It has been a busy month for the blog, despite all the seasonal festivities. The main attraction of course has been the Reprint of the Year Awards, the results for which will be posted tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what everyone makes of the winner! I read 17 books, 10 of which I reviewed, which is perhaps a little lower than usual but in theory that should make deciding on the winner of the Book of the Month accolade easier. Surely?
However, before we get under way with my best reads of the month here is a list to catch you up on the other things I have been doing on my blog:
- Catchphrase: The Agatha Christie Edition
- Kate’s Epic Ranking of Christmas Mysteries
- The Literary Crossovers Between Modernist Literature and Golden Age Detective Fiction
- Fancy Winning Tickets to the Olympics? [You’ll have to click on the post to find out what I’m on about]
- Sergeant Beef’s Case: Yet Another List
Now back to the Book of the Month. I thought it was going to be quite easy to pick my favourite, until I realised that 7 of my reviewed titles all shared the highest rating. My initial pruning reduced the number of potential winners down to 4:
- The Three Widows (1952) by Bernice Carey
- Partners in Crime (1929) by Agatha Christie
- Murder of Olympia (1956) by Margot Neville
- Case Without a Corpse (1937) by Leo Bruce
I was tempted to go for Leo Bruce’s work, as given it is my final foray into the Sergeant Beef series, it does hold sentimental value. Yet I would have liked greater page space for Beef and Lionel, whose tense relationship is always a delight to read about. So instead I decided to go for…
This was a new-to-me author and despite a rushed ending, I felt of four it had the most surprising ending and my enjoyment of this book means I definitely want to try more by her. I equally enjoyed researching the competition a newspaper held whilst they were serialising this story.
