TBR Thursday 262…

Episode 262

I’m still reading considerably less than usual, though I’ve noticed my enthusiasm growing a little again in the last few days, so fingers crossed! Thank goodness for vintage crime, Christie audiobooks and horror stories – my saviours at the moment! So a couple of books out, a couple of books in and the TBR and I remain stuck on 199…

Here are a few more that I should get to soon…

Winner of the People’s Choice Poll

The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

Another exciting race this week! Black Water Rising leapt into an early lead, but The Crow Trap snuck up on the inside fence and soon stormed into a unassailable position! Good choice, People! I’m (almost) sure I’ll enjoy this one! It will be a January read…

The Blurb says: At the isolated Baikie’s Cottage on the North Pennines, three very different women come together to complete an environmental survey. Three women who, in some way or another, know the meaning of betrayal…

For team leader Rachael Lambert the project is the perfect opportunity to rebuild her confidence after a double-betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. Botanist Anne Preece, on the other hand, sees it as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace Fulwell, a strange, uncommunicative young woman with plenty of her own secrets to hide…

When Rachael arrives at the cottage, however, she is horrified to discover the body of her friend Bella Furness. Bella, it appears, has committed suicide – a verdict Rachael finds impossible to accept.

Only when the next death occurs does a fourth woman enter the picture – the unconventional Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, who must piece together the truth from these women’s tangled lives…

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Horror

Into the London Fog edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

Courtesy of the British Library. Another anthology from the BL’s Tales of the Weird series, this one taking us on a hopefully terrifying tour of the various districts that make up London. Fog was designed for horror, so the porpy is taking precautionary tranquilisers…

The Blurb says: As the fog thickens and the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from all over the city. A jilted lover returns as a demon to fulfill his revenge in Kensington, and a seance becomes a life and death struggle off Regents Canal. In the borough of Lambeth, stay clear of the Old House in Vauxhall Walk and be careful up in Temple—there’s something not right about the doleful, droning hum of the telegram wires overhead…

Join Elizabeth Dearnley on this atmospheric tour through the Big Smoke, a city which has long fueled the imagination of writers of the weird and supernormal. Waiting in the shadowy streets are tales from writers such as Charlotte Riddell, Lettie Galbraith, and Violet Hunt, who delight in twisting the urban myths and folk stories of the city into pieces of masterful suspense and intrigue. This collection will feature a map motif and notes before each story, giving readers the real-world context for these hauntings and encounters, and allowing the modern reader to seek out the sites themselves—should they dare.

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Crime

Grave’s End by William Shaw

Courtesy of Quercus via NetGalley. I’ve only read one book by William Shaw so far and loved it, so have high hopes for this one…

The Blurb says: An unidentified body is found in a freezer. No one seems to know or care who it is or who placed it there.

DS Alexandra Cupidi couldn’t have realised that this bizarre discovery will be connected to the crisis in housing, the politics of environmentalism and specifically the protection given to badgers by the law. But there are dangerous links between these strange, reclusive, fiercely territorial creatures and the activism of Cupidi’s teenage daughter Zoe and her friend Bill South, her colleague Constable Jill Ferriter’s dating habits and long forgotten historic crimes of sexual abuse – and murder.

DS Alexandra Cupidi faces establishment corruption, class divide and environmental activism in this gripping new novel by a rising star of British crime fiction.

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Vintage Crime

Inspector French: Sudden Death by Freeman Wills Crofts

Courtesy of HarperCollins. I’ve loved the couple of Crofts’ books I’ve previously read, so am looking forward to this one, especially since vintage crime has become my slump-busting comfort reading at the moment!

The Blurb says: To mark the publishing centenary of Freeman Wills Crofts, ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’, this is one of six classic crime novels being issued in 2020 featuring Inspector French, coming soon to television.

Anne Day is the new housekeeper at Frayle, the home of Mr Grinsmead and his invalid wife. To Anne’s horror, her intuition that something is very wrong in the house culminates in an unexpected death. With the police jumping to devastating conclusions, Inspector French arrives to investigate. With the narrative switching between Anne’s and French’s perspectives, giving alternately the outside and inside track of an ingenious and elaborate investigation, will tragedy strike a second time before the mystery is solved?

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NB All blurbs and covers taken from Goodreads or Amazon UK.

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So…what do you think? Are you tempted?