Campion is contacted by Joyce Blount, who is engaged to a friend of his. Joyce lives in Socrates Close, Cambridge, surrounded by the old, eccentric Faraday family. The matriarch of the family is Caroline Faraday, widow of a famous academic. However, Uncle Andrew has gone missing and all is not well within the household. As a favor to his friend, Marcus, Campion goes to the house and helps with the investigation. Upper-class families are always at least a bit more open to others like themselves than to detectives.
It turns out Uncle Andrew is dead, just the first of the murders. The family members don't get along well, but they all rely on Mrs. Faraday, since none have money of their own. To be honest, I really enjoyed them. One Aunt was a bit of a religious fanatic, an uncle is a closet drinker who wants to be braver than he is, Joyce is just sweet, Carolin is as tough as...
I've been on a bit of a Royal Spyness kick lately. They're light and easy to follow when I'm doing other things. Georgie is delightful as always. This time around, Georgie is staying at Kensington Palace and showing Princess Marina around London. She is the fiancee of the King's sons, George. And then a dead body shows up in the courtyard, a woman who had plenty of lovers including George himself. Georgie gets roped into helping the detective due to her position, but also does a fair amount of investigating on her own. The mystery was fine with a few suspects and some red herrings. Malice at the Palace touches on the plight of unwed mothers at the time, too.
The characters are really the highlight. Georgie is fun and caring and smart. She's a bit naive, but I'm not sure how, given the behavior and talk of her mother and her best friend, both of whom are far from innocent....
I did see the movie version of The Talented Mr. Ripley starring Matt Damon back when, so I had some vague idea of what I was getting into with the novel, but I didn't honestly remember much.
Tom Ripley is probably a sociopath.
He conveniently leaves murder off his list.
He is definitely an expert manipulator and liar, lacks a conscience, is obsessive, and has difficulty with personal relationships. He is sent to Italy by a wealthy man with the intent of convincing the man's son to return to America. Needless to say, that does not happen. He spends some time playing the rich American, sight-seeing, eating, hanging out with his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf, and Dickie's maybe girlfriend Marge, who Tom clearly doesn't like. He wants Dickie to himself and sees Marge as an obstacle to that.
We see the world through Tom Ripley's eyes, which is fascinating and disturbing. Everything he does is logical, given his reasoning. He has...
Bleak House is like a soap opera, in a good way. It was originally written as a serial, so it had to have qualities that kept you coming back, day after day or week after week. There's murder and romance and everything in between. You've got some plot lines that are the same no matter how many months (years) between the last time you watched it. Here it's the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the longest-running case in the Court of Chancery. This book actually spurred on legal reform in England. There are probably 60-ish characters, some that show up on an irregular basis and play their bit: a dance instructor, a man who constantly lives off others' generosity, a devoted housekeeper; and others who are the core characters. Bleak House shows us all the types of people in England, the poor, the destitute, the rich, the lawyers and law enforcement, the sick, the lonely.
The central character is Esther Summerson,...
There are a few things you might not know about me. 1.) I love clickbait. 2.) I can be a sucker for ads, not the ones on tv necessarily, more often the ones that show up on websites or facebook, you know those targetted ads. A Gentleman's Murder showed up in one of the ads on Goodreads. I forget what exactly the mini-blurb in the ad said, probably something along the lines of "reminiscent of the Golden Age of Mysteries, but it, along with the title and cover, was enough to send me off to the full blurb and I ended up adding it to my to-read list.
A Gentleman's Murder takes place just after WWI in London. While a lot of the mysteries I've read that were actually written in that era gloss over the war, this one faces it aftereffects head-on. "Shell Shock," since this takes places before we referred to it as PTSD, plays an important role in...
I loved The Consuming Fire! It's the middle book in a trilogy and do read #1 first. Galactic travel through the Flow is breaking down and human civilization is in grave danger. The Emperox of the Interdependency is convinced, but she’s surrounded by a lot of wealthy, powerful people who are actively conspiring against her.
Grayland II is a tough lady. She's convinced her empire is in danger -and it totally is. She's doing everything she can to figure out how to save as many people as possible, but as always there are others who are in denial or simply trying to spin things so they come out on top. There's politics and adventure and even a sweet romance that doesn't take away from the story as a whole.
The Interdependency is full of strong women, royalty, religious women, heads of merchant families, assassins, and everyday women whose common sense and unrestrained-ness make them just as valuable. I like that for the...
