osprey_archer | Wednesday Reading Meme

What I Just Finished Reading

Charles Finch’s latest Charles Lenox mystery, A Death in the Small Hours. Since I first found this series I have been earnestly questing to make someone else read them, because - Victorian murder mysteries! Cracking good mysteries with a good sense of period and a more delicate grasp of character than mysteries often have! How can you go wrong with that?

Actually Finch does sometimes go wrong: he has an occasional fondness for convoluted conspiracies, which are not my cup of tea (although, now that I think about it, A Death in the Small Hours does contain a conspiracy. Clearly that one did not bother me). But A Death in the Small Hours catches him at the top of his game: the mystery is most satisfying, as is the depiction of the country village.

Finch has a great affection for his period, without being blind to its faults. His books are set rather earlier than Downton Abbey, but I suspect they would appeal to much the same audience - provided they appreciate murder mysteries as well as period pieces.

The mysteries are fun, but the thing that sets these books above is the slow unfolding of Lenox’s relationship with his neighbor Lady Jane, and the way the secondary characters grow and change, sometimes two steps forward and one step back. There’s a sense, sometimes melancholy, that we’re seeing snapshots of their lives.

What I’m Reading Now

Les Miserables. By which I mean, I read the first chapter, which is three pages long. Myriel has become bishop of Digne. But still! The journey has begun!

Also Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shield Ring, although I started it when I was getting sick and the beginning has thus descended into a strange dreamlike quality. (To be fair, I think the first chapter is pretty dreamlike anyway: Frytha is too young and too confused to be thinking straight.)

What I Plan to Read Next

More Les Miserables, obvs. Also Sarah Rees Brennan’s Unspoken, which I’ve had for...like a week and haven’t started yet. Does anyone else have this problem? You get a book you’ve been looking forward to and then feel strangely reluctant to start it?

I’ve also got Jaclyn Moriarty’s newest, A Corner of White, which is waiting for just the same reason. It just doesn’t seem likely to me that any of her books are going to knock me off my feet like Bindy Mackenzie did - it’s not that I think Bindy Mackenzie is such a perfect book (in fact I tend to ignore the ending entirely, because I think it undercuts the rest of the book), but that it was the perfect book for me. And yet I can’t help going into Moriarty’s books with Bindy-size expectations.