You will note that the category for this post is Crime and Detection and yet I have called my entry Relaxing Reading. It seems odd to describe a murder story this way, but the ones I am reading at the moment do have that cosy British feel about them, they are not horrific (though as I have just read one in which the victim is stabbed through the heart with a stiletto, they should be) and somehow they are totally reassuring. I am aware that this sentence is totally contradictory.
At the moment I am under the cosh at work with only two weeks to go before the conference in Chicago and suddenly deadlines for getting things done are hurtling towards me at the speed of light and mild panic is setting in. I was at work late most of last week and cannot see anything changing from now until the time I go to catch my flight at Heathrow. I have also been shopping for my daughter's wedding dress as you will have seen from my previous blog which, though wonderful and exciting, was a highly emotional experience and quite exhausting.
So, Atonement by Ian McEwan has been put to one side which was my next reading, Edith Wharton has 
once more been consigned to await my presence in the convalescent home post-Chicago, and out comes the detective novel. I have just finished reading a collection of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories, Lord Peter Views the Body, and have another lined up, Striding Folly. I have an awful feeling I am coming to the end of the Lord P books which is horrid, so I need to find another series pretty damn quick and I think Margery Allingham may be due for a whirl. I spent Friday night propped up in bed reading Agatha Christie, Partners in Crime, a Tommy and Tuppence collection of stories set in the 1920s and am now half way through After the Funeral, also by Dame Agatha.
Over Easter one of the tv channels had a Christie Weekend with lots of Marple and Poirot and I just sat and wallowed. As some of my little old ladies used to say to me when I worked in Highgate Library many moons ago "There's nothing to beat a nice murder".....
