A Better Man by Louise Penny

A Better Man by Louise Penny

by Carol6 Comments
With A Better Man, Penny is back to the kind of mystery I enjoy, the small, personal mystery where the fate of Canada is not hanging on the outcome, which I was happy about. When the stories are too big, too political, it makes me think maybe I should step away from the series, but then one like this brings me back. It starts as a missing person case, but quickly changes to a murder investigation, all while the waters are rising around Quebec. The dead woman was abused by her husband, so suspicion quickly and naturally falls on him - and stays there. But proving he's the killer is another matter altogether. I knew the "who" although not necessarily the why or how. That's not the fault of the book, really the mystery was well-done. The trio, Gamache, Beauvoir, and Lacoste think they have a decent case against the husband, but it's blown out of the water and they...
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Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

by Carol7 Comments
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,...
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Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers

by Carol2 Comments
Did you listen to the bell video above? Do, because it's the background to the book. We start with church bells and end with church bells, but it's not a tune like the carillon at our church plays. It's change ringing, more mathematical than melodic. The story actually talks about it a fair amount, but basically, the bells are rung in a sequence, but then go through the "changes" or permutations of that sequence. It can more complicated and the jargon itself is interesting, with bobs and hunts and dodges. Lord Peter Wimsey is the series' amateur detective, an English gentleman, second son of a duke, who is wealthy and solves mysteries for his amusement. On New Year's Eve, his car goes off the road near the village of Fenchurch St. Paul. It just so happens that the church has a fabulous set of bells and Wimsey is recruited to help ring a nine-hour peal, as one of the regular ringers is...
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Father Brown: Selected Stories by G. K. Chesterton

Father Brown: Selected Stories by G. K. Chesterton

by Carol4 Comments
I finally got around to reading the only Father Brown book I have on my shelf. It's a selection of stories from each of the collections. Father Brown is easy to underestimate. In the first story of the collection, a police detective sees him as rather stupid and bumbling, which is the impression he gives most people at first meeting. "There was ... a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village... The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting... He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had...
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Behold a Fair Woman by Francis Duncan

Behold a Fair Woman by Francis Duncan

by Carol2 Comments
Behold a Fair Woman is the last in the Mordecai Tremaine series and I'm a bit sad to be finished with it. I like Mordecai. He's unassuming, observant, solves crimes and reads romance stories. The books are typical for the era, in a good way. Mordecai is on vacation, staying with friends. He meets several of the residents and guests on the island before the inevitable murder occurs. There are several suspects. The dead man was not as well-loved as he wanted everyone to believe. And the people on the island are not all as care-free as they would seem. Mordecai has a well-known reputation for solving mysteries and is invited immediately by the local police to sit in on interviews and is encouraged to find out what he can on his own and report back. The plot is a little convoluted and we never actually meet one of the main players. The characters were fine, but I just don't think this...
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A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang

by Carol4 Comments
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...
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