My first encounter with Ruth Ware’s work was when I read The Turn of the Key quite by accident. I think I found it at the library and realized when…
British
The Keeper of Lost Things
July 20, 2022Ruth Hogan’s novel is a cozy, multi-layered love story about a woman who inherits a gorgeous home full of catalogued found objects that she is tasked with returning to their…
Eight Detectives
May 28, 2022The blurbs on the back are all true: this is one of the most creative detective novels I’ve read lately. There are homages to Christie, Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Marsh, etc.…
Enter a Murderer
January 16, 2022The second detective novel by Ngaio Marsh featuring the almost imperturbable Roderick Alleyn does not disappoint. This one develops the friendship between Detective Alleyn and the journalist Nigel Bathgate. I…
A Man Lay Dead
December 29, 2021This is the first Roderick Alleyn mystery novel by Ngaio (“Nigh-O”) Marsh, published in 1934. Marsh is considered one of the great “Queens of Crime” from the Golden Age of…
Books I Did Not Finish
September 5, 2020For the Summer 2020 edition of Things I Started and Stopped, I’ve got three books. First up is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. When this book first came out…
Last Bus to Woodstock
August 18, 2020[spoiler alert!] A little surprising, a little disappointing. We’re fans of the British TV series, here, so I thought I’d better see how Colin Dexter originally depicted Inspector Morse and…
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
May 26, 2020This did not disappoint. Although I was surprised at the similarities between this plot and its resolution and that of Sayers’s first novel Whose Body? I suspect that once you’ve…
Strong Poison
May 13, 2020The most surprising thing happens on page 47 of this edition: Lord Peter proposes marriage to Harriet Vane who’s in prison for poisoning her former lover. This is just after…
The Turn of the Key
April 20, 2020In the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, this new novel by Ruth Ware seeks to revise and update Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw…