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Book 20: Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh, audiobook review

This isn't a review of the book, as much as of the narrator of the audio book version. Artists in Crime is among of the better of Ngaio Marsh's Chief Inspector Alleyn novels, and one of the ones I occasionally reread - not so much for the murder plot, which is gruesome and more than a little melodramatic, albeit clever - but for the romance. It's not a romance novel per se, but the side plot concerns Alleyn's very tentative courtship of his future wife, artist Agatha Troy. They had met in a previous book, where he was interested in and attracted to her while she was in equal parts intrigued by him and annoyed with herself for being so. In this book we get to see how she begins to accept that she has feelings for him, and he to have some hope that she may reciprocate his feelings for her. It is not the same breathtaking romance arc as in contemporary author Dorothy L. Sayer's detective novels, to which some have drawn parallels, but is quite satisfying even so. ...

Review: The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Genre : Crime noir and horror crossover. Originally published : 2015. Have you read this book? Do you agree or disagree with my review of it? It was the title of this book that first caught my attention. Then I spotted the cover art, which was enough to make me pick it up and read the blurb, which in turn was enough to make me buy the book. Thomas Fool is the senior of Hell's three Information Men, a small group of detectives whose job mostly seems to be to be aware of - but not investigate - every atrocity committed in Hell, mostly by demons against humans. Every now and then they do receive a case their overseers, a group of demons called The Bureaucracy, want them to pay more attention to. A mutilated body is found that has had its soul completely removed - there usually remain some vestiges of it after death - and this is deemed worthy of investigation. Soon the bodies are piling up, bearing signs of ever more frenzied attacks, and Fool has to divide his ti...

Review: Dead Man's Folly

Status: Rearead. Permanent collection. Genre: Murder mystery; detective fiction. Did I mention I'm on an Agatha Christie kick? When I picked up Cards on the Table for the What's in a Name reading challenge it had been ages since I had read any Christie and I had forgotten how delightful her books are. So I decided to read some more Christie. Since I own three Avenel omnibus volumes of Christie's books, each with 5 novels in it, plus several single books, I have plenty to choose from and began with one I don't recall reading before: Thirteen at Dinner (aka Lord Edgware Dies ). One of the Avenel volumes contains Poirot stories, another Miss Marple stories, and the third is called Agatha Christie's Detectives, and that's what I'm making my way through right now. It contains one Miss Marple story, two Poirots, one Tommy and Tuppence story and one Superintendent Battle story. I have already finished two of the books, and have three left, all of them ones...

Review: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Book status: Reread. Permanent collection. Genre: Murder mystery; amateur detective fiction. It‘s funny how some books can stay in one‘s memory for ages, with even tiny plot details remembered, while others, equally good, seem to simply evaporate from one‘s brain. This is one of those books. I remembered nothing about it, not a single thing, which is good, because the main objective of this kind of mystery, besides being entertaining, is to engage the reader in trying to solve the case ahead of the sleuth. The narrator of the book is Leonard Clement, the vicar of St. Mary Mead. At the beginning of the book he and several other people express wishes that Colonel Lucius Protheroe, the local magistrate and churchwarden, would die. Protheroe is shown to be an unpleasant man, a harsh judge, domestic tyrant and quarrelsome to boot. Everyone is shocked but no one grieves much when he is found shot dead in the study at the vicarage, where he had been waiting for the vicar to return from...

Review: The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson

The cover of my copy. Genre: Historical murder mystery; detective fiction.   Themes: Murder, secrets, false identities, false pretences, unexpected visitors, movies, young love.  Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 4/6, a book with an item of clothing in the title. The titular mink (a coat) is the property of one of the characters in this frothy and funny country-house murder mystery. (You will have to read the book if you want to know how and why it got mutilated). The Affair of the Mutilated Mink and the books that preceded it and followed it, The Affair of the Blood-stained Egg Cosy and The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks , have been justifiably called tributes to the Golden Era mystery, and one quickly realises that it doesn't take place in some unspecified version of the 1930s, but specifically the 1930s of the detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Michael Innes, whose detectives, Wimsey, Alleyn and Appleby, ...

(kinda, sorta) Review: Thirteen at Dinner by Agatha Christie

Alternative title:  Lord Edgware Dies (original British title) Genre: Detective fiction, murder mystery. Themes: Murder, identity switch, sociopathy. When I finished reading Cards on the Table I realised I only had one book left to finish the five-novel Poirot omnibus it is in, so I sat down and read Thirteen at Dinner in order to finish the book.  The plot (if you aren't already familiar with it, from book or film) revolves around a murder apparently committed by a woman who has no fewer than 12 witnesses to give her an alibi, and yet was seen at the scene of the crime at the same time. Poirot, having already become involved before the crime was committed, is commissioned by Inspector Japp of the Scotland Yard to investigate, and does so, aided by his friend Hastings and the police. I love the noir feel to these covers. When I called Cards on the Table a proper mystery I was, of course, referring to the fact that I haven't touched a pure mystery novel in a...

Review: Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie

Genre: Detective fiction, murder mystery. Themes: Murder, secrets.  Reading challenge: What's in a Name 2016 Challenge book no.: 2/6, a book with a type of furniture in the title. It's been ages since I read a proper mystery, and this is definitely one of those.   It begins, like several of Christie's other stories, with a dinner party that ends in murder.  This is a murder-magnet tale, i.e. one of those Poirot books where he is present, or as good as, when a murder takes place and the police ask him to assist in solving it, but he is still the principal detective (of course).  What's interesting about this story is that Poirot has no fewer than three Watsons to assist him, or rather: they work together to solve the case, with facts found out by each contributing to Poirot being able to work out the truth. Two of those Watsons, Colonel Race and Superintendent Battle, are also Christie detectives in their own right (the former in Sparkling Cyanid...

Review: Arnaldur Indriðason: Skuggasund (Potential title translation: Shadow Channel (source: Wikipedia))

This is a "crimes of the past revisited" story, something Arnaldur has done before in several of his other books (e.g. Silence of the Grave , The Draining Lake and Strange Shores ). Told in chapters alternating between 1944 and the modern day, it tells the story of how the murder of an old man sets a retired police detective on the trail of another, unsolved, murder that happened during WW2 in Reykjavík. This is not a detective Erlendur story and does not feature either of his two closest collaborators on the police force but instead introduces a new character, a recently retired detective named Konráð. I don't know if the English title given for this book in the Wikipedia entry on Arnaldur and elsewhere on the web (except that literature.is gets it (almost) right), is the one that will be used for the eventual translation, but to me it looks suspiciously like a Google Translate blooper. Skuggasund actually means "Shadow Alley " and is the name of a stre...