June Books: Mystery

 As always, there was some mystery in the reading I did last month.

The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths

I have read a few of the books in the author’s Ruth Galloway series and enjoyed them, so when she was a guest on a recent episode of the Shedunnit podcast, talking about this book (not in the series), I listened and was intrigued by the plot. Peggy, an elderly woman who was a ‘murder consultant,’ is found dead in her chair by the window by her carer one afternoon. She was 90 and had a heart condition, so no one but the carer, Natalka, and Peggy’s friend Edwin are suspicious. These two enlist the help of Benedict, a former monk who owns a coffee shack, where people can get the best coffee in the area. They band together to investigate and Natalka, an immigrant to England from Ukraine, contacts the police. She talks to DS Harbinder Kaur, a lesbian Sikh detective who lives in the spare room of her parents’ house. As things unfold, and it becomes clear that there is something suspicious about Peggy’s death, the crew of investigators, both professional and amateur try to find out what happened. How are the mystery writers that Peggy provided plots to involved? How are they all connected? What does an obscure, out-of-print Golden Age author have to do with the whole thing? How are the personal histories of some residents of the Seaview facility where Peggy and Edwin were neighbours impacting what is going on?

I quite enjoyed this book. In the podcast, the author said she meant this as a stand-alone novel, but the characters won’t go away, so there may well be more books coming. If there are, I’ll seek them out.

Death of a Gossip by MC Beaton (audiobook read by David Monteith)

I was in the mood for a cozy, so went to the e-audiobook section of the library website and clicked around. I found this one available—the first in the series of the author’s Hamish Macbeth series—so I borrowed it. I think I might have read one of the books over a decade ago and I listened to the Christmas novel at the end of last year, but that was the extent of my familiarity with the series. It was a good book which was funny at times. I don’t feel the need to seek out a bunch more of them, but I would borrow more if the mood struck.

In this book, we are introduced to Loughdubh (pronounced lock-doo), where Hamish Macbeth is the village constable with no great ambition to move up in the hierarchy. He first appears in the hotel where a new group of people is assembling for coffee—all pupils in a fishing school run by a local couple. Hamish always comes for coffee. Unfortunately, he has many more occasions to be with some or all of this group as there are tensions among them, mostly caused by Lady Jane Winter, a nasty woman who seems to know an awful lot about things people would prefer to keep hidden. Her barbs, thrown out randomly in the middle of conversations, and the way she deliberately humiliates some of them, do not endear her to the others, all of whom end up wishing she was dead. It goes without saying that when these wishes come true, no one mourns. Some bigwig cops are called in and they have no respect for Hamish, telling him to keep to village matters and leave the big case to them. In what is a surprise to no one, Hamish investigates and solves the crime while the big shots are still flailing around.

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