Wednesday is earwormed by 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen'*
What I read
Continued with the Antonia Fraser Jemima Shore mysteries, which are quite readable even if Jemima is no great shakes as an investigator (she is no Miss Marple for sure; nor are the books doing the 'I'm playing about with the genre here, for la, 'tis only a mystery story' that Amanda Cross does): A Splash of Red (1981); Cool Repentance (1982) (which I actually remembered, though only about the really bizarre directorial choices for The Seagull), and Oxford Blood (1985) - which does involved SCIENCE though I vaguely recalled it as eye-colour and not blood-groups revealing parentage (unless that's a different one).
Laurell K Hamilton, Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #27 (2020), and at first I was yay, she gets to go and investigate something, it is that trope of 'outside investigator is obliged to go and look into crime in small inward-looking community' - in this case it is what looks like a case of a killing by a were-leopard that someone on the spot thinks might be a frame-up. With all that, even if there is not actually corruption going on there is resentment against outsiders and they solve their own problems and there are things they are not revealing etc etc. But there was still a load of stuff to do with Anita's emotional life and relationships which I could have done without.
Anne Wellman, Monica: A Life of Monica Dickens (2018) - I was sufficiently prepossessed by her book on the Angry Young Women, and this was inexpensive enough, to take a punt on it, and it's a competent biography of her that does go beyond her own autobiography and does seem to have done a fair amount of delving (not sure I entirely concur with her readings of the books).
John D MacDonald, The Turquoise Lament (1973) (re-read). The one with the complicated plot to do with records of submerged treasure, the heroine in peril saved by McGee, she not only survives but ends up walking away with someone else.
Aster Glenn Gray, Enemies to Lovers (2021): short sweet rather meta-f/f novella about fanfic writers.
On the go
Antonia Fraser, Your Royal Hostage (Jemima Shore #6) (1987).
Up next
Purportedly the UK ebook of Witness for the Dead is due tomorrow
***
*And inclined to think that that whole 'quite impervious to heat' thing was some kind of performative Imperial thing, because it sure does not apply back on ye home shores, pant, pant, sweat, complain, complain.
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