This week’s letter in the Crime Fiction Alphabet series is H for Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie. I think this is one of the best Agatha Christie books I’ve read recently. Poirot investigates the death of Simeon Lee, the head of the Lee family. None of his family like him, in fact most of them hate [...]
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I think The Builders is a brilliant little book. I suppose it’s really a long short story, or a novella. It’s part of the Open Door series written by Irish authors for adult literacy learners, so it’s a quick read. It took me about 30 minutes to read it and I was amazed at how much detail [...]
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Subtitled Adventures of a Devout Sceptic I thought Is Anybody Up There? was an interesting book, although it is more a biography or memoir than an exploration of why Paul Arnott calls himself a sceptic. At times he seemed to me to be advocating most of the world’s religions. He describes how as a child [...]
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The Riddle of the River by Catherine Shaw is the fourth book featuring Mrs Vanessa Weatherburn. It’s the first one I’ve read so it took me a little while to work out her background. Set in Cambridge in 1898 Vanessa used to be a school mistress until she married Arthur. Now with two children (twins) she acts [...]
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Today’s reading: I finished reading Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear this morning. I’ve read a couple of the Maisie Dobbs mystery books before and this one is very good. Set in 1930 Maisie is asked by Sir Cecil Lawton to prove that his son, Ralph really did die in 1917 during the First World War. Sir Cecil’s wife, who had [...]
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Peter Robinson has written a series of Inspector Banks books. Strange Affair is the first one I’ve read but not the first in the series. I borrowed this one from the library as it was the earliest in the series available on the shelves. Although it’s one of the later ones in the series it does work [...]
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I borrowed The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie from the library. It’s a collection of twelve short stories, stories of unexplained phenomena, in most cases tales of the supernatural rather than detective stories. Of the twelve stories I think The Witness for the Prosecution is the best. Agatha Christie later wrote a play based [...]
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The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick is his second novel. Although this book is a page turner I felt it was rather disjointed in parts. I had to backtrack a few times to make sure I was following the plot and the timeline is occasionally confusing. But on the whole I thought the [...]
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In The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie a group of friends, including Miss Marple meet on a Tuesday night and tell sinister stories of unsolved mysteries. It was first published in the UK in 1933, collecting together short stories previously published in various magazines. The first story The Tuesday Night Club introduces the character of [...]
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I first wrote about Barbara Vine’s The Birthday Present a few weeks ago when I’d almost got to the point of giving up reading it. But I decided to read a few more pages and ended up finishing it. It wasn’t too bad even though the plot depended upon too many coincidences and I thought it was rather lifeless. Ivor Tesham, [...]
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