Murder by Invitation by Verity Bright

 

A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery #15

363 pages

Publisher: Bookouture

Release Date: September 27, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

Lady Swift has been cordially invited to a huge royal celebration in Little Buckford to toast the King’s birthday… but wait, is that a body in the village hall?

Lady Eleanor Swift and her loyal butler Clifford are busy lending a hand with preparations for the big day. The grand dining room at Henley Hall is overflowing with home-sewn flags, paint and royal rosettes. Even Gladstone the bulldog and his new friend Tomkins the ginger cat are invited!

But just days before the event Mr Prestwick-Peterson, the chairman of the celebrations committee, is found dead in the village strangled with handmade red, white and royal blue bunting.

With the village hall in total disarray and a key part of the decorations missing, Eleanor wonders if someone dastardly is sabotaging the King’s birthday celebrations? Teaming up with her handsome beau Detective Hugh Seldon to question the local butcher, baker, and pub landlord it becomes clear that the meddlesome busybody Mr Prestwick-Peterson was not universally liked in charming Little Buckford. Indeed, the only mystery is why he wasn’t murdered before…

Searching Mr Prestwick-Peterson’s pristinely organised rooms, Eleanor is surprised to find a faded photograph of a beautiful young woman hidden within the pages of a novel. Could this be the key to untangling this very village murder? And can Eleanor catch the killer before the party is over for her, too?

 

Review

I have to start this review with a disclaimer: I did not read the 14 preceding Lady Eleanor Swift mysteries. Fortunately, I can also state that this did not leave me confused and that it didn’t affect my enjoyment of this story at all.

Quite the opposite in fact. There’s a lot to enjoy in this charming story. The characters and the interactions between them are vivid, interesting, and at times chuckle-worthy. The exchanges between Lady Eleanor and Clifford, her butler, are especially delightful. Just as those between Eleanor and her fiancé Detective Hugh Seldon often made me smile. Overall, I can honestly say there wasn’t a boring or superfluous character in this story, and that includes Gladstone the bulldog and Tomkins, the cat.

The mystery in this book was intriguing and well-plotted. The murder of a man universally disliked is always a great set-up and the fact that every possible suspect had the same, impossible to disprove, alibi, added greatly to the intrigue. When a second murder victim is discovered, the urgency of the investigation increases, especially since it is only days until the festivities to celebrate the King’s birthday are to take place. The solution surprised me, although I realised after I had it all spelled out for me that the clues I needed to figure it out for myself were all there. 😊

The one thing I found less charming was the thriller aspect near the end of the story. I don’t object to it being there, it just felt a bit (too) long in what was otherwise a delightful cozy mystery. Having said that, I can’t say it bothered me enough to put me off Lady Eleanor and I can definitely see myself reading other books in this series in the future.

To summarize: Murder by Invitation is a smoothly written, captivating cozy mystery featuring delightful characters and a well-plotted mystery.

 

 

 

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

447 pages

Publisher: Viper

Book Club Read

Own

 

Blurb

 One Murder.

Fifteen Suspects.

Can You Uncover the Truth?

There is a mystery to solve in the small town of Lockwood. It starts with the arrival of two secretive newcomers, and ends with a tragic death. Roderick Tanner QC has assigned law students Charlotte and Femi to the case. Someone has already been sent to prison for murder, but he suspects they are innocent. And far darker secrets have yet to be revealed…

Through the amateur dramatics society’s disastrous staging of All My Sons and the shady charity appeal for a little girl’s medical treatment, the murderer hit in plain sight. Will Charlotte and Femi solve the case? Will you?

 

Review

 “Arthur Miller constructs a play the way a sculptor creates a three-dimensional image from an amorphous chunk of clay. He shows us a basic shape. Then bends and stretches its contours, turns it for us to view alternate angles, gradually reveals the finer details until, finally, we can see for ourselves what it really is.”

And the same can be said for this story. Nothing is as it appears at first and as the story progresses, deeper and hidden levels are constantly revealed. The big question being how it all ties into the mystery.

It is only thanks to the first two pages, where two young lawyers (?) are tasked to go over the paperwork of a case, that we know we will be dealing with a murder somebody has already be imprisoned for.

The next 2/3s of the book deals with an amateur dramatics group and the real-life drama taking place off stage. Through emails and messages, we get to know the Fairway Players and how they relate to each other. We learn about a young child with cancer and the fundraising efforts to get her an experimental treatment from America. But most of all, we slowly but steadily discover that nobody is exactly how or who they present themselves as. Secrets, past connections, animosity, obsession, fraud, lies, they all float to the surface. Until ultimately, on the premiere of their performance of All My Sons things come to a head. Truths are spoken and accusations made, and they lead to death.

I have to be honest, the cast list in this story is so long that it took me a while before I knew who was who and how they related to each other, and to what was happening. While it was a little frustrating initially, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because keeping track of it all forced me to read slowly and pay attention to all the details. And that, in turn, allowed me to notice the various discrepancies and misdirections I might have missed if I’d read at my normal pace.

The murder is almost an afterthought. In most mysteries, we start with a body after which the investigator tries to figure out the motives and events that led up to and might explain the crime. In The Appeal, we are given all those possible motives and the events that led up to the crime before the murder is committed. You would think that having all that information would make the identity of whodunit obvious. Not for me. I still wasn’t sure who out of an enormous cast of suspects had done the deed.

The murder victim wasn’t who I thought it would be either, although it does make a lot of sense it would be them. The actual murderer was also rather low on my list of suspects, although now that I know, it does make sense that it would be who it is.

The final page and a half were delightfully creepy.

I rarely re-read books, not even mysteries, on purpose, although the occasional title does slip in due to my far-from-perfect memory. However, I can’t help feeling that The Appeal and Hallett’s other titles would greatly benefit from a re-read. While I tried to keep a running list of characters and things that stood out about them and their actions while reading this story, I’m still sure I must have missed a long list of clues. For obvious reasons, I can’t share those notes or the thoughts I had when I wrote them down. The fun (for me) in this mystery is the slow lifting of the veil.

After having read all three of Janice Hallett’s currently available titles I have to conclude that she is something of a genius when it comes to slow reveals and misdirection while still giving the reader all the information they need to keep up with the investigators. Except that the fictional sleuths have so far proven a lot cleverer than I am. Then again, being shocked and surprised by the end of the book is one of the big joys I find in reading mysteries.

I am now caught up with Hallett’s mysteries and eagerly awaiting the release of The Christmas Appeal on October 26^th. The blurb indicates that the story will return us to the Fairway Players and Femi and Charlotte, which should be interesting, to put it mildly. 

Bring. It. On.

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie

#25 Hercule Poirot

287 pages

Publisher: HarperCollins

 

Blurb

Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other suspects: Philip Blake (the stockbroker) who went to market; Meredith Blake (the amateur herbalist) who stayed at home; Elsa Greer (the three-time divorcee) who had roast beef; Cecilia Williams (the devoted governess) who had none; and Angela Warren (the disfigured sister) who cried ‘wee wee wee’ all the way home.

It is sixteen years later, but Hercule Poirot just can’t get that nursery rhyme out of his mind…

 

Review

When I started Five Little Pigs, I was convinced I’d never read it before. As the story progressed, I realised that I probably had, be it a long, very long, time ago. I remembered just about enough to figure most of the solution out before Poirot revealed all in the final chapter. And, as always, it didn’t matter.

This wasn’t the only time Agatha Christie used a nursery rhyme as a title for one of her mysteries and in Five Little Pigs worked very well for this story. The five surviving suspects all fit their designated little pig very well. At the same time, The Things We Do for Love would have been an equally fitting title for this story.

In this book, the same story is basically told (at least) five times and then repeated five more times in written statements. It should be boring but, no doubt due to Agatha Christie’s genius as a storyteller, it is actually fascinating. Especially since there are minor yet revealing differences between what the five narrators relate.

As always, I don’t want to expand on the blurb for this story. Spoilers are always a no-no, but never more so than in a mystery. Suffice it to say that for me this story ranks among the best mysteries Christie ever published. It was a joy to read and I lost myself in this very clever mystery. It won’t be long until I dive into the Christy-verse again.

 

Harlem After Midnight by Louise Hare

#2 Canary Club Mysteries

Publisher: HQ

Pages: 416

Release Date: September 14, 2023

Netgalley

 

Blurb

1936, September 17th, 1am…

In the middle of Harlem, in the dead of night, a woman falls from a second storey window. In her hand, she holds a passport and the name written on it is Lena Aldridge…

Nine days earlier…

Lena arrived in Harlem less than two weeks ago, full of hope for her burgeoning romance with Will Goodman, the handsome musician she met on board the Queen Mary. Will has arranged for Lena to stay with friends of his, and this will give her the chance to find out if their relationship is going anywhere. But there is another reason she's in Harlem – to find out what happened in 1908 to make her father flee to London.

As Lena's investigations progress, not only does she realise her father lied to her, but the man she’s falling too fast and too hard for has secrets of his own. And those secrets have put Lena in terrible danger…

 

Review

This book starts almost at the point where Miss Aldridge Regrets ended. For that reason alone, I recommend that you read these books in order. I’m not saying you can’t read this story as a stand-alone, but you’ll get a lot more out of it if you’re familiar with what has happened before. What’s more, events come full circle in Harlem After Midnight.

And while I’m on the subject of how this book starts; I hope you’re ready for a shocker. The first scene of the book features a young woman on a Harlem pavement. She appears to have fallen out of a window and is clutching Lena Aldridge’s passport. What on earth is going on?

Actually, it will take some (reading) time before you discover what happened in that prologue. The timeline of the story moves back nine days, and we join Lena after she has moved in with friends of her lover, Will. Over the next few days, we follow Lena as she tries to find out about her father’s life in New York before he travelled to London. At the same time, she tries to figure out what her future should look like. Does she return to London and her friend Maggie, as she originally planned, or could there be a future for her in America after all…a future with Will?

Slowly, through meeting his family and from stories told by his friends, Lena gets to know Will better and it isn’t long before she realises that Will has a few secrets in his past. Not that she can complain about that. It is not as if she has told him all her secrets either. But, over the nine days, the atmosphere around her goes from friendly and welcoming to fraught and a little hostile, although Lena has no idea why.

Things come to a head on the night of a party with a woman falling from the window of Will’s friends’ apartment and Will being the main suspect.

Since I try to avoid spoilers at all costs, that’s all I’ll say about the mystery. As for the story, it is just as fascinating as the prequel. Except that in this case there is more than one mystery from the start. While most of the story is told from Lena’s perspective and focusses on her stay in New York, other sections are set in 1908 and voiced by her father and one other character who will remain unidentified in this review.

I’m obviously not going to reveal how any of the mysteries in this story are resolved, but I do have thoughts I want to share about those resolutions. For starters, I found the resolution to the mystery of the fallen woman as dubious as the one in Miss Aldridge Regrets. The answer is provided and makes sense but whether or not you’d call it satisfactory depends on your personal opinion. As the word dubious implies, I remain to be convinced. Furthermore, while the reader finds out exactly why Lena’s father left New York for London, it is a little unclear whether or not Lena herself was aware of his ultimate goal. Then again, for her sake, I’m inclined to hope that she didn’t figure it all out.

Having said all of the above, the story did fascinate me. The setting, the characters, and the interactions between them grabbed my attention. The book is very well written, and my reading experience was smooth and enjoyable. While this book may not completely satisfy the mystery purists, I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy a combination of captivating characters, a rich historical setting, and enough intrigue to keep them on their toes.

I wonder if there will be more Lena Aldridge mysteries. While this book could easily be the end of her story, I wouldn’t be sorry if Louise Hare decides to feature her in future books. Reservations or not, Miss Aldridge has gotten under my skin.

 

 

 

 

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.