Welcome to the New Year! I am so glad that 2014 is finally over, it was all used up, and I am very much looking forward to 2015. For some reason, odd numbered years are always more appealing to me.
Monday Murder Mystery began 2014 with Charles Todd's latest Inspector Rutledge mystery, Hunting Shadows. I liked it more than I thought I would and decided to read more of this popular series. But then I got sidetracked by Louise Penny and quickly gobbled down her Inspector Gamache series. The Humans by Matt Haig provided a change of pace as it told the story of a Vonnadorian sent to the earth to destroy the proof of the Riemann hypothesis developed by Cambridge mathematician, Andrew Martin. A delightful hybrid read.
Lexicon was another cross genre tale that combined Science Fiction elements in a mystery that was told in a mesmerizingly complex fashion. Also half-SciFi and half-mystery was John Scalzi's Lock In as was John Twelve Hawks' Spark. Interestingly, both novels dealt with mind/body connection although Spark used that connection, or lack of connection, to explore a near future dystopian world of strict surveillance while Scalzi used it to more broadly explore identity.
As a group we read PD James' An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, and perhaps this year we can reconstitute that book club with another title.
Please join me below the fold for more.
Many of the 2014 mysteries allowed us to travel around the world without ever leaving the comfort of an armchair. Parker Bilal was the tour guide to Cairo in
The Golden Scales and Derek B. Miller, in
Norwegian by Night, took us on a cross-country trip through Norway with an "eighty-two-year-old demented American sniper [who] is allegedly being pursued by Korean assassins across Norway after fleeing a murder scene. Either before or after." And he's Jewish. Later in the year there were visits to
Laos, via Colin Cotterill's delightful Dr. Siri Paiboun, and to
Tokyo to meet Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga as well as Detective Galileo, both created by Keigo Higashino.
The UK was visited in Tana French's latest Dublin Murder Squad novel, The Secret Place, involving a murder at a private girls' school. Alex Marwood's novel, The Wicked Girls dealt with the two adult women who had committed a crime as children, and now coincidently find themselves thrown together in an English seaside town where another murder has been committed.
From southern England, we travel all of the way up to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, site of The Blackhouse by Peter May. The first novel in the Lewis Trilogy, it introduces us to this foreign land of sea and wind where Gaelic is still spoken and ancient traditions observed. No trip to the UK would be complete without a stop in London, and I was surprised to find that only one mystery claimed that locale as its home. Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery, by Christopher Fowler, was a pleasant surprise, a mystery filled with little known bits of London history, eccentric characters and cats.
Between the The Lusitania Murders and The Hindenburg Murders, Max Allen Collins has convinced me to continue traveling overseas by airplane, as uncomfortable as that may be. But they were fun novels to read and to write about.
Back in the States, Nevada Barr guided us down the Rio Grande through Big Bend National Park's Santa Elena Canyon in Borderline. And Stephen King visits the midwest in Mr. Mercedes, his second mystery novel. Former CIA analyst, Susan Hassler, gave us an insider's look at the CIA in Intelligence: A Novel of the CIA.
Set in Ohio,
Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, is a lovely literary novel that contains a mystery. It was one of my favorite books of the year. Also at the top of the list would be my belated discovery of
Sara Paretsky who writes about crime in my home town with the knowledge of a native and the political outlook of a progressive liberal.
Karin Slaughter took us back to 1974 and the first women on the Atlanta Police Department in Cop Town. And Laura Lippman's character driven mystery, After I'm Gone, opens in 1976, just two years later, in Baltimore.
The only non-fiction work that I included in 2013 was Daniel Stashower's Edgar and Agatha award winning The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War.
Also set in Chicago were some of Andrew Greeley's novels that michelewln wrote about last month, where they caught the eye of Father Greeley's niece who wrote a note to michelewln that she shared with us.
Bookgirl wrote two guest posts this year, one was on the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James mysteries by Deborah Crombie. This is a series that has been on my TBR list for years, but the backlog has always seemed intimidating. She also contributed a review of Karin Fossum's latest work, The Murder of Harriet Krohn.
For 2015, books I am reading or have on the stack slowly working their way to the top:
- The latest Jonathan Grisham novel, Gray Mountain which involves mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.
- The Bishop's Wife, by Mette Ivie Harrison. According to the publisher it is "Inspired by a chilling true crime and written by a practicing Mormon, The Bishop’s Wife is both a fascinating look at the lives of modern Mormons as well as a grim and cunningly twisted mystery."
- A non-fiction book Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It to the Revolution by T.J. English.
- Hank Phillippi Ryan's latest Jane Ryland mystery, Truth Be Told.
- Called a cozy spy novel, Mr. Churchill's Secretary, the first in what is currently a four book series featuring Maggie Hope, by Susan Elia Macneal, is on sale now as a kindle book for $1.99 at Amazon.
- Dead Cat Bounce, by Sarah Graves
- The Tears of Autumn, by Charles McCarry
- The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo
- Chiefs, by Stuart Woods
- Moving Day, by Jonathan Stone
What is on your stack for 2015? What was there last year?
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule: