Why am I posting a Saturday Summary on a Sunday? Because Saturday was a travel day and my travel was delayed. So this is a Saturday Summary on Sunday.

I was on holiday this week, so I spent a lot more time reading than writing reviews and even more time doing nothing much at all beyond enjoying the scenery and the atmosphere. Even so, I read three books and bought three more (which is why my TBR pile never goes down).

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This week, I read a collection of linked horror stories about a Halloween Carnival, the ninth and latest book in a British spy series and a 1965 Swedish crime novel that launched the series that helped invent Nordic Noir.

It’s Halloween, and the carnival has come to town.
The gates open at sunset, and the attractions are all one of a kind. Faery illusions caper under the big top while a demon hunts monsters on the midway. A psychic delivers actual messages from the dead and a real ghost lurks and laughs inside the haunted house. A werewolf plays Halloween tricks, a succubus learns the delights of a human Halloween, and a vampire hypnotizes his future prey.
Those who go to the carnival and come back have tales to tell long after the tents are gone. Those who go and never come back… well. There are stories that linger about them, too.
Monsters, magic and mischief abound in these thirteen short stories about the Midnight Carnival

As the thirteen stories in this collection make clear, the Midnight Carnival is not what it appears to be. Its presence creates a liminal space where the human and the not at all human, intersect. On Halloween, which humans and non-humans understand differently but both believe in, the Carnival can be an especially dangerous place for humans and a playground for things that think tricks are treats. 

I liked the idea of the Carnival. I admired how the authors collaborated to create a consistent version of the Carnival and its denizens, while telling stories that varied widely in tone and style. 

I particularly enjoyed seeing everything from the point of view of the characters who would normally be the things that lurk in the dark and which smart humans run from, usually while screaming. 

I mostly preferred the darker stories, but the lighter ones added to the image of Halloween as a playful time, if your definition of playful embraces potentially lethal outcomes. 

Spies lie. They betray. It’s what they do.
Slow horse River Cartwright is waiting to be passed fit for work. With time to kill, and with his grandfather – a legendary former spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of the old man’s library, and a mysteriously missing book.
Regent’s Park’s First Desk, Diana Taverner, doesn’t appreciate threats. So when those involved in a covert operation during the height of the Troubles threaten to expose the ugly side of state security, Taverner turns blackmail into opportunity.
Over at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Catherine Standish just wants everyone to play nice. But as far as Jackson Lamb is concerned, the slow horses should all be at their desks.
Because when Taverner starts plotting mischief people get hurt, and Lamb has no plans to send in the clowns. On the other hand, if the clowns ignore his instructions and fool around, any harm that befalls them is hardly his fault.
But they’re his clowns. And if they don’t all come home, there’ll be a reckoning.

I discovered Mick Herron’s Slough House novels in 2017, seven years after the first book, ‘Slow Horses’, was published. I quickly made up for lost time so that, by the time the fifth book, ‘London Rules’ came out in 2019, I had it on pre-order and read it within a month. That’s a pattern I’ve been following ever since.

‘Clown Town‘, the ninth novel, is a perfectly paced, beautifully choreographed thriller, full of secrets, betrayals, intrigue and violence. It’s populated by a crew I’ve come to know well over the past eight years and dominated by the unpleasant but depressingly believable personality of Jackson Lamb. Illuminated by Mick Herron’s often cynically lyrical prose and enriched by Sean Barrett’s inimitable narration, it was a pleasure to read. 

And yet, to my surprise, my overall reaction when I finished the book was weariness.

I have grown weary of the purgatorial nature of Slough House. Weary of Jackson Lamb’s abuse of himself and everyone around him. Weary of Taverner’s endless self-serving machinations. Weary of the losses the Slow Horses always suffer. Even weary of Mick Herron’s heavily embroidered prose, which starts to feel as manipulative and depressing as Jackson Lamb’s dialogue.

That said, I’ll still be pre-ordering the tenth book when it emerges from Mick Herron’s dark imagination. 

My review is HERE.

On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

According to Henning Mankell’s introduction, ‘Roseanna‘, the first of ten Martin Beck books, re-wrote the rules for Swedish crime novels by making the plot more realistic and the policemen more human. 

I think the realism part worked better than the making the policemen more human part. This is realism that might cross the threshold into mind-numbingly dull were it not for how much fun it is to see how times have changed since 1965. Allthat smoking. And going to the library to look up Lincoln, Nebraska in an Atlas. And getting a thirty-minute warning of an incoming call from America. The main way of making Beck more human seemed to be that he was sick all the time.Even drinking coffee can knock him off his game.

I chafed at the pace at first Then, I realised that the book sets out to show that a key virtue for a policeman is patience. The same virtue is required of the reader.

I enjoyed the painstaking effort Beck and his team put in over many months to gather evidence of a murder for which there were no witnesses and for which they had no viable suspects.

In the last fifteen per cent of the book, the pace changed. The tension rose. The action happened quickly, offering the possibility of a disastrous and violent ending. This was well done and gave the book an exciting finish, but I was a little disappointed that the denouement didn’t maintain the slow but inexorable pace of the pursuit of justice that made the book so distinctive.

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The three books I bought this week are unted only by their quirky nature and by the fact that all of the authors are new to me.. One is a cosy mystery novelisaton of a recent British TV series set in London in 1946, One is about a killer who now sees herself as too old to be bothered killing anyone… unless they leave her no choice. One is a fantasy mystery that provides a vehicle for considering how history is made and by whom.

London, 1946. Gabriel Book is an erudite and unconventional London bookseller married to Trottie, the owner of the wallpaper shop next door. He is also a sleuth who uses the chaotic riches of his stock to crack the puzzling cases that come his way.

He does not work alone. Book’s shop is a magnet for waifs and strays – some of whom bring mysteries of their own to his door. There’s Nora, sometime bookseller and true crime enthusiast; Dog, connoisseur of ginger biscuits and then Jack, whose arrival at the shop forces Book to confront a loose end from his own past.

This is a roll of the dice for me. I don’t normally read novelisations. My first instinct here was to buy a DVD of the TV series but it’s still streaming so I went with the novelisation.

Here’s the trailer for season one of the TV series.

You’d never guess Lottie Jones had skeletons in her closet.

She’s lived in town for decades now. She’s getting older. She lives for the simple pleasures of weekly bingo games at church, and gossiping with her friends about their children’s love lives.

But when investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past, and specifically about her connection to numerous unsolved murders, well, Lottie just can’t have that.

But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realises this crime might just be the death of her…

‘Too Old For This‘ (2025) rolled on to my wishlist as soon as I saw it was a dark comedy about a septegenrian woma who kills. I usually enjoy meeting them, at least when they are fictional characters. I hadn’t pre-ordered it because there was no audiobook sample avavailable. I saw Leah’s review this week and decided to check on it again.

The narrator sounds fine, so it’s on my shelves, waiting for Halloween Bingo to be over.

Seeking war with his neighbor, the tyrannical ruler of Aelia convenes several of his kingdom’s professors for a chat. First Citizen Gyges only just invaded Aelia a few years back and, naturally, his public image can’t take the hit of another unjustified assault.

His totally sane solution? Simple, really. These scholars must construct a fake ancient city from scratch to verify Gyges’s apocryphal claims.

Now these academics must put their heads together to make history. Because if they don’t, they’ll lose their heads altogether.

I picked this up after reding Elentarri’s review. It sounds like a lot of fun. It also sounds relevant, given how politiicians are leaning on academics in the US and the UK to write more palatable versions of history.

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The three books on my reading list for next week are all recent releases. So recent that one of them won’t be released until 23rd September. They include what I hope is a light-hearted hunt for Bigfoot in the wilds of Montana, a horror-dark psychological thriller set in a secluded hotel in the Scottish Highlands, and a science fiction nightmare set in a remote research centre in the desert. 

Every month at St. Pete’s Tavern in rugged western Montana, a meeting is convened by the Basic Bigfoot Society’s members—both of them. Jute and Vergil are lifelong friends, bound by an affinity for the elusive North American Wood Ape. Their monthly meetings and annual expeditions are a tradition that keep their friendship alive when so much else about their small town has fallen away.

But things are about to get exciting for the Basic Bigfoot Society. Dr. Marcus Bernard, the country’s foremost Bigfoot “expert,” approaches them with a proposition that seems almost too good to be true: to join their next expedition, along with an ambitious young documentarian, Vicky Xu. Thankfully, Vergil’s daughter Rye is home from college, and decides to tag along in order to make sure her dad and Jute aren’t made fools of. Once in the woods, strange things begin to happen to them that seem to defy rational explanation. Is this a hoax? Or are they on the precipice of the greatest anthropological discovery ever?

This is another roll of the dice. I’m hoping it will be fun. It’s certainly a great fit for the Monsters Halloween Bingo square.

Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the isolation and the way the desert keeps temptations from the civilian world far out of reach.
When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside. But the longer it’s there, the more her carefully controlled life begins to unravel. Temptation has found her after all, and it can’t be ignored any longer.
One by one, Kinsey’s team realizes the thing they’re studying is in search of a new host—and one of them is the perfect candidate….

I loved Sarah Gailey’s ‘Magic For Liars’ (2019) and I have two more of her books on my shelves. I pre-ordered ‘Spread Me’ because I love the mad-scientist-meets-sentient-but-mad-entity premise. I’m looking forward to this one.

They say blood is thicker than water. I say blood is just harder to wash off your hands.
My name’s Kimberley. I’m twenty-five. I have epilepsy, a seizure alert dog named Muffin, and a job I love as a senior housekeeper in one of London’s top hotels. I’m used to being invisible. Overlooked. Safe.
But that was before Jennifer Clifton checked in. She’s rich, powerful, terrifyingly calm — and she asks for me by name.
She offers me my dream job, working in her exclusive hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It’s more money than I ever imagined.
There’s just one catch: Don’t open the door to Room 21.
How hard can that be?
But something is wrong in this hotel. The guests give me the creeps. The staff whisper behind closed doors. And that room — the one I promised not to enter — calls to me.
I took this job for a better life. Now I’m trapped in a nightmare

I think I’m suffering from trope fatigue when it comes to psychological thrillers, especially the woman-with-a-perfect-life-but-a-dark-past-risks-losing-it-all kind. What appeals to me about ‘Room 21‘ (2025) is that the dark secret is actually a room in a hotel, that isn’t really a hotel, owned, staffed and visited by people who are hiding who they are. I love the drama of that.

I’m part way through this one The writing isn’t doing much for me but it’s not getting in the way either and I absolutely have to find out what secrets Room 21 holds.

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We’re 30% through Halloween Bingo now and 35% of the squares on my card have been called. All the books I’m reading are for called squares. I’m still a long way from my first Bingo, but that’s fine.

Anyway, here’s the status of my card:

Reading: 4, Called: 9, Read: 9, Read and Called: 4