time, coincidentally choosing substances that cancel each other out so he continues in bafflingly rude health. (This isn't a spoiler, by the way, the book is told as a howdunnit so you know who is doing what from the start.) I liked it so much that I had to slow down and savour it.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

This was a re-read, of course, and a delightful one. The dramatic introduction of mystery novelist Harriet Vane to Sayers' fiction is excellent and luckily for me, involves a complicated arsenic plot and so fit into my podcast episode very well. This time, I really appreciated how well Sayers built tension into her plot by setting the clock ticking on Wimsey's investigation in the first chapter with a judge ordering a retrial. I also rewatched the Edward Petherbridge adaptation (any excuse) and noted that the director brings out this aspect well by having him walk past the same advertisements and posters in different scenes, showing how time is running out for him to solve the case.

A Blunt Instrument by Georgette Heyer

All the Heyers are starting to blend together now! I'm beginning to think that her detective fiction is not seen to its best advantage when read close together as I have been doing (with the eventual goal of producing a podcast episode about it this autumn). This one has many of her usual hallmarks: an unpleasant patriarch killed, an eccentric, a damsel-in-distress, an artsy heir to said patriarch, and a sensible, wise-cracking women to whom the heir will be engaged by the end of the book. It is a formula I like, though, and I enjoyed the G.K. Chesterton touch to the solution.

That was, belatedly, my reading for May: nine books, bringing me up to 50 for the year so far. I'm bang on the pace needed to hit my target of 120 in 2025.

This wasn't a well-balanced or especially satisfactory month of reading. I managed no serious non-fiction (that Edgar Wallace book was basically a long Wikipedia article), did not finish an audiobook, and my only non crime reading was a decidedly mid romantasy novel. That's what happens when I get behind with the podcast research in work hours: I just start doing it in my leisure time instead. Here's to doing better in the future.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.