Friends

I got quite a few recommendations for new books/series back when I attended Crime Bake New England back in November. I read a bunch of Christmas themed mystery in December, then after reading Four Queens of Crime I read some Margery Allingham (did not like her detective, Albert Campion) and started on Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn series, which I am enjoying very much. And I've been picking single books off the To Be Read pile here and there.

In one of Ngaio Marsh’s books that I read recently, I was really starting to enjoy a character, who was sort of everyone’s favorite uncle. But it turned out (much to my dismay!) that he was the corpse! Of course, I’m so used to the corpse being someone that everyone hates that it was interesting to watch Marsh build a plot around a corpse that everyone really did actually love. Although I would have enjoyed seeing him become a recurring character, alas, his fate was to die to move the plot along.

I also finally got around to picking up a book that I’d picked up at Crime Bake, Murder at the Wham Bam Club. I picked it up because the book is set in the 1920s, which is my current sweet spot for mysteries, and because the protagonists were all Black. What I hadn’t realized was that our amateur detective was going to be psychic (one of my pet peeves is supernatural help with detecting). And her auntie is the local HooDoo practitioner. But, as it turns out, the author was writing what she knows. Her author bio says she is a Reiki master, a psychic medium and a Professor at Berklee College of Music Online. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, she has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and represented her country as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department. When she is not writing, performing, or offering Reiki to students at Berklee, she maintains a private practice in healing and mediumship. It wasn’t a bad book, but there were enough weaknesses that I don’t think I’ll be buying any of her other books. There were lots of info dumps that just didn’t make sense. Like the heroine had been working for a catering company for eleven months, but for some reason, when they work a gig for their best customer, a woman who hires them at least once a month, her boss is busy explaining to her who the woman is and how to act when she’s in their house. Because somehow she’s never been there in the past eleven months? That sort of thing just doesn’t make sense. I know the author was trying to tell the reader about the client, but repeating things to the character that she should already know is a clumsy way of doing it. It violates the advice “show, don’t tell” that you hear so often when writing fiction.

I also recently picked up Richard Osman's We Solve Murders. He's the fellow who wrote Thursday Murder Club series, which are good fun, but this is not part of that series. I'd picked this one up a while back, read the back of the book, and put it back on the TBR pile. No idea why I didn't read it before, it was just as good as the Thursday Murder Club books, just a new set of people thrown together to solve a murder or two. I have to say, for someone who is only 55 years old, Osman really understands how to write older/elderly characters and their feelings about being retired and/or widowed. Plus, he’s one of the few murder writers who can make me laugh out loud.