Mansions of Murder Monday
What I've Just Finished Reading
Home By Nightfall, the latest in the Most Comfortable Man in London series, which has settled into a pretty strong formula. Here, Lenox helps his brother Edward after the death of Edward's wife, and gets mixed up in a murder, as usual -- well, more than one, this time. The village murder has an unsavory explanation, involving a culprit who is comfortably and perhaps a little unrealistically condemned by all the good people in the narrative. There's also an unscrupulous rival detective agency trying to discredit Lenox's firm, but given what we've seen of the Comfortverse so far, can we really doubt that virtue will win out in the end?
Meanwhile there are the expected updates on Team Comfortable: Polly and Dallington are still flirting less discreetly than they think they are, Jane is still gentle and socially adept, the McConnells have sorted out their marriage and are more content than before, the babies are growing up, but not too quickly yet.
It was nice to spend some time with Lenox's brother, and we get a very low-key meditation on mortality and relationships, as befits the Most Comfortable Man in London's amiable nature. The multiple-mystery plot means there is a lot going on at once, and Charles Finch is not as good at action and suspense as he is at evoking the leisurely gravity of an armchair by the fire, but that doesn't hurt anything.
What I'm Reading Now
I'm finding The Great Mistake a little harder to follow. It's very dense -- with incident, with characters and their pasts, with corpses -- and there's a through-line of romance that isn't working as a through-line because I spent too much time being annoyed by one of the partners to notice when it was supposed to be developing. I really liked the first-person "murder in retrospect" conceit when I first started, but now that several murders have happened and multiple investigations are underway, that aspect of the narrative voice has dropped into the background, and Pat, the narrator, becomes less distinctive and more burdened with detail. But it'll probably come together by the end.
Ngaio Marsh's Night at the Vulcan is completely delightful. A young New Zealander, having made a poor (but so far unspecified) decision, finds last-minute work as a dresser for a troupe of Marsh actors, and gets some much-needed kindness and advice from the night porter, despite the night porter's inability to stop making fun of the antipodes. Now she's learning the ropes, along with plenty of gossip.
Also borrowed from my in-laws during Thanksgiving: a contemporary mystery novel with the irresistible title Honeymoons Can Be Murder. Charlie Parker is a CPA who does a little murder investigation on the side, and Drake is her new spouse, a helicopter pilot. They try to take a vacation, but naturally the guy who rented their cabin gets wrongfully arrested for murder immediately upon their arrival, so Charlie takes it upon herself to poke around and set things right. It's ok! The writing is not very exciting, but it does its job better than either Murder Uncorked or Murder is a Girl's Best Friend. Drake and Charlie are basically inoffensive, and there's a certain amount of fun vicarious activity (snowshoeing, flying around in a helicopter) that keeps the book moving. The actual investigation has been pretty casual so far -- lots of sidling up to people at parties and some mild poorly executed cattiness -- but the author is making the amateur investigator thing work, more or less, so I'm curious to see where it goes. The Detective Romance content is somewhat disappointingly non-gratuitous.
The tagline on the back cover, which has nothing to do with any aspect of the plot as far as I can tell, is "You may now KILL the bride!"
Appeared at my bookstore in the past week:
Night Watch by Stephen Kendrick, described in a subtitle as "A long-lost adventure in which Sherlock Holmes meets Father Brown."
Home By Nightfall, the latest in the Most Comfortable Man in London series, which has settled into a pretty strong formula. Here, Lenox helps his brother Edward after the death of Edward's wife, and gets mixed up in a murder, as usual -- well, more than one, this time. The village murder has an unsavory explanation, involving a culprit who is comfortably and perhaps a little unrealistically condemned by all the good people in the narrative. There's also an unscrupulous rival detective agency trying to discredit Lenox's firm, but given what we've seen of the Comfortverse so far, can we really doubt that virtue will win out in the end?
Meanwhile there are the expected updates on Team Comfortable: Polly and Dallington are still flirting less discreetly than they think they are, Jane is still gentle and socially adept, the McConnells have sorted out their marriage and are more content than before, the babies are growing up, but not too quickly yet.
It was nice to spend some time with Lenox's brother, and we get a very low-key meditation on mortality and relationships, as befits the Most Comfortable Man in London's amiable nature. The multiple-mystery plot means there is a lot going on at once, and Charles Finch is not as good at action and suspense as he is at evoking the leisurely gravity of an armchair by the fire, but that doesn't hurt anything.
What I'm Reading Now
I'm finding The Great Mistake a little harder to follow. It's very dense -- with incident, with characters and their pasts, with corpses -- and there's a through-line of romance that isn't working as a through-line because I spent too much time being annoyed by one of the partners to notice when it was supposed to be developing. I really liked the first-person "murder in retrospect" conceit when I first started, but now that several murders have happened and multiple investigations are underway, that aspect of the narrative voice has dropped into the background, and Pat, the narrator, becomes less distinctive and more burdened with detail. But it'll probably come together by the end.
Ngaio Marsh's Night at the Vulcan is completely delightful. A young New Zealander, having made a poor (but so far unspecified) decision, finds last-minute work as a dresser for a troupe of Marsh actors, and gets some much-needed kindness and advice from the night porter, despite the night porter's inability to stop making fun of the antipodes. Now she's learning the ropes, along with plenty of gossip.
Also borrowed from my in-laws during Thanksgiving: a contemporary mystery novel with the irresistible title Honeymoons Can Be Murder. Charlie Parker is a CPA who does a little murder investigation on the side, and Drake is her new spouse, a helicopter pilot. They try to take a vacation, but naturally the guy who rented their cabin gets wrongfully arrested for murder immediately upon their arrival, so Charlie takes it upon herself to poke around and set things right. It's ok! The writing is not very exciting, but it does its job better than either Murder Uncorked or Murder is a Girl's Best Friend. Drake and Charlie are basically inoffensive, and there's a certain amount of fun vicarious activity (snowshoeing, flying around in a helicopter) that keeps the book moving. The actual investigation has been pretty casual so far -- lots of sidling up to people at parties and some mild poorly executed cattiness -- but the author is making the amateur investigator thing work, more or less, so I'm curious to see where it goes. The Detective Romance content is somewhat disappointingly non-gratuitous.
The tagline on the back cover, which has nothing to do with any aspect of the plot as far as I can tell, is "You may now KILL the bride!"
Appeared at my bookstore in the past week:
Night Watch by Stephen Kendrick, described in a subtitle as "A long-lost adventure in which Sherlock Holmes meets Father Brown."