Age

From the publisher: A spectacularly spine-chilling novella in which an American art student in London is invited to join a classmate for the holidays at Starvewood Hall, her family’s Cotswold manor house. But behind the holly and pine boughs, secrets are about to unravel, revealing this seemingly charming English village’s grim history.

The Christmas Guest is a small bite of a read, a little snack that can be read in one sitting. It’s immersive and fun and a bit disturbing. We hear from two voices: Emma Chapman, the English student who lives at Starvewood Hall, and Ashley Smith, the American classmate Emma has invited home for the holidays. Ashley speaks to us through the words she pours into her diary.

The author pulled me in right from the Dedication: “For two aunts – Pearl Taylor Moynihan, who disliked Christmas, and Sue Ellis Swasey, who doesn’t particularly like it either.” The dedication is followed by an Epigraph that calls out to A Christmas Carol.

The novella opens with our narrator, living in New York and alone on Christmas Day except for her cat, sorting through her crowded bedroom closet. She comes across an old diary, written by a friend thirty years ago. Although hesitant to “go back in time to that annus horribilis, that murderous year,” she cannot stop herself and begins to read.

The author pokes fun at himself and his “gothic” novella, with Ashley, the diary’s author, revealing that things are both exciting and creepy and almost willing herself into a gothic romance or thriller. (“Chance of gothic thriller murder mystery: Growing by the minute.”) There are a few twists, but in a weird way, this is a comfort read for the cozy mystery reader. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where the story is going, but the atmosphere makes it worth the read.

The cover is amazing – cute and cozy but also sinister. I read an advance reader copy of The Christmas Guest from Netgalley.

It is scheduled to be released on October 17 and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library. (Although it comes out in October, I recommend waiting until Christmastime to read it. 😊)

From the publisher: The discovery of a submerged car in a murky pond reveals betrayals and family secrets that will tear a small town apart.

The Death of Us has a great premise. A man cheats on his young wife, and the woman he slept with has a baby. One night, his wife answers the door, and the other woman hands the wife the baby and promptly disappears. Although fifteen years pass for the characters, the mystery of her disappearance is solved quickly in the book. A submerged car is found in an old flooded quarry on the family property. Inside is a baby carrier and some bones.

The husband and wife are now separated, as his ability to stay faithful hasn’t improved. They’ve been raising the child that was left behind together. Liss, the wife, loves her stepson fiercely. Because of the unknown status of his birth mother, Liss has never formally adopted Callan, but she IS his mother. Her husband Link is a man-child, spoiled by his mother, but Liss has broken things off with a man who loves her to try to salvage her damaged marriage.

The Death of Us is a great, fast read. The character development is good – I liked and sympathized with Liss and felt sorry for the teenager who is not quite sure how to handle his emotions when his missing mother is discovered. The marshal investigating the discovery is Liss’s recent lover; the man he replaced is the husband Link’s father. It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business.

I guessed one of the big bads early on, but that did not affect my enjoyment of the book. The author still had to spin out her plot, and I liked watching it unravel. There’s a bit of Hollywood blockbuster nonsense at the end, but the author paints some great pictures. Surprisingly, this is my first book by Rader-Day, but it won’t be my last.

I read an advance reader copy of The Death of Us. It is scheduled to be published on October 3, and the Galesburg Public Library will own the book in print, as an ebook, and in audio. The library owns Rader-Day’s previous six books, if you want to try one now. 

From the publisher: A perplexing murder in a renowned Oxford University library and a suspicious fire at a famous inventor’s London laboratory set Wrexford and Lady Charlotte on two separate investigations in this masterfully plotted, atmospheric Regency-set mystery.

Are you looking for a new historical mystery series? Check out Wrexford and Sloane by Andrea Penrose. Charlotte Sloane is a widowed lady of quality with a secret. She is a satirical cartoonist under a pen name. She uses her pen to cast light on injustices and misbehavior. Circumstances bring her together with two orphaned guttersnipes who she comes to love as her own, and with the intimidating Earl of Wrexford. This series has a nice mix of mystery, historical details, and found family. The relationships feature romantic love, parental love, family love, and deep friendships.

The book that introduces these characters and other series regulars is Murder on Black Swan Lane, and book seven in the series is due out in September. This is a great time to start reading, because if you like the first book, you can move right on to the next, but the number of books already published is not intimidating. Set in Regency London, the author likes to spotlight legitimate scientific innovation of the time period. Real scientists make occasional appearances in her stories.

Book seven, Murder at the Merton Library, starts with the murder of an Oxford librarian. It deals with fallout from the Napoleonic wars and intrigue around competition to create a marine propulsion system utilizing steam engines. (If that sounds boring, don’t worry – the author makes it interesting.) The Regency details seem perfect, and the author believably makes her female characters as important to the action as the male characters. I’ve found some of the other books in the series a bit draggy at times, but this one moved along briskly for me.

This series is a lot of fun for the serious historical mystery reader.

I read an advance reader copy of Murder at Merton Library from Netgalley. It is scheduled to be published on September 26. The Galesburg Public Library will own it in multiple formats, and we already own the first six books in the series.