Winter seemed to bully its way past Autumn this week, with nighttime temperatures dropping below freezing and daytime temperatures barely warm enough to banish the frost. The cold days and the early dark have given me the perfect excuse to stay inside, reading, reviewing and planning what to read next.
I’ve been travelling back in time by reading crime novels of different flavours this week: a character-driven piece of historical fiction set in the Kansas City Country Club set of 1974; a gentle, amusing British police procedural set in a fictional County Town and published in 1974; and the second Adam Dalgliesh mystery, published in 1963.
It’s 1974 and Ellison Russell’s life revolves around her daughter and her art. She’s long since stopped caring about her cheating husband, Henry, and the women with whom he entertains himself. That is, until she becomes a suspect in Madeline Harper’s death.
The murder forces Ellison to confront her husband’s proclivities and his crimes – kinky sex, petty cruelties, and blackmail. As the body count approaches par on the seventh hole, Ellison knows she has to catch a killer.
But with an interfering mother, an adoring father, a teenage daughter, and a cadre of well-meaning friends demanding her attention, can Ellison find the killer before he finds her?
‘The Deep End’ (2015) is the first book in a twenty-two-book series of what I took to be cosy mysteries. The first book is set in 1974 and is told from the point of view of Ellison Russell, the central character of the series. In this book, her status as a murder suspect pushes her to become an amateur sleuth.
I was surprised and pleased to find that this was much more than a cosy mystery. It had a strong plot, a complex, believable main character, an authentic historical background, and prose that was more than functional.
I’ll be back for more.
My review is HERE
When he is called to the scene of a gruesome murder at a psychiatry clinic in London, he finds it in lockdown: no one has entered or left the building since the discovery of the body. So, it figures, the culprit must be amongst the people before him.
As Dalgliesh quickly discovers, however, the intricate web of lies and grudges among the staff and patients at the Steen Clinic cast confusing shadows. Amid all that deceit, could the killer be preparing to strike again?
‘A Mind to Murder’ (1963) is the second novel featuring the patient, patrician, perceptive Adam Dalgliesh. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first book, ‘Cover Her Face’ (1962); even so, it was a satisfying mystery, with engaging characters described in pleasing-to-the-ear prose but with problematic pacing. The start was so slow, so static, and so linear that by forty per cent I was considering setting it aside. The second half was better. The ending was exciting and surprising. I’ll be continuing with the series.
My review is HERE
On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall’s case goes from missing person to homicide.
In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there’s something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body. What little evidence is available—a burned match, a black thread, an earring—doesn’t bode well for a quick and easy solution.
Even the legendarily cool-headed great detective might begin to crack when a second body turns up. And then an important file goes missing from Sloan’s office. How does it all connect?
Catherine Aird’s Inspector Sloan books are a comfort read of mine. They’re gentle (considering there’s always a dead body of two), calm, quietly amusing, written with self-deprecating erudition and unexpectedly clever. They’re also a window into an England that didn’t survive the advent of digital technology.
The mystery in ‘His Burial Too‘ (1973) was a puzzle rather than a thriller. A good puzzle. One that needed physics and a little imagination to solve. The humour was muted but pleasing. The characters were mostly plot devices rather than people but the daughter of the missing man was vividly described, so much so that she felt quite out of place in this quiet Engl,ish county town.
This week, I bought six books: a cosyish mystery, a horror story in the snow, a thriller in the snow, two golden age mysteries and a police procedural set in Oxford. Half of them continue series I’m reading. I was tempted by the other half because they showed up on BookBub for £0.99 each.
‘Guaranteed to Bleed‘ (2016) is the second book in The Country Club Mystery Series, set in Kansas City in the 1970s. I’m hoping that it’s as good as the first book, ‘The Deep End’.
I bought ‘Snow‘(2021) to add to my ‘Reading Myself Into Christmas’ list. Snow, horror and Christmas Eve are a traditional combination.
‘One by One (2020) is a snow-bound locked-room thriller that feels like a good fit for the season.
I’ve been picking up Catherine Aird’s Inspector Sloan crime novels whenever I see them discounted. ‘Passing Strange’ (1983) is the ninth book in the series.
I’ve been reading American Golden Age Mystery short stories and discovered Anthony Boucher. When I learned that he’d written crime novels with a nun as an amateur sleuth, I had to try one. ‘Nine Times Nine’ (1940) is the first of two Sister Ursula mysteries.
‘The Broken Afternoon‘ (2023) is the second book in the Oxford-based police procedural series that started with ‘A Killing in November’ (2022). I’m intrigued by the characters. I’m hoping this book will be as good as the first one.
With his dying breath, Bobby Lowell begs Ellison Russell, “Tell her I love her.” Unable to refuse, Ellison struggles to find the girl the murdered boy loved. Too bad an epically bad blind date, a vindictive graffiti artist, and multiple trips to the emergency room keep getting in the way. Worse, a killer has Ellison in his sights, her newly rebellious daughter is missing, and there’s yet another body in her hostas. Mother won’t be pleased.
Now Ellison must track down not one, but two runaway teenagers, keep her promise to Bobby, and elude the killer – all before her next charity gala committee meeting.
A four-year-old girl goes missing in plain sight outside her nursery in Oxford, a middle-class, affluent area, her mother only a stones-throw away.
Ryan Wilkins, one of the youngest ever Detective Inspectors in the Thames Valley force, dishonourably discharged three months ago, watches his former partner DI Ray Wilkins deliver a press conference, confirming a lead.
Ray begins to delve deeper, unearthing an underground network of dark forces in the local area. But will he be able to get closer to the truth of the disappearance? And will Ryan be able to stay away?
The blizzard begins pummeling the Midwest on Christmas Eve, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Todd Curry doesn’t need another reason to disappoint his son, so he joins three other people in renting the last four-wheel drive available and they set out into the blinding snow.
Only two hours into the treacherous trip west, Todd swerves to avoid a man in the middle of the highway. The stranger claims his daughter is lost somewhere out in the snow. Though his odd demeanor and ripped clothes make Todd and his group uneasy, they agree to take the man to the nearest town—if the now-damaged car can make it.
What awaits them at the next exit, however, is nothing they could have imagined. Around an empty town square, fires burn, cars are abandoned, storefronts are smashed. And there is no one to be seen—for now…
But soon the shadows lurking on the edges of their vision will step into the light, and Todd and his fellow travelers will find themselves facing a sharp-scythed evil shaped from the snow, tearing its way into human form—and taking the neighborhood by storm.
Snow is falling in the exclusive alpine ski resort of Saint Antoine, as the directors of Snoop, the hottest new music app, gather for a corporate retreat to decide the future of the company.
At stake is a buyout that could make them all millionaires, or leave some of them out in the cold.
But when an avalanche cuts the chalet off from help, and guest goes missing in the snow, the group is forced to ask – is there a murderer among them?
The annual Horticultural Society Flower Show would have gone off without a hitch were it not for one very pesky murder.
When nurse Joyce Cooper goes missing from the parish’s fortune-telling booth at the flower fair, her friends at the local church are immediately concerned. It’s not like this old lady, who plays the organ during service every Sunday without fail, and who, it’s told, lives for the purpose of helping others, to disappear without notice. So when she’s found strangled to death under a tarp, the community is thrown into an uproar.
Who better to calm the crowd than Calleshire’s greatest detective? Alongside his bumbling sidekick, Constable Crosby, C. D. Sloan runs through the bizarre list of suspects—the daughter of a deceased anthropologist, a greedy developer, a jealous tomato gardener, and a set of wealthy farmers—to find out who would have benefited most from the beloved nurse’s death. What he finds will astonish the entire village.
The man in the yellow robe had put the ancient curse of the Nine Times Nine on Wolfe Harrigan. And when Matt Duncan looked up from the croquet lawn that afternoon, he saw the man in the yellow robe in Wolfe Harrigan’s study.
When Matt got there, all the doors and windows were locked from the inside. But when the door was broken down, there was no man in a yellow robe in the room, and Wolfe Harrigan lay murdered on the floor. But at the time of the murder the man in the yellow robe was nowhere near the room.
Who better to explain this miracle than Sister Ursula, a nun, whose childhood ambition was to become a policewoman?
My reading is following the seasons into the cold and dark. I have two novels about bad things happening in the snow and a Science Fiction novella about a dystopian future.
Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
I bought this in September when the Booker Prize 2026 Longlist was announced. I was surprised to see a short speculative fiction novel on the list. Last week it was announced as the winner of the Booker Prize, so I’ve pulled it to the top of my TBR pile to see if I can figure out why it won.
He went to Prague to drink himself to death. He woke up in a hospital in Tromsø.
Sander Solvang used to be the cleverest person in any room. Now he is broke, feverish and lying in Room 302 while the doctors decide how much of his leg they can save.
The man in the next bed is Jens. Four old friends went racing snowmobiles in the mountains. Jens was run down and left in the snow. Now the friends have started to visit, and each of them wants the same thing: for Jens to keep quiet about that night.
Sander can’t walk. He can barely sit up. But he can listen, and he notices what other people miss.
Then he comes back from surgery and the bed beside him is gone. The hospital calls it a complication. Sander calls Detective Kari Eidem
‘Silenced by Snow‘ (2026) is the first book in a new Nordic Noir mystery. Book two will be published in December. Ole Magnus is the pen name of two crime writers from Arctic Norway. The book calls to me partly because it gives an unromanticised view of daily life in Arctic Norway.
Deputy Shelby Lake was abandoned as a baby, saved by a stranger who found her in the freezing cold. Now, years later, a young boy is missing—and Shelby is the one who must rescue a child.
The only evidence of what happened to ten-year-old Jeremiah Sloan is a bicycle left behind on a lonely road. After a desperate search fails to locate him, the close bonds of Shelby’s hometown begin to fray under the weight of accusations and suspicion. Everyone around her is keeping secrets. Her adoptive father, her best friend, her best friend’s young daughter—they all have something to hide. Even Shelby is concealing a mistake that could jeopardize her career and her future.
Unearthing the lies of the people in Jeremiah’s life doesn’t get the police and the FBI any closer to finding him. As time passes and the case grows cold, Shelby worries that the mystery will stay buried forever under the deep, deep snow. But even the deepest snow melts in the spring.
When a tantalizing clue finally comes to light, Shelby must confront the darkest lie of all. Exposing the truth about Jeremiah will leave no one’s life untouched—including her own.
‘A Deep, Deep Snow’ (2019) has been languishing in my TBR pile since 2019. It’s time to drag it to the top. It’s the first book in the two-book Shelby Lake series. It has snow, death, deep dark woods and it’s narrated by January LaVoy. so it should be good.
