Review: THE MAID. Nita Prose

• 
  This title made available as an e-book on Libby by my local library
• Published: 2nd February 2022, Harper Collins
  
• ISBN: 9780008435738
• 352 pages

Synopsis (bookseller)

I am your maid.
I know about your secrets. Your dirty laundry.
But what do you know about me?

Molly the maid is all alone in the world. A nobody. She’s used to being invisible in her job at the Regency Grand Hotel, plumping pillows and wiping away the grime, dust and secrets of the guests passing through. She’s just a maid – why should anyone take notice?

But Molly is thrown into the spotlight when she discovers an infamous guest, Mr Black, very dead in his bed. This isn’t a mess that can be easily cleaned up. And as Molly becomes embroiled in the hunt for the truth, following the clues whispering in the hallways of the Regency Grand, she discovers a power she never knew was there. She’s just a maid – but what can she see that others overlook?

Escapist, charming and introducing a truly original heroine, The Maid is a story about how the truth isn’t always black and white – it’s found in the dirtier, grey areas in between.

My Take

 Molly is 25 and she works a hotel as a maid. Until recently she lived with her grandmother who was instrumental in getting her her job. But 9 months ago her grandmother died and now all Molly has is her job, her flat, and her walk to work.
Molly takes great pride in being the best that she can be, in her ability to restore the rooms she cleans to perfection. She has few friends, basically only those she works with, and really Molly is not a good judge of people.

And then her world changes when she discovers one of the guests dead on his bed. She had cleaned the suite of rooms earlier but had returned later in the day to "do" the bathroom, and found Mr Black very dead.

Eventually the police charge Molly with murder, and now she finds out who her real friends are.

As you read you will discover that there is something a little different about Molly....

My rating: 4.4

About the author

As for my professional life, I work in the publishing industry. I began years ago as an intern, photocopying edited manuscripts and secretly snooping the fascinating margin conversations between editors and writers. Currently, I’m vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, Canada, where I have the privilege of working with an incredible array of authors and publishing colleagues whom I credit with teaching me, manuscript by manuscript, book by book, the wondrous craft of writing.

Review: AGATHA CHRISTIE: A Very Elusive Woman, Lucy Worsley

• 
  This edition published By Hodder & Stoughton, Great Britain 2022
  
• ISBN 978-1-528-30388-9
• 415 pages

Synopsis (publisher) 

Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.'

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.

So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century. 

My Take

An impressive non-fiction work that covers Agatha Christie's whole life, written by a person who is quite obviously a "fan", well versed in the events of Christie's life and the books she has written.

I've also just watched, and can recommend, the first of the documentaries (4?) based on the book.

I was glad to see that Worsley shares some of my own impressions of the importance of Agatha Christie in crime fiction. She refers to some of Christie's plot strategies as Christie's "tricks" and refers to the way they made a difference to what we expect from crime fiction as a genre. The book has also sowed a few seeds that will influence my interpretation of the Christie novels that I intend reading this year.

My rating: 5.0

About the Author

Lucy Worsley OBE is Chief Curator at the charity Historic Royal Palaces and also presents history documentaries for the BBC. Her bestselling books include Queen Victoria, Jane Austen at Home, A Very British Murder, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, Courtiers, Cavalier and four historical novels for young readers. In 2019 her BBC One programme Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley won a BAFTA. 

Review: STONE TOWN, Margaret Hickey

• 
  Published: 1 July 2022
• ISBN: 9780143777274
• Imprint: Bantam Australia
• Format: Trade Paperback
• Pages: 416
• #2 Detective Sergeant Mark Ariti

Synopsis (publisher)

STONE TOWN is captivating new rural crime drama from the author of the bestselling Cutters End.

With its gold-rush history long in the past, Stone Town has seen better days. And it’s now in the headlines for all the wrong reasons . . .

When three teenagers stumble upon a body in dense bushland one rainy Friday night, Senior Sergeant Mark Ariti’s hopes for a quiet posting in his old home town are shattered. The victim is Aidan Sleeth, a property developer, whose controversial plan to buy up local land means few are surprised he ended up dead.

However, his gruesome murder is overshadowed by a mystery consuming the entire nation: the disappearance of Detective Sergeant Natalie Whitsed.

Natalie had been investigating the celebrity wife of crime boss Tony ‘The Hook’ Scopelliti when she vanished. What did she uncover? Has it cost her her life? And why are the two Homicide detectives, sent from the city to run the Sleeth case, so obsessed with Natalie’s fate?

Following a late-night call from his former boss, Mark is sure of one thing: he’s now in the middle of a deadly game . . .

My Take

The sequel to CUTTER'S END. Mark Ariti has been appointed to his home town of Stone Town, in South Australia's mid north. His quiet life is disrupted by the discovery of a body in the bush, and then the arrival of reinforcements from Adelaide, with an additional interest in locating a missing CID detective.

The main narrator is Mark Ariti, but a second narrative thread hints ta what has happened to Natalie Whitsed. 

A cleverly constructed story. 

My rating: 4.6 

I've also read

4.7, CUTTER'S END 

Review: BLEEDING HEART YARD, Elly Griffiths

• 
  this edition published by Quercus Great Britain 2022
  
• ISBN 978-1-52940-996-3
• 340 pages
• #3 in the Harbinder Kaur series

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

A murderer strikes at a school reunion—but the students are no strangers to death— in this propulsive, twisty thriller from the internationally bestselling author of the Ruth Galloway Mysteries

Is it possible to forget that you’ve committed a murder?

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late 90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost twenty years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job—as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory.

One day her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. Cassie catches up with her high-achieving old friends from the Manor Park School—among them two politicians, a rock star, and a famous actress. But then, shockingly, one of them, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. As Garfield was an eminent—and controversial—MP and the investigation is high profile, it’s headed by Cassie’s new boss, DI Harbinder Kaur, freshly promoted and newly arrived in London. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again.

Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies? It’s in Cassie’s interest to skew the investigation so that it looks like it has nothing to do with Manor Park and she seems to be succeeding.

Until someone else from the reunion is found dead in Bleeding Heart Yard…

My Take

While this was written with the author's usual aplomb and skill, my main beef with the plot was the final resolution which felt plucked out of nowhere, and, looking back through the plot, I didn't feel there were many hints for the reader.

The book developed Harbinder Kaur's career and her social life. Apart from that it told us that when something traumatic happens, most of us will not remember the finer details, or may even interpret them incorrectly.

A good read. I recommend reading the two earlier books in the series first.

My rating: 4.6

I've also read

• 4.6, THE CROSSING PLACES - Ruth Galloway #1
  
• 4.6, THE JANUS STONE - Ruth Galloway #2
• 4.6, THE HOUSE AT SEA'S END - Ruth Galloway #3
• 4.5, A ROOM FULL OF BONES - Ruth Galloway #4
• 4.8, DYING FALL- audio book - Ruth Galloway #5
• 4.5, THE GHOST FIELDS, Elly Griffiths - audio book - Ruth Galloway #7
• 4.7, THE OUTCAST DEAD, Elly Griffiths - audio book - Ruth Galloway #6
• 4.7, THE WOMAN IN BLUE - Ruth Galloway #8
• 4.7, THE CHALK PIT - Ruth Galloway #9
• 4.4, THE VANISHING BOX
• 4.6, THE STRANGER DIARIES - Harbinder Kaur #1
  
• 4.5, SMOKE AND MIRRORS
• 4.4, THE POSTSCRIPT MURDERS - Harbinder Kaur #2
  
• 4.7, THE LANTERN MEN - Ruth Galloway #12
• 5.0, THE STONE CIRCLE - Ruth Galloway #11 
• 4.8, THE DARK ANGEL - Ruth Galloway #10
• 4.7, THE NIGHT HAWKS - Ruth Galloway #13
  
• 5.0, THE LOCKED ROOM - Ruth Galloway #14

Review: HER LAST WORDS, E.V. Kelly

• 
  this edition first published by Quercus UK 2022
• ISBN 978-1-52941-717-3
  
• 386 pages

Synopsis (publisher) 

THE DEAD WON’T STAY SILENT FOREVER…

It’s a crisp spring morning when Cass drops her husband, a respected lecturer, to the beach for his medically prescribed swim. While waiting for him, something catches her eye. A young woman runs towards her husband and embraces him – until he holds his hand over her face and she falls down on the stones, dead.

In the backseat of the car, their seven-year-old son sits quietly. When her husband returns, he says nothing. Neither does Cass. Afraid to speak up in the immediate aftermath, Cass embarks on a solitary quest to unravel what has taken place.

Cass is quickly drawn into a web of lies that pulls her back to the previous autumn, when a beautiful Italian postgraduate student finds herself subsumed by an inescapable desire. It’s visceral. It’s destiny. But sometimes destiny can kill…

Atmospheric, twisty, and propulsive, Her Last Words is an edge-of-your-seat read about obsession and dark secrets coming to light.

My Take

A young Irish wife watches her husband apparently murder a young woman on the beach in front of her. But when he gets in the car he makes no comment about it and she is not sure exactly what she has witnessed.

As the morning progresses the death is reported on the television news and Cass is still not sure what she should do.

The novel uses two time frames which seem to work independently of each other, one in fact considerably ahead of the other. The reader's job is to jigsaw them together which is at time s very challenging. I found the eventual result quite unexpected although there were early hints.

My rating: 4.7

About the author
E. V. Kelly holds a PhD in sociology from UCD. Her short stories have been broadcast on RTÉ and published in Crannóg, while her winning stories have appeared in The Irish Times, an anthology and online. She has been shortlisted for various awards including the Francis MacManus Short Story Award, the Hennessy Literary Awards and the SBP/Penguin Ireland Award. She was nominated for The Pushcart Prize 2021. Her Last Words is her first novel.

Quick Summary for 2022

I met most of my goals for 2022

Here is the summary. Find the full page here

I read 127 books, nearly all crime fiction, nearly 50% from the library, over 50% e-books on Kindle and Libby, 50% British authors,  about 1/3 new-to-me authors.

My reading challenges for 2023 will probably be very similar.

Quick summary

• 2022 Good Reads Reading Challenge. I have set my challenge at 110. Currently: 127
  
• Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Completed in 2014, titles read in 2022: 10
• USA Fiction Challenge So far 29/51, this year: 10
• 2022 Aussie Author Reading Challenge: aiming for 20: currently 29
  
• 2022 Australian Women Writers Challenge: aiming for 20. Currently 17
• British Books Challenge 2022 currently 64
• 2022 Ebook Reading Challenge currently 79
• New to me authors - a personal challenge currently 41
• Not crime fiction - a personal challenge currently 5
  
• New Zealand reading challenge -again a personal challenge. currently 2
• Translated crime fiction - a personal challenge that will overlap with many of the other reading challenges that I have undertaken. currently 8
• Snagged through the Library currently: 59
  
• 2022 Historical Reading Challenge. Currently: 14

Review: THE CASE OF THE ABSENT HEIRS, Cathy Ace

• 
  This edition an e-book available on Kindle
• #6 in the WISE Enquiries Agency series
  
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BNZLPLH2
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Four Tails Publishing Ltd. (December 29, 2022)
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 294 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 199055007X

Synopsis (Amazon) 

A VALUABLE INHERITANCE, NO SIGN OF THE HEIRS...and a looming deadline. Can the women of the WISE ENQUIRIES AGENCY track down the missing men in time? Or are there good reasons for them not wanting to be found?

The sixth book in the series finds the women of the WISE Enquiries Agency looking forward to spending their first Christmas and New Year together as guests of the Duke and Duchess of Chellingworth. They’re expecting some memorable festivities – which might owe more to ancient Welsh traditions than mince pies and plum puddings if Dowager Althea has anything to do with it.

What they aren’t expecting are the worrying twists and turns they encounter while tackling the troubling case of missing triplets and a deepening mystery, and tragedy, associated with a trove of antiques…not to mention the bizarre and disturbing “gifts” being left on the front doorsteps of some very puzzled and perturbed locals.

A further complication arises when Duchess Stephanie’s parents arrive to support her through the imminent arrival of her first child; did the seemingly squeaky-clean businessman they got involved with on their recent holiday strike a deal with them that was too good to be true?

Join our softly poached professional investigators for Christmas and New Year in Wales…and find out!

My Take

The perfect start to a new year of reading, albeit cozy crime fiction.

The author has become even more adventurous with the number of sub-plots that she juggles at once. I enjoyed the development of characters of each of the WISE women and the relationships they are part of.

Seriously, if you are a reader of British cozies, and you haven't tried this series, then here is something for this year.

My rating: 4.5

I've also read

• THE CORPSE WITH THE SILVER TONGUE 
  
• 4.3, THE CASE OF THE DOTTY DOWAGER  - Welsh Mystery #1
• 4.5, THE CASE OF THE MISSING MORRIS DANCER  - Welsh  Mystery #2
• 4.4, THE CASE OF THE CURIOUS COOK - Welsh Murder #3
• 4.5, THE CASE OF THE UNSUITABLE SUITOR - Welsh Murder #4
• 4.5, THE CASE OF THE DISGRACED DUKE - Welsh Murder #5