Not a great book. But I did manage to finish.

The setting is interesting. A collection of tenants in a low rental London boardinghouse.

Lisa, also known as Collette, is on the run after witnessing her shady boss, Tony, beat a man to death at the Nefertiti Men’s Club.

Now her mother is dying in a nursing home and she wants to be nearby, so she rents a room in a boardinghouse that’s one step up from a homeless shelter.

The shabby home, subdivided into apartments, is owned and managed by a grossly obese man who takes advantage of his down-and-out residents:

• Hossein, who’s seeking political asylum in England
• Vesta, who’s lived in the basement apartment all her life
• Cher, a 15-year-old who’s slipped the reins of social services
• Thomas, lonely, tries to make friends with his neighbours
• Gerard

While Collette uses the money she has left, about £100,000, to evade Tony and his henchmen, the residents are dealing with backed-up drains that smell awful.

Unknown to the other residents, one of the men has been making a habit of killing young women, including Nikki, the former resident of Collette’s apartment …

Kirkus Review

I finally read the ORIGINAL in the Aunties series.

Like the sequel, very funny.

It’s like a Wedding at Bernie’s — but with frustrating, meddling, loving Indonesian sisters.

There’s a surprising amount of profanity and sexual innuendo.

“Sutanto brilliantly infuses comedy and culture into the unpredictable rom-com/murder mystery mashup as Meddy navigates familial duty, possible arrest and a groomzilla.

—USA Today (four-star review)

These books are too slow. Not enough Holmesian brilliance.

Not enough action.

A Letter of Mary is the third in the Mary Russell mystery series of novels by Laurie R. King. 

This is the first case that Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes work on together as husband and wife. …

August 1923

… an unexpected visit from Dorothy Ruskin, an elderly amateur archeologist from the Holy Land, who met the couple four and a half years earlier during the events from O Jerusalem (novel).

As a gift, Ruskin presents Russell with an inlaid box containing a papyrus scroll, which seems to be a genuine first-century letter by Mary Magdalene.

When she returns to London that evening, Ruskin is killed in a hit-and-run accident with only two witnesses.

When Holmes and Russell visit London to identify the body, they discover evidence of foul play. …

I’m thinking these Alex Cross books are getting better.

Alex Cross Must Die (2023) is quite good.

Suspend your disbelief and be entertained. 😀

“Drop whatever you’re doing, Detective Cross, and head to Reagan Airport,” DC Metro Police dispatch says. “A jet just crashed and exploded on the runway. The chief and the FBI want you and John Sampson there pronto.”

Cross and Sampson race to the crash site. The plane didn’t fail—it was shot down by a stolen Vietnam War–era machine gun. 

The list of experts who can operate the weapon is short. And time before another lethal strike runs even shorter.

Bad Blood (2010) is another intense murder mystery by John Sandford.

4th in the Virgil Flowers series.

One Sunday in late fall in southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator — and a young man hits him on the head with a t-ball bat, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he’s sure he’s dead (if the blow didn’t kill him, the smothering grain surely would), and then calls the sheriff to report the “accident.”

Suspicious, the sheriff quickly breaks the kid down… and the next day the boy’s found hanging in his cell.

Remorse? The sheriff’s not so sure, and in fact she’s beginning to wonder if one of her own men might not be responsible. She has no choice but to bring in outside help, and investigator Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is her man (in more ways than one — the sheriff’s awfully attractive, he notices).

As Virgil investigates, though, what at first seems fairly simple quickly becomes very complicated as he begins to uncover a multi-generation, multi-family conspiracy — a series of crimes of such monstrosity that, though he’s seen an awful lot in his life, even Virgil has difficulty in comprehending it… and in figuring out what to do next.

The 3rd book in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Rough Country.

The earlier books in this excellent series are not nearly as good as later ones.

To me Virgil seems very two dimensional in this one. I didn’t much care about his investigation.

Virgil’s always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he’s probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case.

While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn’t start out to be a place mostly for those with Sapphic inclinations, that’s pretty much what it is today.

Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer, and the more he digs, the move he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear.

And then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated one, the year before.

And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now.

And as for the fourth… well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens.

Because it could be his own.