Well, that was a relatively quiet month for the blog. A few different reasons. Mostly due to work commitments, as I’ve been organising a workshop at school for our neighbouring schools on University interviews, partly due to two other books that I’ve read but can’t post a review just yet, as one’s not out for a while and the other is appearing on December 1^st as part of a blog tour. Oh, and a fair bit of my weekend time at the moment is playing Christmas tunes with this bunch of reprobates. Don’t have a video of anything Christmassy, but this’ll do.

Anyway, back to the point. Only seven books, but I use the word “book” loosely, as one is a novella and one is two short stories with a child detective who looks slightly less human than the monkey in the tree next to him on the cover. But everything counts. So which one is the book of the month?

The books were:

• The Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths
• The King’s Writ by Paul Doherty
• Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
• All But Impossible by Edward D Hoch
• Fire by L C Tyler
• Death In The Stars by Frances Brody
• The Monkey’s Clue and The Stolen Sapphire by Edward D Hoch

Yup, nothing Golden Age this month. I was hoping to get my current read, Invisible Death by Brian Flynn read in time – which is an unabashed delight, by the way – but that won’t happen. But once I’ve got a few promised reviews out of the way, it’ll be Golden Age all the way for a while. Probably.

So Book Of The Month? Well, everyone should read All But Impossible, but the formatting on the ebook still annoys me – still not fixed – and The King’s Writ is a great Hugh Corbett tale, but it is a novella… And, to be honest, everything this month was a decent read. But it comes to the two Fire-based tales, and as much as I loved Len Tyler’s Fire, this month’s easy win was the memorably evocative Bonfire, the debut novel by Krysten Ritter, best known for her performance as Jessica Jones on the Netflix show of the same title, but who now should be better known for her writing. This is a thunderingly powerful book and easily walks off with the Puzzly and the free advertising that comes from being the blog’s wallpaper for the next month.

So, coming up? New books from Peter Bartram, Jane Harper and Catherine Ryan Howard (that might be in the New Year – need to check the publication date) and then it’ll be Golden Age all the way, starting with the aforementioned Invisible Death – where a retired army major drops dead with no sign of injury in the middle of a siege of his house by survivors of the Russian Revolution. And that’s only the beginning of the tale…