March is here. I’d love to say how wonderful things are, but let’s face it, they aren’t. I don’t know if I have any Ukrainian followers – visits from the country take up less than 0.1% of my views and I doubt anyone from Ukraine will be reading this – but if you are, please know that you, your families and everyone in your country are in my thoughts, and in those of everybody I know, and I hope that peace is restored as soon as possible.

It seems very trite to now bang on about my reading for this month, but that’s what I do, so here we go. Might be a bit briefer than usual though. Off we go.

The books that I’ve read this month were:

• Vultures In The Sky by Todd Downing – Admirable but didn’t quite work for me.
• The Youth Hostel Murders by Glyn Carr – Liked this a lot, would like to read more from Carr.
• Quickly Dead by Belton Cobb – A good early title from Cobb, Burmann’s first non-poisoning case.
• Tour De Force by Christianna Brand – Excellent, but takes a bit of a run to get into.
• The Corfe Castle Murders by Rachel McLean – An object lesson in why you should always ignore Amazon recommendations. A very ordinary book.
• The Red Death Murders by Jim Noy – Fascinating debut novel, and I really hope there is more to come from this Noy character.
• Jumping Jenny by Anthony Berkeley – Other opinions are available but this is not a mystery novel, not particularly funny and left a sour taste in my mouth.
• Black Coffee by Agatha Christie & Charles Osborne – Poor adaptation of a poor play. Enough said.

Easy to narrow it down to three. While the Glyn Carr book isn’t perfect, as the killer is a bit obvious, there’s a lot of good stuff in there, with clues and everything. After that, it probably should by Tour De Force by Christianna Brand, easily my favourite of her books to date – and, to repeat myself again, yes I have read Death Of Jezebel. But the imaginative The Red Death Murders is going to take the Book of the Month this time. For a start, it’s one of the most original classically-plotted mysteries that I’ve read in an absolute age and for a debut novel, it’s stunning. And the author is a friend of mine – sue me – but I’m only using that fact to help with a tie-breaker. Go and buy it now – it’s available as an ebook and as a… well, book.

Next month, let’s see if I can get the pace of reading back up. I’ve got the new Paul Doherty Brother Athelstan on my Kindle – review copy, sorry – so that’ll definitely help.