September 2026 Reading

During August I read more historical fiction novels than usual and, while they were enjoyable, they were long and/or dense and took some effort to read. By September I was ready to kick back and make my reading easier. When that happens I fall back on mysteries and that's mainly what I read this month. In truth, I've been in a bit of a reading slump, unable to concentrate on anything that requires effort. So these mysteries were a sort of life saver for me. 

These are the books I finished in September. 

MYSTERIES

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentil

The Boston Public Library is usually a quiet place but one day a woman’s scream pierces the air. Four strangers at a table begin to talk to each other about the scream and become unlikely friends. The source of the scream is not located at that time but the next day a woman’s body is found. But, is one of the friends involved in the murder? I am a fan of Gentil's Rowland Sinclair mystery series and am just starting to read her standalone novels. I enjoyed this one although there is a mystery within the mystery that I found a bit distracting (and found I found it completely unbelievable that someone could travel from North America to Australia in the midst of the pandemic when Australia was on a very deep lockdown.) However, Sinclair, who is Australian, has a nice easy to read writing style that brings the reader along and her main character was quite likable. 

Death in Paris by Emilia Bernhard

Rachel, an American living in Paris, is surprised to hear that a former lover has died by drowning in a bowl of soup.  But when she hears that a bottle of rose wine was also on the table, she is even more surprised, because he HATED rose wine. Although the police rule the death accidental due to a heart attack, Rachel  decides that he must have been murdered and she (and her best friend Magda) start to investigate. I think this was a debut novel and for a debut mystery it wasn't bad. Bernhard is no Agatha Christie but Rachel was a likeable main character, if a little dense. As regular readers know, I hate novels written in the first person where the main character has to be a little stupid to make the plot work. I don't like to be in the heads of stupid people. Fortunately, this was written in the third person so it didn't bother me too much. I could nit pick about parts of the plots and character development but I won't. This is a good "palette cleanser" mystery that won't fill you up but will refresh you before your next deep read. I didn't bother to check but it looked like she was setting it up at the end to be a series.

From the Charred Remains by Susanna Calkins

The year is 1666, only a few weeks after the Great Fire of London and the people of London are (literally) digging out from the fire. Lucy Campion, a lady's maid to a lady who is now deceased, is trying to decide what to do next and, in the meantime, is assisting with the digging. She is there when a couple of boys discover a murdered man in a keg. On his person is a leather bag with an odd assortment of objects including a poem that doesn't make much sense. Who was he? Can Lucy figure it out so that justice can be done? I liked this novel even though I figured out quite early that is is the second in a series, but that didn't matter. Calkins managed to weave in any facts from the first book that were necessary for this book without undue exposition and without giving away too much of the plot of the first book. Lucy is an interesting main character. She is literate and wants to eventually own her own print shop where she can print, among other things, her own writing.  When she becomes an (unofficial) apprentice at a print shop the details of her day to day life were very interesting. The mystery itself was good.  I think I will go back and read the first in the series.

The Chrysanthemum Tiger by Alys Clare

When I picked up this novel at the library I knew it was part of an ongoing Gabriel Taverner Mystery series which I had never read, but I thought that wouldn't matter. I'm used to writers of historical mysteries doing what Susanna Calkins (above) did - writing a standalone mystery in each volume but perhaps expanding on the character development. I was wrong in this case and I don't recommend reading this novel if you've not read the other novels in the series. First, there really wasn't much of a mystery. Although a murder takes place it doesn't happen until well into the book and isn't the crux of the story. Second, the action is split between the adventures of Taverner in the far east and on his trip back home and the people he left behind. Since I knew nothing about those people having never read the other novels, I didn't care about them. Third, there is an element of the supernatural in this novel that just didn't ring true to me. Finally, while the idea of an Englishman in Japan in the early 1600's seems a great idea to me for an historical novel, Clare didn't really give me enough detail since she was simply using it as a setup for the rest of the story.  This did not make me want to read any of the other Taverner novels and I can't recommend it. 

Murder in Mayfair by D.M.Quincy
Murder in Bloomsbury D.M. Quincy
Murder at the Opera by D.M. Quincy

We are in London during the Regency and Atlas Catesby is an amateur investigator. The fourth son of a now deceased famous poet and minor aristocrat, Catesby has been haunted by the death of his older sister Phoebe. He can't settle down and is constantly traveling. However, a carriage accident has resulted in a broken foot that required him to stay in England for some time. While returning to London from a trip to Bath with his friend the Earl of Charlton, they come across a man attempting to sell his wife to the highest bidder. Appalled, Catesby "purchases" her. But she turns out to be a somewhat mysterious woman. When the husband is later found dead, Catesby must solve the crime. It is rare that the library has all three books of a series available at one time so I jumped on the chance to check them out figuring that if I didn't like the first one I'd just return all of them. But I did enjoy the first, so I read all three. As far as I can tell, there have been no further volumes written. These are light entertainment but the characters are well drawn. I have to say that I sometimes get tired of Regency mysteries that are full of Dukes and Earls, etc. and I felt that you could tell this author also wrote historical romances perhaps set during that period and they were her first love, not mysteries. But the mysteries are perfectly fine. Although set during the Regency I didn't think Quincy dwelled too much on the time period details and in many ways the time period didn't much matter. These were good books to pass hot summer days with and would make good vacation reading for people who like mysteries.  D.M. Quincy is the pen name of Diana Awad, a former journalist who also writes historical romance as Diana Quincy. 

Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood

I was a fan of the Phryne Fisher mystery series written by Kerry Greenwood and set in Australia. I heard that she passed away last year and the last book was published posthumously.  I haven't read it yet. But I did discover at the library that she wrote another series set in Melbourne so I checked out the first book of that series. Earthly Delights is the first of the Corinna Chapman series. This series is not historical (although it’s been so long since publication it seems historical). Corinna, a former accountant in Melbourne, walks away from her job and her husband and opens a bakery called Earthly Delights. One day she opens the back door of the bakery to find a young woman dying of an overdose. Corinna calls emergency and the young woman is saved. At the same time Corinna meets the handsome and mysterious man who spends his time helping feed people who are living on the street. He is concerned that someone is intentionally killing junkies and he recruits Corinna to help him figure out who. As if that is not enough, Corinna is also trying to figure out who is sending threatening letters to the women in her building.  As the first book in a series there is a lot of setup and character introduction but fortunately the characters are interesting and include Goths, Wiccans, a sympathetic female cop and even a Dominatrix. The actual mystery was good too. I will probably read more. 

Death at the White Hart by Chris Chibnall

Chris Chibnall is best known as the writer and creator of the British TV Series Broadchurch, which I enjoyed immensely. He also was the writer and show runner of Doctor Who for a few seasons and I did not enjoy those very much. He has now published a mystery novel and ... it's very good! The proprietor of a local pub is found one night dead, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road with deer antlers affixed to his head. The investigating office is new to town having moved from Liverpool, where she had a good reputation in putting organized crime villains behind bars. She thought she was moving to a place where life would be quieter. Her constable is completely green but together they must solve this crime. Not surprisingly Chibnall is great at setting a scene and with dialog. The plot hangs together. I wasn't totally surprised at the end (there are only so many persons that could have done it) but that didn't matter. It's possible he is setting this up to be a series and I would read more. 

GENERAL FICTION

A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids by Linda LeGarde Grover

Margie Robineau is fighting the tribal council because they want to take part of her land allotment to complete a road from the reservation to the nearby State Park. She is prepared to make a presentation at the next meeting. But in the meantime she meets her friend Theresa, who is undergoing chemotherapy, for coffee at the State Park visitor center and, while they are there, an incident occurs revealing a death from long ago. The incident is precipitated by a group of mischievous ancestor ghosts who comment on the story throughout. This very short novel (less than 200 pages) is apparently one of a series of novels set on a fictional Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota. The author is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe which is located up near where I vacation. I can’t remember where I heard of this novel and had forgotten that I had put in a library request months ago. I think I might look for her the other books because I did enjoy this one. 

NONFICTION

Forever Young: A Memoir by Hayley Mills

As a big consumer of Disney movies when I was young, I vividly remember Hayley Mills even though most of her child actress career was over before I was 10 years old.  In this memoir she recollects how she almost accidentally fell into movie acting. Her father was the well known British actor John Mills and her mother was a writer of plays and novels. Her older sister Juliet always knew that she wanted to be an actress but Hayley says she never really gave it any thought. Then one day a film director was visiting her father telling him that there was difficulty in casting a young boy as the lead in a film he was making. He saw Hayley goofing around with her brother, reciting television commercials and immediately decided to change the character to a girl and cast Hayley. Then Walt Disney saw that British film and signed her to a contract. Her first film was Pollyanna. In this memoir Hayley goes into a lot of detail of those Disney years and some of the years following (the memoir ends when she is about 30).  She's very nice about all the stars she worked with. She's very nice about her first husband who was more than 30 years older than she was. She only gets testy when talking about the family solicitor who set up the trust into which all of her childhood earnings were placed until she reached 21, which was then found defective in some way and the British Inland Revenue took over 90% of her money. But even then, she was too nice to sue him. I enjoyed this memoir; I listened on audio and it was read by the author herself so it sounded like she was telling me the story directly. My favorite Hayley Mills movie was not a Disney movie.  It was The Chalk Garden which also starred Deborah Kerr and Hayley's dad John Mills. Ironically, she didn't tell much about this film other than to say it was the first time in her life she got bad reviews. But looking back at them she now realized they weren't all bad; the bad ones were just the ones that stuck in her mind. Personally, I thought she did a great job. While I would have liked her to have told more about her adult life and maybe to have been not quite so nice, I did enjoy this book. Her ability to describe scenes was surprisingly vivid.