The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell

400 Pages

Publisher: Penguin

Release date: September 14, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

 

Six contestants. The nation's favourite baking show. And a prize worth killing for...

For six amateur bakers, competing in Bake Week is a dream come true.

But for the show's famous host, Betsy Martin, it's more than a competition. It's her legacy. As she welcomes contestants to her ancestral home, Grafton Manor, she's excited to discover who will have what it takes win the ultimate prize: The Golden Spoon.

Quickly, though, things start to go wrong.

The contestants are jittery - they've heard strange noises in the manor at night.
Betsy is irate - a new co-host has arrived, and he's out for her spotlight. Then, the sabotage begins. At first, it's small. Sugar switched for salt. A hob turned too high.
But when a body is discovered, everyone is a suspect.

Because someone at Bake Week wants to settle old scores...

 

Review

 

I love it when a book surprises me, and boy, did The Golden Spoon do just that. Because, while this book certainly falls under the ‘mystery’ heading, it’s anything but a stereotypical whodunnit. In fact, for the longest time it isn’t entirely clear what has been done, or to whom. All the prologue tells us is that Betsy makes a horrific discovery while there is a storm raging around her estate, where she hosts the Golden Spoon baking competition. The story then returns to a few days earlier. The six contestants in the baking competition are introduced as they arrive at the impressive location, and we subsequently follow them and their host Betsy Martin through the first few days of the competition.

Not all is well. Betsy finds herself having to work with a co-host she detests, while the competitors find themselves competing not only against each other but also against somebody unknown who appears determined to sabotage them and the competition. Add to all this mayhem that most if not all of the contestants may have ulterior motives for taking part in the competition…

You catch my drift. Much is happening between the covers of this book and quite a lot of it doesn’t become clear until very late into the story. And that could have been an issue. After all, I tend to read mysteries because I want to try and figure out whodunnit before the story reveals all. That becomes a lot harder if it is unclear who the victim is and what exactly has been done to them.

I’m very happy to report, that the set-up of this story, despite being untraditional, worked perfectly well for me. All the characters in this story are fascinating and watching their back-stories and motivations unfold kept me captivated. In fact, there were times when I all but forgot that the mystery in this story still remained a mystery itself.

While I can’t say anything specific about it, I would like to add that the resolution to this tale is somewhat untraditional as well. I’m sure there will be those who’ll end up frowning about the ending of this story but for me, it made perfect sense in the context.

To summarize: The Golden Spoon was a fascinating, well-written, and easy-to-read mystery featuring fascinating characters, an original set-up, and a captivating storyline. Colour me impressed.

 

 

The Couple at the Table by Sophie Hannah

 

358 pages

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

#11 Culver Valley Crime

Library

 

Blurb

You're on your honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort.

You receive a note, warning you to 'Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours'. At dinner that night, five other couples are sitting close by, but none of their tables is any nearer or further away than any of the others. It's almost as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless. Why would anyone do that?

You have no idea.

You also don't know that you're about to be murdered, or that once you're dead, all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could possibly have committed the crime.

So who might be trying to warn you? And who might be about to kill you, and seems certain to get away with it?

Review

 

Six couples.

One honeymoon resort.

An impossible murder.

Trust me to start reading a series of mysteries with title #11. I usually go out of my way to avoid starting anywhere other than at the start, but in this case, it didn’t even occur to me to check before bringing the book home and diving into it. After reading and loving Sophie Hannah’s Hercule Poirot novels, I just didn’t think twice when I saw her name on the cover of this fascinating-sounding book.

Is there such a thing as a slow-burn mystery? Slow-burn is a huge trope in romance, but is the term used for the mystery genre too? Because if it is, I think it applies to this book. Although the murder has happened six months previously, I didn’t get any sense of an (ongoing) investigation until about halfway through the book.

The story in this book alternates between July 2019 and January 2020. In July Jane Brinkwood was murdered in an exclusive resort in what appears to be an impossible murder. Six months later, Lucy, one of the other guests at the resort and the ex-wife of Jane’s new husband, contacts the investigating police officer, Simon Waterhouse in the hope of breathing new life into the case, which appears to have stalled.

Simon Waterhouse, much to the disgust of his superior, hasn’t given up on the case at all, mainly because he and his wife and colleague Charlie, were also guests at the resort at the time. However, Lucy’s action sets in motion a chain of events that will, eventually lead to the solution.

The first part of the book centres mostly on Lucy and Simon and it isn’t until later that we get introduced to the other guests at the resort. In fact, for the first part of the story, it isn’t clear that most of those guests had reasons to at least dislike Jane. For me, the story didn’t really start to flow until all those other voices came into play too. But as soon as it started flowing, the story washed over me like a tsunami; I was hooked and had to finish the book in one long sitting.

And I liked the ending. The solution to the seemingly impossible crime was plausible. Not only that, but it was also somewhat obvious now that it had been explained to me. And yes, I did want to kick myself for missing one or two clues that were hiding in plain sight. Having said that, while the how and the why were very much a mystery (pun intended) until the very end, I figured out the culprit early on. Discovering I had been right was hugely satisfying.

Overall verdict: A very well-plotted mystery featuring fascinating characters, and a wonderful read. I will be diving into more, none Hercule Poirot, books by Sophie Hannah in the not-too-distant future.

 

 

Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare

Canary Club Mystery #1

404 pages

Publisher: HarperCollins

Library

 

Blurb

A nightclub singer with more than one secret hastily leaves London on The Queen Mary after her best friend's husband is murdered...only to discover that death has followed her onboard, in this thrilling locked-room mystery.

London, 1936. Lena Aldridge is wondering if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. Instead, she’s stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just dumped her.

But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage. She has nothing to look forward to—until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York.

After a murder at the club, the timing couldn’t be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But when a fellow passenger is killed in a strikingly familiar way, Lena realizes that her greatest performance won't be for an audience, but for her life.

 

Review

My main reason for bringing this book home from the library, apart from the beautiful cover and the intriguing blurb, was that I had signed up on Netgalley to read and review the sequel. If at all possible, I much prefer to read my mystery series in the right order. While I can’t be sure until I read Harlem After Midnight, I’ve got a feeling that having already met Lena Aldridge when I start that book will stand me in good stead.

Lena Aldridge is a fascinating main character. She was raised by her musician father, who was black, and knows nothing about her mother except that she was white, which means that most of the time, Lena can ‘pass’. When the story starts, Lena’s father has recently died, she has broken up with her married lover, and she’s mostly disillusioned about her life and her job as a singer in a dingy nightclub. The club is owned by her best/only friend’s husband who has just announced that he wishes to divorce Maggie and leave her with nothing. When the husband is murdered in his club while Lena’s on stage, Lena’s life goes from uninspiring to outright frightening. Thankfully, Lena has a way of getting away from the madness because she has been made an amazing offer. An old friend of her father’s wants her to travel to New York to star in a Broadway production. The murder, and Lena’s uncertainty about what the consequences will be mean that she’s only too happy to leave London behind her and try for a new and brighter future on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you’re anything like me, you may wonder why a mostly streetwise woman like Lena would trust a stranger with an offer that sounds too good to be true. I pushed that niggle of doubt aside because being a possible accessory to murder might make most of us jumpy and prone to dodgy decision-making.

The crossing from England to New York should have been a time of rest and relaxation for Lena, but no amount of creature comforts makes up for the shock of having one of her fellow passengers dying in a way that is strikingly similar to the earlier murder in London. And that’s only the start of the violence on board.

I’m not going to say anything else about what happens next, except that if you are expecting a traditional mystery in which the main character investigates what’s going on, this isn’t quite that. While Lena does think about everything that happens, she doesn’t try to get to the bottom of it and the only reason she and the reader find out what did happen and why, is because the guilty party spells it out for her. I have to admit I didn’t see the solution coming, which for me is always a positive in a mystery.

I really liked this story. It gave me a smooth read and featured a fascinating character. Lena captured my interest right from the start. It’s great when the main character is multi-faceted, and boy are there a lot of sides to Lena, and not all of them are what you would call positive character traits. Which is of course what made her relatable and so much fun to read about. Since the story is told in Lena’s voice and from her perspective, we don’t get to know the other characters in this story as well, especially since she only spends a few days with them on the crossing to New York. And I have to say that most of the others felt a bit two-dimensional. Again, this is perfectly understandable given how the story is told, but it did mean I was less invested in what had happened to them or why.

And that brings me to my one ‘issue’ with this book. While I enjoyed reading the story whenever I picked the book up, the story never gripped me in such a way that I couldn’t wait to get back to it. There was none of the usual urgency I experience when I’m reading a mystery. Combine that with the fact that both the set-up and the solution, while original, felt a little far-fetched and you’ll understand why I rated it 3.5 stars. Having said that, I am looking forward to reading the sequel, Harlem After Midnight, soon because spending time with Lena Aldridge is unlikely to be boring.

The Good Liars by Anita Frank

400 pages

Publisher: HQ

Publishing Date: August 17, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

In the hot summer of 1914 a boy vanishes, never to be seen again.

Now, in 1920, the once esteemed Stilwell family of Darkacre Hall find their already troubled lives thrown into disarray when new evidence leads to the boy’s case being reopened – and this time they themselves are under police scrutiny.

As the dead return to haunt the living, old resentments resurface and loyalties are tested, while secrets risk being unearthed that could destroy them all.

 

Review

If you take the blurb to suggest a dark tale, you would be right. This story is very atmospheric, as Darkacre, the name of the manor where the action takes place implies. Doom, gloom, secrecy, and shellshock all add to the undercurrent of evil. As the story progresses, that suggestion gets stronger until, in the end, it turns out not to be a suggestion at all.

I’m not sure how to label this book. It’s not quite a mystery, although there certainly are quite a few puzzles to resolve. And despite the haunting atmosphere, it’s also not quite a gothic thriller. And while there are hints of supernatural goings on and the departed certainly haunt those still alive, The Good Liars isn’t a ghost story either. This is however a fascinating and memorable tale; one that may well leave you wondering what you would do under similar circumstances.

Darkacre is a large manor house occupied by a cast of four. There’s Ida Stilwell, the mistress of Darkacre and the wife of Maurice Stilwell who two years after the end of WWI still suffers from shell shock. Leonard Stilwell is the younger brother who is an invalid, having lost the will to live after losing three of his limbs during the war. Finally, there’s Victor Monroe, a friend of the Stilwell brothers who has more or less been adopted into the family. Sarah Hove is a nurse/housekeeper who joins the family to look after Leonard and take care of some household duties. Eventually, this group will be joined by Detective Sergeant Verity, who ends up stranded there when bad weather makes leaving Darkacre impossible.

From the beginning, it’s clear that all is not happy and well with this family. And the tension increases when the police arrive to tell them that they will reopen an old investigation into the disappearance of a young boy in 1914. What’s more, they will be searching the estate’s woods.

Told from shifting perspectives, we watch as the situation in the house slowly moves from mildly uncomfortable to outright horrifying. But, as the title implies, we are dealing with a group of good liars. I mean, you have unreliable narrators, and then you have this lot.

And that’s probably all I should say about the plot. There are a lot of layers to this story, just as there is a lot of evil in it. It’s a fascinating tale though of the unravelling of a family who thought themselves to be untouchable and it asks some interesting questions about guilt, innocence, and justice.

The story is very well written and told. The descriptions of the house, the atrocious weather, and the surroundings add at least as much menace to the tale as the actions of the characters do. The words flow smoothly, pulling the reader along and the further I got into the book, the harder it became to take a break from reading. I did manage to figure out one or two plot twists before they were revealed on the page, but that didn’t diminish the story for me.

Overall, The Good Liars is a fascinating and thought-provoking book.