TRIGGER WARNING: domestic abuse
Edie and Ethel go out for a walk in the hills but stumble across a body. They recognise the woman as Joyce Reid, an unpopular pacifist from the local area. The police think it was a terrible accident but Edie isn’t convinced and appeals to the police officer who helped her previously to aid her investigation…
Murder In A Country Village is the second book in the Edie York murder mystery series set during WW2. There are major spoilers about the outcome of the first book so I would advise reading the books in order.
Edie is still hoping for her big break in journalism. When she stumbles across a dead body, she is sure that it wasn’t a simple accident. Added to this are a pair of missing teens that no one is concerned about.
The mystery sustained my interest but the pace was quite slow. Both the murder and the missing teens provide Edie with plenty of opportunity to investigate and explore the local area and community. There were a whole range of suspects and potential motives for each crime.
I felt fully immersed in the 1940s with the rationing, black outs, tragic telegrams. There is some big emotion as we consider the deaths of brave young men fighting for their country and evacuees desperately missing their homes. I also felt incredibly moved by the plight of Edie’s friend Suki who is trapped in a violent marriage.
Murder In A Country Village is an enjoyable cosy historical murder mystery.
Murder in a Country Village: An utterly compelling historical cozy mystery (An Edie York Mystery Book 2)
England, 1941. With World War Two shaking the nation, rookie reporter Edie York wants to write the front-page news. But she ends up as the headlines when she stumbles over a body on the moors…
Eager to follow Churchill’s order to keep calm and carry on, Edie York has left the bombed-out streets of Manchester behind for a stroll in the countryside. But her rationed picnic lunch turns to ashes in her mouth when she discovers Joyce Reid, a well-known anti-war activist, lifeless at the bottom of a cliff.
Despite infuriatingly handsome DCI Louis Brennan’s less-than–amused warnings ringing in her ears, Edie is unable to leave the conscripted local bobby to do his work. Heading off to investigate, she immediately uncovers potential suspects galore. From alleged black-marketeers to the local land girl, a shell-shocked artist to Joyce’s on-off lover, Edie is sure the murderer is right under her nose.
Then Edie makes another gruesome discovery, and realises she needs long-suffering Louis on the scene to officially investigate. Can they uncover the killer hiding in plain sight, before it’s too late? Or will Edie’s own obituary end up featured on the front pages she’s coveted for so long…?
A fantastically gripping historical cozy mystery perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Agatha Christie. This is the second book in the Edie York Mystery series.
About the author
Flic Everett is a Mancunian writer who now lives in a cottage in the beautiful West Highlands with her patient husband and two deranged cocker spaniels. She still misses Manchester, and returns like a homing pigeon every month to see family and friends. She spends a lot of time writing on trains.
Flic has owned an award-winning vintage shop, guest-presented Woman’s Hour and was once a part-time tarot reader. She has a grown up son who makes her laugh more than anyone on earth, and she likes reading, painting, cooking, clothes, animals, Art Deco and rummaging in charity shops for bargains. Her greatest fear is being stranded without a book. She has spent many years as a freelance journalist and editor for national newspapers and magazines and can’t believe she’s finally allowed to make up stories from the comfort of her own home.
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1991: DCI Jane Tennison has to survive in a male dominated profession and carefully negotiate her personal and professional relationships…
I have never watched Prime Suspect on TV which is shocking as I love Lynda La Plante’s books. I am definitely going to catch up with all 7 series now! So, my introduction to the force of nature that is Jane Tennison was the three books (audio versions) that kickstarted the series (books based on her earlier life have now been published).
Prime Suspect: Jane investigates the death of a prostitute but her team are acting against her. Can she prove herself and catch the killer?
Face in the Crowd: the body of a woman is discovered in a poor black community but can she be identified?
Silent Victims: a death in a fire and a transvestite subculture leads to an investigation into a paedophile ring
Jane is an utterly brilliant character and I loved the mix of personal and professional elements that feature across the three books. She experiences sexism directly from her colleagues and the attitudes towards female officers from the general public.
The storytelling is superb in all 3 books but they do feature racism and homophobism, alongside the misogyny mentioned above, which impacts the murder investigations. Reading the books now, the content seems a little dated but I felt that the depiction of the 1990s was authentic.
I enjoyed both the style of writing and the narration with the narrator using different accents and voice inflections to depict the different characters and bring them to life. These three books are brilliant police procedural with important social comentary that doesn’t shy away from big topics including misogyny, institutional racism, abortion and AIDS.
Book blurbs
Prime Suspect: In the dark night of the soul . . . . If Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison hadn’t been a woman, she might not have noticed the victim’s shoes . . . . and that they didn’t match the size given on the info sheet now so obviously misidentifying the dead blonde as a hooker named Della Mornay. Being so through, so good at the details, made Jane a top investigator; being a woman made the boys in the squadron want to see her fall on her face. But Jane Tennison was determined to catch the madman stalking women in London’s street shadows. She had a prime suspect, and she needed to make the charges against him stick. She also needed to keep her own secret in check: she couldn’t let anyone see that she was falling apart inside, as her obsession with cracking this case and breaking out from under the heel of the station house boy’s club took over life, destroying her relationship with the man she loved, pushing her closer and closer to the dark urges of a killer . . . .
Face in the Crowd: The victim was young. Female. And black. Her skull had been smashed in, her face decomposed beyond all recognition. But for Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, the corpse that had just been found in one of London’s poorest communities was only the beginning of a case that would tear apart an already divided city . . . and embroil the gritty cop and her force in a hotbed of racial strife, shocking accusations, and sudden, wrenching violence.
Silent Victims:The drag queen named Vera Reynolds swayed on-stage singing “Falling in Love Again.” And a sixteen-year-old boy lay in Vera’s fire-engulfed apartment . . . very, very dead. He was a “rent boy,” a sex-for-hire street kid who catered to the tastes of special customers. It was the kind of murder Soho’s Vice Squad saw often. But the influential do-gooder who was a prime suspect in this one made the young boy’s death different–a ticking bomb able to blast open the nasty, secret lives of politicians, judges . . . and cops. Detective Jane Tennison had moved up the career ladder through sheer guts and an unstoppable passion for justice. Now, on her first day as the head of the Vice Squad, she caught a case threatening to wreck her career. She had been told whom to arrest–and whom to back off from-in the murder of the “rent boy.” And she couldn’t go with the program. She knew a destroyer of children was out there. She knew she had a choice: to save her future or go after him like an avenging angel, and damn the consequences to hell . . . .
Molly, a homeless woman, leaves her precious bag at the library. It is packed full of papers with rather sinister notes written on them. The librarian passes the bag to retired cops Matt and Liz to sort through but, before they can start, Molly’s murdered body is discovered…
The Bag of Secrets is the sixth book in the Matt Ballard private detective and crime thriller series.
Matt and Liz have several cases on the go: shoplifting, a missing teen and now this mysterious bag. When they find out that Molly has been killed, they are asked by the police to help investigate as it isn’t a high priority. They are lumbered with working with a senior officer’s grandson who has a lot to learn about compassion and avoiding assumptions.
The mystery develops as it becomes obvious from the post mortem and information from other homeless people that Molly wasn’t quite what she appeared. This ties in with the bag of notes that the detectives sift through to make sense of the death. Meanwhile Matt is becoming increasingly worried about missing teen Liam.
The narration is in the third person. Most of the focus is on Matt and Liz but we also get chapters that show the other characters including unnamed people acting suspiciously with obvious secrets.
I really like Matt and Liz’s characters. There is a touch of gentle humour about their relationship and their love and respect for each other as well as the compassion they have for those involved in their cases are an important feature of the book.
The Bag of Secrets is an engaging crime thriller.
THE BAG OF SECRETS (Matt Ballard #6) by Joy Ellis
A GRIPPING NEW CRIME THRILLER FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND BRITISH BOOK AWARDS CRIME & THRILLER OF THE YEAR NOMINEE JOY ELLIS.
From three-million-selling author Joy Ellis comes the book that everyone will be reading this Christmas.
Matt and Liz may have retired from the police, but that doesn’t guarantee a quiet life.
An abandoned carpet bag full of mysterious handwritten notes. A body in a marshy lagoon.
Matt is intrigued when his partner Liz brings home an old carpet bag she found dumped in the local library. It contains a pile of mysterious handwritten notes. Liz is convinced the bag belongs to Old Molly, a local woman who lives on the streets.
The following day, a body is discovered in a marshy lagoon. It’s Old Molly. Suffocated with an expensive men’s handkerchief.
Molly clearly knew something that got her killed. Liz believes she was trying to tell them something important. She calls on her nephew David to help decipher the carpet bag notes.
Meanwhile Matt is hired to find teenage runaway Liam Cooper. Liam has been missing for ten days now, and Matt has a very bad feeling about him.
A few days later, a second body is discovered in an old barn out on the fens.
Matt and Liz must piece together the cryptic clues Molly has left for them before more people die. The answers lead to the remote fenland village of Marshdyke-St-Mary — and a series of shocking secrets stretching back many years.
DISCOVER A TOTALLY ENTHRALLING CRIME THRILLER.
This utterly gripping crime thriller is perfect for fans of L.J. Ross, Peter May, J.D. Kirk, Angela Marsons, J.M. Dalgliesh, Elly Griffiths or Ann Cleeves.
THE SETTING
England’s rural fenland is a strange place, with its never-ending fields, winding tracks, and long straight droves (the old livestock routes) that lead to nowhere. The lonely lanes are flanked either side by deep drainage ditches and are, for a good part of the year, filled with tall, whispering reeds. Closer to the Wash, high seabanks form a barrier between river and marsh, and the richly fertile soil of the drained land. But when the mists come down, as they so often do, perspective is destroyed and all sense of direction lost, and then the fens become a rather frightening place of mystery and danger. Somewhere that you do not want to be at night.
DETECTIVE MATT BALLARD
1: BEWARE THE PAST
2: FIVE BLOODY HEARTS
6: THE BAG OF SECRETS
JOY ELLIS
UK #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE JACKMAN & EVANS AND DI NIKKI GALENA SERIES; SHORTLISTED FOR BOOK OF THE YEAR FICTION: CRIME & THRILLER AT THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS 2021
OVER 3 MILLION BOOKS SOLD!
Joy grew up and lived in Kent, trained in floristry in Mayfair and ran her own highly successful floristry business in Weybridge for many years. In the mid-1990s, she followed her lifelong love of books, first as the manager of an independent bookshop in Leatherhead, Surrey, then as a writer. When she retired, Joy and her partner Jacqueline and their two spaniels settled in a village just outside Boston, captivated by the Lincolnshire Fens.
Joy’s happy home life is far removed from her storylines, however, and while she loves living in the misty Fens, the area provides a remote and eerie backdrop to her novels. Joy is also able to add the authenticity vital to any crime thriller by drawing on Jacqueline’s inside knowledge, to confirm procedures and the reality of tackling brutal crime and criminals in a modern police force.
FOLLOW JOY ON
1876, Alfred Palmer travels to North Wales for an art and history exhibition. The previous curator died mysteriously of a snake bite and Palmer is struck by the feeling that something evil is at work…
Blood Among The Threads is an historical murder mystery set in the 1870s.
Alfred Palmer was a real person with connections to Wrexham but this whole situation has been imagined by the author. I was instantly transported back to Victorian times right from the start as he embarks on a steam train journey and repeatedly uses snuff. The history and geography of the setting are wonderfully evoked at all times.
The first death which occurs before Palmer’s arrival is very suspicious indeed. The curator died after a snake bite on her lip and neck and the adder’s poison soon did its worst. No one can understand why an adder would have been in the woman’s home and been able to injure her in such a way. A mystery indeed! More deaths follow and Palmer is underwhelmed by the police’s attention to the case so decides to investigate for himself.
One of the artefacts that was prepared for the exhibition also draws Palmer’s attention. A mysterious woman claims the tapestry has blood among the threads but could it be linked to the death? Class tensions and even a royal connection also impact on the development of the plot. The characters are richly described and I was immersed in the story. I liked the way that real people and events have been used to create an entertaining fictional story.
Blood Among The Threads is an enjoyable historical novel.
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Book Blurb
He only sought the truth. But some truths are best left buried.
Wrexham, 1876. Meet Alfred Neobard Palmer, an unlikely hero.
“It was a death which had brought him here. Death by snake venom, of all things.”
Palmer – and his more courageous sweetheart, young Ettie Francis.
A series of accidental deaths which increasingly seem – well, more than simply accidental.
Deaths luring Palmer and Ettie, slowly but surely, towards a terrifying climax through the treacherous waters of the North Wales coast.
But can those deaths truly be linked to the huge coverlet on display at Wrexham’s magnificent Art Treasures Exhibition?
A patchwork of images both Biblical and bewitching. And is there, literally, blood among the coverlet’s threads?
A glittering mystery by award-winning author David Ebsworth.
David’s Bio
DAVID EBSWORTH is the pen name of writer Dave McCall, a former negotiator and workers’ representative for Britain’s Transport & General Workers’ Union. He was born in Liverpool but has lived in Wrexham, North Wales, with his wife Ann since 1981.
Following his retirement, Dave began to write historical fiction in 2009 and has now subsequently published twelve novels: political thrillers set against the history of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, the Battle of Waterloo, warlord rivalry in Sixth Century Britain, and the Spanish Civil War. His sixth book, Until the Curtain Falls returned to that same Spanish conflict, following the story of journalist Jack Telford, and is published in Spanish under the title Hasta Que Caiga el Telón. Jack Telford, as it happens, is also the main protagonist in a separate novella, The Lisbon Labyrinth. The third of his Jack Telford novels, A Betrayal of Heroes, takes Jack into the turmoil of the Second World War but through a series of real-life episodes, which are truly stranger than fiction.
Dave’s Yale Trilogy tells the story of intrigue and mayhem around nabob, philanthropist (and slave-trader) Elihu Yale – who gave his name to Yale University – but told through the eyes of his much-maligned and largely forgotten wife, Catherine.
The eleventh novel, The House on Hunter Street, is a mystery set during the political turmoil of Liverpool in 1911 and, more recently, Dave has published a non-fiction guidebook of Wrexham history, Wrexham Revealed. It was his research for the guidebook which inspired him to write this current and twelfth novel, Blood Among the Threads.
Each of Dave’s novels has been critically acclaimed by the Historical Novel Society and been awarded the coveted B.R.A.G. Medallion for independent authors.
David’s Links
Beth is delighted when her daughter returns home but she brings her new husband Luke. And Luke used to be married to Beth…
The Son-In-Law is a psychological thriller and family drama set in Wales.
OK so to clarify the family situation. Beth is 50 and her daughter is in her early 20s. Beth’s first husband and Cerys’ dad died a decade ago. Beth was briefly married to Luke who is her age but the marriage colapsed after he repeatedly cheated on her. Luke and Cerys never met as she was travelling abroad but I really struggled to believe that neither of them had ever seen photos of each other. Now Cerys and Luke are married and expecting a baby.
Although it isn’t incest, there is a decided ‘ick’ factor involved for me imagining this scenario. Luke is someone who I instantly loved to hate and the way he moved from mother to daughter was a bit gross. Besides this complicated threeway relationship, the opening chapter hints at other secrets that will be revealed.
The book is written from the alternating first person perspectives of both Beth and Cerys. Both women’s voices were clearly defined and it was easy to get into their heads to understand their thoughts and feelings. They are both determined and strong women which makes it even more surprising that either of them would have looked twice at Luke!
The situation is tense from the start and being thrown together on the remote Welsh farm isn’t enjoyable for any of the trio. Luke seems to thrive on pushing the boundaries at every turn while Beth and Cerys want to appease each other but still get their own way. I was gripped by the plot and characters and found myself reading faster and faster to see how events would play out.
The Son-In-Law is a tense and gripping psychological thriller.
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Book Blurb
I just met my new son-in-law . . . And he’s my ex-husband.
They’re here. I watch them arrive from the kitchen window. My pregnant daughter and her new husband. They’ve barely known each other six months.
I greet him with a tight smile that he recognizes as fake.
Luke is no good for my beautiful, fragile Cerys. He’ll break her heart. I know that because he broke mine — when he was married to me.
I don’t know what he wants. But I’m going to make it my business to find out.
I’ll do anything to keep my daughter safe. Don’t underestimate me.
Author Bio
Jane E. James is a bestselling author who likes to create chilling reads that appeal to fans of psychological suspense thrillers, mysteries, and dark fiction. Her novels are packed with plot twists and turns that keep the reader guessing. All of them are standalone novels.
Jane is an animal lover and lives with her cat, Hero, in a small country village near Stamford, Lincolnshire in the UK, which is known for its quirky tea shops and cobbled streets. Rebecca, Carrie, The Woman in Black and Wuthering Heights are among some of Jane’s favourite reads.
Jane’s Links
