Hot Money

 

By Dick Francis (read by Tony Britton)

 

 

I intensely disliked my father's fifth wife, but not to the point of murder.

What a great opening line! Fourteen words in and we already have a corpse and a rather complicated corpse at that.

Arbitrageur Malcolm Pembroke has the Midas touch and someone is trying to kill him. Who? Why?

He enlists his son by his second wife , Ian, to  play bodyguard and to figure out which of his family members is out to get him. Who else would it be but a family member? There are plenty of suspects because Malcolm has 5 wives (2 deceased by the start of the story), 9 children (and their 5 spouses) -- and we get to meet them all. This all makes for a delightfully complicated story that will keep you guessing right up to the very last second.

Four and a half stars. Because it is explosive. Because it is full of family drama that doesn't suck the joy out of the reader.

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High Stakes

 

By Dick Francis (read by Geoffrey Howard)

 

About the toymaker who thinks in circles

Regardless of the profession/trade of the hero, all Dick Francis stories are some how tied to the horse-racing industry. The main character in this story is Steven Scott, a successful, race horse owning toymaker. When bamboozled (read cheated, lied to, assaulted, robbed) by his trainer, he sets about to make it right and to put an end to the nefarious doings of his erstwhile friend.

I am a long, long time fan of Dick Francis. I like the fact that, with a few exceptions, each book is a new set of characters and a fresh setting within the world of horse racing. Most of all, I love the writing; it is one of the things that keeps me coming back to these books over and over again.

Four stars.

Friday's Child

 

By Georgette Heyer (read by Eve Matheson)

 

 

Terrible cover

Lord Sherringham comes of age.

While it would appear from the title that this story is about the heroine, the more I listen to it, the more I feel that it is more the hero's coming of age story. The title comes from the nameless nursery rhyme:

Monday's child is fair of face

Tuesday's child is full of grace

Wednesday's child is full of woe

Thursday's child has far to go,

Friday's child is loving and giving,

Saturday's child works hard for a living,

And the child that is born on the Sabbath day

Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

In a fit of pique, young Sherringham marries his childhood friend, Hero. She is a bit of a Cinderella -- orphaned, living with relatives, poorly treated. He married, first, because his inamorata rejected him and, second, to gain control of his fortune; she married because at age 17 she was going to be packed off to be a governess. Neither of the pair was ready for marriage but both in their immaturity agreed that it was the only solution. The rest of the story is their merry path to adulthood and happily ever after

Sadly, the narrator is a bit whiny and screechy and I seem to notice it more and more with every read. Still, I have seen what has been done with re-issues and for me it is a case of "better the devil you know."

Three and a half stars for the humor and the romance. Not her best Regency romance but far from her worst.

ACCC: March, 2021

 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  (c. 1926)

 

Theme: English village murder

Side-read: Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers (March, 2021)

*The Key by Patricia Wentworth (April, 2021)

This month's run-off poll ended in a tie.

Non-winners:

*Overture to Death by Ngaio Marsh

*Lake District Murder by John Bude

*Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh

*The Floating Admiral  by the Detection Club

*Cover Her Face by P.D. James

*Fallen Into the Pit  by Ellis Peters

Main read: https://peregrinationsbooksand.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-murder-of-roger-ackroyd.html

Side read: no audio version so I'm not reading it; really disappointed because everyone has been so positive about the book

In lieu of the side read: Who Killed Roger Ackroyd by Pierre Bayard. https://peregrinationsbooksand.blogspot.com/2021/03/who-killed-roger-ackroyd.html

Other links of interest:

Pierre Bayard reference this list of rules for writing detective stories: http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv288.html

The Detection Club Rules: https://murder-mayhem.com/the-detection-club-rules

Midwinter Murder

 

Short stories by Agatha Christie (read by Fenella Woolgar)

 

This is a new collection of Agatha Christie short stories -- as opposed to a collection of new Agatha Christie short stories. Grandson Prichard, keeper of the flame, has packaged a dozen stories all set in winter for us to enjoy but they were mostly stories that I have read recently and already own.

Christmas at Abney Hall (more of a reminiscence than a short story)

Three Blind Mice 

The Chocolate Box (originally in Poirot Investigates, 1924)

A Christmas Tragedy  (The Thirteen Problems,  1932)

The Coming of Mr. Quin (The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 1930)

The Clergyman's Daughter/The Rose House (Partners in Crime, 1929)

The Plymouth Express

Problem at Pollensa Bay 

Sanctuary

The Mystery of Hunters Lodge (Poirot Investigates, 1924)

The World's End (The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 1930)

The Manhood of Edward Robinson (Listerdale Mystery, 1934)

Christmas Adventure

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Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

 

By Pierre Bayard (translated by Carole Cosman)

Hard-bound

Bayard is out to prove that the revealed murderer is not the actual murderer -- and no, I am not going to say who he fingers -- but that is not why I heartily recommend this book to devotees of murder mysteries.

I might not agree with his analysis of the story but I can say that I learned a lot about the genre of the detective story and things to think about while reading the stories. Detective stories are about deception, disguise and lies. It is the job of the narrator to tell you the truth while  hiding it at the same time; in other words, even the narrator is not trustworthy. 

Bayard is one of those college professors who is teaching his students how to think, how to not be afraid of rejecting the conventional wisdom in favor of , how to approach books and reading from multiple directions, for which I applaud him. On the other hand, he is also a psychoanalyst and as soon as he got into the psychoanalytic gobbledygook, I tuned out and skip right to the last chapters where he finally revealed who he thought the murderer was and why.

However, I cannot accept his conclusion and will continue to go along with Christie's  solution because  that is the story that Christie wrote. Yes, his conclusion fits the facts and Christie could have equally as easily made  X the murderer, but that is not the story she chose to write.  Fun to explore the alternatives but in the end, as far as I am concerned, it is the author running the show.

3.5 Stars

The Presidents Club

 

By Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy (read by Bob Walter) c.2012

 

 

Another book about the the U.S. Presidents

The Presidents Club is considered to be the most exclusive club in the world; there is only one way to become a member and that is to serve as President of the United States. In this Presidential history, the authors focus on the the relationships between the serving President and his various predecessors starting with President Truman and his relationship with his only living predecessor Herbert Hoover through to Barak Obama and his relationship with the former presidents.

Four stars -- informative, well-written, easy to listen to

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How the Penguins Saved Veronica

 

By Hazel Prior (read by Helen Lloyd , Andrew Fallaize , and Mandy Williams)

My sister recommended this one. A few days later it was in the Audible 2 for 1 pile and I bought it.

While dealing with some rather deep topics -- casualties of war, forced adoptions, abandonment, etc. -- I still found the book to be a cute, light read. Good for reading when I don't need to devote my entire attention to what is going on.

Three stars.

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Myth-busting?: We keep hearing people say that Shakespeare is responsible for these cliches, implying that he created them all. I don't think that is necessarily true for all of these phrases. Shakespeare may well have been the one who used them in print for the first time but it is entirely possible that these are phrases that were already entrenched in the spoken language but had yet to appear in print. Yes, we can thank Shakespeare for preserving these phrases but not necessarily for creating them. Same goes for words that Shakespeare is said to have invented. Of course, we have no way of proving this other than to say that we know that even today we hear new words and phrases long before they appear in print.

Frederica

 

By Georgette Heyer (read by Clifford Norgate)

The jaded and bored Marquess finds his she-marquess.

While the title of the book is Frederica, this story is more about the hero, the Marquess of Alverstoke, who at the age of 37 had given up on love and marriage. He was a prize in the marriage sweepstakes -- money and a title -- but had no interesting in marrying anyone who was only after either of them. He could spot them a mile away. Then, he met Frederica, who was looking for neither. In fact, she had only sought out her distant cousin so that his wife could help her and her sister, Charys, navigate the London social season; imagine her surprise when Alverstoke said he wasn't married. And that was the meet-cute.

The story takes off when Alverstoke sees what a beauty Charys is and decides to use it to get a bit of revenge on his widowed sister who has asked him to give (and pay for) a ball in his niece's honor to launch her into society. Add a few more secondary characters into the story -- some school boy siblings, the heir to the Alverstoke title, some unwanted suitors --and you have a classic Georgette Heyer Regency romance. And they all live happily ever after.

Written barely 10 years before her death and in the fifth decade of her career, Heyer has long since hit her stride as an author. She has long since set the parameters of the genre that she is credited with inventing, the regency romance, and now she is knocking it out of that park time after time.

This is one of her best. Four and a half stars.

Charm City

 

By Laura Lippman (read by Deborah Hazlett)

Book 2: Tess Monaghan

AudiblePlus 

 

I like everything about this book except the reader, who, it seems, would not recognize a Baltimore accent if it bit her in the ass; the Baltimore accent does not include a southern drawl or a Texas twang, so why does every character in the book talk with a drawl or a twang? Really, really annoying.

Otherwise, I liked the story. I liked the multiple mysteries that had to be solved. I liked the twists and turns . I like that it was a cozy mystery with a slightly hard-boiled main character -- tough and down to earth but missing the Kinsey Milhone baggage. It was an easy, light read, good for those days when you don't want to have to think.

In a few years, I'll be able to read another one of this series, when I have forgotten all about the terrible narrator.

Three stars for the author and her book -- a good middle of the road read.

Watchers of Time

 

By Charles Todd (read by Sam Gillies)

Book 5, Inspector Ian Rutledge

How many different ways can I say just how much I enjoy this series?

It is interesting to see how Rutledge, a damaged WWI veteran, is regaining his strength both bodily and mentally and adjusting to living with his past; it will haunt him always. The relationship between our hero and the ever-present voice in his head continues to evolve. Yes, it is the gimmick of the book but the idea is not that far-fetched; too many men came home from this war "shell shocked" and permanently damaged by the battlefield atrocities and it is easy to accept that some, maybe even many, lived with voices in their heads. 

 

I do have to say that I figured out rather early on what the trigger events were for the murder and who the murderer would be but it really took the whole book to build the story and learn why he was the bad guy and what he had done that had to be covered up at the cost of lives of others.

The series just keep getting better and better.

 

Four stars.

Motherless Brooklyn

 

By Jonathan Lethem (read by Jeffrey Cantor)

Recommend by I can't remember who

 

Yes, I know they made a movie of it and yes, I know it stars Edward Norton (sigh). Still, I don't plan on seeing the movie; I liked the book too much to spoil the experience seeing the movie.

I enjoyed the book very much. It is strange but simple book with odd duck of a Tourette syndrome suffering hero trying to figure out who has killed his father figure of a boss. 

 

Four stars

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I thought this was so cool that I just had to share it.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

 

By Agatha Christie (read by Hugh Fraser) published 1926

An "Agatha Christie Centenary Celebration" Read

 

 

SPOILER ALERT • SPOILER ALERT • SPOILER ALERT

If you don't want to know whodunit, stop reading right now.

 

 

 

WOW!!  What happened? There is such a quantum leap from her last book to this one. The Queen of Crime has finally arrived.

Now I understand why everyone has been waiting for this book to have its turn in our readathon. She has finally found her voice and, at the same time, written a detective story that turns the genre on end a bit. Who on earth would expect the village doctor to be the bad guy? Not only was he the narrator of the story but doctors are supposed to be  good people not murderers.  I am enjoying it so much, that I immediately started it again, just so that I could listen more carefully to the voice of the narrator. Is he a reliable narrator? Maybe, maybe not.