Episode 160…
Oops! The dramatic falls of the last few weeks suddenly went into reverse this week – the TBR is up 1 to 220! It’s just a blip, though – I’m sure it will all be fine again next week…
(Tip: apparently, this isn’t a good way to uproot the stump of a tree…)
After what seems like an awful lot of heavyweight books recently, I’m looking forward to some lighter reads (aka murders) over the summer months. Here are a few to start me off in the right direction…
True Crime on Audio
I have a feeling someone recommended this to me or I was inspired by a review long ago, but I don’t seem to have kept a note of who or where. It really appeals, anyway, and listening to the sample, the narrator, William Dufris, sounds great…
The Blurb says: In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.
The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era’s most perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Re-creations of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio – an anxious cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor – all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hingeing on circumstantial evidence around a victim that the police couldn’t identify with certainty – and that the defense claimed wasn’t even dead.
The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale – a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.
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Crime
Courtesy of Urbane Publications. I thoroughly enjoyed The Rock, the first book in Robert Daws’ Sullivan and Broderick series set on Gibraltar, so I’m looking forward to reading this second one…
The Blurb says: In London, the British Government has declassified a large number of top secret files regarding British Military Intelligence operations during World War Two. One file, concerning espionage operations on Gibraltar, has been smuggled out of the U.K. to Spain. It contains information that will draw Sullivan and Broderick into the dark and treacherous world of wartime Gibraltar. A place where saboteurs and espionage plots abounded. Where double and triple agents from Britain, Germany and Spain were at war in a treacherous and deadly game of undercover operations.
As the summer heat reaches its zenith in Gibraltar Town, a film crew has arrived on the Rock to shoot a movie about one of the most enigmatic and legendary spies of the war years – ‘The Queen of Diamonds’. Starring Hollywood A-lister Julia Novacs and produced by local born film maker, Gabriel Isolde, it is the talk of the Rock.
It is only a matter of time before past and present collide and a dangerous battle begins to conceal the truth about the Rock’s poisonous wartime history. Detectives Sullivan and Broderick become caught in a tangled web of intrigue and murder that will once again test their skills and working relationship to the very limit.
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Crime
Courtesy of Amazon Vine. It’s set in Cornwall, it claims it’s perfect for fans of Peter May, the blurb sounds like fun and I love the cover. And that’s as much as I know about it…
The Blurb says: He was running from his past. She was running from her future. Sometimes helping a stranger is the last thing you should do . . .
The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Killgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme hiding from some very violent people and St Petroc’s offers him a chance to live a safe and quiet life. Until he meets Lila.
Lila is a seventeen-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom’s house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers’ commune she’s been living at. Something sinister has been going on there and Lila knows more than she realises. But to find her he risks not only giving away his location to the gangs he’s in hiding from, but also becoming a target for whoever is hunting Lila.
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Crime
Courtesy of Random House, Vintage, via NetGalley. My resistance to contemporary psychological thrillers has been worn down by the relentless drip-drip of glowing reviews for Ruth Ware from you enablers over the last year or two, so it better be good or on your heads be it!
The Blurb says: When Harriet Westaway receives an unexpected letter telling her she’s inherited a substantial bequest from her Cornish grandmother, it seems like the answer to her prayers. She owes money to a loan shark and the threats are getting increasingly aggressive: she needs to get her hands on some cash fast.
There’s just one problem – Hal’s real grandparents died more than twenty years ago. The letter has been sent to the wrong person. But Hal knows that the cold-reading techniques she’s honed as a seaside fortune teller could help her con her way to getting the money. If anyone has the skills to turn up at a stranger’s funeral and claim a bequest they’re not entitled to, it’s her.
Hal makes a choice that will change her life for ever. But once she embarks on her deception, there is no going back. She must keep going or risk losing everything, even her life…
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NB All blurbs and covers taken from Goodreads, Audible UK or Amazon UK.
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So…what do you think? Do any of these tempt you?
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