These past couple of years my participation in my in person mystery book club has been minimal. Granted, that’s partly due to the pandemic but also this year, my availability has just been limited due to taking care of my mom, but things are starting to get more normal all around so I was very happy to be able to join in yesterday.
We met up to discuss Chapter and Curse by Elizabeth Penney. This is the first book in the Cambridge Bookshop series and features Molly Kimball a recent transplant to Cambridge, England. Molly and her mom leave Vermont behind to help Aunt Violet run her bookshop, Marlowe Books. Molly has big plans for the bookstore to make it profitable and but just as the shop is celebrating a local author with a reading and book signing, a body is found and plot ensues.
I liked this book but most of the group found it forgettable and simplistic. I do have some small gripes with the book, mainly that the author explains a lot of British sayings which I didn’t think needed an explanation as the meaning of most words could be figured out just by reading one or two sentences. In the end, I found it a nice change of pace from my more typical psychological suspense or heavier mysteries.
I’m very excited about our next book though because it is When She Was Good by Michael Robotham. We read the first in the series, Good Girl Bad Girl, earlier this year and we loved it so much we wanted to continue the series ASAP!
The book line up for the next several months includes: The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, The Red Palace by Jane Hur and Stone Dead by Christopher Wortley.
Let me know if you’ve read any of these books or if you’ve read a good mystery recently.
Oh, it’s always nice to be able to attend a book group that you’ve been missing, isn’t it? Glad you got to go to this one, Iliana. The book is not one that I’m familiar with, but I will check it out. I have read several of Michael Robotham’s books, but not the one you’re doing next month. I have read all of the Vera books by Ann Cleeves except for the newest, which just came out. I love those. Vera is a memorable character. I think the TV adaptation of that series is really well done.
Michael Robotham is awesome! I love his books. And Penney’s Cambridge Bookshop series sounds like a fun one.
I wish we had a mystery book club with selections I like. Many of the books in the library club are by famous male writers like Patterson and Coben, etc. whom I seldom read. Your list of books appeal to me.