Well the Jubilee weekend is now over and it was all huge fun and also rather wonderful. Highlight for me was the video of the Queen having tea with Paddington Bear which ranks alongside her James Bond skit at the Olympics in 2012.
So back to normal and I managed to get some reading done.
I was in a charity shop a week or so ago and picked up a book Murder at the Brightwell by Ashley Weaver. It had a delightful and stylish cover and I read the first page and thought oh this sounds fun.
"It is an impossibly great trial to be married to a man one loves and hates in equal proportions. It was late June and I was dining alone in the breakfast room when Milo blew in from the south.
'Hello darling' he said brushing a light kiss across my cheek. He dropped into the seat beside me and begain buttering a piece of toast as though it had been two hours since I had last seen him last rather than two months.
I took a sip of coffee. 'Hello Milo. How good of you to drop in'"
The setting is Kent, England and it is 1932. I really enjoyed this book. Witty and amusing and though there are rather too many descriptions of clothes and jewellery, it is all great fun. Amery is married to Milo who seems to do what he likes and spends a great deal of time on the Riviera. When Amory's ex fiance turns up asking for her help regarding his sister who is contemplating marriage to a rather unsatisfactory character, she decides to go to the Brightwell Hotel where they are all staying and help him out. Naturally, the rather unpleasant fiance turns up dead at the bottom of a cliff and Amory finds herself at the heart of the mystery. She manages to solve the mystery and it is all light and silly and written in great style.
This book had cost me the princely sum of £1 and I then went on line and discovered there were six others in the series. Needless to say, I downloaded them all and read them one after the other and derived great pleasure from them.
I then received an alert that a pre-order had been sent to my Kindle, the latest in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. I read these all last year when I initially discovered them and enjoyed them, but I have now rather changed my mind as they are becoming increasingly tedious.
To Kill a Troubadour deals with a terrorist threat to a free concert featuring a local group Les Troubadours who will be performing their latest hit 'A Song for Catalonia'. The song goes viral when the Spanish government ban its performance on the grounds that it is encouraging the Catalonian bid for independence.
Now this is all very exciting and the scene is set but then we go off piste to an alarming extent. It becomes clear that there is a sniper in the area following a car crash and the discovery of a bullet. We are treated to at least four pages of a lecture on the history of military rifles from Bruno (who is an expert). Later on we have pages on Catalonia and the Arabic influence on medieval culture. While the security services are involved and the big cheeses arrive from Paris, Bruno manages to play tennis, cook meals for everyone with copious descriptions of his recipes and methods including the preparation of a wild boar and then at the end of course he saves the day.
And, as I assume the author is an ex-pat, we get the predictable dig at Brexit.
I found myself skipping great chunks of this book. I reckon 30% of the book was germane to the plot, the rest was padding. I doubt I will waste my money on purchasing any more in this series.
I will wait and see if they turn up in a charity shop instead.
