I’m back in England. The days are getting shorter and colder. I can feel the wheel of the year turning towards Samhain. It’s time to move my reading towards the spooky and the dark in the second half of Halloween Bingo. I’m reading a little faster than usual and reviewing a little more slowly, trying to accommodate my mood-reading tendencies and still read books that match Bingo Squares.
Anyway, here’s what I read and bought this week and what’s coming up next.
I read four books and a short story this week: a new recording of a British golden age mystery, a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster, a time travel novel with talking cats, an American vampire novel set in 1975, and a cosy supernatural novel in a series I’m quietly becoming addicted to.
General Fentiman is found dead in his armchair at London’s Bellona Club. His passing appears entirely natural for a ninety-year-old veteran. However, the exact time of his death sits at the centre of a fierce inheritance dispute. If the General died even a minute before his wealthy sister, Lady Dormer, his grandsons receive only a small fraction of a £500,000 estate. If he survived her, they inherit a fortune.
A solemn two-minute silence on Armistice Day, an unsupervised corpse, and an autopsy turn a simple family dispute to a classic British murder mystery when Lord Peter Wimsey notices medical anomalies. Wimsey must track down the mysterious Mr X who fled when wanted for questioning, uncover how the General actually died, and determine which Bellona Club member is lying. With the General’s grandsons suffering from the shell shock and poverty common among WWI veterans, they both have ample motive to secure the cash.
‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club‘ (1928), started off as an amusing version of a Sherlock Holmes-type puzzle. Old General Fentiman has been found dead in his chair in the Bellona Club on Armistice Day. Complications in man’s will lead to Lord Peter Wimsey being asked to figure out exactly what time General Fentiman died. What follows is a fun bit of deduction, with Wimsey, assisted by Bunter and his camera, trying to reconstruct what happened, weeks after the event. Then the story becomes darker; decisions have bigger consequences, more people come under suspicion, and anything Wimsey does may ruin lives.
I enjoyed Robert Bathurst’s narration. He brought Wimsey alive for me. This was the fourth Peter Wimsey book, and I think it showed how much better Dorothy Sayers had become in constructing plots. Yet it was Wimsey who made the book shine. He is both compassionate and ruthless, fundamentally honest and skillfully manipulative. Almost everything he does is a performance, and yet he is driven more by empathy and a sense of justice than by ego.
A thought-provoking and prescient short story that envisions a future society entirely dependent on an intricate machine for all aspects of life. As the machine starts to falter, the story follows Vashti, a protagonist questioning the machine-dominated existence. Forster’s gripping narrative explores themes of technology, isolation, and the consequences of relying too heavily on artificial systems, offering a cautionary tale that remains eerily relevant in our increasingly digital age.
I stumbled across a review of ‘The Machine Stops‘ (1909) on GoodReads and was so surprised by the idea of E. M. Forster writing Science Fiction that I had to read the story.
The story is in the nature of a warning; a warning that, in an age when the Gospel of the Inevitability and Beneficence of AI is being preached incessantly by our Tech Gods, felt remarkably prescient. My review is HERE
The cats and humans of Chronos College know that time travel is the best job in the world, and nothing bad can ever happen to them in the past except that one time they lost a traveler. And that other time they lost a cat.
Now they have a chance to make up for past mistakes by rescuing a long lost legend. If only they could convince Professor Boswell, the grumpiest marmalade tabby of all time, to join their mission to the Swinging Sixties, and save one of their own.
‘Time of the Cat’ (2023) has a great premise: in the far future, time travel works but only if you take a talking cat with you. It made me smile. The talking cats were excellent. The humour mostly worked. The End Notes that closed every chapter made me wish that I’d gone with the ebook rather than the audiobook. I set the book aside at 30% because I wasn’t in the mood for it. I may go back to it later.
My review is HERE
It’s the winter of 1975, and Duane Minor, back home in Portland, Oregon after a tour in Vietnam, is struggling to quell his anger and keep his drinking in check, keep his young marriage intact, and keep the nightmares away. Things get even more complicated when his thirteen-year-old niece, Julia, is sent across the country to live with her Aunt Heidi and Uncle Duane after a tragedy. But slowly, carefully, guided by Heidi’s love and patience, the three of them are building a family.
Then Minor crosses the wrong John Varley, a criminal with a bloody history and a trail of bodies behind him. Varley, who sleeps during the day beneath loose drifts of earth and grows teeth in the light of the moon. In an act of brutal retaliation, Varley kills Heidi, leaving Minor broken with guilt and Julia shot through with rage. The two of them are left united by only one the desire for vengeance.
As their quest brings them into the dark orbit of immortal, undead children, silver bullet casters, and the bevy of broken men drawn to Varley’s ferocity, Minor and Julia follow his path of destruction from the gritty al-leyways of 1970s Portland to the desolate highways of the Northwest and the snow-lashed plains of North Dakota – only to have him turn his vicious power back on them. Who will prevail, who will survive, and what remains of our humanity when our thirst for revenge trumps everything else?
‘Coffin Moon’ (2025) was an impressive vampire novel: original, bloody, thoughtful, emotionally complex and, of course, more than a little horrifying. An historical thriller featuring damaged people driven either by irrepressible malice or an almost unquenchable thirst for revenge, this is a dark tale of escalating violence, sacrifice and loss.
My review is HERE
The Vampire Knitting Club decides to take part in Oxford’s Holiday Market, selling exquisite hand-knit scarves, sweaters, and gift items. Their most popular item is the hand-knit Christmas stocking, brightly colored and extra-long to squeeze in a few extra small gifts.
But when a sales clerk in another booth is found strangled with one of the stockings, Lucy Swift and her undead detectives are on the case, determined to find out who would do such a terrible thing. And why.
In the meantime, Lucy’s working hard at her spell book, learning to be a witch, with the help of her black cat familiar and her new assistant. Meritanum is a 3,000-year-old Egyptian witch, and she’s having trouble with some of the concepts of modern life, such as traffic, smartt phones, and anything powered by electricity.
’Stockings and Spells’ (2018) was my fourth visit with Lucy Swift and the Vampire Knitting Club. These books are addictive. They have the same appeal as favourite comfort foods: I know what I’m going to get, I know it will be good, that it will slide down easily, and I’ll feel better afterwards.
The memorable things about this episode were that the mystery plot was more complicated and more interesting than the previous books and that Lucy is finally beginning to get a handle on her abilities.
This week, I bought four books in an Audible two-books-for-one-credit sale, had a pre-ordered book arrive, picked up a new cosy mystery series–starter for £0.99 and added a golden age mystery because I like the new narrator. All of the writers are women. Three are English, two are American, one is Canadian, and one is Scottish.
‘The Housekeeper’ (2026) is the latest historical fiction novel from Rose Tremain. I’m intrigued to see how she weaves Daphne du Maurier into this fictional story.
’Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books’ (2024) uses the banning of books to surface cultural divisions in a small town in Georgia.
’A Town Called Solace’ (2021) is a story about secrets and misdeeds set in a small town in Northern Ontario in 1972. It was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, but I’m not holding that against it.
‘The Mother-in-Law (2019) is an Australian psychological thriller by the author of ‘Mad Mabel’.
‘Unnatural Death’ (1927) is the third Peter Wimsey novel. I’m excited about it because I’ve been enjoying how Robert Bathhurst’s narration brings Wimsey to life.
‘A Darker Domain’ (2008) is the second Karen Pirie novel but the first in which she is the central character. I picked it up in the sale because I enjoyed reading ‘Past Lying’, the seventh book in the series, earlier this year.
‘Death By The Sea’ (2026) is the first book in a new cosy mystery series called The Misfit Detectives. It’s an amateur sleuth story by the seaside with a cat in it and it was an Amazon Prime First Read, so available for £0.99, so I pressed the buy button.
Mrs Danowski – known as Danni – is the housekeeper of a grand mansion on the wild coast of Cornwall. When glamorous young writer Daphne du Maurier visits Manderville Hall to research her new novel, she and Danni are drawn into a clandestine and intoxicating affair.
For Danni, it is an all-consuming love; for Daphne a submission to long-suppressed desires. But their fragile secret is vulnerable to prying eyes and destined for heartbreak. When Daphne’s novel launches to triumphant success, Danni is distraught to find herself transformed into a malign and jealous character on the page. She seeks respite from the hurt by telling her own story: The Housekeeper.the name of Mrs Betty…
In Troy, Georgia, local woman Lula Dean has campaigned to cleanse the town’s reading habits. All the ‘disgusting’, ‘pornographic’ and downright ‘un-American’ books have been removed from public spaces. Now, the townspeople are only allowed to read ‘appropriate’ books from Lula’s personal lending library.
But a small group refuse to be told what they can and cannot read and, unbeknownst to Lula, her personal collection is slowly restocked with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, spell books, and more.
One by one, each person who borrows the books from Lula’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. And as they begin to reveal their new selves, it’s clear that a showdown is fast approaching – one that will change the town of Troy forever …
Northern Ontario 1972
Clara’s sister is missing. Angry, rebellious Rose, had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. Eight-year-old Clara, isolated by her distraught parents’ efforts to protect her from the truth, is grief-stricken and bewildered.
Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, moves into the house next door, a house left to him by an old woman he can barely remember and within hours gets a visit from the police. It seems he’s suspected of a crime.
At the end of her life Elizabeth Orchard is thinking about a crime too, one committed thirty years ago that had tragic consequences for two families and in particular for one small child. She desperately wants to make amends before she dies.
From the moment Lucy met her husband’s mother, Diana, she was kept at arm’s length. Diana was exquisitely polite, and perfectly friendly, but Lucy knew that she was not what Diana envisioned. Even so, Lucy wanted so much to please her new mother-in-law.
That was five years ago.
Now, Diana has been found dead, a suicide note near her body. Diana claims that she no longer wanted to live because of a battle with cancer.
But the autopsy finds no cancer.
The autopsy does find traces of poison and suffocation.
Someone wanted Diana dead. And everyone in the family is hiding something.
‘No sign of foul play,’ says Dr Carr after the post-mortem on Agatha Dawson. The case is closed. But Lord Peter Wimsey is not satisfied…
With no clues to work on, he begins his own investigation. No clues, that is, until the sudden, senseless murder of Agatha’s maid.
What is going on in the mysterious Mrs Forrest’s Mayfair flat? And can Wimsey catch a desperate murderer before he himself becomes one of the victims?
Twenty-five years ago, a woman and her baby son were kidnapped and held to ransom. Catriona Grant ended up dead and little Adam’s fate has remained a mystery ever since.
When a new clue is discovered in a deserted Tuscan villa – along with grisly evidence of a recent murder – cold case expert DI Karen Pirie is assigned to follow the trail.
She’s already working a case from the same year. During the Miners’ Strike of 1984, pit worker Mick Prentice vanished. Where did he really go? And is there a link to the Grant mystery?
Jamie Sinclair is only meant to be minding the cat.
A temporary house-sitting job in a windswept Scottish seaside town feels straightforward enough. Keep the place ticking over. Tackle a few handyman jobs. Enjoy time away from London, with sea views and the steady company of a glossy black cat. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
When an elderly client dies after a routine repair, Jamie finds himself at the centre of local gossip and under the watchful eye of Detective Constable Emma MacLeod—who has very firm opinions about civilians meddling in police business. But Jamie knows his handiwork was solid. And in a town where everyone has history, nothing is ever quite that simple.
Drawn into an improbable team by an unlikely pair of locals—a burly gym owner and a sharp-eyed student—Jamie begins pulling at the threads of a family’s buried secrets. And the more they unravel, the more he suspects that solving this mystery might be the start of something far bigger than he bargained for.
My books this week have been chosen to fit Halloween Bingo squares. I have an Irish psychological thriller about a cleaner with an agenda, the first book in an American Urban Fantasy series based around an accidental time traveller, and the second book in a cosy supernatural series about two women who can see ghosts and who have moved to a town infested with them.
Esmie is supposed to be invisible. Just a cleaner with a foreign accent that no one quite has time to place. Her uniform of leggings and a duster allows her to explore the homes of the wealthy, unseen; an outsider creeping around the edges of privilege.
But as she sweeps through the exclusive Woodlands gated neighbourhood, cleaning is the last thing on her mind. Treading silently over the polished wooden floorboards and cloud-soft carpets, Esmie gathers up the mess of broken marriages, quiet deceptions and careless failures. She tucks away their fragments, keeping them safe. For now.
Because one of the residents took from her the person she loves most. She’s not here to clean; she’s here for revenge – and she’ll get it using the weapons her employers unwittingly handed her along with the keys to their homes: their own secrets…
Mary Watson is originally from Cape Town but has been living in Ireland since 2009, so she seems to have the perfect background to write a young woman from an unspecified Southern Hemisphere country coming to Ireland to infiltrate the lives of rich white women to find out which of them harmed her brother.
Medical student Felicia Sanchez is only trying to help an injured man when she slips through a time rip and into 19th century New Orleans, one very different than the one she knows from history books.
The only person who can get her home is Professor Seamus Connor, a former convict seeking a quiet life of obscurity. But even the “mad Irishman” knows that recreating a freak accident is next to impossible.
With the help of a local street urchin, they discover that their problems run deeper than solely getting Felicia back to her own time. The three of them must unravel the secrets of a steam engine that operates upon a scientific impossibility and the mysteries of a grand cathedral at the center of town, where clockwork automatons perform for rapt audiences.
But can a convict, a guttersnipe and an accidental time traveler prevent the destruction of a city and the death of thousands? Others are watching, and Felicia may not be the only time traveler in New Orleans.
This is my second attempt at a time travel book for Halloween Bingo. I’ve had this on my shelves since I finished Heather Blackwood’s steampunk novel, ‘Hounds of Autumn’, in 2020. I’m hoping it will give me an appetite for the rest of this five-book series.
Jess and Libby’s side hustle is becoming a full-time job.
Ghosts are everywhere in St. Sebastian, and it turns out houses aren’t the only things that get haunted. Little Jelena Blazevic has an invisible companion, a lady who started out friendly and is becoming something else entirely. The crying. The sleepless nights. The strange fixations that nobody can explain.
Jelena isn’t scared. Her parents absolutely are.
Jess and Libby take the case and find it considerably more complicated than expected. The ghost is in distress — that much is obvious. What she can’t do is explain why. And whatever is driving her grief is escalating, which means Jess and Libby need answers fast.
Did something terrible happen in the Blazevic house? Is the secret buried in the ghost’s past? Or is it something else entirely — something that connects more than one family’s history in ways nobody saw coming?
With their own kids in tow and no shortage of ghosts willing to weigh in along the way, Jess and Libby are about to risk everything to untangle a mystery that runs deeper than anyone suspected.
The truth they’re uncovering stretches far beyond St. Sebastian. A little girl’s invisible friend was just the tip of the iceberg.
I had fun with ‘Dead Companions’ the first book in this series, earlier this year, so I bought the second book and set it aside for Halloween Bingo. I’m hoping for a smile or two.
Mike Finn's Fiction 