Oh, woe is me! My worst reading month for an age, mostly due to some irritating back pain that’s been plaguing me for the past week or two. Irritating is the right word – it’s just been annoying that sitting still has been at times a problem. Especially for a reader like me. For some reason, the constant distraction made it difficult to stick with a book, with several books that I fully intend to return (and the new Poirot) to being abandoned mid-chapter.

Oh, and it’s absolutely nothing to do with running around CGI Japan assassinating people left, right and centre. No, definitely not that. Honest.

But while it’s been a bit of a rubbish month for quantity, quality was not an issue. And it also contained one of my best bookish experiences.

Yes, just like Bruce Springsteen pulling Courtney Cox onto the stage for the Dancing In The Dark video (most of you are probably old enough to get that reference), my own Springsteen, Dolores Gordon-Smith, asked me to be a last minute stand-in on the Golden Age panel at Death In The Dales in Sedbergh. It was an honour to be asked, especially in such company, and many thanks to those who said such lovely things about it afterwards. Of course, now I want to do it again… Be warned!

But before you get too worried, let’s take a look at the seven titles.

• A Scrooge Mystery by Andreina Cordiani – one year on from A Christmas Carol and Ebeneezer Scrooge finds himself haunted by another spirit, one whose body he found in a churchyard near Marley’s grave…
• The Affair At Little Wokeham by Freeman Wills Crofts – a slightly experimental multiple viewpoints inverted mystery from Crofts. Not my favourite of his works.
• The Prince Of Darkness by Paul Doherty – the fifth Hugh Corbett book and while the killer is pretty guessable, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff going on here, with a healthy layer of medieval political machinations along with multiple murders.
• Quantum Of Menace by Vaseem Khan – Major Boothroyd may have left Q Branch, but that means he’s now directly in the firing line when he investigates the death of his childhood friend who was on the verge of cracking the secrets of ultimate quantum computation.

• The Merry Christmas Murders by Alexandra Benedict – huge plus points for the positive neurodiverse lead characters in this children’s book, but points off for the lack of clues in the mystery, despite the puzzles included with the text. Oh, and for killing a Maths teacher.
• The Bloomsbury Murder by Mike Hollow – the tenth Blitz detective mystery and I felt that I would have liked it more if I’d been following the series.
• The Death Lesson by Sarah Ward – a return to the Mallory Dawson series from Sarah, and a murderous cult lurking in the shadows of a private school. And the second dead Maths teacher of the month.

So, Book of the Month? Well, anyone who kills a Maths teacher is automatically disqualified – sorry, Sarah – but I do have a problem as there are two utterly fantastic books this month that don’t kill one of the most valued and awesome people in the world. Quantum Of Menace and A Scrooge Mystery…

Oh, I can’t separate them, they are both so good. So given that Vaseem Khan will is getting bucketloads of praise elsewhere and everywhere (apart from the USA where the book isn’t being published – any info on this, gratefully received), the Puzzly goes to a Christmassy treat that you really shouldn’t miss, namely A Scrooge Mystery. Don’t worry if you’re not a Dickens fan – I’m not – this is the Christmassy treat you need. And why not check out her other two fantastic Christmas mysteries while you’re at it, The Twelve Days Of Murder and Murder At The Christmas Emporium.

Right, let’s try and get things back on track for November – and it’s going to start with a bit of a cracker…