This week’s graphic features Diocletian’s Palace because we’re taking a week or so of rest and recreation in Split on the Croatian coast and on the Island of Brač. I’m hoping for good food, great scenery and lots of time to read in beautiful surroundings.
Anyway, here’s what I read and bought before we got here and what’s coming up next.
This week, I ended up setting aside both the books I’d intended to be the first ones I read for Halloween Bingo: ‘Murder Most Bookish’ and ‘Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons’. The good news is that the replacements I found for them were both entertaining reads: ‘A Most Unusual Demise’ and ‘Dragon Bones’. The best read of the week was Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country for Old Men’. The writing was hypnotic, and the ideas and reflections hit as hard as the many scenes of violence and death.
We all play roles at times. Wardwick of Hurog played the role of a fool till he reached adulthood, just to keep his father from murdering him. Now he must overcome the image he so carefully built and fight not simply for his birthright but to free the five Kingdoms from tyranny and the rising tide of darkest magic that threatens his world.
‘Dragon Bones’ (2002) was pure fun. A fast-paced, energetic Sword and Sorcery adventure with original twists in both the plot and the magic, and a main character who made me smile. It reminded me of how much fun a fantasy novel can be and left me keen to read the second book in the duology.
My review is HERE.
Retired librarian and bookshop owner May Morrigan lives in the affluent village of Blackheath with Fletcher, her best friend since they met decades ago, and May’s two dogs. What could be more normal? But May is not your average little old lady . . .
After an unpleasant church volunteer and an annoying local butcher meet their untimely ends, Fletcher and May team up to do some sleuthing.
Soon, the elderly pair start working with a young journalist to investigate the case of a missing girl and its possible link to previous unsolved crimes. May finds this new project quite intriguing.
She’s never met a murderer before—and now she just may get the chance, if they play their cards right . . .
This was so much fun. Original, well-written and over-the-top in the best possible way.
It wasn’t the cozy mystery about old people playing amateur sleuth that it appeared to be, partly because the old people weren’t who they appeared to be and partly because it was written in a way that used all the cozy tropes but then smiled and said, “You do know the world is never that nice, don’t you. So you know we’re going to have to…”
My review is HERE
1980. Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope near the Rio Grande when he discovers the aftermath of a drug deal turned deadly. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice – walk away or take the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything.
And so begins a terrifying chain of events, as each player in this brutal game seems determined to answer one question: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
‘No Country for Old Men’ (2005) was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t expect something so raw and thoughtful, bloody and contemplative, as this. I started off irritated by the absence of direct speech punctuation and then fell under the spell of dialogue written with such precision that the punctuation was unnecessary and which, freed from the interruptions of ‘He said’ ‘She said ’, flowed so naturally and so powerfully. I want to think about this one some more before I attempt a review. Right now, my two responses would be “Wow, that was good” and “How in hell did they make this into a movie?”
Meet Rona Parish, a feisty biographer with a talent for digging up murder and mystery wherever she goes — and Gus, the golden retriever, nipping loyally at her heels!
Rona jumps at the chance to write about Theo Harvey, a famous author who drowned in stranger-than-fiction circumstances. But is she diving head-long into danger?
Six months ago, Harvey was found floating face-down in a peaceful stream. Not far from the quaint little cottage where he penned his bestsellers.
His drowning is a puzzle the police can’t solve. So now Rona’s on the case — ready to dig deep to find the answers Harvey’s grieving widow craves.
But someone out there doesn’t appreciate her snooping.
It’s not long before Rona finds a sinister note tucked into her golden retriever’s collar, warning her to drop the project while she still can . . .
I set this aside at 25%. From the start, I struggled with the writing style and the over-detailed descriptions of the town’s geography. When middle-class family melodrama overwhelmed the murder plot, I lost all interest.
Miss Mildred Percy inherits a dragon.
Ah, but we’ve already got ahead of ourselves…
Miss Mildred Percy is a spinster. She does not dance, she has long stopped dreaming, and she certainly does not have adventures. That is, until her great uncle has the audacity to leave her an inheritance, one that includes a dragon’s egg.
The egg – as eggs are wont to do – decides to hatch, and Miss Mildred Percy is suddenly thrust out of the role of “spinster and general wallflower” and into the unprecedented position of “spinster and keeper of dragons.”
But England has not seen a dragon since… well, ever. And now Mildred must contend with raising a dragon (that should not exist), kindling a romance (with a humble vicar), and embarking on an adventure she never thought could be hers for the taking.
I set this aside at 21% not because there’s anything wrong with the book, but because I wasn’t doing anything for me. It’s a gentle, calm, well-written book about mostly nice people and a newly hatched dragon. I think I’m too old and too impatient (and perhaps not nice enough) for this book. I wanted to be amused but couldn’t quite get there. The plot moved too slowly, and the humour was too gentle, for me.
My (very short) review is HERE
This week, I bought five books: three continuing series I’ve just started and two because I saw good reviews. It’s a fairly mixed bag: one mainstream read, two murder mysteries, one fantasy novel, and a Young Adult Science Fiction novel.
’Lost Property ’ (2021) is an allegedly uplifting book about a woman who has become as lost as the items she catalogues in the London Transport Lost Property Office.
’A Most Malicious Messenger’ (2024) and ‘A Most Curious Christmas’ (2025) are the next two books about the redoubtable May Morrigan, the not-at-all-who-she-seems-to-be seventy-five-year-old bookshop owner who I relished meeting last week in ‘A Most Unusual Demise’ (2023).
‘Dragon Blood’ (2002), is the second book in Patricia Briggs’ fantasy duology. It continues the story of the characters in ‘Dragon Bones’ (2002)
‘Red Star Rebels’ (2026) is the latest Young Adult Sci-Fi adventure from Amie Kaufman.
Dot Watson has lost her way. Wracked with guilt and struggling with grief, she has tucked herself away in the London Transport Lost Property office, finding solace in the process of cataloguing misplaced things. It’s not glamorous or exciting, but it’s solitary – just the way Dot likes it.
That is, until elderly Mr Appleby walks through the door in search of his late wife’s purse and Dot immediately feels a connection to him. Determined to help, she sets off on an extraordinary journey, one that could lead Dot to reclaim her life and find where she truly belongs…
Wardwick of Hurog wishes to live in peace. Destiny has other plans. He is about to be arrested and imprisoned in the Asylum for Nobel Embarrassments and Inconveniences. Worse still, Ward has learned that the same man bent on his imprisonment, Jakoven Tallven, High King of the Five Kingdoms, is seeking Hurog blood to activate the supernatural equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction.
Once again Ward must play the fool to survive. Yet that will not suffice. Ward’s closest companions all must risk their lives and fortunes to keep Jakoven and his malevolent mage Jade Eyes from destroying their world.
May Morrigan is in her bookshop one morning when she—and everyone else in the shop—receives an anonymous text. It contains a reference to a Shakespeare quotation—and seems to be aimed at the vicar and his partner, Juan. The next morning, one of them is dead.
Meanwhile, May’s elderly mother, Minty, is staying with her, her old friend Fletcher, and her two dogs. To her dismay, Minty is quite preoccupied with death herself lately. She also keeps reminiscing about her past in ways that make May wonder what secrets she’s hiding.
As disturbing texts continue to arrive, the Blackheath residents are threatened with further revelations and titillations. Then Fletcher becomes the focus of the tormenting texter . . . and barely escapes an attempt on his life. It’s time for May to send a strong message—and block this killer permanently . . .
May Morrigan was hoping for mulled wine and minimal drama this festive season. But when your eccentric mother asks you to hide a bloody knife, your estranged twin sister moves in, and your housemate is staging a chaotic pantomime starring a washed-up TV actor with a stalker . . . a quiet Christmas is off the cards.
When a string of mysterious stabbings shatters the peace on the heath, May finds herself sleuthing through a flurry of secrets involving long-lost babies, pantomime politics, and more than one case of mistaken identity. With her divorce finale looming, her love life in tatters, and her sister revealing a life-altering secret of her own, May must untangle a knot of lies stretching back decades.
As snow falls and secrets unravel, the Morrigan women must reckon with the past—before another body drops.
It’s 2067, and the Graves family has transformed Mars from a lifeless rock into a chaotic patch of settlements – equal parts national pride, and corporate power grab.
Enter Hunter Graves: handsome, ambitious, and with spectacularly bad timing. He shows up unannounced at the United Nations base just in time for a toxin alert to set off every alarm they’ve got. Then the evac pods leave without him.
Also stranded: Cleo, a sharp-tongued stowaway with no intention of dying today, and even less patience for overconfident trust fund boys. But the enemy of your enemy is the jerk who might just help you survive.
There is no toxin. There is a team of invading mercenaries planning to blow up the base – and every trace of their crime – in eight hours.
Now, Hunter and Cleo have one shot to stop the explosion, escape alive, and deal with the inconvenient fact that they’re falling for each other.
My books this week have been chosen for two reasons: to fit Halloween Bingo squares and to acknowledge that I’m reading them in Croatia. I have a gothic thriller set in the woods of the Scottish Highlands, an industrial espionage book set partly in Dubrovnik, a thriller about cloning, and an historical thriller set in the Yugoslav Wars and translated from Croatian.
Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.
In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.
Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.
This has been on my shelves since days after its publication in 2020. Each year I plan to read it for Halloween Bingo and each year so far it’s been pushed aside. This year, it’s my book for the GOTHIC square on my Bingo Card. I’m looking forwad to it.
An assignment with a Milan fashion house leads Finn to an undercover investigation of a train wreck in Croatia—scene of her most tragic professional mistake and home to terrorists still out for revenge. The hunter becomes the hunted and the stakes skyrocket as Finn must win a race against the clock to stop the spread of a deadly African pandemic and escape with her life.
I enjoyed Twist Phelan’s story ’The Fourteenth Juror’ in Lee Child’s short story collection ‘Vengeance’, so I bought ‘Fake’ (2016), the first book in her five-book series about corporate spy Finn Teller.
I’m reading it this week because it’s set in Croatia, and it fits the SPIES & ASSASSINS square on my Halloween Bingo Card.
I’m hoping that I’ll like this well enough to follow the rest of the series.
It was meant to be an evening to honour and celebrate Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning, career-making scientific research – but Evelyn has things on her mind.
Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better, newer woman. A woman who is now pregnant – but shouldn’t be – and is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence.
A woman who shouldn’t exist. .
Sarah Gailey never lets me down.
In ‘Magic For Liars’, they tackled a mysterious death in a school for magic. In ‘Spread Me’, they delivered a fever dream of body horror in a remote research station. In ‘River of Teeth’, they pulled me into an alternative version of US history where hippos were farmed and wrangled in the Mississippi.
So, when I needed a mad scientist book for the DIABOLICAL MASTERMINDS Halloween Bingo square, Sarah Gailey’s novel about illegal cloning was my first choice.
The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia’s easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the site of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early ’90s. It is referred to only as “the city” throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe’s most celebrated young writers.
In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed – or permitted – during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation-the children, now grown up – to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past.
Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion – a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime.
As I’m in Croatia, I decided to read a novel by a Croatian author for the DEATH IN TRANSLATION Halloween Bingo square.
Ivana Bodrožić is an award-winning Croatian poet and novelist. I’ve picked her novel ‘Rupa’ (2016), set during the Yugoslav Wars, which was published in English as ‘We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day’ in 2021. I chose the audiobook version because it’s narrated by Xe Sands.
Mike Finn's Fiction 