OK second post catching up on all my reading over the last few weeks.
Love Lies Bleeding - Edmund Crispin. Second Gervase Fen in a week and much better than the Case of the Gilded Fly. This one outside Oxford and set in a boarding school where Gervase is presenting the prizes and attending speech day. However, the night before two members of staff are found dead and the
Headmaster asks for Professor Fen to help him solve the murders. Goes without saying that he does but as there is a missing pupil from the neighbouring girl's school, an attempt on his life and the possible discovery of a missing Shakespeare manuscript, it is not as straightforward as it first appears. Humorous in places and written in an engaging and witty style, this was a real pleasure to read and I think I am now converted to Gervase Fen. At last.
I Remember You - Harriet Evans. This is a feel good romantic novel with a deceptive chicklitty type cover which might make the reader feel it will be run of the mill, but it is much better than your average book of this genre. Tess and Adam have been best friends since childhood and everyone expected them to get together, but their paths diverged and it is some years since she has been back to the village of Langford and she is only now returning to recover from a broken heart and to make a fresh start. Adam, still living there, is too wrapped up in his girlfriend to have much time for Tess and when she has the chance of taking a class of her mature students to Rome, she is glad to go.
There she meets a glamorous stranger who sweeps her off her feet and all is going well when a tragedy forces her back home to the village where there are divisions and tensions over a scheme to build on a local water meadow. I really enjoyed this book. Not too light, not too chick litty, with good characterization which engages the reader. I stumbled across another by this author in a charity shop yesterday so have grabbed that and look forward to reading it.
And now for something completely different - the Duff Cooper Diaries edited by John Julius Norwich. A discussion in my on line reading group about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, about whom I have very strong feelings (I disliked this ghastly pair intensely), made me pull down these diaries from my shelf where they have been lurking some time. Duff Cooper had a ring side view of the whole Edward and Mrs Simpson saga and his comments are very pertinent. He felt that he could forgive Mrs Simpson anything if she showed any sign of loving the Prince of Wales, but he said she never did. Duff married a society beauty and later, film star, Lady Diana Cooper and adored her all their married life though it did not stop him being unfaithful on a more or less continuous basis. His son, John
Julius Norwich, was rather worried when he came to publishing these diaries whether the reader would see past this and appreciate that his father was more than just a serial philanderer. Difficult to do so but no gainsaying that these diaries are fascinating. The blurb says he was a first hand witness of just about every significant event from 1915 to 1950: he was a young soldier at the end of World War 1, a politician during the general strike of 1926, King Edward VIII's friend at the time of the abdication, and was British Ambassador in Paris after the liberation in 1944. So plenty of fascinating material to balance out the domestic side and I can thoroughly recommend these for anybody who is interested in social rather than political history.
Cambridge Blue - Alison Bruce. A debut mystery novel by this writer due to be published in July and very promising it is too. DC Goodhew is a new, very bright and very young detective at Cambridge's Parkside Station and is out to make an impression. Richard Moran has reported his employee and girl friend, Lorna Spence missing and is
frantic with worry. He claims that she was universally popular and loved by his sisters, Alice and Jackie. Of course, the reader will immediately twig that she was disliked by just about everybody and that she is going to turn up dead and pretty quickly too. And she does and it seems that an old friend of Goodhew may be more involved than he admits to.
Writers are very fond of placing crime novels in university towns - we have the above mentioned Edmund Crispin stories mainly set in Oxford, ditto those of Veronica Smallwood and now we are back in Cambridge with Alison Bruce. I found this book very gripping and it kept me engaged until I read it straight through. A couple of minor plot lines that I could not quite get to grips with, but very very minor, and these did not spoil my enjoyment of this promising debut. I look forward to more of DC Goodhew in what should be an interesting series.
I think I am more or less caught up now, but still a few to go so there will be Part Three later on in the week.
