October:

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

I re-read this for the Halloween episode of Shedunnit, and was pleased to find it better than I remembered. There's a folk horror, pagan element to it that I rather enjoyed.

Third Girl by Agatha Christie

A less successful Christie, mostly because of her attempts to be up to date. She tried to fold details about youth culture and drug taking into the story when she clearly didn't know very much about them. I did, however, enjoy Mrs Oliver's antics in this book, especially the bit where she tails a suspect across London and then ends up having tea with them.

An Unsuitable Heir by K.J. Charles

I read this on the recommendation of a blog reader (thank you, Theodora!) and ended up agreeing with her that K.J. Charles writes good romance-mystery hybrids that are straightforward enough to read for relaxation but sufficiently well-written that your brain doesn't snag on any rough edges. This one was a queer nineteenth century romance that included some discussion of gender fluidity, circus/music hall performing, and ghosts. I'll pick up other books by this author when I'm in the right mood, for sure.

Giant's Bread by Mary Westmacott

A work project that I can't talk about yet required me to re-read all six of the Mary Westmacott books (written by Agatha Christie under a penname) in a short space of time. I've covered them on Shedunnit before but haven't looked at them in at least five years and arrived at some new insights this time around, probably because I've advanced in my knowledge of the Christie canon quite a lot in that time. I do think all six are worth reading. In this one, I was rather struck by the details about music, which was Christie's first choice for a career (she was a talented singer and pianist).

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

This was the Shedunnit Book Club's November book and my detailed thoughts on it are available to members over there. In brief: I found the setting in Raj-era India fascinating, the mystery just ok, and the author's choice of first-person narration frustrating.

Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott

The correspondences between this second Westmacott novel and the sections of Agatha Christie's autobiography (which she didn't start writing for a couple of decades after this) are very striking. All of her youthful courtship details are the same and the failed marriage of "Celia" and "Dermot" is very similar to that of Agatha and Archie Christie. It actually made me wonder about the extent to which Christie's memories were shaped by working on this novel in the early 1930s, and whether that was what she was remembering, rather than the actual events, when she came to write her memoirs.

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

A new Thursday Murder Club novel, consumed as an audiobook. It was just OK for me, this time. I still regret the loss of Lesley Manville as the original reader of the series (sorry, Fiona Shaw). I also feel like any attempt at serious mystery plotting has been shelved in favour of dialogue and character stuff, which doesn't work as well for me.

Pride and Prescience by Carrie Bebris

Another instalment in my continued and never-ending effort to read every Austen spin-off ever written. This series is a crime fiction crossover, with a now-married Darcy and Elizabeth taking on the role of "detectives" when things go awry in their social circle. In this one, Caroline Bingley has married a rich American and started behaving very strangely. Then, while everyone is staying at Netherfield Park, a murder takes place... A decent premise, but stilted dialogue and a slow-moving plot meant it disappointed, and I won't be continuing the series.

November:

Penhallow by Georgette Heyer

Now, this is a book I've thought about a lot since I finished it. I read and largely enjoyed all of Heyer's twelve detective novels this year as I was making a podcast episode about them, and this was the standout. Perhaps because it's barely a detective novel at all, but rather a grim, Gothic portrait of a family being controlled by a brutal patriarch on a remote estate in Cornwall. Shades of Rebecca, for sure. According to her biographer Jennifer Kloester, Heyer personally considered this to be one of her best books and was rather disappointed when the reading public didn't agree. I think I might, though! There is a murder plot in it, of a sort, but now that I've read some of Heyer's historical fiction this feels like a bridge between her work in the two different genres.

Duplicate Death by Georgette Heyer

Here, Heyer was on much safer ground, genre-wise — this is a traditional whodunnit, set around a card party at a fancy London house and detected by her recurring detective, Inspector Hemingway. After I mentioned this book in passing on the podcast, a bridge expert felt compelled to get in touch to point out that the "duplicate bridge" aspect of the plot doesn't really work, but since I don't know what that is anyway it didn't bother me. Perfectly readable, and with the usual Heyer sharpness of wit and description.

The Rasp by Philip Macdonald

I had heard bad things about this book from a fellow devotee of interwar crime fiction. But despite the dire warnings, I had a generally good time reading it. It felt to me like a mid-1920s hybrid, with MacDonald including both R. Austin Freeman-style forensic investigation of footprints and more thriller-ish elements such as you find in an early Christie like The Secret Adversary. Sometimes these two styles vie for the reader's attention in an irritating fashion, but mostly I wasn't bothered by it. I liked the early details about contemporary journalism and liked the amateur sleuth MacDonald sets up here, Anthony Gethryn. What this book has over and above everything else is vim and purpose: the narrative momentum is so great that it positively zips along. When I discussed this book with my guest for the podcast episode, I learned a lot about MacDonald's subsequent screenwriting work, and this unlocked a whole new appreciate in me for what he does with structure in this book. Have a listen to the Shedunnit episode about it.

Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott

I am convinced that this was Agatha Christie's experiment with horror fiction. It follows a self-satisfied, middle class English woman as she travels back home from visiting her married daughter in Baghdad. Owing to some bad weather, she misses a connection and has to wait for an unknown number of days at a remote rest-house on the Turkish border until the next train can get through. She quickly finishes the small amount of reading material she has with her and runs out of writing paper. There is nothing to do and nobody to talk to, beyond the staff who have no interest in engaging with her.

For the first time in her life, she has nothing but her own mind to fill her days. She takes desultory walks in the surrounding desert, reliving happy memories of her wonderful husband, lovely children, and attentive neighbours. But the more she thinks about her life, the more she comes to realise that she has been living in a smug, self-centred bubble, absolutely unaware of what is really going on around her. Her husband was relieved that she was going away on a long trip because he finds her hard work to live with. Her children pity her and have made hasty, unsuitable marriages to get away from her. The neighbours she has looked down on with their coarse, inferior lives were actually much better off — happy, together, honest. It's an intense and fascinating psychological portrait. Christie wrote this book in three days straight without sleeping, during WW2, and the intensity of tone and the narrative momentum is consistent with this kind of creation. I'd highly recommend it.

The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott

The back half of the Westmacott half dozen is a bit less rewarding. The overarching storyline of this one makes me go "hmmm". I do, however, like the details of a post-WW2 parliamentary election campaign, supposedly gathered by Christie from the experiences of her nephew Jack Watts.

A Daughter's A Daughter by Mary Westmacott

Originally a play and I can imagine it being better in that format. Still, a very clear-sighted and not especially flattering viewpoint on motherhood, written by someone who was mother to an adult daughter who hated this piece of work.

The Burden by Mary Westmacott

The final Westmacott and, like the one above, centred around quasi-parental relationships and the tensions thereof. My main observation coming out of this one: for someone who didn't write much in her crime fiction about children, Christie really loved to write about childhood.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

This was the Shedunnit Book Club's December book and my detailed thoughts on it are available to members over there. I already knew that I liked this book a lot (bellringing, crime fiction and East Anglia being three of my favourite things) but on this re-read I unlocked a whole new level of love for it.

The Murder of Mr Wickham by Claudia Gray

Another Austen follow-on, again with a crime slant. Wickham, for obvious reasons, is a popular murder victim in this type of book (P.D. James is not alone in thinking that, although for me, Death Comes to Pemberley was far too weighed down with all the period research she had done to be a good read). I liked this one best of all the Austen-crimes I have read so far, principally because Gray does a great job of blending all the characters from all the different Austen novels together into one wide circle of acquaintance so she has plenty of scope (she explains her reasoning regarding timelines in an explanatory preface). Thus, our amateur detectives are Mr Jonathan Darcy (son of Darcy and Elizabeth) and Miss Juliet Tilney (daughter of Catherine from Northanger Abbey), and they detect a crime that takes place in the home of Emma and Mr Knightley. I will read more of these!

The Victorian Prizefighters series by Alice Coldbreath (three books)

In a similar vein to the K.J. Charles book mentioned above, these are well-structured but quite repetitive historical romance novels that I read either when travelling in hard-to-concentrate circumstances (in this case, incredibly busy and loud trains to a conference) or when extremely tired. If you have similar need for a brain-break but find a lot of supposedly "cosy" fiction frustratingly badly written, these might work for you (as long as you can handle the occasional spicy scene).

December:

Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer

The twelfth Heyer detective novel is something of an anticlimax, being very far from her best either in plot or character terms. I'm glad I managed to read all of them this year, though.

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

Another re-read for an upcoming podcast episode. This one still isn't a favourite of mine, even though I am fond of Mrs Oliver. By 1972, at the age of 82, I think Christie was a bit tired of writing mystery novels.

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace

This is the next title in my Green Penguin Book Club series on the podcast and a book I have a real soft spot for. Probably because it's Dorothy L. Sayers at her most peculiar: there's no Peter Wimsey, no conventional mystery structure, and no well-developed characters who go on a journey through the novel. Just 53 documents, laying out the inner lives of the inhabitants of a suburban London villa in the early 1930s and the horrible crime that gets committed as a result. The episode will be out in January.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

This is the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen book for January! Join us if you'd like to discuss it together.

The Adventures of Dagobert Trostler by Balduin Groller

These are short stories starring the "Sherlock Holmes of Vienna", the titular amateur detective, Dagobert Trostler. I really enjoyed these and would have read lots more, but I have so far struggled to find any more English translations beyond the Kazabo edition. If you have any leads for me, please get in touch.

A Case of Life and Limb by Sally Smith

A Christmas present, devoured in one day on 26th December! I recorded this time last year how much I enjoyed the first book in this historical mystery series set in the Inner Temple in the early 1900s, and the second book held up well. Here's hoping Smith keeps up her schedule so I can keep getting these as gifts for some years to come.

These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer

More on this to come in my next reading email...

Carrington's Cases by J. Storer Clouston

Another Christmas gift — a lovely collection of mystery short stories by an Orkney-born writer from the golden age of detective fiction. I suspect my husband worked quite hard to track this down, but if you do get a chance to pick up a copy, it's well worth it.

That was, belatedly, my reading for October, November and December: 28 books across three months, bringing to 121 for the year (if I finish any others in the remaining three days of December, I'll update the total in the next update). I just hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

I'll have more coherent thoughts about my year of reading and what I plan to do in 2026 for you next week. Thanks for scrolling this far through all of that — I hope you found something to try reading yourself. If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph.

Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

I was a reader of Christie long before I saw any of the film or TV adaptations, so I formed my own imaginary versions of her characters long before I saw any actors interpreting them. But for some reason, with this book only, the 2013 ITV version with David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker as Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver dominates my mental image of it. Perhaps it's because it was filmed at Greenway, the very house that Christie had in mind when she was writing it? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found myself favourably impressed by the plot upon this re-read, given that this is not a book that is usually named as a top tier Christie mystery. She did a good job here of marrying the old and the new, combining a classic country house setting with some hints of social change. I'm writing about this book shortly for an episode of Shedunnit, so look out for that if you want more extended thoughts on it.

What Abigail Did That Summer and The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

My audiobook re-listen of the Rivers of London series continues with two of the novellas. I really like both of these stories because they give me my favourite things about Aaronovitch's work — the magic and the London history — without the bit I like least, which is the police procedure and the multi-book nemesis. What Abigail Did That Summer cleverly fills the reader in on what was happening in the capital while usual protagonist Peter Grant was off on a rural case in Foxglove Summer, with his cousin Abigail as narrator. She gets in with a gang of talking foxes on Hampstead Heath, makes a new friend, and gets trapped in a century-old timeloop in a very posh house. Shvorne Marks narrates what I think might be my favourite book in the series so far.

The Furthest Station, another novella, is also great for readers with my preferences, as it's a magical ghost story set in Metroland (ie, along the northern extent of the Metropolitan line). John Betjeman fans, swoon with me. Unlike Abigail, this one stars Peter Grant again and does a great job of running a historical mystery in parallel with a contemporary one, another favourite trope of mine. At about four hours, an excellent listen when you want something engrossing and escapist but can't face committing to another 10+ hour audiobook.

Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

This was the October book for my podcast's book club and a novel I was delighted to revisit — truly one of the best WW2 mysteries and such a clever plot. I've talked at length about it already so I won't repeat myself, but I highly recommend this and the 1946 film starring Alastair Sim.

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

I mentioned this back in April: I really enjoy the type of book where someone reluctant ends up being terrifically competent and guiding an institution towards a good outcome. And this Discworld book about a convicted thief having to rescue a city's neglected post office and bring it back into operation absolutely scratches this itch for me. The sub-plot involving a cabal of investors who ruin the "clacks" — a semaphore-based telegraph system, basically the technological advance that has killed off the post — felt quite prophetic on this reread given the state of the tech companies these days... I'm only a casual Pratchett-enjoyer (I think I've read about half a dozen of his books, total?) but I've listened to the unabridged audiobook of this one at least three times.

A Rare Book of Cunning Device by Ben Aaronovitch

I fear I am becoming a Ben Aaronovitch completist. This was a short short story that he wrote for an event, now recorded by superb Rivers of London narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. It's brief — under thirty minutes — and the plot is correspondingly simple. Since I love bibliomysteries, I kind of wish he had developed this idea of a sentient book roaming the British Library stacks into something longer.

Let's Make a Scene by Laura Wood

This is a gorgeous novel, a second-chance romance about two actors who originally meet (and clash, despite obvious chemistry) in their youth when they are both cast in a period drama film. It's all made much worse by the fact that the studio puts them in a fake PR relationship to promote the film. At the end of the press tour, they part ways and mutually agree never to speak again. Then they have to come together again thirteen years later to make the sequel. The original film has become a cult classic and their careers have gone in very different directions: formerly inexperienced Cynthie is now an Oscars darling, and alleged nepo baby Jack is doing a vampire TV show, to the disgust of his snobby thespian parents. When the pair reunite, they don't seem to hate each other anymore...

I follow Laura Wood's work because she is an Eva Ibbotson fan and I feel that influence strongly in her fiction. For me, this is her best novel yet — funny, clever, sharp and moving. The passages that deal with Cynthie's "cancellation" because of her affair with a married director are nuanced and feel accurate but don't overwhelm with their topicality, while Jack's struggles with his family and their legacy are likewise handled with a light touch. Wood thanks Emma Thompson in the acknowledgements for writing the The Sense and Sensibility Diaries, which gave her insight into what it's like to make a really good small-budget Austen adaptation, and you can feel that influence. Probably the highest praise I can give this book is that it reads like the off-camera romance you wanted from Sense and Sensibility or the 1995 Pride and Prejudice series.

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

Another reread in advance of writing that podcast episode I mentioned up top. My opinions are divided on this 1961 Christie. The solution is fantastic and the creepy misdirection layered on top is pretty good, but I really dislike a lot of the "young people are so dirty and modern" stuff. It's there at least in part because Christie is trying to give her middle-aged male narrator a distinct point of view, but there's enough of it that it was grating on me by the end of the book. I would have preferred more about the witches, honestly, but that's just me.

That was, belatedly, my reading for September: 7 books, bringing me up to 93 for the year to date. I'm a couple of books ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

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...

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 86 for the year to date. I'm a 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...

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