NY: Soho Press, 2012.
I kind of have a thing about contemporary Japanese fiction. I don’t know why, really, but books by people like Ryu Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Natsuo Kirino, and Mitsuo Kakuta, who are very different from each other in style and subject matter, nevertheless appeal to me on a number of levels.
NY: NBM Comics, 2007.
Geary’s graphic documentary “Treasury of Victorian Murder” series is a guilty pleasure, the sort of thing you almost don’t want to admit you enjoy reading. They sometimes range into folklore and myth, but this volume is solidly historical, set in Labette County, Kansas, in the southeastern corner of the state, in 1870-73.
NY: St. Martin, 1992.
Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Borders and Lothian Police (i.e., Edinburgh) is as thorough a Scot as you can find, but in this quite mature third novel in the series he has to go and deal with those foreigners down in London, and it’s not a pleasant experience for him.
NY: HarperCollins, 2003.
Six years ago, when sort-of best friends Alice and Ronnie were eleven years old and were sent home from a birthday party in disgrace, they kidnapped an infant from someone’s front yard on the spur of the moment. The baby died and the girls went to juvenile prison until they were legal adults.
NY: St. Martin, 2007.
Penny writes murder mysteries, and wins prizes doing it; this is the third in her series featuring Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and it got her a third Agatha Award. But her books are also a good deal more than that.
NY: Berkeley, 2009.
As Bowen’s fans know by now, Lady Georgiana of Glen Garry and Ranoch, half-sister of the Duke of Ranoch, is trying to live in the family’s London townhouse on beans, tea, and toast. She’s a granddaughter of Victoria and 34th in the line of succession, but she’s still basically penniless.
NY: Bantam, 2012.
Like most authors of popular mystery series, Crombie has been getting out a new book every year for some time now. This time fans of the detecting adventures of Superintendent Kincaid and DI Gemma James had to wait three years — but it was worth it. (And time doesn’t move at the same rate as in the outside world, however, or Kincaid’s son, Kit, would be at university by now.)
NY: Bantam, 2009.
This is the 13th novel in the mystery series starring Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard and his (once professional and now domestic) partner, Inspector Gemma James, and I think it’s one of the best. This is largely, I think, because there’s rather less digression about purely family matters
NY: Bantam, 2007.
Maybe it’s because Crombie isn’t a Brit herself, but she seems determined in this admittedly enjoyable mystery series to hunt up a new background theme and location for each book and to expound on it remorselessly. And it does get a little old.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1955.
Along with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh was one of the Big Three British mystery novelists of what is now called the Golden Age. I’ve always enjoyed Sayers’s books (still very popular), though I never cared at all for Christie (still enormously popular), but it puzzles me why Marsh’s stores featuring DCI Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard have sort of fallen by the wayside.
As a retired public librarian (very large system in a very large city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of other people for more than 40 years. Since 1999, I've been posting my reviews to a personal website, but I'm now shifting my reviewing jones to this blog.
I have been a semi-professional genealogist since the 1960s and I have another blog of book reviews in the field of family research! To read those, go to BookSmith's Genealogy Book Reviews.
