Brighton Belle by Sara Sheridan

review by Maryom

1951. Brighton. With the war over and the Nazis brought to justice at Nuremberg, Mirabelle Bevan (Secret Service, retired) thinks her skills are no longer required. After her lover's death she retires to the seaside to put the past behind her and takes a job at a debt collection agency run by the charismatic Big Ben McGuigan. But when the case of Romana Laszlo - a pregnant Hungarian refugee - comes in, Mirabelle soon discovers that her specialist knowledge is vital. With enthusiastic assistance from insurance clerk Vesta Churchill, they follow a mysterious trail of gold sovereigns and corpses that only they can unravel.

Mirabelle won't quite admit it but she's finding post-war life a little dull, so a little mystery to solve comes as quite a diversion. She's an independent, sophisticated young woman in the habit of thinking and acting for herself but she soon discovers that there's a huge difference between sitting in an office, writing the manual on covert ops, and putting them into practice. Vesta is more cautious and baulks at some of things Mirabelle asks her to do but never chickens out. Together they make an interesting and unusual team.

Brighton Belle is what I like to consider a good old-fashioned 'cosy' crime book - there are no psycho serial killers loosing their grudges on the world just good old bad guys prepared to murder their way to a profit - and Mirabelle herself is a 'traditional' amateur sleuth - think Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence series or a Brighton based Mma Ramotswe. Brighton itself is a murky sort of place with underworld gangs operating almost in the open and a corrupt police force that turns a blind eye. It hadn't really occurred to me till I started to add the 'tags' to this post but I suppose fiction written now and set in the 1950s counts as 'historical'

This is my first Mirabelle Bevan mystery - a lucky find at the library which, after reading Sheridan's Secret of the Sands, I'd expected to enjoy - and most definitely did! I'm now hoping they stock more!

Maryom's review - 5 stars

Publisher - Polygon

Genre - crime, adult, historical
 
Buy Brighton Belle (A Mirabelle Bevan Mystery) from Amazon

Secret of The Sands by Sara Sheridan

review by Maryom

In 1833 although slavery has recently been abolished in Britain, elsewhere it is still flourishing. Zena, an Abyssinian beauty, is captured and taken to the slave market of Muscat in Arabia where her captors expect to raise a high price for her. Passing through different hands she is given to Lt James Wellstead, a British naval officer involved in mapping the coastline of the Arabian Peninsula and about to embark on an arduous trip into the desert in search of two missing fellow officers. In charge of the rescue party, though, are the two slave traders who captured Zena. Their knowledge of the desert makes them ideal guides but not the best companions.

Secret of the Sands is a book I came across through a Twitter friendship with the author. Initially I wasn't sure that it would be my kind of book as I'm not really a reader of romantic fiction but I decided to borrow it from the library and give it a go. I'm glad I did, finding it to be an exciting adventure story rather than a purely romantic one.
The starting point for the novel was an account of the real life adventures of James Wellstead - maybe not quite as exciting as this fictionalised account but something that lends a good historical backing to the novel.
The telling alternates between the viewpoints of Zena, Wellstead and the 2 missing officers - conjuring up the atmosphere of 19th century Arabia, of bustling towns and sea-ports backing onto the endless, empty desert. A world peopled with a large cast of diverse plausible characters - not all the bad guys are totally bad, and the good ones aren't too good to be true!


Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - HarperCollins
Genre - romance, historical fiction 

Buy Secret of the Sands from Amazon