Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs was like water after a reading drought! I was half afraid that the series would have lost its charm, but I needn’t have worried. Happy to report that this was an awesome read.
Tag: mysteries
It’s been a while since I read any contemporary YA, think the last one may have been Thirteen Reasons Why and Some Boys Do. So, I took up Karen M. McManu’s One of Us is Lying with some trepidation. It came highly recommended in last week’s Top 10 Tuesday posts. And it was actually quite good.
Simon’s been running a gossip app in high school, and has made a lot of enemies because most of that gossip is perfectly true. Ouch! Then Simon and 4 other classmates get called to detention over somebody else’s prank, and Simon ends up dead. Who killed Simon, and what secrets had Simon discovered that he needed silencing?
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The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.
The Plot:
Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.
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Behold, Here’s Poison by Georgette Heyer
Behold, Here’s Poison is a good example of how difficult it must have been to investigate back in the 1920s. There were no CCTVs, camera phones, voice recognition, or DNA analysis. Even fingerprinting really just started in 1901. All the police had: post-mortem (never as sophisticated as forensics today), witnesses (mostly unreliable), and criminal psychology (quite dodgy). There’s also a certain disdain towards police among the upper classes, which makes it difficult to make honest inquiries.
That’s why Inspector Hannasyde and his very-chatty Sergeant Hemingway are in a bit of a pickle. Old Mr. Matthews has been poisoned by nicotine overdose, and his entire remaining family is suspect. Then his sister dies, also by nicotine poisoning, and the police none the wiser. The Inspector knows that Randall, the extremely snarky dandy heir to Matthews, is hiding something. But Randall just won’t spill the beans.
: that title alone makes you want to grab the book. Since its publication in 1908, the book has gone through a series of covers, each better than the next:
How we Begin:
The book begins with a poem called the ‘Nightmare’ which seems to suggest that it’s all just a horrid old dream. The first chapter presents a psychedelic imagery of red brick houses, red sunset and a red haired man, i.e. the Saffron Park. Very dream-like indeed, till two poets begin to debate on whether Order or Chaos is the true spirit of poetry. I kid you not — one of these poets is an underclothes policeman name Gabriel Syme and the other poet is an anarchist named Gregory.
It seems that the Anarchists in the early 1900s regularly shot people and Presidents and caused ‘reigns of terror’ (). In that sense, every secessionist movement and every terrorist outfit is essentially a manifestation of anarchism?
Anyway, to cut a long story short: the debate gets really heated. Our genius and poetic hero, Syme, finally outwits Gregory into exposing some unsavory secrets. Using those secrets, he then manages to infiltrate a band of anarchists called the Council. Each member of this Council is named after a day of the week (here lies a hint), and Syme gets appointed as “Thursday”. Syme’s real goal is to flout the plans of the Council, save the world, and expose the notorious head of the gang, the man everybody calls “Bloody Sunday”. Will Syme succeed?
Stop here, if you don’t want me to ruin the book for you with my spoilers.
The Friday Face Off meme was created by Books by Proxy and hosted by Lynn. For each week’s theme, we select a matching book and compare its different book covers across editions. Perfect for a visual fix!
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Theme for Friday Face Off #1 is:
Dressed in White – could be a person could be a landscape – or something else completely?
In Wilkie Collins’ , there is literally a character dressed in white, a mysterious figure at the heart of this classic Gothic mystery from 1859. A gallery of a few of its book covers below:
My own personal favorite from these is the Vintage Collins edition in the middle row, to the left. I think that cover captures the theme of the mysterious lady seen at night, dressed in all white, very well indeed. This has been a fun Friday Face Off!
It’s time for #6degrees. Start off from the same place as other wonderful readers, add six connected books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.
January 2021’s book is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Hamnet is a fictional account of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died at the age 11 in 1596, and his wife Agnes, about whom we have heard so little.
Hamnet reminded me of all things Shakespeare; so for today’s , let’s travel today across works inspired by the Bard.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we spotlight our favorite books of 2020.
This is a necessary ritual for wrapping up the year, and so here are my top ten reads for 2020.
Are you looking for a screwball murder mystery comedy? The 1985 movie Clue is just the right answer.
Based on a board game of the same name, tells the story of six guests who are invited to the castle of an unknown host. Well, it doesn’t go the way of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but there are six murders before the dinner is through.
The first half is all about getting to know the weird guests and their weird behavioral quirks. Carry on and you’ll be rewarded in the second half. Because when the laughs come, they will be dragged out of you suddenly, and repeatedly. The last whacky hour just whizzes by, as our crazy guests get curiouser and curiouser.
The movie also doesn’t lose track of the whodunnit … And the award goes to the butler for revealing what “really” happened. In that final climax scene of the movie, our butler (Tim Curry) presents three scenarios, and I DARE YOU not to roar with laughter.
I have seen comparisons of with (starring Maggie Smith). But , IMHO, is vastly more humorous and well-orchestrated.
Rating: 8/10. Highly recommended.
