Tag: mystery (Page 1 of 4)

The Secret Hours is a companion piece to Slow Horses, or rather to the Slough House book series by Mick Herron. Although some of the characters appear under different names than what you see in the tv series, this novel offers a backgrounder on the intrigue and corruption in the secret service from 90s Berlin to present day and offers insight into the Lamb’s Berlin days, which are only hinted at in the tv series.

The Secret Hours opens with the stink of dead badger, and it turns out to be a McGuffin. That badger is used by an ex-spy on the run, who manages to thwart his own violent kidnapping.

There are several intersecting storylines and flashbacks that can make it hard to follow in audiobook form, but I really like action and drama in audio format. So we have our man on the run (Max), who meets up with his handler who appears to be based on the Jackson Lamb character. The man is rude, flatulent, and a drunkard who manages to act when necessary. This drunk appears to be the man in charge in Berlin in the throwback story to the 90s, which comes out slowly through witness testimony in the present-day Monochrome inquiry.

The reason behind the thwarted kidnapping is not clear until the end so I don’t want to spoiler the plot for anyone. But I can say that in the present time of the story, there is an inquiry going on into wrongdoing by the secret service, and it’s being stunted by First Desk, until one witness starts to reveal truths that no one is prepared to hear.

If you’re a fan of the TV series Slow Horses, or even better the Slough House book series, then this is the secret behind-the-scenes history of Slough House.

Listen on Audible to The Secret Hours

Gosh, could I be any bigger fan of this author. Kate Quinn’s The Briar Club is a spellbinding exploration of loyalty, deception, and resilience amongst the women living at Briarwood House (boarding house) in Washington DC, 1950. It’s post-war America and McCarthy era politics are pitting neighbour against neighbour.

Mrs. Nilsson runs a tight ship, and she is tight fisted with money. When Grace March moves into the tiny attic room, Mrs. Nilsson—despite riffling through her suitcase uninvited—does not know she has just let the cat in amongst the pigeons. Grace draws the oddball collection of sullen, petty, and privacy-oriented women up to her small room every Thursday for a supper club. She susses out everyone’s problems and with ample grace smooths over tensions, teaches lessons, and is an all-around bright light. It’s like Mary Poppins for adults has waltzed in; and she likewise turns around the fate of the two Nilsson children.

But there are secrets Grace keeps tight to her chest, all the while bring others’ secrets to the forefront. The paranoia of the McCarthy era, the changing roles for women, the poverty and widening gap between rich and poor all play out in the small upper room of Briarwood House.

If you like Kate Quinn, you will like The Briar Club. I’d say this novel is more like The Phoenix Crown than The Rose Code, but it has all the wonderful traits of a Kate Quinn novel: history, strong women, and a deftly told story.

The Framed Women of Ardemore House by Brandy Schillace is a delightful romp infused with wit, charm, and a cast of characters who are as quirky as they are endearing.

The story is set in village of Abington, UK, and mostly on the estate of Ardemore House, a grand yet dilapidated estate. The roof has certainly seen better days. The house, much like its former inhabitants, is filled with secrets and stories that unravel as the plot thickens.

The protagonist, Jo Jones, is an American woman with a past she’d rather not discuss and a talent for getting into trouble. When Jo inherits Ardemore House it is as much as surprise to her as it is to the residents of Abington. Jo takes up residence at Ardemore House, rather at the cottage initially, where the lewd caretaker Sid unexpectedly turns up dead on the rug. Jo is thrust into the middle of a mystery involving a missing painting, a murder, and an ensemble of eccentric residents, each with their own peculiarities. Will she ever get a chance to learn about her own family and this house?

Schillace’s writing is sharp and humorous. The pace of the novel is brisk. And there’s a sense of whimsy that permeates the narrative, making it a joy to read. The characters are wonderfully idiosyncratic, each bringing something unique to the table. Whether it’s the enigmatic barkeep with a penchant for knowing everyone’s business, or the bumbling yet lovable local detectives, Schillace has crafted a world that feels familiar yet delightfully strange.

The mystery at the heart of the novel is well-constructed, with enough twists and turns to keep even the most seasoned mystery reader guessing.

Overall, The Framed Women of Ardemore House is a fun, fast-paced read that will appeal to fans of lighthearted mysteries with a touch of the unusual. If you enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman or The Maid by Nita Prose, you’ll find a lot to love in this book.

Find out more:

• Amazon.ca
• Author site

The Lost Book of Bonn is perfect for fans of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code. It’s a story of bravery and resistance in the face of injustice.

The novel is set in Germany, 1946, with flashbacks to the 1930s and early years of the 1940s. Our protagnoist, Librarian Emily Clarke has just arrived in Bonn. She is there at the request of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is cataloguing and acquiring books plundered by the Nazis. There are divisions in the massive depot where Emily works that are dedicated to determining if personal connections can be identified and returned to surviving family members, others that bring Jewish literature to refugees, and Emmy’s branch which takes key works stolen by high-ranking Nazis and assesses if they can be returned to their rightful owners or are available to be acquired by the Library of Congress and shipped to the U.S.

The background story is about how the Nazis tried to re-write history by stealing and destroying books and art, or by hiding and examining those works as a way to position themselves as superior. The story at the forefront is Emmy’s search to find the owner of a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke that has a beautiful handwritten dedication of love on the title page: “My dearest Annelise, my brave Edelwiess Pirate.” Emmy is keen to find Annelise and her lover Eitan. Interwoven into that story is the love story of Annalise and Eitan. The chapters move between Emmy’s present day (1946) and that of Annalise and her sister Christina (1936 to 1943).

This is a quick read, an intriguing story, and a timely reminder that the consequences of war are felt well beyond the dates of the conflict.

The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes is published by HarperCollins Canada.

Homecoming by Kate Morton is a chilling novel about the mysterious death of a young Australian family on Christmas Eve, 1959. It’s literary fiction written in a true-crime style.

2018: Jess Turner is a struggling journalist who’s making ends meet in London when she is called back to Australia, where her beloved grandmother Nora has been hospitalized after a fall. Nora practically raised Jess after her mother Polly moved from Sydney to Brisbane without her. As Jess struggles to figure out what happened to Nora, to get Nora’s affairs in order, to deal with her estranged mother, she discovers her family’s connection to the brutal Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. As an investigative journalist, Jess is intrigued. As the connection to Nora and Polly becomes clearer, she is alarmed.

Christmas Eve 1959: Percy Summers stumbles across the sleeping bodies of Isabel Turner (English wife of a respected Australian businessman) and her three children (Matilda, John, and Evie). He does not realize that baby Thea is not present. The family is spread out on a picnic blanket under a walnut tree near a water hole, as if they were sleeping. It’s been a hot Australian day and storms and bushfires are on everyone’s mind. But all of their attention quickly focuses on finding baby Thea and figuring out if there is a murderer among them. What unfolds is an unusual story of small village dramas, love lost, and alliances formed.

Homecoming spans three generations and offers glimpses at the spellbinding nature of a family tragedy. It’s also a look at loneliness and how home is more than a place.

Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

In the acknowledgments, Kate Morton relays that the first ideas for Homecoming came to her in the Adelaide Hills, her family’s refuge during the “great unsettlement at the start of the Covid pandemic.” Instead of the hustle and bustle of London, they found themselves removed to a remote farm in South Australia. The uncertainty and loneliness of those early pandemic days must have informed the sentiments of Isabel Turner, displaced from London to a small Australian village, of Polly who never knew who her father was, of Jess, drawn to London and a busy career but never really belonging to either London or Sydney.

Homecoming is lovely and unsettling, beautiful and tragic. I really enjoyed this read.

Hard to beat Stephen King’s blurb, “Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.”

Set in the summer of 1974, during Boston’s heatwaves and on the eve of the desegregation of schools, there is a murder of a young Black man on a subway station in “Southie”, a neighbourhood known for poverty, drugs, and housing projects. The Irish immigrants and descendants of Southie are in an uproar about sharing their school and having half of their kids bussed to a nearby Black school. So on the surface the novel is a police drama and the crime seems to be that four Irish-American teens have attacked an up-and-coming Black man, whose only crime was having his car breakdown in the wrong neighbourhood while he was en route home from his retail management training program.

That indeed is the crime, but the novel unveils the systemic racism and rule of law that undermines the welfare of those four teens who are fed lies from early on and jacked up on drugs fed to them by the neighbourhood watchmen who are running girls, guns, and drugs.

The Irish mob has a stronghold on the community of Southie until Mary Pat’s daughter is one of the teens on that subway platform. Mary Pat is one tough Broad and she has now lost both husbands and both children to Marty Butler’s gang of thugs and way of life. She disrupts his shit in a way that not even the police can, and it’s her story of hate, poverty and crime that is the real power of the novel.

This is America’s version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where human folly and racism lead to greed and cruelty at a scale that is nauseating.

If you enjoyed The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters or Hell of a Book by Jason Mott then Small Mercies explores the same depraved indifference to human life, and the corruption the erodes democracy and exacerbates inequality, poverty, and division among communities.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is published by HarperCollins Canada. And NPR has a a great, indepth review.