Don’t worry, I’m not going to bang on about how busy I’ve been recently yet again. Almost thought I’d skip this month’s Puzzly, but my brain wouldn’t let me leave such a gap in the blog, so here’s my short-and-sweet summary of this month’s reading. Bear in mind, not all of these have been reviewed yet, as I’m saving some of those in the build-up to September 6th. Oh, and I forgot to write a review A Shroud For Rowena. Oops.
Anyway, books this month were:
The Mystery Of The Blue Train by Agatha Christie – sub-par Poirot, not as bad as The Big Four.
Black Edged by Brian Flynn – fun inverted mystery/thriller
The Case Of The Painted Ladies by Brian Flynn – typical Flynn whodunnit, with a very interesting denouement.
They Never Came Back by, yes, Brian Flynn – disappearing boxers and (possibly) a murderous pterandon (!)
Glittering Prizes by, um, Brian Flynn again – one of my favourites from this tranche of titles.
The Grim Maiden by you-know-who – his first excursion into straight thriller territory with some rather nasty villains.
A Shroud For Rowena by Virginia Rath – book-club title, interesting points, but I couldn’t get into it properly. A lot of telling not showing.
Dead Ground by M W Craven – no surprises here, the latest Washington Poe title is an easy winner of the Puzzly. Mike Craven has won the Puzzly for five out of his six novels, and the only reason that The Puppet Show didn’t win in June 2019 was that I read Black Summer in the same month and that edged it – just. So he doesn’t have the full house that Rob Thorogood has, but only by default. This is a fantastic mystery thriller with two of my favourite characters in modern crime fiction. And it’s out this Thursday! What are you waiting for?
So, next month, hopefully we’ll get back to normal service in a couple of weeks – fingers crossed. I do have two books that I need to write reviews for, apart from the various Flynns, so no need to look elsewhere just yet – keep the faith, the blog will be back to normal, reviewing deeply obscure books that you can’t find and modern books that you don’t want to read very soon.
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel 