June reads

 Holy moly it's been so long since I read these books and then finally got around to posting about them that I have almost entirely forgotten what most of them are about.  Luckily there's the internet (and not, might I add, fucking AI which - has everyone forgotten about Terminator?).

• The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik.  #2 in the series (see A Deadly Education in my last post).  Loved it.
• The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik.  #3/last in the series (see above re same).  Also loved it.  Good fun.
• Buried Deep by Naomi Novik.  I'm on quite a NN tear, aren't I?  This is a collection of ghost stories.  Mixed bag.  Liked it, didn't love it.  Short stories are hard, y'all, but when they're good, they're great.
• Where I End by Sophie White.  Dark and disturbing, set on an isolated Irish island where Aoileann and her grandmother care for her disabled mother.  This one is brutal.  And the narrator, while deprived and abused, is unlikeable.  
• Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey.  After getting a call from her estranged mother, Vera Crowder comes home to care for her.  It's more complicated than that, though, because Vera's now-deceased father, whom she loved and who loved her, was a serial killer.  Her mother has been trading on that notoriety and all kinds of sketchy folks are attracted to it.  The characters are all interesting but unlikeable and things take a supernatural turn towards the end.  Meh.
• The Witch of Colchis by Rosie Hewlett.  There seems to be a recent surge of modern novelists taking a stab at ancient Greek mythology (just wait 'til the July reads).  I have a particular fondness for Medea, having done my senior Classics essay on her.
• Still Life by Sarah Winman.  I loved this one: set mostly in Florence, Italy, beginning at the end of WWII, this novel is about found family, art, luck, love and spies.
• The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny.  The nineteenth book in the Armand Gamache series, this one is a bit of a cliffhanger, to be finished with The Black Wolf.  Not necessary one of the strongest of Penny's mystery series but this one does bring back characters from previous books, for those who enjoy a callback.
• Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica.  Mystery thriller.  Eleven years after she and her mom and another, unrealted woman go missing, Delilah reappears in the town she used to live in with her family, after having been locked in a cellar since she was a little girl.  Her reappearance overjoys her grieving father, annoys her little brother (who had preferred being an only child) and calls into question everything about the missing women.  Twisty.  I really enjoyed it right up until the ending.

So what sort of summer reads are you enjoying?

April reads

 I'm late!  Which is hilarious, given how rarely I post on this little blog anymore.  But we were on vacation in the desert for ten days at the end of April/beginning of May and I read a bunch of books in between outdoors things and drinking (also sometimes outdoors), and then we came home and I got overwhelmed by laundry and real life and here we are, way late in sharing what I read in April.  Pluswhich, it's been so long I don't know how much I remember any of them.

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher.  I keep trying to read her older stuff but this is the newest one.  When your mom's an evil sorceress, it makes things difficult for everyone.  All the reviews say this is a "dark retelling of the Brothers Grimms' Goose Girl, but I don't really remember that one either.
• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.  Told by a somewhat unreliable narrator, this riff on a cursed movie tells the story of the making of an ultralow budget 1990s cult horror movie among a group of friends.  Unsettling for sure.
• Holly by Stephen King.  Holly Gibney returns to solve more murders in this mystery-horror mashup.  She's a great character and I like how King has kept her story going after her partner (and the main protagonist of the first few books in the series) has left the scene.  Good stuff.  Kind of icky.
• Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie.  This is a collection of short stories set in the First Law (etc.) universe, telling back stories and side stories that didn't quite have a place in those books.  Lots of fun (and rather a lot of knives).
• Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.  An 1872 lesbianish vampire novella, this is a precursor to - and perhaps inspiration for - Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I loved it, although I thought the ending sort of fizzled out.  I was DELIGHTED to subsequently discover a 2015 Carmilla webseries on YouTube - recommend you read it first and then watch it.
• Home Before Morning - by Lynda Van Devanter.  This memoir, recalling the author's stint as an Army nurse in Vietnam, is basically a blueprint for the subsequent novel The Women that I read in March.  It leaves no question that war is hell, and so is the homecoming sometimes.
• All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Crosby.  Changing gears, this one - which I quite liked - is about a black sheriff in a small southern town, fighting racism and the tattered remains of the Confederacy, while also trying to hunt down a serial killer.
• The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.  Stolen children, serial killers, recluses and charismatic cats are woven together in this one.  I was entralled all the way through and there are multiple twists as you go along.  So fun.
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.  A retelling (huh, another one) of The Fall of the House of Usher, this time with more mushrooms.

Mini book review: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

Finally a book that has enticed me enough to go after subsequent volumes in the series: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch!  Peter Grant is a probationary constable with London's Metropolitan Police.  After learning to his dismay that his supervisors plan to put him into an all-paperwork job - Peter is perhaps a little too easily distractable for the Murder Unit - he just happens to speak to a ghost who is an eyewitness to a very strange and violent crime.  Peter learns that the Met actually has a supernatural investigations division, headed by the mysterious Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale.  Nightingale gets him transferred and soon Peter is learning magic, talking with river spirits and going through cellphones faster than you can say "Piccadilly Circus" as they try to discover, with help of Constable Leslie May and terrier Toby, who is behind a string of escalating murders.

Midnight Riot is an excellent entry in the mashed-up British detective/urban fantasy genre.  Written in the first person, with Peter Grant as the sarcastic, interested and sometimes baffled narrator, it is a real page turner with plot advancements coming fast and furiously amid gently pointed and contemporary observations about London's traffic, tourists, police, weather and spicy West Indian food.  I was charmed by Peter Grant and his magical, modern London and I will definitely be picking up the second book in the series, Moon Over Soho, in the near future.

Books, in brief

I'm still churning through Spartacus: Vengeance, hence the not much of anything new here.  I like it and Liam McIntyre is doing a fine job but I still miss Andy Whitfield.  I've read a couple of books as well:

This Book is Full of Spiders - Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It by David Wong.  I think I liked this sequel to John Dies at the End better than the first book.  I found it easier to follow, the story moving much more linearly.  David inadvertently unleashes a plague of parasitic spider monsters that turn the townsfolk of [Undisclosed] into zombies, for all intents and purposes.  Then he, John, Amy and Molly have to stop the spider-zombie apocalypse before it spreads to the rest of the world.  Funny, fast-paced and pretty gruesome/gory in spots.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket.  I am a big fan of Mr. Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" books (Full disclosure: I went to college with Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket's alter ego, and he is every bit as brilliant, funny, articulate and talented as you might imagine).  "WCTBaTH?" is the first book in a new series, "All the Wrong Questions" - a children's noir series.  This first book follows young Snicket in his first apprenticeship as he tries to solve a mystery and, in doing so, asks wrong question after wrong question.  It's a good start but I think it's been a little more challenging for Handler to find his voice here.

Book review: Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

I like British mysteries and I like historical literature, so when I found Dissolution by C.J. Sansom recommended on NPR.org, I figured I'd hit the jackpot.

Set in Tudor England, hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake is a member of the Reformer movement, led by Thomas Cromwell, as King Henry VIII seeks dismantle the Catholic Church's hold on England.  Cromwell is leading the charge to dissolve the kingdom's monasteries.  Unsurprisingly, there are those who do not take kindly to the King's men trying to take away their religion, and one of Cromwell's commissioners is murdered while negotiating the closure of the monastery at Scarnsea.  Shardlake and his handsome and hale protege, Mark Poer, are sent to Scarnsea to investigate the murder.  Once there, however, they find two more murders to solve amid a morass of sexual assault, homosexual behavior, theft, embezzlement and - most troubling to a loyal Reformer - treason.

Shardlake is quite intelligent and is loyal to Cromwell and the King, but he struggles to know whom to trust.  The monastery's infirmarian, Brother Guy, is a gentle, educated Moor who offers a new way of looking at things to the lawyer.  The abbot is of weak character, preferring to hunt the countryside with local landowners.  Brother Mortimus, the prior, runs the day-to-day operations of the monastery and is a harsh-minded brute.  Brother Edwig, the bursar, has an extremely tight fist with the monastery's money and his parsimonious ways frustrate Brother Gabriel, the librarian and cantor.  Everyone Shardlake interviews is hiding something and in 1537, there was not much in the way of forensic science to help point the way.

Dissolution is a solid enough book, but nothing brilliant.  I was able to guess who murdered Cromwell's commissioner, despite the red herrings sprinkled throughout the chapters - and I almost never guess whodunit.  Shardlake is a tough protagonist to identify with: because of his physical deformity, he keeps at a remove from the other characters, and yet Sansom doesn't do much to make the reader feel sympathetic towards him.  I did find it interesting to read a bit about the resistance to Reformation; so much seems to be written (or on cable) telling the stories from Henry's and Cromwell's side, it was nice to get another point of view.  I understand that there are a series of Shardlake mysteries but I don't think I'll indulge in another one right away.

Book review: Missing Joseph by Elizabeth George

I believe I am growing unenamoured of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series.  This makes me sad as I am a big fan of British mysteries (and yes, I know that she's an American but I think she does a really good job of sounding British in these books ... it's called talent and imagination, people: Joss Whedon isn't an actual vampire (that I know of) but he writes 'em good regardless).  I think George is a good mystery writer - smart, clever, engaging - but her more recent Lynley books seem to be moving away from the actual mystery-solving and focusing on the mushy stuff.

For example, take Missing Joseph, the novel I most recently finished, and sixth in the Lynley series.  A vicar is murdered in a remote Lancashire village.  That's the mystery to be solved.  But the only reason Lynley is working on this case is because his best friend, Simon St. James, and St. James's wife Deborah (Lynley's ex-flame/fiancee), are having marital difficulties - she wants a baby but can't carry to term due to an botched abortion early on; he wants to adopt but she wants "her own child"- and have gone to Lancashire to see said vicar, now deceased, for counselling.  There is quite a lot of time spent weeping and wailing and breast-beating with Deborah and St. James that has nothing pertinent to do with the vicar's murder.

In addition, Lynley has recently convinced Lady Helen Clyde to be his lover, but she's not entirely on board, fearing being hurt by the former playboy, plus her family thinks she's a flighty girl who needs to settle down.  Lynley is all angsty and longing and blue balls (when he's not getting laid) and it's quite frankly tedious.  I don't care about the romantic entanglements among these entitled upper class Brits - I want them to stop mooning about and focus on the murders. 

Even stolid, dependable, sarcastic Barbara Havers gets pushed to the side for most of this book, shunted off on one or another field trip, ostensibly doing "research" for the case but really just put out of the way so the author can write more love scenes.  Blech.

If I wanted to read chick lit, I'd read Short Girls by Bich Minh Nguyen (which I actually am reading but only because I'm between books and have nothing else on hand) or that insufferable Eat Pray Love (which I actually have read and thought it was okay as a travelogue but ... really? Am I supposed to be able to connect with this entitled woman who is rich enough to run away from her life for an unpaid year just because she thinks her heart is broken? And then finally ends up with the perfect man as the prize to her hedonistic year? Double-blech).  I don't want to read chick lit.  I want to read British murder mysteries (when I'm not reading historical fiction or swords-n-sandals fantasy or Neil Gaiman).  And Elizabeth George is just not serving up a full helping anymore.

Mini book reviews: Finch by Jeff Vandermeer; and Summer Knight by Jim Butcher

Now, Finch by Jeff Vandermeer?  This is one of the weirder books I've read in a looooooong time.  The book jacket is alive with glowing phrases and newly coined genres as folks try to define this novel:  "Fungal noir.  Steampunk delirium.  Paranoid spy thriller, quite literally, on 'shrooms." (Richard K. Morgan)  "[Noir] ... with flashes of Raymond Chandler and The Thing."  (Meg Gardiner)  "... Farewell, My Lovely if Philip Marlowe worked for the pod people while snacking on Alice's Wonderland mushrooms." (Tad Williams)  To all that, I would add that if Dashiell Hammett wrote a Brazil/Blade Runner/Terminator novel with giant, mobile, sentient fungi as the bad guys, he might have come up with something like Finch.

Finch is an unwilling detective, forced into the job in the post-apocalypse after his city (country? world?) has been overrun with and overtaken by giant, mobile, sentient fungi, the graycaps.  In this time and place, the city's human rebels are scattered and ineffective, citizens are being put into detention camps and forced to build two looming towers, horrific half human/half fungus beings known as "Partials" roam the city, reporting back to their graycap masters.  Finch's partner and old friend, Wyte, has been infected by spores and is transforming into ... something else, right in front of Finch's eyes.  There is no power, no food, no money, no hope.

In the middle of all of this, Finch is assigned to a mysterious double murder in which a dead man and half of a dead graycap have been discovered in an abandoned apartment.  The graycaps don't expect Finch to solve this case - hell, he isn't interested in solving it, he just wants to write his reports and keep his head down.  But Finch is inexorably drawn into a sea of espionage, extortion, torture and rebellion and it's all he can do to keep his head above water.

I told you it was weird.  Walking, talking, oppressing mushrooms, ferchrissakes?  And yet Vandermeer pulls it off.  It took me a long time to get into this novel.  The language Vandermeer uses is foreshortened, clipped, uber-hardboiled and terse - and yet the images he crafts are fantastic (in all senses of that word) and the dialogue rings absolutely true to the genre.  Whatever genre this science fiction/fantasy/hardboiled detective fiction/horror story might call its own.  Finch is not for everyone - it's challenging and somewhat tiring - but I'm awfully glad I stuck with it as I've never read anything quite like it before.

In Summer Knight: Book Four of The Dresden Files, author Jim Butcher brings us back to the world of Harry Dresden.  It's sort of a rough place right now: Harry is ignoring his friends and his clients, hiding away in his basement laboratory to try to discover a cure for near-vampirism so he can save his girlfriend Susan.  Susan was bitten and infected by vampires at the end of the last Dresden Files book, and Harry is guilt-ridden, his overwrought sense of chivalry insisting that Susan's attack was all his fault.  He hasn't showered or changed his clothes in over a week; he can't pay rent on either his office or his apartment.  Plus the Red Court vampires are still trying to assassinate him whenever he does poke his head above ground.  And there was a downpour of toads earlier that means seismic magical shifts are imminent.  If ever straits were dire, these would be them.

Luckily, Harry is about to get a new client: Mab, the Queen of the Winter Faerie.  Mab has been framed for killing the Summer Knight (ooh! title!), the Queen of the Summer Faerie's go-to guy, and she wants Harry to find out who really did it.  He is loathe to get any more involved than he has to with faeries but since he's also in serious trouble with the White Council of Wizards - as in, they're thinking about executing him trouble - he finagles a deal: if he helps Mab, her people have to help the wizards in the upcoming battle against the vampires. 

And so it begins, with Harry getting support from the regular cast - his cop pal, Karrin Murphy, who is still physically and emotionally scarred from the last book; Billy and his pack of werewolves; Bob the Skull; Toot-Toot the pixie - and meeting about a million new characters, changelings, trolls, winter and summer faeries, centaurs, ghouls, evil ents on acid ... Butcher has a LOT going on here and while I confess to turning some of the pages pretty quickly once we got to the big Sidhe battle in the Never-Never, the fact that he manages to keep everything straight and moving is impressive.

More quickies

It's not even that I'm too lazy to post more here these days, it's just that I'm too tired.  If you check out my other blog, you'll see that Mr. Mouse and I have been keeping very active and thus I've found myself far more wiped out in the evenings than I was when we were in Maine - which was when I used to do most of my writing.  Here, after a day of hiking and drinking beer, and/or skiing and drinking beer, and/or even yardwork* and drinking beer, all in the glorious Utah sunshine, I'm just beat.  I'm way behind on a DVD review I need to do and yet when I can't stay awake to watch, I can't really write an honest review, can I? 

Anyhoodle, I did manage to knock off these two books lately, in addition to that Stephen King behemoth:

A Suitable Vengeance - Elizabeth George. This is #4 in the Inspector Lynley series.  It's out of the timeline of the first three, going back into the pasts and personal lives of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, his fiancee Deborah, his estranged chum Simon St. James (who in the "current" timeline is married to said Deborah) and St. James's former lover, Lady Helen (after whom Lynley is pining most desperately in the current timeline). It's all very twisted and strange, the relationships these people have with one another.  Luckily there are a couple of murders to be solved to distract everyone from the sordid affairs of the heart:  the editor of the local paper of the village in which Lynley's family's summer home is found brutally bludgeoned to death and then, later, St. James's fashion model sister's boyfriend falls to his death from a cliff.  I didn't think this volume was as strong as the first three books because of its focus on the main characters' personal lives.  I suspect this may have been a slight sop to the fans of the series who probably wished to know how everyone got to where they are - I just didn't find it as interesting.

Every Last Drop - Charlie Huston. I also didn't find the fourth of Huston's hard-boiled noir vampire Joe Pitt Casebooks series as interesting.  Oh, Joe is in more trouble than he's ever been before, banished to the Bronx, with all the Manhattan Clans poised to take his head off should he come back to the island, Joe is all alone.  Evie is sequestered in the Enclave, and all his former allies are now enemies.  So when the Coalition offers him a way back to Manhattan for a small job - infiltrating a newly rising Clan as a mole - Joe takes it.  Of course, along the way some of those enemies take a few pieces of Joe.  When during the course of his infiltration, he discovers the most heartbreaking and horrifying secret yet, learning that there are more levels to the hell he lives in than he ever imagined.  This one just had too much going on and was clearly written as a set-up for the next (and I believe, final) book.  It's very busy and although the secret Joe stumbles onto is a huge and impactful revelation, there's no resolution.  The other books could be read as stand-alones if necessary; not so Every Last Drop.

DVD review: The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries

The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries were first brought to the airwaves by the BBC in the early 1970s, and Set One, recently released on DVD by Acorn Media, includes two feature length mysteries based on the novels by Dorothy L. Sayers. Set in the 1920s, these two episodes follow the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey and his loyal butler Bunter as they root out answers to dastardly deeds in their profoundly British manners.


The first Mystery, “Clouds of Witness,” takes place on Lord Peter’s brother’s country estate where the group is gathered for a shooting party. When Lord Peter’s future brother-in-law is found dead, Lord Peter’s older brother Gerald is accused of his murder. At the inquest, however, many inconsistencies in nearly everyone’s stories come out – plus Lord Peter’s sister’s dead fiancé is revealed to have been a card cheat and thus a man who has many enemies. Lord Peter, along with Bunter and Scotland Yard’s Charles Parker follow the leads from the countryside to Paris and even to America, trying to clear Lord Gerald’s name. Many red herrings later, the truth comes out.

In the second Mystery, which I enjoyed quite a lot, “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club,” confusion arises as to who will inherit a fortune when both General Fenteman and his elderly sister die within hours of each other. Lord Peter’s allegiances are called into question when one of the suspects is a war buddy of his, poor shell-shocked George Fenteman, the deceased general’s grandson.

Although hugely popular when it first aired in the 1970s, this series seems dated now. The sets seem cheap and the action is staged like a play, along with outsized stage acting from the supporting players. These are very talky movies, as though the person in charge of adapting the screenplay was loathe to cut any of Dorothy Sayers’s prose. The costumes, however, are quite fabulous and the British manners of the day impeccable.

I found the acting a little uneven between the two Mysteries. In “Clouds of Witness,” there was a distance to the large cast of characters that made it difficult to sympathize with any of them. In addition, Ian Carmichael played Lord Peter extremely fey, making him more of a dilettante and a caricature, and difficult to believe as a ladies’ man, as some characters professed him to be. Carmichael was more subdued in “The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club,” portraying Wimsey as a highly intelligent and empathetic bon vivant which I think is closer to Sayers’s writing.

The DVD extras are slim: an interview with Ian Carmichael, looking back at The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries twenty-five years or so later; production notes; and a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Fans of classic British mysteries will very much enjoy these DVDs of The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries , which by their popularity in the 1970s inspired PBS’s series Mystery!. It takes a little time to get used to the production values of the show but once you do, Lord Peter Wimsey makes for pretty good company.

Book review: Dead Beat: a Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

As any of you who have read the book reviews here before well know, my favorite novels tend towards escapist stuff: fantasy, mystery and horror. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon a series that combines these exact three genres: the Dresden Files books, by Jim Butcher. I’m not exactly sure what led me here – I think I was poking around on Hulu.com and watched an episode of the eponymous and now-defunct SciFi series loosely based on the books – but I picked up Dead Beat on my last trip to the library ( I love the library!) and finished it last night, staying up ‘til nearly midnight to do so.

Harry Dresden is a wizard whose magically-inclined parents are now dead, and who fights on the side of good against the powers of darkness. This is all Dresden has in common with that other wizard named Harry. Dresden lives in modern-day Chicago, operating an under the radar wizardry business and also assisting the Chicago PD (particularly his current crush, cop Karin Murphy) with the weirder cases. He lives in a basement apartment with his dog Mouse, his cat Mister, and his super-intelligent spirit in a skull, Bob; he is off the grid because being a wizard wreaks havoc with technology; and he is a sucker for damsels in distress.

In Dead Beat, Dresden encounters some serious Big Bad: in an attempt to save Murphy’s reputation from a blackmailing vampire boss, he stumbles upon a plot by six competing necromancers to resurrect an army of dead spirits, and basically subsume the newly-risen dead to deify themselves with stolen eldritch powers the world hasn’t seen for millennia. Harry has to call upon all his allies – werewolves, his vampire half-brother, a cowardly polka-loving mortician, the suspicious Wardens of the White Council, a ruthless faerie queen and a fallen angel – help him save the city on Halloween.

There is a whole lot going on in this book and author Jim Butcher does a great job of keeping all the balls in the air. In fact, Dead Beat is the seventh book in the Dresden Files series (which I didn’t realize because my copy didn’t list all the titles in the front of the book) and yet I was still able to figure out who everyone was, and what was going on. Butcher has his main character allude to past occurrences with just enough detail for a newbie like me to garner perspective without over-expositing for fans who have been with him from the beginning.

Based on this one volume, I’m going to say that the Dresden Files novels are fun, with a main character/narrator who is full of conflict and foibles and wry humor. I’m thrilled to have found a new series to work my way through and you better believe that I’m going to go back and start from the beginning (– and won’t you all be glad to have a break from Gaiman and Pratchett?).

Note: The SciFi television series is very different from the books and Jim Butcher apparently posted on his website when it first aired that the show was rather an alternate universe, based loosely on the books but by no means faithful to them. I’ve watched 3.5 episodes and it’s okay, better than average for SciFi’s stuff, but not even close to the quality of BSG (or Angel, to which it bears similarity as well).

Book reviews: A Great Deliverance and Payment In Blood by Elizabeth George

I can’t believe it took me seven books into vacation to reach the first British murder mystery (hereinafter sometimes referred to as “BMMs”); I love BMMs and once spent a whole vacation reading nothing but – PD James, Dorothy Sayers … now, thanks to the excellent suggestion of Nancy B. and Megan (B)K., I can add the Thomas Lynley novels by Elizabeth George to the roster.

A Great Deliverance and Payment In Blood are the first two books in the series (many of which have been adapted into films by the BBC). The investigatory team is Inspector Thomas Lynley, Eighth Earl of Something-or-Other and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. In the best BMM tradition, these two are terribly mismatched and at odds with each other immediately – Lynley an aristocratic, handsome, urbane rake, Havers a short and squat working class oaf. But neither is exactly as they seem. Lynley holds pain and compassion within his gilded breast; Havers has a very sharp mind and good instincts beneath her bad temper and manners. Plus, Lynley is the sergeant’s last chance to advance in New Scotland Yard: if she can’t figure out how to work with him, she’s doomed to being a beat cop forever since she’s already alienated every other available inspector.

In A Great Deliverance, Lynley and Havers’s first case together takes them out of London and into the tiny, lovely village of Keldale, in Yorkshire. There, a wealty farmer has been found decapitated in his barn, his elderly border collie killed as well, and his fat, unattractive daughter sitting next to him, saying “I did it. And I’m not sorry.” But the good people of Keldale refuse to believe that Roberta, a good, gentle, simple soul, could have killed her father. And so the hunt is afoot for Scotland Yard.

Payment In Blood has Lynley and Havers in Scotland at a hulking manor house, investigating the brutal murder of a playwright. The acting troupe also ensconced at the house is full of insufferable characters and suspicious pesonages. Havers, as usual, struggles with the preferential treatment given to the upper class, while Lynley is shocked to discover that the woman he loves is there, and there with another man. Right under their noses another murder is committed and both Lynley and Havers find the situation spiraling dangerously out of their control.

Elizabeth George has not broken any particularly new ground here. She stays true to form with the tropes of her police team and their country cases. But she does it all so very well: she has a lovely eye for detail, and draws her characters exceedingly well, giving even the minor ones depth and making it impossible not to care about the major players. George doesn’t shy away from the grimness of human behavior and instead has crafted two very strong BMMs – and good novels apart from their genre to boot. I look forward to investigating more cases with Lynley and Havers in the near future - and may have to look into their BBC live action adaptations.