Didn't realize I haven't posted in so many weeks! Time flies when you are having company. After all, it is summer and lots going on sometimes.
I meant to share some of the top picks from the Mystery Book Club from our early June meeting. We all read different books, choosing from the list of books nominated or won awards this year. I will give you a few. We chose our reads mostly from Stop You're Killing Me! under the Book Awards category.
All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby:
Good Reads Choice Award Nominee
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Mystery & Thriller (2023)
Nominated for Edgar - Best Mystery Novel 2024, Dagger - Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award 2024, Winner of Anthony - Best Mystery Novel 2024
About: "In heroine Tempest Raj, modern-day queen of the locked room mystery Gigi Pandian has created a brilliant homage to the greats of classic detective fiction.
Secret Staircase Construction is under attack, and Tempest Raj feels helpless. After former client Julian Rhodes tried to kill his wife, he blamed her "accident" on the home renovation company’s craftsmanship. Now the family business—known for bringing magic into homes through hidden doors, floating staircases, and architectural puzzle walls—is at a breaking point. No amount of Scottish and Indian meals from her grandfather can distract Tempest from the they’re being framed.
When Tempest receives an urgent midnight phone call from Julian, she decides to meet him at the historic Whispering Creek Theater—only to find his dead body, a sword through his chest. After a blade appears from thin air to claim another victim, Tempest is certain they’re dealing with a booby trap… something Secret Staircase Construction could easily build. Tempest refuses to wait for the investigation to turn to her or her loved ones. She knows the pieces of the puzzle are right in front of her, she just has to put them together correctly before more disaster strikes.
Multiple award-winning author Gigi Pandian and her sleuth Tempest Raj return in A Midnight Puzzle, where an old theater reveals a deadly booby trap, secrets, and one puzzle of a mystery."
To Slip the Bonds of Earth by Amanda Flower (Katherine Wright #1)
This was my choice and I know one other person has read it since I recommended it and has gone on to read the second book in the series- Not They Who Soar.
Winner of Agatha - Best Historical Novel 2024
About: "While not as famous as her older siblings Wilbur and Orville, the celebrated inventors of flight, Katharine Wright is equally inventive – especially when it comes to solving crimes – in USA Today bestselling author Amanda Flower’s radiant new historical mystery series inspired by the real sister of the Wright Brothers.
December 1903: While Wilbur and Orville Wright’s flying machine is quite literally taking off in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with its historic fifty-seven second flight, their sister Katharine is back home in Dayton, Ohio, running the bicycle shop, teaching Latin, and looking after the family. A Latin teacher and suffragette, Katharine is fiercely independent, intellectual, and the only Wright sibling to finish college. But at twenty-nine, she’s frustrated by the gender inequality in academia and is for a new challenge. She never suspects it will be sleuthing…
Returning home to Dayton, Wilbur and Orville accept an invitation to a friend’s party. Nervous about leaving their as-yet-unpatented flyer plans unattended, Wilbur decides to bring them to the festivities . . . where they are stolen right out from under his nose. As always, it’s Katharine’s job to problem solve—and in this case, crime-solve.
As she sets out to uncover the thief among their circle of friends, Katharine soon gets more than she bargained She finds her number one suspect dead with a letter opener lodged in his chest. It seems the patent is the least of her brothers’ worries. They have a far more earthbound concern—prison. Now Katharine will have to keep her feet on the ground and put all her skills to work to make sure Wilbur and Orville are free to fly another day."
There's nothing easier to dismiss than a conspiracy theory—until it turns out to be true
What Theo never expects is to be drawn into a hidden literary world in which identity is something that can be lost and remade for the sake of an audience. When her mentor, a highly successful author, is brutally murdered, Theo wants the killer to be found and justice to be served. Then the police begin looking at her brother, Gus, as their prime suspect, and Theo does the unthinkable in order to protect him. But the writer has left a trail, a thread out of the labyrinth in the form of a story. Gus finds that thread and follows it, and in his attempt to save his sister he inadvertently threatens the foundations of the labyrinth itself. To protect the carefully constructed narrative, Theo Benton, and everyone looking for her, will have to die."
Early one morning, a men’s rowing team discovers a body floating face down in the Thames. Many years before, the chief executive of a clothing manufacturer walked off with a multi-million dollar corporate retirement fund and disappeared without a trace. Now, the discovery of this body has reopened that cold case.
Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp has his own evening at the theater upended by the discovery of a dead body just a few seats away. Two decades ago, Eliza Chapel, a fourteen-year-old student at a girls boarding school in Cornwall, disappeared in the middle of the night under dubious circumstances. A second body and a second cold case reopened.
As DI Caius Beauchamp—along with his associates Matt Chung and Amy Noakes—investigates these parallel missing persons cases, he finds himself ensnared in the unexpected political machinations of a duke-in-waiting. This is yet another masterful mystery from Charlotte Vassell that is every bit as pointed as it is poignant.
