I’ve been travelling this week, which somehow has resulted in my doing more book buying than book reading. Still, my travelling was made much more pleasant by listening to Marguerite Gavin perform the latest Dana Stabenow novel.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve read and bought this week and what’s up next.
This week I read two very satisfying reads and set one book aside.
A strange house A ghost from the past
As soon as she moves into Hillside, Gwenda knows there’s something strange about this house.
A sealed room. A hidden door. The apparition of a young woman being strangled.
But strangest of all – this all seems quite familiar.
As her friend Jane Marple investigates, the answer seems to lie in a crime committed nearly twenty years ago.
The killer may have gotten away with murder. But Miss Marple is never far behind.
Like ‘Curtain’, the last Poirot novel published. Agatha Christie wrote the Jane Marple novel‘Sleeping Murder’ during World War II and then held back its publication until the 1970s. Unlike ‘Curtain’, which brought Poirot’s career to an end, ‘Sleeping Murder’ does not read like Jane Marple’s last case. It is a vigorous, cleverly constructed mystery novel in which Jane plays a crucial and active role in the denouement. This is not the frail but still mentally acute Jane whom we met in ‘Nemesis’. That’s not a criticism. I enjoyed meeting Jane again at the height of her powers.
One week into lockdown, the tenants of a run-down apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop each evening and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbours gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants – some of whom have barely spoken to each other before now – become real neighbours.
I loved the concept of a collaborative novel set mostly on the roof of a seven-story walk-up apartment building in Manhattan during Lockdown. Sadly, I didn’t love the execution of the idea.
The start was slow and laboured, but I put that down to the need to set up the situation.
By the end of Day 1 (of 14), I suspected that the novel wasn’t going to work for me. The storytelling felt clumsy, contrived and emotionally distant. I knew that if the narrative style didn’t change, I’d never make it through the 367 pages of the novel.
I gave up partway through Day 2. The style was too declamatory and too arms-length to be engaging. It was like ‘The Canterbury Tales’ but with none of the humour.
1890. The New Mexico Territory is a lawless frontier where criminals steal money and land alike with impunity. Everyone wears a six-gun and is ready and willing to draw it.
In the new city of Montaña Roja, Fred Harvey’s growing empire is threatened by the robberies plaguing his newest Harvey House restaurant. To get justice, he needs a skilled detective to go undercover and procure answers to questions the law will not ask.
The assignment falls to Clare Wright, a young Pinkerton agent. Disguised as one of Harvey’s famous hostesses, Clare travels west where she risks being exposed at every step of her investigation. To get answers – and to get out alive – there are only two things she can trust: her instincts, and her derringer.
‘The Harvey Girl (2026) is the first book in an historical fiction series about Pinkerton Agent Claire Wright. It hooked me immediately. Claire is clever, brave, and lies fluently to everyone to protect her cover story of being a Harvey Girl. The story used real people and events from America’s ‘Gilded Age’ to enliven and give context to the mystery at its heart. I enjoyed the mystery, the historical setting, and getting to know Claire. There’s a lot of violence in the story, but then this is the American West before the law had arrived, and when the billionaires of the day regularly demonstrated that the law didn’t apply to them. The book doesn’t have a cliff-hanger ending, but it does have a Season 1, Episode 1 feel where many possibilities are left open, not all mysteries are solved, and it was clear that we will meet some of the most charismatic characters again in the next book. I was fine with that, even if I have to wait a year for Episode 2.
I bought six books this week an I’m excited about all of them.
The first two booka are Speculative Fiction: a collection of sixteen short stories by Michael Hodges, and a quirky novel from Loraine Wilson. I loved her novel ‘This Is Our Undoing’. ‘We Are All Ghosts In The Forest’ is the first book in a series. The second book, ’The Salt Oracle’ will be published in November.
The Gloaming: 16 Organic Tales, including:
Fletcher’s Mountains: In a world drained of oil and scorched by World War III, a lone survivor treks across a fractured America toward the sanctuary of a friend’s Montana cabin. But in the silence of the wilderness, he realizes he isn’t just traveling—he’s being hunted.
Lost Planes, Lost River: When a fleet of Wildlife Service Cessnas falls from the sky during a controversial wolf-culling mission, the FBI is deployed to the crash sites. What they find suggests that the wolves aren’t the only predators in the woods—and the “accidents” are anything but.
Hydra: A visionary scientist unlocks the secret to near-immortality, offering humanity a way to cheat the grave for decades. But the breakthrough carries a grim price: a biological imbalance that ensures humans will be the only living things left on Earth.
Gudmund’s Wolf: Sixty years ago, a wolf howled for Gudmund’s birthday. Today, the wolves are a myth, and Gudmund’s memories are following them into extinction. In this haunting tale of brotherhood and biological betrayal, two men wander into the deep uplands of the Michigan wilderness. One is searching for a way out; the other is searching for a way to say goodbye.
When the internet collapsed, it took the world with it, leaving its digital ghosts behind – and they are hungry. Former photojournalist Katerina fled the overrun cities to the relative safety of her grandmother’s village on the edge of a forest, where she lives a solitary life of herbal medicine and beekeeping.
When a wordless boy finds her in the marketplace with nothing but her name in his pocket, her curiosity won’t allow her to turn him away. But haunting his arrival are rumours of harvest failure and a rampant digital disease stirring up the ghosts, and the mood in the village starts to sour.
Accused of witchcraft, Katerina and Stefan escape into the forest, searching for his missing father and the truth behind the disease. If there is a cure, Katerina alone might find it, but first she must find the courage to trust others – because the ghosts that follow her aren’t just digital.
I bought the next two books because they’re on the 2026 Canada Reads Shortlist. Neither of them are books I’d normally pick up. One is about a hockey player and one is a second chance romance. I’m hoping to read them next month as I watch the Canada Reads books being championed on CBC.
Adam Macallister’s sportswriting career is about to end before it begins, but he’s got one last shot: a Sports Illustrated profile about hockey’s most notorious goon, the reclusive Terry Punchout-who also happens to be Adam’s estranged father. Adam returns to Pennington, Nova Scotia, where Terry now lives in the local rink and drives the Zamboni. Going home means drinking with old friends, revisiting neglected relationships, and dealing with lingering feelings about his father and dead mother-and discovering that his friends and family are kinder and more complicated than he ever gave them credit for.
June Wood has nothing left to lose.
With her hit TV show cancelled, and no acting jobs lined up, being lured back to New York by a mysterious email was easy. Thanks to a clause in her former landlord’s will, June and her old roommate, Adam Harper, now own the multimillion-dollar property-or they will in a month, once the paperwork is signed.
June and Adam are stuck together for four weeks. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that they haven’t spoken in five years. But this is the opportunity of a lifetime, and once it’s over, she can return to LA and forget all about Adam, New York and everything that went wrong in their friendship.
Through shared meals and late-night conversations, old wounds and long-buried sparks resurface. It soon becomes strikingly clear that June and Adam have unfinished business. Second chances are always a risk, but maybe, if they are finally honest with each other and themselves, it could be different this time.
Each of the final two books kicks off a new series, but that’s about all they have in common. One is a twelve year old novel about a secret supernatural branch of the FBI, the other is a hot off the press Nordic Noir crime story set in a small town in Denmark.
Eleri Eames thought her career as an FBI analyst was over after her last case got her committed for psychiatric help. When she’s offered a chance to be an agent with the secret NightShade division, it feels like a second chance. But her new partner may be hiding more than she is, and he and NightShade are both not what she expected.
Donovan Heath was content in the morgue, his uncanny abilities making him a sought-after medical examiner. When his wins start drawing unwanted attention, that offer from the Bureau starts looking like a solution. NightShade needs the unusual edge he brings. Donovan understands what he is makes him a target, but Eleri might just figure him out before he can decide if he even trusts her.
Thrown together on their first assignment, they’ll have to track a charismatic cult leader, solvea high-profile kidnapping, and navigate a world where nothing is as it seems.
As NightShade’s mysteries grow darker, the line between what they hunt and what they are blurs.
Police detective Nelly Birkebæk and her teenage son, Matthias, leave Aarhus in search of a new—and hopefully quieter—life in the provincial town of Hedeborg in central Jutland. Nelly has purchased a run-down house in one of Hedeborg’s nicer neighborhoods, where her neighbor, the friendly—and a little too curious—Ejnar Skjold, quickly takes an interest in her.
But there’s no time to settle in. A missing teenage boy is found dead in a creek in a wooded area just outside town, and it soon becomes clear that the person who called it in was not the first to discover the body.
Hedeborg is a town with many layers. The local eccentric, Randi Bruun, keeps talking about a drone circling over her house. The powerful Eskelund family, who live near the forest, pull more strings than anyone dares admit. And then there are those who live out in the Village—those nobody really talks about.
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day on Tuesday so this week I’m reading Irish novels: a murder mystery set during Lockdown, a thriller that kicks off a three-book series, and the latest twisty mystery from Liz Nugent.
No one even knew they were together. Now one of them is dead.
Fifty-six days ago. Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin and start dating the same week COVID-19 reaches Irish shores.
Thirty-five days ago. When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests they move in together. Ciara sees a unique opportunity for a relationship to flourish without the scrutiny of family and friends. Oliver sees a chance to hide who – and what – he really is.
Today. Detectives arrive at Oliver’s apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.
Can they determine what really happened, or has lockdown created an opportunity for someone to commit the perfect crime?
I’m reading ’56 Days’ (2021) both because it’s St. Patrick’s Day and as part of my Fiction In A Time Of COVID reading challenge. ’56 Days’ is a mystery set during Lockdown, which Catherine Ryan Howard wrote during Lockdown so it’s a true artifact of the COVID days. I don’t use streaming services, so I wasn’t aware, when I picked this book, that Amazon has just launched it as a TV series on Prime. Here’s the trailer:
Ten years ago, Anna Clarke’s parents disappeared. The mystery haunts her, and she hopes her job in a busy city Garda Station will one day help her find answers.
The case of a man shot dead crosses her desk – and Anna is shocked to discover that the main suspect is her childhood friend Kate Crowley. Certain that Kate is innocent, Anna is determined to help her clear her name. But first she has to find her …
Tom Gallagher’s son David is dead, and Tom believes Kate is responsible. Now his older son John is missing – unable to grieve for one son until he finds the other, desperation can cause a man to do terrible things … Then the German Meier brothers descend on the city, intent on finding an item David had offered to sell them. Even Tom doesn’t know where it is, but he suspects Kate Crowley must have taken it.
Kate is on the run. She is trapped in the dead man’s city – can her old friend help her find a way out?
In a week where a political summit is taking place and the city is on high alert, Kate must struggle to stay hidden and stay alive. And Anna is drawn into the twisted race against time, falling deeper into danger.
‘Blinding Lies’ (2020) is the first book in the Anna Clarke trilogy. It’s a debut novel that has been very sucessful. I’m hoping that it will capture my imagination and leave me keen to read the rest of the trilogy.
Ruby Cooper and her sister, Erin, live an idyllic life in their close-knit church community in Boston. But when Ruby is sixteen, she is involved in an incident that causes her family’s world to implode.
Across decades, the fallout leaves a wake of destruction behind Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston.
Not that Ruby wants to think about the past.
But it can’t stay a secret forever.
‘The Truth About Ruby Cooper’ (2026) was published on Thursday, so it really is hot off the press. I bought it as soon as I saw it because I loved ‘Lying In Wait’ (2016) and ‘Strange Sally Diamond’ (2023). I have high hopes of this book.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
Had to search that cityscape image — it’s so beautiful 🙂
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I should have tagged it. It’s Cobh in County Cork in Ireland. It’s the port that most of the Irish migrating to America left from. I thought it was a good fit for St. Patrick’s Day.
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