Book 20: Copper Script by KJ Charles

A book that beautifully straddles the line between a murder mystery and a romance! This author writes about damaged men finding each other in post-Great War Britain so well, and this one has just a touch of the paranormal to keep it interesting. Joel can essentially see who a person is at their core from their handwriting, and this skill makes him useful for both a socialite checking up on their fiancée and a cop trying to solve a murder. The cop in question is Aaron, a detective who's living a small, closeted life and has to open himself to work with Joel to save themselves and apprehend the crook. And you know what, it just works! It's a nice book with a lovely romance at the center of it, and if the mystery isn't the most complicated one I've ever read, I still really enjoyed my time reading this. It hit the spot.

Grade: A

Book 14: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Sometimes books that are a cross between two different genres sound great but end up not quite jelling. And then other times you get a book like The Tainted Cup, which manages to create a whole fantasy world with giant sea creatures that invade a country and then set a compelling murder mystery inside it, with a classic eccentric detective and her beleaguered assistant who doesn't always know exactly what's going on or how important they are. 

It's just a really good read! I read the whole thing on a couch at a vacation house with my girlfriend and two friends and a very cute dog, and honestly what an ideal weekend. Can't wait to read book 2!!

Grade: A  

Book 1: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

We're still within the Twelve Days of Christmas, so I'm still reading Christmas books and watching Christmas movies! This one is a festive mystery novella in a series I haven't read any of the other books in, but I've heard very good things about the main books, and based on my experience with this, I'm not surprised!

This is a very meta mystery series, with a detective/protagonist who knows that he's playing that role in his 'real life' and so comments on elements of it within the story. In this case he discusses the specific aspects of a Christmas special, where the mystery is lighter and the story as a whole doesn't include every reoccurring character and plot element that you would expect from the main story. It's a festive story in which five days before Christmas, his ex-wife's current partner is murdered, and she's the main suspect, so he travels to help her clear her name. It's also about a magician and stagecraft hijinks and also includes commentary on how celebrity charity works, with a satisfying ending that I in no way predicted but that did all come together when he laid it out, and I could see how I could have put it all together if I was that kind of mystery reader. A very pleasant way to spend New Year's Day! 

Grade: A

Book 27: The Mistletoe Mystery by Nita Prose

This is a Christmas-themed novella set in the same universe as The Maid, and everything that I (despite my misgivings) ended up making my peace with in that book are back in this story and much, much worse. So! It was not be saved by the fact that it's a Christmas-themed story--I started to call it a mystery, but it's not. The only suspense in the book is the fact that Molly is unable to see that everything odd that's happening is because her boyfriend is trying to propose to her, but she doesn't see, but the reader sure does, and honestly it just made me think that if you are dating someone who (understandably!) needs things stated explicitly and clearly to you, you're doing a bad job if you try to keep secrets, even if it's in service of something nice, i.e. a proposal. This was the last book I read this year and no thank you!

Grade: C

Book 26: The Maid by Nita Prose

Man, this is one of those books that I feel really conflicted about! At its core it's a pretty well-constructed murder mystery that takes place at a fancy boutique hotel, where Molly, the titular maid, works. The mystery itself is pretty compelling, with some nice twists and turns, but what sets this book apart from most other similar contemporary mysteries is the extremely close first-person POV of Molly. It's never explicitly stated, but it's pretty clear from the narration that Molly falls under the autism umbrella: she has a hard time understanding what people's facial expressions mean, she takes everything literally, she is an exceptional maid in large part because she finds comfort in routine and cannot stand to let something be dirty or uncared for. It's a very readable and enjoyable POV, and before the mystery properly kicked off I prepared myself for this being one of the kinds of mysteries where someone's neurodivergence makes them a savant at putting together patterns and seeing things that more neurotypical people can't, a la Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock. And while I was already a bit 'sure, I guess' about that possibility, I was still looking forward to it.

But instead, she just...doesn't know what's going on. There's a whole seedy underbelly to the hotel that she's caught up in and just doesn't see it for what it is, and so it's this odd thing where I guess in theory the reader could enjoy being ahead of her in solving the mystery? But instead it just made me feel bad. The narrator's unreliable but not in a way that I found served the story particularly, aside from one reveal at the end that I did like a lot. But overall it left me a bit cold. However, I did enjoy reading it and I finished it in a very pleasant evening, so! As I led off with: CONFLICTED.

Grade: B

Book 23: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

A book club book! This is a lesbian romance that's also a detective story that happens to take place on the rings of Jupiter? So there's a lot of genre tropes and narratives all kind of smashed together in it. The set up is that earth became uninhabitable, so humanity set up a space colony of sorts on the rings of Jupiter that's connected by all of these trains. Different settlements resemble different cultures or really settings of humanity, so you have one town which feels like the old west, another area that's basically a living zoo of all of the creatures and vegetation the colonists will want to bring back to Earth when it's inhabitable again, and then there's a university which feels very Oxbridge. The story is a fun noir involving two exes, even if I could have done with more development of why they broke up and why being together now makes sense. Looking forward to reading the next one in the series and finding out where it's going. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman

Another great entry in this mystery series! I'm really enjoying the way each story builds on the last, and how the friendships deepen through the process of solving various crimes. Elizabeth continues to be the greatest, and I accept my place as the Joyce of a group. I'm taking a break after this one because I know the fourth one is a bit sad, and I'm not quite ready for it yet.

Grade: A

Book 8: Murder on Mistletoe Lane by Clara McKenna

So, this is a sequel! Something I did not realize when I started reading it. It's a Christmas-season set murder mystery at the English manor of newlyweds in the early 20th century. This is apparently the fifth murder mystery that Stella and Lyndy have found themselves in the middle of, and because it's a sequel, the character setup is both perfunctory and spends a lot of time referencing events from previous books, and I found it more tedious than intriguing. I kept reading because I did actually want to find out the big reveals, and while they weren't disappointing exactly, they couldn't overcome the overall experience I had reading it. 

Grade: C 

Book 7: The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict

A Christmas manor house murder mystery! The twist with this one is that it's a contemporary setting, and also that it's a game within a game, essentially - the now deceased matriarch of the Armitage family has required that her whole family gather at the family estate in order to play a series of games to determine who would inherit the house. The whole setup is contrived even for this genre, and the main failing of this book is that there are twelve poems of clues to decipher and solve, but they're not actually clues the reader can hope to solve. The whole mystery development ends up feeling inert as a result. 

Grade: C

Book 6: Hercule Poirot's Silent Night by Sophie Hannah

A classic kind of Poirot mystery, this time for Christmas! He and his trusty friend Catchpool are convinced by Catchpool's fairly unpleasant mother to come to a crumbling manor by the sea a few days before Christmas to help the family solve a murder to prevent a murder. Of course there are many secrets and revelations and red herrings along the way. I would have preferred slightly more Christmas in this story, but it's twisty in the Christie style, and I enjoyed reading it. 

Grade: B

Book 41: Murder on the Christmas Express by Alexandra Benedict

My final Christmas mystery of 2023! This one was pretty entertaining - it's an obvious riff on Murder on the Orient Express, only it's a Christmas Eve train to Scotland that's been delayed. Our main protagonist is a retired police detective who's traveling to the Highlands to see her daughter; their relationship has always been fraught and distant, and now her daughter is having a very difficult delivery of her first baby and so time is of the essence! Without wanting to spoil too much of this book, I will say that there's a lot more sexual assault trauma than I was really looking for in my Christmas murder mystery. It ended up feeling pretty dark in a way I wasn't expecting. Still, with that caveat, it was a good read. 

Grade: B

Book 37: The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson

Another Christmas mystery novella! This one is about a woman living in New York in 2019, who always spends Christmas alone, and rereads an old journal that tells the tale of a Christmas in the Cotswolds in 1989 that involved an old country manor house and murder. Halfway through the story, it takes a twist and we discover the real truth, etc. 

I liked this story a lot, but it felt a bit unbalanced--I think it would have been better if rather than the two parts being about equal in length, the first part was longer. I felt like the latter half suffered from being overexplored, and lessened the impact of the Christmas haunting themes of the story. But it was another one that I enjoyed overall, and I'd definitely read another story by this author. 

Grade: B

Book 36: The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

Next up on the Christmas-themed stories, the first mystery of the month! Apparently this is a sequel novella to a very popular full length mystery called The Appeal that focuses on the same amateur theater group in a small English village. This explains why it felt like there were a bunch of references to characters or previous events that never got resolved, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit! It's an epistolary style, with lots of emails and text messages and ads in church programs, and it felt like a Christmas special on a cozy mystery show that would air on Acorn. The mystery and resolution wasn't particularly shocking, but then it fits with the holiday season that way. 

Grade: B 

Book 25: The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

Sometimes your reading plan gets completely derailed because a person you're on vacation with keeps reacting out loud to a book they're reading, and that book gets launched to the top of your TBR list. That's what happened to me with this book, a delightfully meta contemporary murder mystery that's also an examination of the relationship between a writer and comments from their beta reader. 

The first chapter feels like a fairly standard story about a young woman who has a writing fellowship in Boston and is working at the Boston Public Library when a murder takes place elsewhere in the building. A scream is heard, and she and the three strangers also sitting at her table all get embroiled in the mystery and with each other. But after the first chapter, we see the comments from a reader, who is corresponding with the author of this novel and providing feedback and guidance.

One of the most impressive parts of the story is how the novel within a novel at the heart of this book simultaneously feels like a draft in progress without actually having the problems that a first draft of a book inevitable does. There's a cat and mouse tension between the mystery of writing the novel combined with the murder mystery being told, and I enjoyed every minute of it. 

Grade: A

Book 21: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

A friend read this and recommended it, and boy did I have a great time reading it! It's a classic Agatha Christie-esque mystery setup (extremely posh wedding set on a tiny remote island off the western coast of Ireland), with five narrative point of views that tell the story of the day leading up to the murder. The reader doesn't know who's dead until very close to the end, but what makes a wedding an ideal setting for a murder mystery in general is bringing together a wide assortment of people who all know various aspects and eras of the bride and groom's pasts. The groom's schoolmates from his days at public school are one key era, and the bride's oldest friend (and his wife) and her sister are another, and the book really draws you through the story because you just want to know how it all fits together as it flips from point of view to point of view. It's extremely satisfying and the characters are so clearly drawn, and I loved how clear-eyed the story is about who the real villains are. A great and fast contemporary mystery read. 

Grade: A 

Book 18: Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen

A queer mystery set at a mansion! This book is pitched as "Knives Out with a queer historical twist," which was enough to make me interested. I have to say that I went in expecting a different historical setting; rather than the turn of the 20th century Edwardian backdrop, we were in the Bay Area in the early 1950s. Our protagonist is Andy, a former San Francisco detective who was fired in disgrace when he was caught with his pants down in a gay bar raid. Before he can drink himself to death, he's hired by a mysterious and wealthy woman named Pearl who wants him to investigate whether her wife Irene died tragically or was in fact murdered. Pearl and Irene lived together on a large estate in Marin County with a whole cast of queer family members and staff, and Andy needs to figure out who might have wanted Irene dead and why. 

This was an enjoyable, fast read and certainly fits the "country house murder but gay" genre, but I think I may have gone in with slightly too high expectations, or possibly just hopes for a slightly different book. One of the themes of the story is how the closet acts as a cage, and we see the impact that had on Andy while he was a closeted and then exposed cop. But we also see how living in a house where everyone knows who you are can make it difficult to survive outside of that house, no matter how beautiful it is. I think I was hoping for a lighter gay mystery novel, but once I realized what kind of story it was, I really enjoyed it. I'm already adding the sequel coming out this fall to my reading list, sigh (one step forward, two steps back, as always). 

Grade: B 

Book 11: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series! This one just jumps right in, since we already know most of the main players, and this time the mystery has come directly to them. We get to see a lot more of Elizabeth's past, and Ron and Ibrahim's friendship (and relationship with Ron's grandson) is so lovely, and this series is just fun to read. There's just the right level of peril; I trust the author to do what needs to be done to make the story work, without being cruel just for the sake of it, but at the same time there is real suspense and real consequences. I don't really want to say much more about the story than that, but it's a sequel that builds on what was great about the first one and keeps running. 

Grade: A 

Book 10: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

It is always so nice when you start reading a book that a ton of people have recommended to you, and within the first couple of pages you're like 'oh yes.' This is the first in a series of English mystery novels set at a very nice retirement community in a small village by the sea. There's a group of four retirees who are all in the titular club together, reviewing old cold cases and files that Elizabeth brings for them to discuss, until suddenly there's a real murder in town and they have an actual current case to solve. 

Elizabeth is a delight; she clearly has a very interesting secret past that means she has all kinds of unconventional methods for investigating leads. We also follow the story through the journal entries of Joyce, who's the newest member of the club and just such a good voice for the novel. They end up working together with a young policewoman who had moved down there from London after a bad breakup, and it's very much a story that I had no idea how it was going to end until just before. 

It's not entirely a light book; while the person whose murder kicks off their whole adventure isn't someone we care about, the entire book is basically a rumination on what makes life living, and grief, and the specter of loss that is everywhere in a community like that. It really hits hard, but for me the balance is exactly what it needs to be. I am very happy that I waited long enough to read the first one that I can now immediately read the next two in the series. 

Grade: A 

Book 29: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery! This is the second one in the series that started with Magpie Murders, which I enjoyed a lot. This one has a similar framing device, except that the order of operations is slightly different: in the first book, the book editor had to solve the real life murder in order to solve the incomplete mystery manuscript, and in this one, the answer to one and possibly two real life murders can be found in a complete published mystery. 

This book was something of a pickle for me - the overall structure of the mystery worked just as well for me as the first book did, where in all three mysteries the reveals and explanations were clever and fit together perfectly, even though I couldn't have predicted the outcome. Unfortunately, there is also a very clear thread of homophobia running throughout this book, one that started in the first book but didn't fully bloom until the sequel. I'm sure that the defense of it would simply be that "well there really are some gay men who are like that" and so forth, but I started to have a bad feeling about it halfway through the story, and then by the end it was about as bad and frankly cliched as it could be. I really enjoy the mystery within the mystery of the structure, but I really can't in good conscience recommend this book. 

Grade: C 

Book 21: Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Another mystery, but this time a modern one! However, it's a modern one masquerading as a post-WWII one, all wrapped up in an enigma, you know how it goes. 

The framing device for this book is that Susan, a book editor in modern London, has received the manuscript for the ninth and final book in the Atticus Pund mystery series, which is set in a small English village in the 1950s and has all of the trappings you would expect from this. The first two hundred pages of the book are that novel, until suddenly it stops at the end of the penultimate chapter on the cliffhanger of who's responsible for the murders. Susan doesn't have the final chapter, and neither does the CEO of the publishing house. The author, Alan Conway, must have it, except he died by suicide over the weekend...or did he?

This is a book in which we get two mysteries for the price of one, a classic whodunit in the style of Christie, and a contemporary meta mystery in which a book editor must assume the role of the detective, to varying degrees of success. It leaves you with one heck of a cliffhanger midway through the book and forces you to both abandon the pretense of the mystery you first started to read as being 'real' and then introduces a new one, which parallels and echoes the first one in interesting ways. It's not easy to keep a reader invested in both of the mysteries at once, but the author definitely pulls it off. I'm very glad I read this particular book after spending a month or two reading a number of the classic mysteries so I had a better grounding in the tropes this books swims around in. Horowitz has written a number of other books (as well as Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War and Poirot, this is a man who knows what genre he wants to write) and I'm afraid my TBR pile is about to get unexpectedly bigger once again. 

Grade: A