I already posted my main 2020 in Review and Looking Ahead to 2021 posts a while ago — only on my new blog (separate post to come) –, but I held back on my 2020 reading statistics until the year was well and truly over. And for all my good intentions when posting my mid-year summary back in early July 2020, the second half of the year continued pretty much in the same vein as the first half had begun; i.e., my statistics for the whole year are still a variation on the theme of Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, or, 17 charts showing that 2020 was a year of reading Golden Age mysteries written by women (and following other Anglo-/ UK-centric reading proclivities); i.e. comfort reading galore … it was just that kind of year, I guess.
As a result, my Golden Age Mysteries / Detection Club reading project progressed very nicely. Luckily, as I said in my main 2020 in Review post, I also managed to add a number of new countries to my Around the World challenge, and the gender balance is solidly in favor of women authors: I read almost 2 1/2 books by women for every book written by a man — in fact, I even reread more books by women than the total number of books by men. So there was at least some progress in other areas, too. And I liked or even loved most of the books I read in 2020 — including most of the new-to-me books –, which of course was another huge plus; in a year where reading was my go-to source of comfort, at that: most of my ratings were 4 stars or higher and thus, above the rating that marks “average” in my personal scale (3.5 stars).
Still, in 2021 I’m going to make a fresh attempt to refocus on my Around the World reading project, in furtherance of which I’ve also created a Diversity Bingo that I’ll try to get through in the space of this one year (though if it takes longer, it takes longer); and I’ll also try to include more books from my Freedom and Future Library in my yearly reading again.
And now, without any further ado:
Greatest New Author Discoveries of 2020
Classics and LitFic Bernardine Evaristo
Olivia Manning
Historical Fiction Dorothy Dunnett
Jean-François Parot
Paul Doherty
Golden and Silver Age Mysteries Josephine Bell
Moray Dalton
Molly Thynne
Christianna Brand
Anthony Gilbert
Raymond Postgate
Patricia Moyes
My Life in Book Titles
This is a meme I’ve seen on quite a few blogs towards the end of 2020; it was created by Annabel at Annabookbel. You’re to answer the prompts, using only books you have read in 2020; without, if possible, repeating a book title. I thought I’d include it in my yearly roundup — and to up the ante a little bit further, I decided to use only books I read for the first time in 2020.
In high school I wasUnspeakable (John Bercow)
People might be surprised by (my incarnation as) Lioness Rampant (Tamora Pierce)
I will never beThe Horse You Came in On (Martha Grimes), nor Resorting to Murder (Martin Edwards, ed.; Various Authors)
My life in lockdown was like (a) Tour de Force (Christianna Brand) and (a) Tragedy at Law (Cyril Hare)
My fantasy job isThe Thinking Machine at Work (Jacques Futrelle)
At the end of a long day I need to be Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi) (to my) Pilgrim’s Rest (Patricia Wentworth)
I hate being (around) Serpents in Eden (Martin Edwards, ed.; Various Authors)
Wish I hadThe Lost Tools of Learning (Dorothy L. Sayers)
My family reunions are (often with) Thirteen Guests (J. Jefferson Farjeon)
At a party you’d find me withMy Friend Mr. Campion (Margery Allingham), Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (Emmuska Orczy), and other Bodies from the Library (Tony Medawar, ed.; Various Authors)
I’ve never been toGoodwood (Holly Throsby), Cherringham (Matthew Costello, Neil Richards), or At the Villa Rose (A.E.W. Mason)
A happy day includesA Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid) (of my own): My Beloved World (Sonia Sotomayor)
Motto(s) I live by: To Love and Be Wise (Josephine Tey); and We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
On my bucket list isShakespeare’s Local (Pete Brown)
In my next life, I want to haveThe Grand Tour (Matthew Pritchard, ed.; Agatha Christie)
The Stats
Number of books started: 273 Number of books finished: 271 DNF: 2 Average Rating (overall): 3.9 Average Rating w/o Favorite Annual Xmas Rereads: 3.8
Note: The above chart includes my 6 annual Christmas rereads, which have a habit of slightly skewing my overall rating figures upwards; without these books, the number of 5-star books is reduced by 5 and the number of 4.5-star books is reduced by 1.
Note: “F / M (mixed)” refers to anthologies with contributions by both male and female authors, as well as to books jointly written by male and female authors. — “N / A” in the protagonist gender chart refers to Martha Wells’s Murderbot, who is deliberately created as gender-neutral.
Note: “Multi-ethnic” either refers to several persons (authors / protagonists) of different genders, or to one person of mixed ethnicity.
Sooo, that’s another bingo game behind us already! Many thanks to our game hosts for successfully moving the game from BookLikes to a new venue and organizing one heck of a game despite that venue’s built-in limitations. I had a great time and would only have wished I could have participated more throughout the game (particularly in October).
As I had expected, RL started to run major interference by mid-September; and while initially I was at least still able to continue reading (even though I no longer had any time to compose update posts here on WP), by the beginning of October, even reading was essentially a no-go. Just as well that I had powered through my remaining books by that time … otherwise, this would likely have been the first year in which I hadn’t made it all the way to blackout.
Anyway — here’s my blacked-out bingo card — gained after having had to wait for Doomsday (to be called … on the game’s very last day, at that: could there possibly have been a better conclusion to this year’s game?), with my “virgin” card below and my final spreadsheet at the end of this post:
Book 2 in Novik’s series of books updating classical fairy tales (though not, actually, a sequel to Uprooted — this one very much stands on its own ground): essentially, a blend of Rumpelstiltskin, Baba Yaga, and the English / British version of the elf lore, set in a fictional Eastern European country that is, however, very clearly inspired by Russia — down to the use of proper names, titles, and other terms, which are either downright Russian or a sort of pan-Slavic bowdlerization of Russian, Polish, or other Slavic terms.
Novik almost lost me during the initial scene-setting, which struck me as overly elaborate and wordy (she’s clearly her own greatest fan where it comes to the use of descriptive language or, for that matter, even “showing” instead of “telling”); but once the story got going, I was happy enough to come along for the ride, and there were enough innovative elements to keep me interested throughout. It was probably a good thing that both the source material and the setting were entirely fictional, though (even if heavily borrowing from Russian and pan-Slavic elements), because I’m almost certain that if Novik had aimed for an existing historical setting (as she does in her Temeraire series), she’d have had me wincing at some point or other. — I may go on to read Uprooted or another fairy tale-based book by her eventually, but it’s not a priority, and after this first taste of her writing, I am even less eager to go anywhere near Temeraire.
The Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
This was a reread, which this time around I liked quite a bit better than when I first read it a few years ago. The Medieval Murderers series of round robins are the perfect books for the “Relics and Curiosities” Halloween Bingo category, as their very concept consists in following one (supposedly cursed or unlucky) item through history, from its first use or appearance at some point in the (typically: early) Middle Ages to the present day (or beyond); so they have become sort of my go-to series for this bingo square. Yet, in this particular instance I was sorely tempted to change my mind and assign the book to either the “Doomsday” or the “Dystopian Hellscape” square, as it ends with a scary-and-believable-as-hell doomsday scenario set in a post-climate-catastrophe future, with half the world (e.g., all of Africa and India) essentially burnt up and turned into a scorching, uninhabitable desert, and the better part of the rest half-submerged by the world’s oceans after the melting of the polar ice caps. (It’s also a showcase for not extrapolating too noticeably from the political order at the time of writing, though, as it was written pre-Brexit and more or less takes Britain’s continued membership in the EU as a given … oh well.)
Like in all the books in the series, the individual sections of The Lost Prophecies (which concerns a book of doomsday prophesies compiled by a 6th century Irish monk) can, at heart, stand on their own, even though there are occasional cross-references; particularly, of course, to the “dangerous book”‘s mysterious origins. Individually and collectively, the book’s various parts take the reader on a journey from 6th century Ireland to medieval Devon, late medieval Cambridge, the Tartar Steppe, rural England in Shakespeare’s times, and, as mentioned above, the doomsday world of the “dangerous book”‘s final prophecies. As is to be expected in a round robin — and as is typically the case in this series, too — not all of the individual mystery sections are equally strong, and I’ve found my previous likes and dislikes essentially confirmed upon this reread, even if, as I said, I liked the book quite a bit better as a whole this time around.
A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok
Ultimately, I decided to go with Byatt’s take on Ragnarök for the “Doomsday” Halloween Bingo square, because let’s face it, doomsday doesn’t get anymore terrifying than in Norse mythology — and I am glad that Byatt, for one, didn’t try to humanize the Norse deities, as so many other authors do in their attempt to make them understandable to modern readers. (You can easily do that to the gods of Greek mythology — and honestly, that’s one of the reasons why as a child I found them, and Greek mythology as a whole, much easier to understand than Norse mythology; but try to assign human characteristics and motivations to Thor or Loki and you’re instantly missing their intrinsic nature.) By the same token, I found it intriguing that Byatt herself — as the “thin child” through whose eyes we are witnessing Ragnarök here is, as she herself confirms in the book’s afterword, an only thinly-veiled edition of Byatt’s younger self — was drawn so much to the Norse version of doomsday in her younger years. Of couse, what with WWII persistently threatening to destroy her own world, on the one hand it’s easily understandable that she would turn to the kind of storytelling that centers on precisely this sort of catastrophe; on the other hand, the thoroughly alien and hard-to-grasp Norse deities don’t seem to be the very first, logical point of identification coming to mind. All the more thought, however, Byatt clearly put into her approach to Ragnarök, and all the more the whole thing is to the benefit of the reader … even if, like myself, that reader still comes away preferring Greek to Norse mythology.
Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley
Just as the Medieval Murderers series has, over the years, become my go-to series for “Relics and Curiosities”, Sharyn McCrumb’s Ballad series is my go-to series for the Southern Gothic bingo square. I’ve enjoyed all of the books from that series that I’ve read so far; none more than The Ballad of Frankie Silver. This particular entry, while not a complete let-down, was thus a bit unexpected as it is the first time that I could not empathize with one of the major POV characters (which, I find more and more, is kind of crucial to my enjoyment of a book); not least because I thought her character unnecessarily clichéd. And although McCrumb insists that — like in her other Ballad novels — the essential story is based on historic fact, she seems to have given in to conjecture here more than she usually does, which is something that I find problematic at least if, like here, it involves people who have actually lived, and have been a part of the events described, though not necessarily (or at least not demonstrably) in the way set forth by the author. — Research and faithful narration aside, however, McCrumb can still write rings around many another writer, and her scene-setting and ear for dialogue (both interior and exterior) is as flawless as ever here.
Additional separate post HERE — Macavity, Mr. Mistoffelees & Co. in all their feline glory still very much deserve a post of their own!
Michael Jecks: The Malice of Unnatural Death
I’ve been a fan of Michael Jecks’s Knights Templar series for a number of years now, and although he pretty much grabbed me with the opening scene of that series’s very first book (and never mind that that particular book did come across as more of a typical “early” book later on), I keep enjoying how much better the series gets the further it progresses. I am not reading it in order (though I’ve read enough books at this point to have a fairly solid grasp of the two main characters’ overall story arch) — so far this hasn’t greatly bothered me, but I may find it more difficult to go back to some of the earlier books after having read this particular installment, which, never mind its occasionally gut-wrenching scenes, is a veritable page-turner and darned near perfectly crafted in virtually every respect. It’s also the perfect Halloween (bingo) read, in that it combines a (medieval) mystery — set in Exeter and the main characters’ nearby Dartmoor home — with apparent elements of the supernatural; concerning, as it does, the activities of a necromancer — an assassin claiming to be in league with the devil and using powers bestowed on him by the devil in order to carry out his murders (in the dead of winter, at that). All told, this was definitely one of the highlights of my bingo reads this year.
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Another (re-re-)reread and, not just in its medieval setting, the perfect follow-up to Michael Jecks’s The Malice of Unnatural Death: The story of a young man professing an earnest desire to become a novice at Shrewsbury’s abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul and yet, soon revealing in his sleep that he is haunted by demons that will need to be exorcised before any decision about his future can be made — not just the decision whether he is meant for the cloister at all.
This is one of my favorite installments in Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series; I’ve revisited both the book and the screen adaptation starring Derek Jacobi numerous times … and I confess that petty li’l me always gets an extra kick out of seeing the odious Brother Jerome brought down a peg or three here when he is temporarily rendered incapable of speech. (And I feel secure in the knowledge that not merely Cadfael but Abbot Radulfus shares that sentiment, so I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it, either.)
Alice Hoffman: The River King
This was, incredibly, my first taste of Hoffman’s writing — in hindsight, I’m wondering whether I should have started with her Practical Magic books after all (but then again, I might be wondering about the same thing in reverse — i.e., whether I should have started with this book — if I had). Either way, I was a bit more underwhelmed than I had expected to be — with this book, at any rate: I”ve always been much less certain that the Practical Magic books are for me, and am even less certain about that now.
This is a murder mystery with supernatural elements set in a New England prep school: I found the main characters and the setting well enough executed, but I suppose I’m just too prosaically-minded to see what the supernatural elements added to the (by and large sordid, but hardly original) story — and Hoffman’s writing at times has a downright manipulative quality that I found more and more jarring the further I progressed in the book. I also have a serious bone to pick with the ending, which doesn’t seem to hold out much hope for the victims of bullying in this (the real, not the supernatural) world — in a book that clearly aims to send a message, that is just about the last sort of message I’d want to see.
Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho
Another comfort (re)read (well, its been that kind of year … and fall): It was more or less “six of this, half a dozen of the other” whether I’d use this book for the “Film at 11” bingo square and something from Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series for “Read by Flashlight or Candlelight” or vice versa, but I ultimately decided to go with the more obvious focus on the book as actually written here, simply because this book’s screen adaptation is one of the Morse TV episodes I care somewhat less for than the series as a whole. The reason is that the screenwriters’ fiddling with the plot (which is present, to some extent, in all episodes of the TV series) in this instance creates a structure that is several degrees more serpentine than the already fairly convoluted plot of the actual book — which in turn, for a number of reasons isn’t my absolute favorite in the series, either, but as a writing exercise it’s still superior to the screenplay. (No reflection on the cast: John Thaw, Kevin Whately, and Gemma Jones are all in great form.)
Another reason for my decision to pick this book for this particular square was that the audio version is narrated by Samuel West, who does an absolutely phantastic job, as he does for the entire series.
In keeping with the theme of this square, I made this listening experience as comfortable and laid-back as possible; starting while having a bath and finishing in bed — with my obligatory black(ish) Halloween bingo good luck cat by my side. — Thanks again to Lora who agreed to flip this square for my original card’s “Stone Cold Horror” … I’d never have found a horror novel set in winter on my shelves (nor been inclined to read it even if I’d found one, this year being what it is)! You’ve got to admit … this was the much more “feel good” version:
Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground
This year’s Halloween Bingo buddy read — thanks again to Christine, BrokenTune and Lillelara for the fun of reading this book together! Somehow, that seems to be the way Patricia Highsmith’s books are enjoyed best … Though I have to say, while I struggled with Strangers on a Train, I’m getting a complete and total kick out of Tom Ripley. I mean, sure, he’s a psychopath, and it was slightly even more fun to watch him turn into the monster that he actually is in the first book … but it was still eye-rolling good fun to watch his antics in the arts world. (He also seems to be one of the notable exceptions to the fact that, as a rule, I have to be able to empathize with at least one of a book’s POV characters, see above. Which is a rule that of course also applies to Highsmith’s books — hence, in part, my response to Strangers on a Train — and c’mon on, you can’t seriously root for a psychopath … or can you?!)
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Thank God for writers like Wilkie Collins, who always provide(s) me with enough options to fill at least one horror-related bingo square without having to reach for a spell card … and still read something generally classified as “horror” (or “gothic”) without actually being scared out of my wits and unable to sleep afterwards. In The Woman in White, it’s all in the psychology: At heart, this is more mystery than what we’d call “horror” today — chiefly concerning, as it does, the identity of the eponymous “Woman in White” and the goings-on in a house that, it turns out, she used to call her home — but one character (the odious Count Fosco) alone provides enough of a creep factor to satisfy the definition as “gothic” three times over, and most of the other tropes of the genre are present as well (mysterious lonely country estate, women in peril, doomed love, fire, etc.) — For those who may have struggled with Collins’s The Moonstone: This is similar in structure in that it, too, has several narrators, but none of them have quite as many idiosyncrasies as does Betteredge, in particular, in The Moonstone; and I also found The Woman in White somewhat more tightly plotted.
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Meet by Moonlight
The book I’ve wanted to read ever since I visited Anógia village, high up in the Cretan Mount Ida (or Psiloritis) massif, several years ago: The first-hand account of the WWII abduction of German Major General Heinrich Kreipe near his home in Heraklion, after which Kreipe was marched all the way up the mountain and, ultimately back down again to the southern coast of Crete and, from there, into English captivity in Egypt for the entire rest of the war. I’ve posted about this before, so by way of background I’ll let that other post say all that is necessary … for purposes of this update, let me just add that “the book itself” is a ripping great read and then some; not just because it’s all true (what need for fiction if reality can write this sort of story?!), but also because Moss’s narrative style is tremendously engaging; affable and charming, understated, and straightforward at the same time. — And for anybody wondering just how fast friends he and Patrick Leigh Fermor (only incidentally his commanding officer in the venture) really were, I’ll give you just one excerpt; straight from Moss’s diary, which forms the backbone of the text, in this particular instance, from their first day in the cave (!) where their little group awaited the arrival of “Paddy” Leigh Fermor and the rest of their contingent:
“To remain here for a few days in comparative idleness will not be unpleasant. I have with me the books which Paddy and I selected in Cairo to take with us, and among them there is something to suit every mood. My literary companions are Cellini, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne, Tolstoi, and Marco Polo, while in a lighter vein there are Les Fleurs du Mal, Les Yeux d’Elsa, and Alice in Wonderland. Then there are The Oxford Book of Verse and the collected Shakespeare which Billy MacLean gave us on our last night in Tara [before starting on the mission] …”
Only a person whom Patrick Leigh Fermor considered a true brother in spirit would find it perfectly normal — even indispensable — to bring (a) any books at all, (b) so many books, and (c) these books of all the books in the world on a potentially deadly mission in enemy territory (as Crete was for the Brits in WWII) … not to mention, consider Baudelaire’s controversial masterpiece and Louis Aragon’s patriotic wartime poems to his muse Elsa something “in a lighter vein.” (And, of course, this is only one of several passages in the book that literally had me do a double take.)
N.B.: I’ve since found out that above and beyond the passage quoted in my other post, Leigh Fermor actually did end up writing his own full, book-length account of that particular mission, too … guess what went straight into my online shopping basket once I’d made that discovery.
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
This was a book I instantly knew I’d be saving for Halloween Bingo after I’d read its back cover blurb. And it proved chillingly topical for our times — it sort of describes the combined effect of Brexit (and Trump in the U.S.), venture capitalism, and a rampant, out-of-control biological pest coming together. (As a minor but significant tangent, also throw in religious fundamentalism.)
In the book’s case the pest is a bacterium that destroys the chemical compounds in which plants ingest nitrogen; in other words, it’s a killer with the capability of destroying the world’s entire food reserve (not just plant-based — animals directly or indirectly (via their prey) feed off plants, too, after all) in the space of less than a year. In the crisis brought about by the bacterium’s spread, a businessman / venture capitalist “relieves” the inept government of the reins of power — first behind the scenes, ultimately overtly — and puts in place a scheme where 90% of the British population (and 99+ % of the world’s population) are condemned to starve, while the remaining 10% of Brits — all of them, of course carefully selected — are put to use in creating a new, utopian society, which alone is in possession of nitrogenated soil and can grow plants. (When religious fundamentalism takes hold in that community of the “select few”, the leader of the cult is first publicly unmasked as a fraud and then, literally only seconds later, shot dead in full view of the crowd he has amassed.)
I was shocked to see that this book was published in 1923; after having read the first chapters, I’d have expected at the very least that Connington had seen Hitler’s “Enabling Law” and use of the press for propaganda purposes in action, but no … and yet, he foretells them with a frightening degree of accuracy, only on the basis of the British system (which, yes, you’ve guessed it, in the book does include adjourning parliament to avoid inconvenient questions. And yes, at the moment when the crisis hits, the future dictator is an MP himself, too … by way of a sort of lateral activity, with the ultimate aim of furthering his venture capitalist interests). The way in which Connington pretty much foretells everything we saw with Hitler, and everything we’re now seeing with the combined effects of Trump, Brexit, a venture capital-based economic system AND the pandemic is scary to the nth degree … I’m glad he only ever put his ideas into this book and didn’t, himself, set about putting them into practice.
Connnington was, incidentally, a chemist by training, so he clearly knew what he was writing about as far as the scientific elements are concerned. In fact, he was even prescient enough to foresee the use of nuclear energy — it’s the energy on which his future, utopian cities are ultimately run. (They also consist of buildings made of other materials than stone or concrete, not unlike the building materials that are actually used today.)
If, in the final analysis, I only ended up rating the book 3 1/2 stars after all, this is based on essentially three reasons, and all of them only truly materialize in the final part(s) of the book — though some of these issues already start cropping up about halfway through:
(1) In terms of social clichés and perceptions, Connington was, alas, very much a man of his times. There’s no sugarcoating the fact that the book contains some glaringly racist passages (and it’s not unconscious racism, either — he clearly meant every word); and, similarly, his take on women and women’s role in society is … well, let’s say, at the very least problematic. There’s a distinct element of misogyny; even if it’s not quite as blatant as the racism (and he may even have believed he was doing something “advanced” in expressly giving one particular woman more of an active voice / role in building that utopian society).
(2) Connington, like a fair number of his contemporaries, was in favor of euthanasia — which is a fact I only know because I’ve read Martin Edwards’s two books about Golden Age crime fiction; but even if I hadn’t known this going in, it would have been hard to miss here. However terrifying the first half of the book, the more the narrative progresses, the more it becomes clear that the author himself doesn’t, fundamentally, seem to see anything wrong with starting from a “clean slate”, as it were, of hand-picked superior human material (although even he does seem to balk at the more horrific aspects of achieving such a “clean slate”). I haven’t read anything else by Connington yet — except for one mystery short story, that is — and I’m willing to grant that, had he foreseen the extent to which the Nazis took their particular version of a “clean slate”, he, too, would have been horrified. (He died shortly after WWII; maybe some of his final literary output can provide some guidance as to his thinking once the world had begun to learn about the unspeakable horrors wreaked by the Nazis.) Still, it’s an unnecessarily jarring feature.
(3) The utopian society ultimately emerging from all the turmoil is presented only in the sketchiest of terms, in great contrast to the description of the destruction of the world as it had been known until then. Granted, this wasn’t Connington’s focus, but the ending of the book still feels rushed; and I found it hard to envision how, even after the discovery of nuclear energy (for which not one but several scientists knowingly and selflessly sacrifice their own lives … really, Mr. Connington??), the whole thing is supposed to have worked out … especially without the least further social turmoil. As Connington himself shows, human society doesn’t work like that — and it’s not just the “dumb, gullible masses” (whoever they are) who won’t be pacified by the “bread and games” approach forever.
Still, I am glad that I have read this book — and there were times when, in the first half especially, I very much felt like quoting huge passages verbatim and yelling at people: “Listen to this — and this is from a book published in 1923, for crying out loud!”
Julie Smith (ed.) & Various Authors: New Orleans Noir
This year’s final bingo book: an anthology of mystery short stories set in New Orleans, by some of the Big Easy’s best-known crime writers. As is usually the case with such compilations, some of the entries struck more of a chord with me than others, but taken together, they definitely conveyed an image of how the city just might see itself — or at least, some of of its seamier sides. In a way, it also proved as fitting a final Halloween Bingo book as Nordenholt’s Million (which I had initially expected to finish last): what I hadn’t known when I picked this anthology — but instantly learned from the introduction — was that this book was put together in support of post-Hurricane Katrina disaster aid. And in a year largely dominated by a global pandemic, that seems as apt a way to conclude my Halloween Bingo reads as having to wait for the Doomsday square to be called in order to be able to record my full “called and read” card blackout.
Native American police procedural meets vampires, witches and werewolves. To give the authors their due, I guess with skinwalkers being a key part of Navajo mythology, it’s a proximate thought to capitalize on the past decade(s)’ vampire craze and go full tilt supernatural / paranormal, and the sequence of events that turns our protagonist into a (half-)vampire is / are well-enough executed. Also, the Thurlos’ love for “their” Navajo country easily translates onto the page, and their prose and plot construction is assured and workmanlike (in a positive sense) enough for me to consider this reading experience encouragement to take a look at their “non-supernatural” Ella Clah Navajo cop series (which has actually been on my TBR longer than this particular book). I guess I’m over vampires once and for all, though (unless they’re created by Terry Pratchett, that is) — and quite frankly, the antagonist’s back story is risible and shows that, supernatural elements aside, the authors really are only interested in giving a credible and true portrayal of Navajo Country, not also in researching the historical and political background of their plot in other respects, where instead they are quite happy to settle for hyperbole and cliché. So as I said, I guess based on their portrayal of Navajo Country (and culture) I’m still going to give them the benefit of the doubt and take a look at their Ella Clah series, but if that series should display similar downsides in its approach to the non-Navajo characters’ back stories, I won’t become a fan, however well-executed the Native American aspects of their books may be.
Posting this on Monday instead of Sunday again … oh well.
I guess after a near-phenomenal first bingo week it was only to be expected that the second week would not be quite as fabulous. Mind you, I’m not complaining — my card is coming together nicely, and none of the books I read this past week was a real dud; even if only some of them could compare with the first week’s reads (which, however, in some instances is also a “YMMV” kind of thing; i.e., it’s not the book, it’s me).
My “Week 2” Bingo Books:
Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson, aka Anne Meredith): Death in Fancy Dress
A carry-over from week 1, best described as “Golden Age country house mystery meets Wuthering Heights“. Lucy Beatrice Malleson was a member of the Detection Club who wrote under several pen names, including Anne Meredith and Anthony Gilbert, and reading her books almost a century after they were first published, it is hard to believe that they should have failed to attain widespread popularity, as both in Portrait of a Murderer (written as by Anne Meredith) and in this book she clearly shows herself to be a cut above many of her contemporaries.
Death in Fancy Dress concerns two young friends (one a budding solicitor, one an adventurer and “gentleman of leisure”) who are urgently called to the remote country home of the young solicitor’s — the narrator’s — extended family, which seems to be in the grip of a ruthless gang of blackmailers who have already driven a number of society figures to suicide in the face of impending scandal. (And no, this is not just a recap of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Charles Augustus Milverton.) As indicated by the book’s title, murder ensues in short order after the two young amateur sleuths’ arrival, during a fancy dress ball no less.
Martin Edwards, in his introduction, cites Dorothy L. Sayers’s review, which highlights that one of this book’s great merits is not to leave any doubt about the fact that there is nothing cozy about this particular country house party; beginning right with the moment of the two young gentlemen’s arrival: during a storm, with the daughter of the house missing and feared in grave peril — even though she is an otherwise independent young lady, who ordinarily would easily be able to take care of herself. Yet, right now the fact that her hand in marriage is coveted by several men would seem to be one of her lesser worries, if it weren’t also so obviously tied in with the blackmail threat. (Her suitors include one of our young sleuths, another guest who happens to be a professional detective, as well as her cousin, the local squire, who is a sort of blend of Rudolph Valentino, your quintessential dark, brooding rogue, and a sane and calculating version of Heathcliff.) And indeed, atmosphere is big in this novel, with the squire’s (the antagonist’s) “Heathcliff” / dark, brooding rogue touch not the only Wuthering Heights overtones — the action is also set near a (fictional) moor, several hours from London: honi soit qui Yorkshire n’y pense. (Well, OK, or Exmoor, Bodmin or Dartmoor — but then we’re in Lorna Doone / Jamaica Inn / Hound of the Baskervilles territory; take your pick.) All in all, definitely one of the highlights among the second bingo week’s books.
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
This is a book from my Around the World project / reading list: the story of Lillian, a young woman of Caribbean descent who returns to her home island of Dominica in order to lay to rest the ghosts of her family history, which has been troubled ever since her grandmother — rumored to be a witch — was convicted for murder, after the unexplained disappearance of her male companion / common law husband, as well as the discovery of several skeletons near her remote mountainside village. Lillian believes the words that have been construed as her grandmother’s confession of guilt (“yes, I am responsible for those deaths”) to have been coerced;, and she bullies her ex-boyfriend, who still carries a torch for her and who is a lawyer specializing in overturning unjust convictions, to join her on a trip to Dominica to clear her grandmother’s name.
I thought the Caribbean / Dominican setting was well-executed; it’s obvious that John was writing from personal knowledge there — including, too, the cross-references between certain African and Caribbean cultures and belief systems. What I liked decidedly less was the way the book was set up in what easily amounted to its entire first quarter, with apparently disconnected chapters tracing the histories of our protagonist, her mother, grandmother, as well as several other (also mostly female) characters important to the plot, and whose stories really only come together towards the end. This narrative technique is hit or miss with me, with “hits” occurring chiefly if I’m quickly drawn into each (apparently) separate character’s story, and if I can at least vaguely discern how the various strands are going to come together eventually. That wasn’t the case here, and things weren’t exactly helped by the fact that, especially at the beginning, John cuts a few corners by instances telling instead of showing, even though far be it from me to accuse her of doing this all the time (in fact, on the other end of the spectrum, there are also scenes that depict violence (by and) against women in a downright viscerally graphic manner). — Lastly, the plot fell apart for me towards the end, when it becomes clear that although Lillian (and her now-on-again boyfriend) find out what really happened all those decades ago, this is by no means the solution they have hoped for. (I do realize the depiction of Lillian’s falling apart instead of healing in Dominica is deliberate and is intended to be key to the novel, but John lost me in the way she went about depicting it.)
Aimee and David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Native American police procedural meets vampires, witches and werewolves. To give the authors their due, I guess with skinwalkers being a key part of Navajo mythology, it’s a proximate thought to capitalize on the past decade(s)’ vampire craze and go full tilt supernatural / paranormal, and the sequence of events that turns our protagonist into a (half-)vampire is / are well-enough executed. Also, the Thurlos’ love for “their” Navajo country easily translates onto the page, and their prose and plot construction is assured and workmanlike (in a positive sense) enough for me to consider this reading experience encouragement to take a look at their “non-supernatural” Ella Clah Navajo cop series (which has actually been on my TBR longer than this particular book). I guess I’m over vampires once and for all, though (unless they’re created by Terry Pratchett, that is) — and quite frankly, the antagonist’s back story is risible and shows that, supernatural elements aside, the authors really are only interested in giving a credible and true portrayal of Navajo Country, not also in researching the historical and political background of their plot in other respects, where instead they are quite happy to settle for hyperbole and cliché. So as I said, I guess based on their portrayal of Navajo Country (and culture) I’m still going to give them the benefit of the doubt and take a look at their Ella Clah series, but if that series should display similar downsides in its approach to the non-Navajo characters’ back stories, I won’t become a fan, however well-executed the Native American aspects of their books may be.
Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt
Brand’s fifth Inspector Cockrill mystery, and of all the books by her that I have read (all of them this year), second only to Green for Danger, which remains my favorite among all of her novels. Brand specialized in closed circle mysteries, and apart from the traditional country house settings so prevalent in Golden Age mysteries, she also came up with a number of truly unusual circumstances creating that closed circle: whereas in Green for Danger it’s a WWII military hospital, here it is a house — in fact, her own Maida Vale home, as she explains in the preface — where a murder happens during a particularly vicious example of a London “pea-souper” (aka “London Particular”, which in fact was the book’s original title). Brand’s plotting is superb, and when — like here — she doesn’t try to serve populist cliché, she has a knack for creating characters that easily draw you into the story (even if I could seriously do without the blonde ingenues that seem to be a fixture in many of her books, never mind that this particular story’s ingenue is decidedly less naïve and innocent than some of the other ones). I only have few books by Brand left to read, and while I didn’t like all of them equally well, by and large she is one of my more notable Golden Age / Detection Club discoveries.
Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare
Hmmm. After having read and liked — though not loved — Harkup’s book on Agatha Christie’s use of poisons in her mysteries (A Is for Arsenic), it took the Shakespeare fan in me about a millisecond to snatch up this third book of hers when I came across it earlier this year … only to then decide, almost as quickly, to save it for the “Truly Terrifying” (or alternatively, “Paint It Black”) Halloween Bingo squares. And as is so often the case, anticipation built over a period of time in the end doesn’t quite deliver the hoped-for bundle of goods.
My main bit of gripe is that Harkup doesn’t seem to have had a very clear picture for which audience she was writing this book. On the one hand, she spends (I’m tempted to say, wastes) several chapters giving an abbreviated biography of Shakespeare and describing the London and the theatrical world in which he moved — NONE of which will be new to anyone even remotely familiar with the Bard and his life, time, and works (and all of which, thus, can only be of any use to a complete newbie to Shakespeare’s works) … and ALL of which I’ve seen discussed better, in greater detail and with a better-informed historical perspective by both Shakespearean scholars (most notably Stanley Wells) and general historians writing for a non-scholarly audience (e.g., Ian Mortimer and Liza Picard). (At least she doesn’t give any credence to the identity conspiracy theorists, but that still doesn’t stop her from using bits of unfounded speculation on the Bard’s life experience later in the book whenever she considers it expedient for a specific purpose.) Similar things can be said for her comments on medicine in the Elizabethan age, which on the one hand is pretty much a staple in historical fiction set in the Plantagenet and Tudor eras; on the other hand, the details that I didn’t already know as historical fiction background, I’ve learned in greater depth by visiting Hall’s Croft, the home of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna and her husband Dr. John Hall, who was a medical doctor (incidentally with rather advanced and well-informed views, compared to many of his contemporaries), who is widely believed to have provided his father in law with the requisite background knowledge for a plethora of deaths occurring in his plays, and whose professional equipment and records form part of the permanent exhibition on Elizabethan-era medicine that can now be visited in his former home in Stratford-upon-Avon.
On the other hand, when Harkup does finally get around to discussing Shakespeare’s portrayal of death and killings in his plays, she gives very little context to the majority of scenes she discusses, so anyone not intimately familiar with those plays (particularly the “histories”, which probably feature most widely overall in her book — and chiefly among these, the two “Henriads”) is soon going to be utterly lost as to the significance and context of the scene(s) under discussion.
Moreover, in at least one instance (Richard III and “The Princes in the Tower”) Harkup, while paying lip service to the idea that RIII perhaps “wasn’t quite as bad a tyrant as Shakespeare makes him out to be”, nevertheless falls into the very trap for which she poo-poos the medical analysis that established the bones found in the Tower in the early 20th century as those of “The Princes”, namely to reason from the desired result instead of dispassionately looking at the available evidence and letting the chips fall where they may. This review isn’t the place for this particular bit of historical discussion, so let me just say that I am unable to take seriously any writer who, like Harkup, blandly describes the reign of Henry VII as “a new era of hope and peace for England” (or words to that effect), in either blissful ignorance or blissful disregard of, to name but a few examples,
(1) the cruelty of “Morton’s Fork”,
(2) Henry VII’s (and later his son’s) ruthless and systematic annihilation of the remaining representatives of the House of York (most notably, the execution — on demonstrably trumped-up charges — of his own closest rival for the throne, who at the time was a teenager, imprisoned in the Tower on Henry VII’s orders since his early childhood), or
(3) the fact that Henry VII (a) purposefully dated his reign from the day before his victory at Bosworth, which in one single stroke of the pen made every single combatant on Richard’s side a traitor to the crown, and (b) only crowned his wife Elizabeth queen a year after he himself had well and truly secured the crown, never mind that she had a much greater claim to the crown than he himself did to begin with.
(And let’s not even get into the inconvenient little detail that BOTH Richard III and Henry VII had their fans and detractors among the eminent writers, politicians and diplomats of the time, depending on who you were listening to and whom they were writing for, which is precisely one of the reasons why it’s so hard to determine what is self-servicing Tudor propaganda when it comes to Richard III and what is credible historical testimony. Or the fact that Harkup blithely buys in virtually all of the things now actually known to be Tudor propaganda and hence, inherently unreliable …)
Anyway. For what it is in terms of the actual discussion of Shakespeare’s use of death in his plays, it’s an interesting read. Unfortunately, way too much of that discussion gets lost in superfluous and, in part, downright irritating “white noise”.
Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor
I read Moyes’s first Henry & Emmy Tibbett book (Dead Men Don’t Ski) earlier this year and liked it a lot. While I still liked most of book 2 as well, The Sunken Sailor (aka Down Among the Dead Men) suffers from a bit of a sophomore slump: Moyes first does a great job establishing the characters and atmosphere of the tiny Suffolk harbor community where the Tibbetts go to spend a sailing holiday with friends. However, inexplicably, somewhere before the book’s halfway point, Henry Tibbett of all people, the man whose “nose” for crime is proverbial at Scotland Yard, after having duly “nosed out” the suspicious circumstances of the death lurking in the recent past of that seaside community, decides to let unexplained bygones be unexplained bygones … and for the worst (and in terms of his character, most unbelievable) of all reasons — as a result of being vamped by a woman (moreover, a woman who herself is one of several suspects and, even if not guilty, just might have reasons aplenty for not wanting the truth to come out). A less convincing instance of throwing a spanner in the plot works just so as to be able to produce yet another avoidable death (as well as a belated solution) I’ve rarely come across, and based on her first book, I seriously would have expected better from Moyes. (I also found few of the characters in thei book as likeable as Moyes obviously intends them to be.) This isn’t an awful book, and I’m still going to continue reading this series, but I do hope we’re talking sophomore slump here and I trust I haven’t already seen the best of the bunch when I read book 1.
(In terms of bingo squares, the book just scrapes within the definition of “Dark and Stormy Night” and I’m counting it for that square as Christine expressly confirmed that it counts. It would obviously also qualify for “Fear the Drowning Deep” — which however isn’t on my card — and, the edition I own, also for “Full Moon”, as that’s what the white dot on the cover actually is.)
Currently Reading
Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver
Rumpelstiltskin goes Eastern Europe and fairyland. I’m using it for “Spellbound” (the fairy king — Rumpelstiltskin in the fairy tale — has already cast the story’s first spell, and “fairy silver” with magic proportions has also made numerous appearances already), but it would of course also qualify for “A Grimm Tale” or “Supernatural”.
My bingo pre-read and a very welcome return to Los Angeles — or at least, the version thereof that constitutes the world of Connelly’s characters, which however only ends up making the city a major character of its own in addition to the humans living in it.
Harry Bosch may not officially be a cold case investigator any longer, but that doesn’t stop him from seeking justice for those who died without their murderers ever having been brought to justice; particularly if he is handed the relevant file by the widow of his own recently-deceased mentor. He ropes in Ballard, and I loved seeing that it was she who was first to tumble to what was wrong with that long-dead investigation. (I’m also relieved that, for the time being at least, Connelly doesn’t seem to be planning to make a couple out of them.) Two other investigations keep our two protagonists busy at the same time, both concerned with more recent deaths. The ending relies a bit too much on coincidence for my liking (for however much Connelly may be protesting that there is no such thing — and of course, in his writer’s mind there isn’t, since he’s the one who plotted the whole thing out to begin with, but from the characters’ / from inside the story’s perspective, it still remains a case of protesting too much); yet, by and large, a more than solid entry in the series. It also would seem to explain, incidentally, why Connelly decided to focus on Jack McEvoy for a change again for his next book (Fair Warning), as there are recent developments in Bosch’s (and potentially Mickey Haller’s and Maddie’s) lives that he’ll likely will want to take some time developing.
This year’s Halloween Bingo started a lot more promising than last year’s with a strong joint entry in Michael Connelly’s Bosch and Ballard series, and in fact, not one of the books I read earned less than a four-star rating — with the standout being Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, which turned out to be a perfect choice for the “Psych” square.
The “Week 1” Books
Michael Connelly: The Night Fire
My bingo pre-read and a very welcome return to Los Angeles — or at least, the version thereof that constitutes the world of Connelly’s characters, which however only ends up making the city a major character of its own in addition to the humans living in it.
Harry Bosch may not officially be a cold case investigator any longer, but that doesn’t stop him from seeking justice for those who died without their murderers ever having been brought to justice; particularly if he is handed the relevant file by the widow of his own recently-deceased mentor. He ropes in Ballard, and I loved seeing that it was she who was first to tumble to what was wrong with that long-dead investigation. (I’m also relieved that, for the time being at least, Connelly doesn’t seem to be planning to make a couple out of them.) Two other investigations keep our two protagonists busy at the same time, both concerned with more recent deaths. The ending relies a bit too much on coincidence for my liking (for however much Connelly may be protesting that there is no such thing — and of course, in his writer’s mind there isn’t, since he’s the one who plotted the whole thing out to begin with, but from the characters’ / from inside the story’s perspective, it still remains a case of protesting too much); yet, by and large, a more than solid entry in the series. It also would seem to explain, incidentally, why Connelly decided to focus on Jack McEvoy for a change again for his next book (Fair Warning), as there are recent developments in Bosch’s (and potentially Mickey Haller’s and Maddie’s) lives that he’ll likely will want to take some time developing.
Joy Ellis: They Disappeared
Before starting this book, I’d said I hoped Ellis was done with the serial killer plots, as I had a feeling she was at risk of turning into a one trick pony that way — well, let’s say I both did and didn’t get my wish. (Several gruesome deaths, yes, but not a mentally diseased mind behind them.) I loved that Ellis had the courage to give us a fresh perspective on IT whiz Orla Cracken: There’s always a risk associated with making a character heretofore so unapproachable and shrouded in secrecy as her more accessible, but Ellis pulled it of very well for the most part … even though I’m only half convinced by the part of “Orac”‘s past that is explored most in depth here: surely, based on the feats we’ve seen her perform in the past (and based on what we now know about her training), this should be a mystery that Orac herself should have been able to solve long ago — and on her own? Be that as it may, though, it was interesting to see another character being included in this particular series’s sweep of Ellis’s authorial focus. I also liked the setting she picked for this book — “urban exploration” — which seems almost tailor-made for her sort of books; even if her protagonists (who are all cops, after all) have a somewhat too tolerant (if not, downright gushing) attitude to that occupation, which is prohibited for a reason, after all.
Big spoiler warning for a previous non-series book, however: While I think it’s fair to say that any reader reading the Jackman & Evans series as such out of order does so at their peril (and this is true for this particular book, too, as it provides — or would seem to provide — a definite ending for one of the past several books’ major narrative strands, so it should definitely be read after everything from The Guilty Ones onwards by anyone wanting to avoid spoilers in that regard), I’m still a bit miffed to see this book also containing a major spoiler for a recent stand-alone by Ellis, which I haven’t read yet and had been planning to get to later this year (Guide Star). I’m fine with authors setting all of their various series in the same universe (Michael Connelly does the same thing, after all), and as long as this merely meant swapping supporting characters (like Dr. Wilkinson) or cross-references in dialogue, I haven’t had a problem with this sort of thing in Ellis’s case so far, either. But the main characters from Guide Star have, it would seem, fully been integrated into the Jackman & Evans series, and Ellis apparently couldn’t find a way of doing that without giving away that other book’s conclusion, as it constitutes a major premise of the events in They Disappeared. Shame.
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker
The thirteenth book in the Campion series; one of the few I hadn’t read yet and thus, a proximate choice for the “13” bingo square. In tone, I find that the post-WWII stories are markedly darker than the series’s very first entries, which by and large is all to the good, however; even if they don’t quite reach the heights of The Case of the Late Pig, Police at the Funeral, or Death of a Ghost. The story is typically wacky and also a typical entry in the series in other respects (characters, setting, etc.) nevertheless, culminating in a rather outré / macabre chase (the clue is in the title) … and introducing a character who will feature as a light in other post-WWII episodes as well (now that Stanislaus Oates has made it all the way to the top of the apple tree), the theatrically / oratorically-gifted D.I. Charlie Luke.
Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die
Wow. What a stunner. Blake (aka Cecil Day Lewis) messes with the reader’s mind literally from page 1, and being fully aware of the fact still doesn’t mean you’ll be up to what he is doing — or at least not all of it. Even to begin talking about the plot would mean giving away half the twists, so let’s just say it concerns a writer’s search for the reckless driver who mowed down his little son a few months earlier, as well as a family dominated by a bullying patriarch (and his equally bullying mother). And from outright suggestions of lunacy to characters deliberately disguising their identities — or their innermost nature and / or intentions — to a myriad other ways in which Blake indulges in his cat-and-mouse game with the reader’s mind (authorial / narrative perspective, sequencing — the whole kit and caboodle), this is one big screwed-up joy ride … for those of us who like this sort of thing every so often, that is.
Side note 1: If you’ve read any of Blake’s other Nigel Strangeways books before (particularly any of the early ones), forget everything you’ve seen there. Even though this book features both the Strangeways couple (Nick and Georgina) and Inspector Blunt, it is anything but a typical entry in the series (and all the better for it).
Side note 2: If you are interested in sailing, you may particularly enjoy this story. It also probably helps to be familiar with the lingo — which I am not, but I could follow along nevertheless, and during the one crucial scene set on a boat, I was just too glued to my speakers to pause listening in order to embark on an online search for the meaning of individual terms.
Agatha Christie: The Thirteen Problems
Audio revisit courtesy of Joan Hickson’s narration, both for Halloween Bingo and as part of the Agatha Christie Centennary celebration of her first novel (The Mysterious Affair at Styles) — and I find I’m drawn to these stories more and more with every time I’m revisiting them. Review HERE.
Currently Reading
Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson, aka Anne Meredith): Death in Fancy Dress
Country house mystery meets Wuthering Heights, with rather enjoyable effects (though more for the reader than for the main characters). I’ll probably finish this either tonight or tomorrow morning.
When updating this post during the game, the books actually selected will be highlighted in bold print and with a check mark (√) next to them.
Updates
Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora — STONE COLD HORROR replaced by READ BY FLASHLIGHT OR CANDLELIGHT
Also, as our game hosts have made it clear that (like in most previous years) the center square won’t be called (but rather, can be claimed as soon as we’ve read a book for it), I’ll be adding a fourth marker for that square (read = called), featuring Charlie’s brother Sunny!
The Card
My Markers
Read Called Read & Called Read = Called
The Spell Pack
Authors (and books) possibly to be used with Amplification Spell:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter, Kissing the Witch
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Gabriel García Márquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
Wild Card Author:
Agatha Christie
Possible squares for Bingo Flip and / or Transfiguration Spell:
Bingo Flip: Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora –“Stone Cold Horror” replaced by “Read by Flashlight or Candlelight”.
The Squares
SLEEPY HOLLOW Most likely: Alice Hoffman: The River King √
Alternatives:
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Talisman
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript, School Days, Chance, Hush Money, Small Vices
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
FILM AT 11 Most likely: Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice √
or: Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped
Alternatives:
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Raymond Chandler: The Little Sister
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse, Curtain, Halloween Party
Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap
Michael Crichton: The Great Train Robbery
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
T.S. Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Craig Johnson: The Cold Dish
Stephen King: Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Talisman
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
Philip MacDonald: The List of Adrian Messenger
Mario Puzo: The Godfather
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Richard III
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost
SOUTHERN GOTHIC Most likely: Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley √
Alternatives:
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Various Authors: New Orleans Noir
MURDER MOST FOUL Most likely: Michael Connelly: The Night Fire √
or: Jason Goodwin: The Janissary Tree
or: Anna Katharine Green: The Leavenworth Case
Oo. Robert van Gulik: Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
or: Margaret Millar: The Listening Walls
Alternatives:
Gary Corby: The Ionia Sanction
Deborah Crombie: Dreaming of the Bones
Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Setting Scores or The Measure of Malice (British Library Crime Classics anthologies)
Ian Fleming: Goldfinger or Moonraker
Graham Greene: The Confidential Agent
Ellen Kushner: Swordspoint
Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise, The Golden Egg, Friends in High Places, or Fatal Remedies
Mystery Writers of America Presents: Odd Partners
George Pelecanos: Hard Revolution
Otto Penzler (ed.), Various Authors: The Big Book of Female Detectives
Ian Rankin: Rebus Audio Box Set 1
Ruth Rendell: Some Lie and Some Die, A Demon in My View, Thirteen Steps Down, Harm Done, A Sight for Sore Eyes, End in Tears, Simisola, Road Rage, A Dark Blue Perfume and Other Stories, An Unkindness of Ravens, Shake Hands Forever, A Guilty Thing Surprised, or The Speaker of Mandarin
J.D. Robb: Naked in Death
Georges Simenon: Maigret: Die spannendsten Fälle
Various Authors: Classic Crime Short Stories (audio collection)
Various Authors: Classic Railway Murders (audio collection)
… or any of the murder mysteries listed as options for other squares on my card.
SPELLBOUND Most likely: Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver √
Alternatives:
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Emma Donoghue: Kissing the Witch
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Stephen Fry: Heroes
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Tessa Gratton: The Queens of Innis Lear
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Stephen King: Carrie, The Talisman
Katherine Kurtz: Deryni Rising
Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonsong
Alexander McCall Smith (ed.): The Girl Who Married a Lion (African Folk Tales)
Vonda N. McIntyre: Dreamsnake
Christopher Paolini: Inheritance
Terry Pratchett: Jingo, Maskerade, Small Gods, BBC Dramatizatons (Mort, Wyrd Sisters, Guards! Guards!, Eric, Small Gods, Night Watch)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter books
William Shakespeare: Macbeth
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Judith Tarr: Alamut, The Isle of Glass
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin, Tales from the Perilous Realm
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Various Authors: Magicats
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden
INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF MYSTERY Most likely: Marie-Elena John: Unburnable √
Alternatives:
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace, The Robber Bride
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter, Kissing the Witch
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty
Tana French: Broken Harbour
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Barbara Nadel: Land of the Blind
Edna O’Brien: House of Splendid Isolation, The Little Red Chairs
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
TERROR IN A SMALL TOWN Most likely: Michael Jecks: The Malice of Unnatural Death √
or: Ann Cleeves: Red Bones
or: Peter Grainger: Songbird or But for the Grace
or: Cyril Hare: Death Walks the Woods or Untimely Death
or: Michael Jecks: The Templar’s Penance, The Mad Monk of Gidleigh, The Chapel of Bones, or The Butcher of St. Peter’s
Alternatives:
Rennie Airth: River of Darkness
Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace
Simon Beaufort: Deadly Inheritance
Francis Beeding: Death Walks in Eastrepps
E.C. Bentley: Trent’s Own Case
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Carol Carnac: Crossed Skies
John Dickson Carr: Castle Skull
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse, Curtain, Halloween Party
Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Matthew Costello, Neil Richards: Cherringham
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edmund Crispin: The Case of the Gilded Fly
Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery
Tana French: Broken Harbour
Elizabeth George: A Place of Hiding, Careless in Red, This Body of Death
Anthony Gilbert: Death in a Fancy Dress
Friedrich Glauser: Wachtmeister Studer
J.M. Gregson: Murder at the Nineteenth
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Reginald Hill: A Clubbable Woman
Alice Hoffman: The River King
Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
P.D. James: Unnatural Causes, Devices and Desires
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Craig Johnson: The Cold Dish
Mons Kallentoft: Midwinter Sacrifice
Mary Kelly: The Spoilt Kill
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie
Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: A Murder of Quality
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
E.C.R. Lorac: Murder in the Mill-Race, Fire in the Thatch
Sharyn McCrumb: The Ballad of Tom Dooley
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Michael McGarrity: Tularosa
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor
Gil North: The Methods of Sergeant Cluff
Edna O’Brien: House of Splendid Isolation, The Little Red Chairs
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Joyce Porter: Dover One
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town
Ruth Rendell: A New Lease of Death
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Peter Robinson: Gallows View, Wednesday’s Child
Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind
James Runcie: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River (?)
Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Julian Symons: The Colour of Murder, The Players and the Game, The Plot Against Roger Rider
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
Various Authors: Magicats
Various Authors: Feline Felonies
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road
T.H. White: Darkness at Pemberley
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost
TRULY TERRIFYING Most likely: Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare √
Alternatives:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Humphrey Carpenter: The Inklings
John Curran: Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making
Judith Flanders: The Invention of Murder
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Neil Gaiman: The View from the Cheap Seats
Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias and Their Enemies
Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm
Ulrich Lampen (ed.): Die NS-Führung im Verhör
Adrienne Mayor: The Poison King
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight
Terry Pratchett: A Slip of the Keyboard
Friedrich Reck-Malleczwewen: Tagebuch eines Verzeifelten
Philippe Sands: East West Street
Julian Symons: The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe
Bob Woodward: The Last of the President’s Men, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat
AMATEUR SLEUTH Most likely: Anthony Gilbert: Death in Fancy Dress √
or: Philip Gooden: The Salisbury Manuscript or: Mary Kelly: The Spoilt Kill
or: Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind
Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker, Coroner’s Pidgin
Simon Beaufort: Deadly Inheritance
Lauren Belfer: City of Light
E.C. Bentley: Trent’s Own Case
Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder, The Beast Must Die
Jan Burke: Eighteen
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, Castle Skull
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow
Michael Connelly: Fair Warning
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Edmund Crispin: The Case of the Gilded Fly
Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector, The Cold Moon
Francis Durbridge: Paul Temple
Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery
R. Austin Freeman: The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke, The Cat’s Eye
Jacques Futrelle: The Thinking Machine at Work
Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton
Elizabeth George: A Place of Hiding
Michael Gilbert: Death in Captivity
Robert Goddard: Sea Change
Sue Grafton: A Is for Alibi
Cyril Hare: Death Walks the Woods, Untimely Death
Carolyn G. Hart: Death on Demand
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Laura Lippman: By a Spider’s Thread
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript, School Days, Burt Reynods Reads: Chance / Hush Money / Small Vices
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Ellery Queen: Calamity Town, The Chinese Orange Mystery
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Clayton Rawson: The Great Merlini
Candace Robb: The Riddle of St. Leonards’
Gillian Roberts: Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
James Runcie: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Frank Schätzing: Tod und Teufel
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
Jay Stringer: Ways to Die in Glasgow
Barbara Vine: Asta’s Book
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road
RELICS AND CURIOSITIES Most likely: Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies √
Alternatives: Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty (?)
Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Philip Gooden: The Salisbury Manuscript
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Stephen King: The Talisman
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
Robin McKinley: The Hero and the Crown, The Blue Sword
Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Christopher Paolini: Inheritance
Robert B. Parker: The Godwulf Manuscript
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter books
S.J. Rozan: China Trade
William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
GENRE: HORROR Most likely: Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White √
or: Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven & Annabelle Lee
Alternatives: Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Agatha Christie: Endless Night
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Shawshank Redemption, Carrie, The Long Walk, The Talisman
Michael McDowell: Blackwater
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE Most likely: J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million √
Alternatives: Ben Elton: Identity Crisis
Stephen King: The Long Walk, The Talisman
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Ian Rankin: Westwind
James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
CENTER (RAVEN) SQUARE Read: Agatha Christie: The Thirteen Problems √
FULL MOON Most likely: W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight √
or: Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor
Alternatives: Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick (?)
Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales (?)
Jeffery Deaver: The Cold Moon
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
THIRTEEN Most likely: Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker √
or: Terry Pratchett: Small Gods
Spell invoked: Bingo Flip with Lora — STONE COLD HORROR replaced by READ BY FLASHLIGHT OR CANDLELIGHT
Read: Colin Dexter: The Dead of Jericho √
Ugh. I’m going to have to give this one some further thought — currently it’s looking like a candidate for the application of one of my spell cards.
(This is going to be was a spur-of-the-moment selection … it’s not like my book pool (of everything BUT horror) is in danger of running low, after all!
PSYCH Most likely: Nicholas Blake: The Beast Must Die √
or: Vera Caspary: Laura
or: C.S. Forester: Payment Deferred or Plain Murder
or: Tana French: Broken Harbour
or: Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground
or Michael Jecks: The Chapel of Bones or The Mad Monk of Gidleigh or: Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Alternatives: Charles Warren Adams: The Notting Hill Mystery
Rennie Airth: River of Darkness
Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace, The Robber Bride
Francis Beeding: Death Walks in Eastrepps
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
Jay Bonansinga: The Sleep Police
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, Castle Skull
Jane Casey: The Burning
Agatha Christie: Endless Night
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Michael Connelly: Fair Warning
J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Lesley Cookman: Murder in Midwinter
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector, The Cold Moon
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty
Joy Ellis: They Disappeared
Ben Elton: Identity Crisis, The First Casualty
Hugh Fraser: Harm
Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
Elizabeth George: What Came Before He Shot her, This Body of Death, Believing the Lie
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Cyril Hare: Untimely Death
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Alice Hoffman: The River King
Roy Horniman: Kind Hearts and Coronets (aka Israel Rank)
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
Richard Hull: Excellent Intentions
P.D. James: Unnatural Causes, Devices and Desires, A Certain Justice
Ianthe Jerrold: Let Him Lie
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Hannah Kent: Burial Rites
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Misery, Carrie, The Talisman
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Tailor of Panama, Our Kind of Traitor
Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
James MacManus: Black Venus
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent
Vonda N. McIntyre: Dreamsnake
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Herman Melville: The Confidence-Man
Margaret Millar: An Air That Kills, Beast in View
Jo Nesbø: Macbeth
Anne Perry: Seven Dials, Southampton Row
Ellis Peters: The Devil’s Novice
Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Amanda Quick: The Girl Who Knew too Much
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Priscilla Royal: Tyrant of the Mind
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III
Julie Smith: Louisiana Hotshot
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Julian Symons: The Colour of Murder, The Players and the Game, The Plot Against Roger Rider
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
C.J. Tudor: The Taking of Annie Thorne
Various Authors: Helsinki Noir
Various Authors: Los Angeles Noir
Various Authors: New Orleans Noir
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, Asta’s Book, A Dark-Adapted Eye
Minette Walters: Disordered Minds
Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests
Patricia Wentworth: Lonesome Road
Mary Westmacott: Giant’s Bread, The Burden
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
DOOMSDAY Most likely: A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok √
Alternatives: J.J. Connington: Nordenholt’s Million
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Stephen King: The Long Walk, The Talisman
Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
Ian Rankin: Westwind
Candace Robb: The Riddle of St. Leonards’
James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Catherynne M. Valente: Space Opera
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden
BLACK CAT Most likely: T.S. Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats √
Alternatives: Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General (?)
Stephen King: Pet Semetary
Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
Saki: Tobermory (?)
Various Authors: Magicats
Various Authors: Feline Felonies
DIVERSE VOICES Most likely: Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
Substitution: Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise √
Alternatives:
Preet Bharara: Doing Justice
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Orhan Pamuk: My Name Is Red
Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT Most likely: Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt Brian Flynn: The Billiard-Room Mystery Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford: The Amber Gods and Other Stories
Substitution:
Patricia Moyes: The Sunken Sailor √
Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick (?)
R.D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
A.S. Byatt: Ragnarok
John Dickson Carr: It Walks by Night, The Hollow Man
Vera Caspary: Laura
Erskine Childers: The Riddle of the Sands (?)
Agatha Christie: Endless Night, The Pale Horse
Ann Cleeves: Red Bones
Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
Michael Connelly: The Night Fire (?)
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
Jeffery Deaver: The Cold Moon
Charles Dickens: Bleak House
David Dodge: To Catch a Thief
Sarah Dunant: Blood & Beauty (?)
Francis Durbridge: Send for Paul Temple
Nino Haratischwili: Die Katze und der General
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Peter Høeg: Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Michael Jecks: The Butcher of St. Peter’s, The Mad Monk of Gidleigh
Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World
Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm
Stephen King: Pet Semetary, Carrie
Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
John Le Carré: The Tailor of Panama
Val McDermid: Insidious Intent
Medieval Murderers: The Lost Prophecies
W. Stanley Moss: Ill Met by Moonlight
Jo Nesbo: Macbeth
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven & Annabelle Lee
Terry Pratchett: Small Gods, BBC Dramatizatons (Mort, Wyrd Sisters, Guards! Guards!, Eric, Small Gods, Night Watch)
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (?)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River (?)
William Shakespeare: Macbeth, King Lear
Robert Louis Stevenson: Kidnapped
Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
Bram Stoker: Dracula
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Aimée & David Thurlo: Second Sunrise
Joel Townsley Rogers: The Red Right Hand
Joan D. Vinge: Ladyhawke
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men, The Terror
Janny Wurts: Stormwarden
PAINT IT BLACK Most likely: James MacManus: Black Venus
Substitution: Julie Smith (ed.) & Various Authors: New Orleans Noir √
Alternatives:
Margery Allingham: More Work for the Undertaker, Coroner’s Pidgin, Blackkerchief Dick
Vera Caspary: Laura
Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
Michael Connelly: The Black Echo
Hannah Crafts: The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!, Breath, Eyes, Memory
Francis Durbridge: Send for Paul Temple
C.S. Forester: Payment Deferred
Aminatta Forna: The Devil That Danced on the Water
Jacques Futrelle: The Thinking Machine at Work
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No one Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
Kathryn Harkup: Death by Shakespeare Taylor Jenkins Reid: Daisy Jones and the Six
Marie-Elena John: Unburnable
Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
George R.R. Martin (ed.), Various Authors: Dangerous Women
Mario Puzo: The Godfather
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses, Watchman
Michael J. Sullivan: Theft of Swords
Donna Tartt: The Secret History
Various Authors: Helsinki Noir
Various Authors: Los Angeles Noir
Various Authors: Trinidad Noir
T.H. White: Darkness at Pemberley
NEW RELEASE Most likely: Joy Ellis: They Disappeared √
or: Roseanne A. Brown: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin
or: Michael Connelly: Fair Warning
Alternative:
Martin Edwards (ed.), Various Authors: Setting Scores
GENRE: SUSPENSE Most likely: Patricia Highsmith: Ripley Under Ground √
or: Patricia Highsmith: Carol
or: John Lanchester: Fragrant Harbour
or: Derek B. Miller: Norwegian by Night
Alternatives: Ken Follett: Eye of the Needle
Maurice LeBlanc: Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes
John Le Carré: A Perfect Spy, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, The Honorable School Boy, Call for the Dead, The Secret Pilgrim, or Absolute Friends
Mary Westmacott: Unfinished Portrait or Absent in the Spring
… or virtually any and all of the mysteries, horror and fantasy books listed as options for the other squares on my card.
DARKEST LONDON Most likely: Christianna Brand: Fog of Doubt √
or: Charles Warren Adams: The Notting Hill Mystery
or: Sarah Waters: The Paying Guests
Alternatives:
Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder
Anthony Boucher: The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1
Christopher Bush: The Perfect Murder Case
John Dickson Carr: Death Watch
Jane Casey: The Burning
Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse
Rory Clements: Martyr
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow
Michael Crichton: The Great Train Robbery
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield
Emma Donoghue: The Sealed Letter
Francis Durbridge: Paul Temple — Complete Radio Collection, Volume 1
Ken Follett: A Dangerous Fortune
C.S. Forester: Plain Murder
Andrew Forrester: The Female Detective
R. Austin Freeman: The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke, The Cat’s Eye
Robert Goddard: Sea Change
Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder, The House of Silk
P.D. James: A Certain Justice
Philip MacDonald: X v. Rex, The List of Adrian Messenger
Arthur Morrison: Martin Hewitt, Investigator; Detective Stories
John Mortimer: Rumpole and the Reign of Terror
Anne Perry: Seven Dials, Southampton Row, A Sudden Fearful Death
Steven Price: By Gaslight
Christopher Priest: The Prestige
Ruth Rendell: Portobello
John Rhode: The Paddington Mystery
Stella Rimington: Dead Line
Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, Asta’s Book
Edgar Wallace: The Four Just Men, The Terror
Oscar Wilde: Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, The Picture of Dorian Gray
January turned out a bit of a roller coaster in RL, continuing the course things had already taken in December: not quite whiplash-inducing, but with several sickness-prone twists and turns (for however much I’d expected them to materialize) surrounding one major glorious event (which was, however, truly glorious; even if this, too, was something I’d had every reason to expect).
So my January books mostly were comfort reading in one form or another. Other than the three Golden Age mysteries (or in one case, a mystery radio play collection) that I (re)visited — Agatha Christie’s 12 Radio Mysteries, Ngaio Marsh’s Scales of Justice, and my carryover from 2019, Gladys Mitchell’s Death Comes at Christmas — and two contemporary mystery short story collections I read / listened to, I burned through all four volumes of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet in the space of a week (well, they are fairly short books), read four books of historical fiction (two of which also qualify as historical mysteries), and more books falling into the sci-fi / fantasy / speculative fiction subset, with classics and nonfiction bringing up the rear, with one book each.
For all that, 14 of those 18 books were by women (and one an anthology, Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance, featuring both male and female authors), and I’ve added two new countries to my “Around the World” challenge — Antigua and Iceland –; even if, with two of my first three books of February (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists and Mia Alvar’s short story collection In the Country), I’m already doing more for the Caucasian / non-Caucasian balance in my reading than in all of January.
Looking at my January books individually, clearly last month’s reading highlight was the buddy read with Moonlight Reader, BrokenTune and Lillelara of the first volume of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, The Game of Kings; a tour de force piece of historical fiction set in the mid-16th century, during the reign of England’s boy king Edward VI (the son of Henry VIII) — or rather, his guardian Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, who goverend England in his stead — and Marie de Guise, the widow of Scottish king James V, who ruled Scotland in lieu of her infant daughter Mary (Stuart).
Francis Crawford of Lymond, ostensibly the book’s (and the series’s) central character, is essentially Rob Roy and Robin Hood rolled into one, with a bit of Edmond Dantes thrown in for good measure, as well as just about every other hero of historical fiction seeking to recapture the position and estate taken from him by the connivance of his enemies. For the longest time, he wasn’t even my favorite character in the book — those honors clearly went to virtually every major female character, all of whom are fully rounded, three-dimensional and very much their own women; strong, intelligent, and more than capable of holding their own in a society dominated by men. Yet, I have to say that Lymond considerably grew on me in the final episode of the novel.
In terms of pacing, although the book took its sweet time establishing the characters and their place in the era and events of the history of Scotland during which it is set (while assuming its readers to either be familiar with that period in history or treating them as adult enough to read up on it themselves, without having to be taught by the author in setting up the novel), once it took off … it really took off, and I whizzed through the last big chunk in almost a single sitting (pausing once more only before the final episode), all of which literally left me breathless by the time I was done. I can absolutely see myself continuing the series, though as a first read, these aren’t the kinds of books I can seamlessly tie together one right after the other; so it may be a while before I’ll start the next book.
Among the month’s other highlights was the second book of Tony Riches’s Tudor Trilogy,Jasper — the volume I’d been looking forward to the least, as it essentially covers the War of the Roses from the Lancastrian POV, which is a tale of many woes and few moments of glory, even if it culminates in Henry of Richmond’s (Henry VII-to-be) victory at Bosworth. But I still enjoyed the narrative voice, empathy for all the characters, and the obviously painstaking historical research going into the writing.
After the disappointment that virtually every bit of YA fantasy I read last year had turned out to be, a somewhat unexpected third highlight was Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet. But I was won over by Alanna (the main character)’s personality and by the fact that Pierce’s approach to creating a fantasy world where it is possible for a woman to beat the odds and assert herself without actually glorying in violence (looking at you, Jennifer Estep); in fact, Alanna learns to use her magical powers as a healer more than as a fighter, and to employ them in order to offset some of the damage and pain she causes as a knight.
Obviously, the idea of a girl masquerading as a boy in order to be trained as a knight, and surviving years of training without ever being discovered by the vast majority of the people at court (except for a select few trusted friends), takes a bit of suspension of disbelief; particularly in the second book, where Alanna and her friends are in puberty and, if nothing else, her voice should be breaking if she were a boy (so the lack of change there, if nothing else, should unmask her — bound chest or not). This, and the equally unlikely notion of a pseudo-Arab tribe of desert nomads firmly rooted in pseudo-Muslim principles of society being swiftly brought around to accepting women as self-determined agents of their own fate solely by their encounter with Alanna in book 3 of the series, were a bit much to take without reducing my rating somewhat.
But overall I still enjoyed the series quite a bit more than I had expected. (Indeed, I hadn’t even really expected to progress beyond book 1 to begin with.) I also truly enjoyed Pierce’s no-nonsense approach to not in out-Tolkien-ing Tolkien — proper names are almost without exception from our world (John, Gary, Alan(na), Tom, etc.), and there are no attempts at giving dodgy half-baked names to animals and inanimate things, either, which is something that hugely annoys me in many a fantasy series I’ve come across lately (particularly, again, YA).
Radio Girls, the book I began this year with (as picked by the bibliomancy dreidel in 24 Festive Tasks) started out strong, and I truly enjoyed the author’s exploration of the early days of the BBC. Unfortunately, she couldn’t resist the temptation of bringing in the (real life) spy background of one of the book’s characters (Hilda Matheson, director of BBC Talks), as a result of which it felt like the book couldn’t really make up its mind whether it wanted to be about the BBC, about pre-WWII Nazi activities in Britain, or about women’s rights (especially general suffrage and women’s (in)equality in the workplace). Less would definitely have been more here. Still, overall the book was enjoyable enough.
Another pleasant surprise, in terms of the book itself at least, was Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s The Legacy, the first book of a series of mysteries / crime novels focusing on the so-called “Children’s House”, the (real) institution that processes children involved in Icelandic court cases (murder trials, custody suits, prosecutions for child abuse, etc.). I liked Sigurðardóttir’s assured writing and well-informed approach to child (and child witness) psychology, and — mostly — also the characters she created. After having finished the book, however, I listened to the interview she gave in the Audible Sessions series, where (somewhat to my surprise) she comes across as a bit condescending, which in turn rather dampened my enthusiasm for quickly following up with another book by her. But I do think I’ll give her books another try eventually.
Most of the remainder of my reading this past month was an exercise in Mt. TBR reduction:
By far the best (audio)book of this bunch was the first installment of the BBC’s McLevy series, which is based on the real life diaries of Victorian Edinburgh police inspector named, you guessed it, James McLevy. It features a great cast (with Brian Cox starring in the title role), great atmosphere, and several intelligently-plotted episode-length cases, and I can already see myself coming back for more again and again.
Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora presents an interesting approach to speculative fiction, somewhere on the borderline between fantasy and steampunk, with an exciting plot and well-rounded characters: enough to make me at least contemplate also reading the next books of the Gentleman Bastard series. However, this seems to be another series featuring excessive amounts of violence (at least judging by book 1), and its installments aren’t exactly short, either — at the end of this book, I felt similarly drained as after Dunnett’s Game of Kings — so this probably won’t be a high and early priority. Still, I’m not unhappy that I’ve finally read it.
Martha Wells’s All Systems Red is intelligently conceived and redolent with edgy humor, satire, and questions about the nature of consciousness, individuality and, ultimately, the thing that we call a soul: if science fiction is your thing (and if you’ve been living under a rock or for any other reason haven’t read it long before I did), it’s definitely a book — and a series — that I’d recommend. Personally, though I enjoyed Wells’s exploration of the inner life of a semi-humanoid AI security unit (aka “murderbot”) that has hacked and disabled its own main governor module, and would much rather watch soap operas than look after inept human research teams on alien planets, I won’t be continuing the series. For one thing, if it comes to tropes, I just prefer those of the mystery genre to those of science fiction (and it seemed like every single sci-fi trope is present here); and then, I also think the pricing of the books in this series is a huge money grab on the part of the publisher (and Audible / Amazon) that I am simply not willing to support; beyond satisfying my curiosity about book 1, that is.
E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady was to the 1930s what Bridget Jones’s Diary is to us: Roll up Angela Thirkell’s High Rising, Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary into one, shake thoroughly, season with a pinch or three of Emma Thompson’s character (the Duchess d’Antan) from the movie Impromptu, and with the perpetual financial woes of the landed gentry, and this (albeit largely autobiographical) book is pretty much what you should get as a result.
Delafield, one of those prolific early 20th century writers who thoroughly dropped off the radar after WWII, went on to write several more installments of the Diary: I got curious about her because of Martin Edwards’s speculation, in The Golden Age of Murder, about a possible relationship between her and Anthony Berkeley, but having read this book by her and several books by him, I can’t see more than the friendship between them that is known to actually have existed. Quite frankly (and quite apart from the fact that they were both married to other people to begin with), judging by her writing, she strikes me as way too shrewdly intelligent to ever have been interested in him as anything other than a friend.
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, finally, is a short, brutal, angry dismanteling of any naive and romantic perceptions that white North American and European conceivably might be holding about her island home of Antigua. Frankly, since I never held any such perceptions, she was pretty much barking up the wrong tree with me, and though I can empathize with her anger, I wonder whether, skilled writer that she is, she wouldn’t have served her purpose better by exchanging the verbal claymore that she insists on wielding for a foil (or at most an epée) — i.e., keep the razor sharp verbal blade, but allow for a less heavy-handed approach. Though I’ll readily concede that probably this is a facile position to take for someone who hasn’t had to do battle with the “Caribbean island paradise” cliché all her life to begin with.
To round things off, my mystery comfort reading consisted of:
* Agatha Christie: 12 Radio Mysteries (BBC adaptations of 12 of Christie’s short stories, which I loved and which incidentally proved that Christie’s writing has not only stood the test of time but is also easily amenable to being transferred to a modern setting without losing any of its punch);
* Ngaio Marsh: Scales of Justice (one of my all-time favorite entries in the Roderick Alleyn series and, it occurred to me while listening to the new unabridged audio recording published a few years ago, also a good book to start the series with for anyone curious about it — PS: it even features a cat in a pivotal role);
* Gladys Mitchell’s Death Comes at Christmas (aka Dead Men’s Morris) (decidedly not a favorite installment in the Mrs. Bradley series);
* Elizabeth George’s I, Richard (another reread, which I liked a whole lot better than when I had first read it; not only for the final / titular story, which has a contemporary setting but a historic background, namely Richard III’s final hours before the Battle at Bosworth — the true standout here is the story immediately preceding it, Remember I’ll Always Love You, where a young widow confronts the aftermath of her husband’s spontaneous suicide); and finally:
* Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance (the mixed bag that such anthologies usually are, with overall better writing than I had expected, though, some of the best pieces of which were from the pens of the lesser-known contributors rather than the big-name authors).
Like virtually all of my book consumption this year, my Halloween Bingo books are more or less necessarily going to have to be primarily audiobooks. So I had a look at my Audible and CD collections what might fit the bill for my card, and here’s what I’ve come up with (mostly new-to-me books but also a few rereads); currently most likely choices first, then the alternative choices in alphabetical order, and listing all books for every square where they match.
— UPDATED WITH ACTUAL BOOKS READ / SELECTED —
(Note: Originally posted on Aug. 14, 2019. — Books read for a given square are marked in bold print. Crossed-out books are books read for other squares, including inofficial extra squares.)
INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF MYSTERY Plenty of choices from the writings of white American and British women, so here I’m just going to list the non-U.S. and UK authors as well as the books by WoC.
Most likely: * Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments √
Alternatives: * Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride
* Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Sara Collins: The Confessions of Frannie Langton
* Trudi Canavan: The Magicians’ Guild
* Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
* Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow
* Toni Morrison: Beloved
* Sofi Oksanen: The Purge
LOCKED ROOM MYSTERY
Most likely: * Clayton Rawson: Death from a Top Hat √
* John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man √
Alternatives: * Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder
* Arthur Conan Doyle: The Golden Pince Nez, The Second Stain, The Bruce-Partington Plans, The Crooked Man, the Naval Treaty
* P.D. James: Unnatural Causes
DEADLANDS Most likely: * Terry Pratchett: Pyramids Substitution: Terry Pratchett: Monstrous Regiment √
Alternatives: Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man
* Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
* Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
* Terry Pratchett: Eric
* Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
* Bram Stoker: Dracula
FEAR THE DROWNING DEEP Most likely: * Delia Owens: Where the Crawdads Sing √
Alternatives: Margery Allingham: Blackkerchief Dick
* Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
* J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Jim Butcher: The Aeronaut’s Windlass
* Agatha Christie: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories, Halloween Party
* Freeman Wills Crofts: The Cask
* Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
* Joy Ellis: The Guilty Ones
* Stephen Fry: Heroes
* Elizabeth George: Careless in Red
* P.D. James: Unnatural Causes, Devices and Desires
* Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
* Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
* Michael McDowell: Blackwater
* Herman Melville: The Confidence-Men
* Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
* Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
* Jay Stringer: Ways to Die in Glasgow
RELICS AND CURIOSITIES
Most likely: * Patricia Wentworth: Eternity Ring √
Alternatives: * Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor
* Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
* Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Trudi Canavan: The Magicians’ Guild
* Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse, Halloween Party
* Freeman Wills Crofts: The Cask
* Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
* Jeffery Deaver: The Cold Moon
* Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
* Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story)
* Ken Follett: Eye of the Needle
* Stephen Fry: Heroes
* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
* Michael Gilbert: Smallbone Deceased
* Jason Goodwin: The Janissary Tree
* Donna Leon: The Jewels of Paradise, The Golden Egg
* Scott Lynch: The Lies of Locke Lamora
* Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow
* Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones, The Devil’s Novice
* Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids
* Christopher Priest: The Prestige
* Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
* Clayton Rawson: Death from a Top Hat
* Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
* Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time
* Barbara Vine: Asta’s Book, A Dark-Adapted Eye
* Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
DARK ACADEMIA Most likely: * James Hilton: Murder at School √
Alternatives: * Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Joanne Harris: Gentlemen and Players
* Michael Innes: Death at the President’s Lodging
* Robert B. Parker: School Days
* Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
* Donna Tartt: The Secret History
MODERN NOIR Most likely: * Joy Ellis: The Guilty Ones √
Alternatives: * Jay Bonansinga: The Sleep Police
* Ann Cleeves: The Crow Trap, Raven Black
* Jeffery Deaver: The Bone Collector, The Cold Moon
* Hugh Fraser: Harm
* Joanne Harris: Gentlemen and Players
* Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder
* Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
* Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island
* Jo Nesbø: Macbeth
* Robert B. Parker: School Days
* Ian Rankin: Rebus series
* Ruth Rendell: Some Lie and Some Die
* Peter Robinson: Gallows View, Wednesday’s Child
* Jay Stringer: Ways to Die in Glasgow
* Donna Tartt: The Secret History
* C.J. Tudor: The Taking of Annie Thorne
* Minette Walters: Disordered Minds
* R.D. Wingfield: A Killing Frost
* Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance
* Various Authors: MachUp
GHOST STORIES Most likely: * Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten √
Alternatives: Georgette Heyer: Footsteps in the Dark
* Michael McDowell: Blackwater Barbara Michaels: Witch * Toni Morrison: Beloved
* Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones
* Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids
GOTHIC Most likely:
* Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor √
Alternatives: * Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
* Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
* John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man
* Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse
* Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
* Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
* Michael McDowell: Blackwater
* Barbara Michaels: Witch * Toni Morrison: Beloved
* Delia Owens: Where the Crawdads Sing
* Christopher Priest: The Prestige
* Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho
* Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
* Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
* Mary Stewart: This Rough Magic
* Bram Stoker: Dracula
* Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, A Dark-Adapted Eye
* Patricia Wentworth: Pilgrim’s Rest
* Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
TRULY TERRIFYING Most likely: * Audible Original: Evil Has a Name * Susan Orlean: The Library Book Substitution: * Bob Berman: Earth-Shattering √
Alternatives: * Agatha Christie: Autobiography
* Neil Gaiman: The View from the Cheap Seats
* Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias and Their Enemies
* Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm
* Hesketh Pearson: Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life
* Patrick Radden Keefe: Say Nothing
* Bob Woodward: The Last of the President’s Men, The Secret Man
CRYPTOZOOLOGIST Most likely: * Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards! √
Alternatives: * Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World
* Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story)
* Stephen Fry: Heroes
* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
* Anne McCaffrey: Dragonflight
* Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Terry Pratchett: Pyramids
* Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
* Bram Stoker: Dracula
* J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin, Tales from the Perilous Realm
DIVERSE VOICES Most likely: * Toni Morrison:Beloved √
Alternatives: * Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown
* Sara Collins: The Confessions of Frannie Langton
* Edwidge Danticat: Krik? Krak!
* Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
* Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
* Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow
BLACK CAT Most likely: * Jim Butcher: The Aeronaut’s Windlass √
Alternatives: * Barbara Michaels: Witch
* Sofie Ryan: The Whole Cat and Caboodle
* Various Authors: Magicats
* Various Authors: Feline Felonies
CREEPY CRAWLIES Most likely: *Silvia Moreno-Garcia:Gods of Jade and Shadow √
Alternatives: * Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lion’s Mane
* Stephen Fry: Heroes
* Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book
* Alexander McCall Smith: The Girl Who Married a Lion
* Terry Pratchett: Pyramids
* Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
* Bram Stoker: Dracula
COUNTRY HOUSE MYSTERY
Most likely: * Anthony Rolls: Scarweather√
Alternatives: Margery Allingham: The White Cottage Mystery
* Agatha Christie: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories, The Pale Horse, Curtain, Halloween Party
* Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
* Matthew Costello, Neil Richards: Cherringham
* Arthur Conan Doyle: The Naval Treaty, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (several stories), His Last Bow (several stories)
* Elizabeth George: Careless in Red, This Body of Death, Believing the Lie
* Anna Katherine Green: The Leavenworth Case Georgette Heyer: The Unfinished Clue, Footsteps in the Dark
* P.D. James: Unnatural Causes
* Mary Roberts Rinehart: The Circular Staircase
* Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
* Patricia Wentworth: Pilgrim’s Rest
SPELLBOUND Most likely: * Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown √
Alternatives: * Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
* J.M. Barrie: Peter Pan
* Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Jim Butcher: The Aeronaut’s Windlass
* Trudi Canavan: The Magicians’ Guild
* Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse
* Michael Ende: Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story)
* Jennifer Estep: Kill the Queen
* Stephen Fry: Heroes
* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
* Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
* Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow
* Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters, Maskerade, Pyramids
* Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials
* Diane Setterfield: Once Upon a River
* Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
* J.R.R. Tolkien: The Children of Húrin, Tales from the Perilous Realm
* Various Authors: Magicats
A GRIMM TALE Most likely: Stephen Fry: Heroes Substitution: Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (eds.), Various Authors: A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales √
Alternatives: Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales
* Nina Blazon: Siebengeschichten
* Neil Gaiman: Fragile Things
* Alexander McCall Smith: The Girl Who Married a Lion
* Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Gods of Jade and Shadow Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment
CREEPY CARNIVALS Most likely: * Fredric Brown: The Dead Ringer√
Alternatives:
* John Dickson Carr: The Hollow Man
* Arthur Conan Doyle: The Veiled Lodger
* Christopher Priest: The Prestige
* Clayton Rawson: Death from a Top Hat
PAINT IT BLACK Most likely: * Trudi Canavan: The Magicians’ Guild√
Alternatives: * Margery Allingham: The White Cottage Mystery, Blackkerchief Dick
* Nicholas Blake: Minute for Murder, Thou Shell of Death, The Beast Must Die
* Agatha Christie: The Pale Horse
* Ann Cleeves: Raven Black
* Sara Collins: The Confessions of Frannie Langton
* Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White
* Michael Crichton: The Great Train Robbery
* Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
* Anthony Horowitz: The Word is Murder
* Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings
* Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian
* Scott Lynch: The Lies of Locke Lamora
* Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion
* Toni Morrison: Beloved
* Mario Puzo: The Godfather
* Ruth Rendell: Some Lie and Some Die, Simisola
* Peter Robinson: Wednesday’s Child
* Donna Tartt: The Secret History
* C.J. Tudor: The Taking of Annie Thorne
* Barbara Vine: The Blood Doctor, Asta’s Book, A Dark-Adapted Eye
* Various Authors: Classic Crime Short Stories
Squares for which I’ve already got too many options to list them all here:
Finally, since I’ve found books for all of my card’s squares, I don’t currently expect to be using my transfiguration spells. If during the game I decide I’m not in the mood for any of the book choices listed here, though, these are the squares (currently without associated books) from which, as of right now, I’d most likely make my replacement / transformation selection:
Previous Status Updates:
Master Update Post: 
Master Update Post: 
INTERNATIONAL WOMAN OF MYSTERY
DIVERSE VOICES
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT
Among the month’s other highlights was the second book of Tony Riches’s Tudor Trilogy, 
Another pleasant surprise, in terms of the book itself at least, was Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s 
By far the best (audio)book of this bunch was the first installment of the BBC’s 
Scott Lynch’s 
Martha Wells’s 
E.M. Delafield’s 
Lioness at Large 
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