Wow, it’s book bingo week again – these weeks roll around fast and for this reason, I quite enjoy using the scheduling tool to schedule posts weeks in advance in case something prevents me from posting one week on the day. Anyway, this week I’m ticking off the a book with a mystery square with a book I have been meaning to read for many months, that I have managed to get to now.
Filling out the final square in row three across and row five, square three down, is the first in a series by Jessica Fellowes, The Mitford Murders – a historical crime fiction centred around the Mitford sisters – in particular, Nancy the oldest, and their nursery maid, Louisa Cannon. Using the real-life crime – the death of nurse Florence Nightingale Shore, a real life mystery that in reality remains unsolved but on the page, comes to a fulfilling conclusion – encapsulates a post-war England trying to heal from four years of what was then known as The Great War, the War to End All Wars.
It is historical fiction and mystery all rolled into one, and it is fabulously written, and an intriguing introduction to a new series that I hope will continue and allow us to see the rest of the Mitford girls grow up and become the women that history tells us they became.
It is quite possibly one of my favourite books of the year, and the full review is linked to this post.
Title: Early Riser
Title: Scrublands
Martin Scarsden is travelling towards a Riverina town a year after a tragic event took the lives of several townsfolk at the hands of the priest, to write a piece on the anniversary of the events. He arrives in a town with a ghost-like aura, where many businesses are shut, or failing, and where everyone has their own version of events that doesn’t quite line up with the official record that Martin has to work with, and he finds that he needs to probe further, and dig into the rumours spun by previous articles – which leads into conflicting account after conflicting account, and further conflicts with characters as he asks the wrong questions, writes a story that goes to print too quickly and brings a media storm to the town, resulting in more deaths and the discovery of more evidence and hints that the crimes committed a year ago were not as cut and dry as the first seemed – questions of motives and suspects, and whether they were linked in anyway come up throughout the novel. Through all this, Martin is quite taken with young Mandalay Blonde, whose involvement and knowledge of the people involved must be peeled away slowly, throughout the novel as the secrets of the town and its residents are uncovered in a media frenzy that seems never ending.
Title: The Legacy of Beauregarde
As well these characters, friends of Gordana Claudia, Madeleine and her husband, and Ilijana and her brother, Dan, are present, and their stories and links to the Seminary and Marcela are woven throughout – and there are mysterious incidents and deaths happening, and each character, whilst trapped within their own lives and dilemmas, is somehow linked to all the other ones – and each chapter is told from a different characters perspective, which at first , feel like individual stories linked simply by time and place, by the setting of the novel.
Title: We see The Stars
Set in the 1970s, not long after the end of the Vietnam War, We See the Stars is a mystery about family and those who care for us, and about ourselves. Simon never articulates why he doesn’t talk, nor does anyone else – they hint at it being like his mother, who is referred to and seen in flashbacks, but his reason for silence and isolation is never made clear. But this makes the mystery interesting, trying to work out all the possible reasons for his silence – some of which, in the 1970s, which is when I think the book was set, were not understood in the same way they are today. So perhaps this is why the reason for his silence isn’t defined.