Sujata Massey’s series of detective novels set in 1920s India starts off with an intriguing glimpse into the lives of Muslim pardanashin, women who live in seclusion. The three widows…
British
The Reading List
June 7, 2024To be honest, what attracted me to this novel by Sara Nisha Adams was, first, that it’s set in a West London neighborhood and, second, that it’s got a couple…
It Girl
July 9, 2023My 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…
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…