July is always a busy month for me, as I try to get ahead with work so I can take time off in August. I seem to have still done a lot of reading, though! One note of warning: I don’t include plot spoilers in these reviews, but I do occasionally discuss the structure of the books I read. If knowing that sort of detail before you read something bothers you, this might not be for you.
All’s Fair in Love and Pickleball by Kate Spencer
This is a grumpy-sunshine, enemies-to-lovers romance novel set at a racquet club in California. The protagonists are the owner of said club, a pickleball enthusiast, and an ageing tennis pro who despises t…
July is always a busy month for me, as I try to get ahead with work so I can take time off in August. I seem to have still done a lot of reading, though! One note of warning: I don’t include plot spoilers in these reviews, but I do occasionally discuss the structure of the books I read. If knowing that sort of detail before you read something bothers you, this might not be for you.
All’s Fair in Love and Pickleball by Kate Spencer
This is a grumpy-sunshine, enemies-to-lovers romance novel set at a racquet club in California. The protagonists are the owner of said club, a pickleball enthusiast, and an ageing tennis pro who despises this new upstart sport. Of course, they must pair up to win a local pickleball tournament so that the prize money can save the beloved club. Of course, as they work towards this goal, they will find that they actually don’t hate each other at all...
My route to this book is a case study in parasocial connection. I have zero knowledge of or interest in pickleball, or indeed of racquet sports of any kind. I don’t even typically read sports romances. But in 2020 I got very attached to this author because she co-hosted a podcast that made me feel a bit less lonely during the various lockdowns (she isn’t on it any more, she quit in May 2024). Thanks to this residual regard, I have now read all three of her romance novels. The first was pretty good, the second was meh, and now this third one was really not for me. I’m not sure you can write a sports romance that all leads up to a climactic game of said sport and then just skip over that scene altogether, just saying what the result was afterwards in an epilogue? I don’t even care about pickleball and I felt short-changed, so I’m sure actual fans and players would find it even more irritating.
Death on the Down Beat by Sebastian Farr
This 1941 mystery novel would be a perfect gift for the classical music nerd in your life (or for you, if that’s you). I read this for my podcast episode about epistolary mysteries, and it was probably my favourite example of that “documentary” format. The story is mostly told via letters from the detective to his wife as he investigates the shooting of an orchestra conductor in a concert hall mid-performance. The shot was fired in such a way that only the members of the orchestra are viable suspects. As well as the letters, we get snatches of the Strauss score they were playing, diagrams of the stage and other pieces of evidence. This book made it feel like the weeks I spent cramming musical theory as a child were not wasted.
Rivers of London Vol. 5: Cry Fox
A new comic shop opened near me and I didn’t want to leave empty handed on my first visit, so I grabbed this Rivers of London graphic novel. I’ve read most of the full-length novels before and am currently making my way slowly through the audiobooks, so this was a nice supplement to that. I will confess that I am still slightly unsure of myself when it comes to buying books in this format. This was quite pricey, given how slender it was, and I read it in an hour at a leisurely pace, with no desire to re-read it cropping up since. Perhaps I’m more of a library reader in this format, rather than a collector.
Maigret and the Hotel Majestic by Georges Simenon
This was my first time reading a Maigret novel and I approached it with some reluctance. Simenon is a big blind spot for me in my reading of twentieth century detective fiction. I know there are lots of discerning crime fiction fans who love his work, but for some reason I’ve never tried it. I think I caught some of a radio adaptation as a teenager that made it seem very bleak and I’ve been avoiding it ever since.
Without justification, it turns out. The mystery in this 1942 story set mostly in a Parisian hotel is not especially complex, but the atmosphere and the descriptions of the city are excellent. The opening follows a hotel worker on his cycle commute from the suburbs to his workplace on the Champs-Élysées and I thought this passage was so good I read it again before I carried on. I didn’t develop any special affection for Maigret as a character but I also wasn’t irked by him. I would read another of his cases if one crosses my path in future, even though Simenon’s oeuvre is intimidatingly enormous and I don’t know how to work out which ones are good.
Bodies in a Bookshop by R.T. Campbell
Last month, I read Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson because I was doing a Green Penguin Book Club episode about another of Ferguson’s novels, The Man in the Dark*. *That’s a murder mystery set in a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road in London and, as I read, I realised that this was a setting I had encountered a fair few times in interwar mystery fiction. So I decided to make an entire podcast episode about this phenomenon. That meant scouring my shelves for any other novels that fit this theme. Bodies in a Bookshop by R.T. Campbell was the first that came to hand.
Also set in London, also concerning a bookseller found murdered in his own shop, this was probably the best novel I read in this little subgenre (as you’ll see below, I went through quite a few bookshop mysteries in a short space of time). Two things elevated this one above the rest. Firstly, I really liked the detailed picture it paints of the London book trade in 1946, complete with obscenity and censorship laws, black market dealings, and the sheer proliferation of bookshops. Secondly, I appreciated the detecting duo of Professor John Stubbs, a botanist, and his assistant Max Boyle. Stubbs is large and enthusiastic and avuncular in a way that reminds me of G.K. Chesterton or Arthur Mee, while the much younger Boyle actively hates* *him but has to keep working for him. No fawning Watsons here. Boyle’s constant sarcasm and rude asides are great and I would like to read more of this pair’s sleuthing adventures.
Beginning with a Bash by Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Another bookshop mystery, this one set in Boston in the 1930s. Much more of a ridiculous caper — it’s full of shenanigans with rival gangs, car chases, shootings, disguises and close calls with the authorities. There’s also a bit of a treasure hunt that the assembled Scooby gang of random book-shoppers and hangers-on must complete before a deadline to get an innocent man out of jail. Not my usual mystery fare, but quite jolly.
Death in a Bookstore by Augusto De Angelis
This one felt like a real find: a 1936 mystery by an Italian anti-fascist journalist, featuring a Milan-based police detective called Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi. Senator Magni, a well known and respected surgeon and politician, is found dead one morning in one of the city’s antiquarian bookshops. A rare work of sixteenth-century erotica is also missing. De Vincenzi has to navigate the political niceties of investigating such a high-profile murder while still pursuing justice. He also has to quell his own scepticism and organise a seance in order to unmask the murderer. I go into lots more detail about this book/author in the podcast episode, so have a look at that if you’re interested.
Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells
This American bookshop murder mystery, also from 1936, was probably my least favourite of the ones I read this month. It’s more sensation fiction — with kidnappings and secret soundproof rooms galore — than detective fiction. Don’t be fooled, as I was, by the cover of the 2018 reprint into thinking this is a golden age murder mystery!
The Peepshow by Kate Summerscale
I have mixed feelings about this book. It would be wrong to say that I enjoyed it, because I found the subject matter — the investigation, arrest and trial of the serial killer John Reginald Christie in London in the 1950s — extremely grim and the approach to telling the story somewhat frustrating. Yet I was compelled by the book, turning the pages rapidly and finishing it in less than two days.
I’m not an expert in the Christie case and I don’t want to become one, so I can’t comment on quality of the information relayed in this book. My main source of exasperation with the structure was Summerscale’s manipulation of the information to provide a twist at the end. I know this is basically a requirement of the “serious” true crime book these days (mostly thanks to her own The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, actually) but it felt especially thin and forced in *The Peepshow. *The “revelation” was just one of many conflicting statements made by the accused, but without compelling additional evidence this one was removed from the chronology and shared late on to provide an extra thrill.
Where this book succeeds is in the choice to tell it from the perspectives of two observers, the crime reporter Harry Proctor and true crime writer F. Tennyson Jesse. Both were present for the trial, both published material about it at the time and afterwards, and both found themselves profoundly emotionally affected by it. Summerscale does a decent job of taking Proctor and Jesse’s writings and weaving them into a cohesive narrative so that they feel like the primary sources for a bigger piece of work, rather than extracts of memoirs or articles. The sense of immediacy she achieves through this technique is impressive. I think with a better structure and without the insistence on forcing the eleventh-hour revelation, this could have been a good book.
Wilkie Collins: The BBC Radio Collection
Does this count as a book? It should — it’s 24 hours long, altogether. I borrowed this chunky collection of Collins radio adaptions on my library app because I was making the aforementioned podcast episode about epistolary crime fiction and I wanted a way to revisit The Moonstone* *that didn’t involve me having to physically read *The Moonstone. *Then I got hooked and kept listening — there are versions of The Woman in White, No Name and plenty of other novels and short stories included in this bundle. I am famously picky about narrators as well and found myself well pleased: Sophie Thompson, David Suchet and Toby Stephens all appear at various points and not once did I get annoyed and want to switch it off. If your library has this collection or you have an audiobook credit going spare, this is a lot of hours of entertainment for a single loan/purchase.
Small Bomb At Dimperley by Lissa Evans
This is a mostly-comic novel set in 1945 about a family of minor aristocrats grappling with the post-WW2 reality. Their peculiar hodge-podge of a country house desperately needs money spent on it that they don’t have and all around them estates are being shuttered or sold off. The new baronet is 23, just back from the war and has little interest in any of it, while his mother is desperate to marry him off to a county girl with money in the bank so they don’t have to sell. Meanwhile, a single mother named Zena has been living at Dimperley for the last few years of the war, acting as secretary to an eccentric uncle and quietly observing all that goes on. When an unexploded bomb is found, it ends up revealing secrets that nobody wanted out in the open.
There is something a little bit Eva Ibbotson, or maybe Barbara Pym, about this book, which is about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of fiction. It elevates ordinariness and unnoticed acts of generosity in a way that I find very charming. However, as I read I had the lingering feeling that it was only about 80 per cent as good as it could have been. Certain plot elements needed to be a little more intense and a little more ridiculous so that the eventual catharsis was fully satisfying. Still, because of my intense Ibbotson fandom, I’m hard to please; this is a good novel. More than anything, I’m so happy that fiction of this type — not high-flown “literary”, nor strongly pulling from the tropes of a clearly-defined genre like mystery or what used to be called “book club” — is being published. Well-written, clever, interesting prose about undramatic yet meaningful events that happened to have occurred in the past, without murders or fairies or young women having traumatic affairs with much older men. What do we call that, these days?
No Wind of Blame by Georgette Heyer
This is the silliest Heyer detective novel I have read yet. It’s all the better for its absurdity. Since I’ve been reading all of her crime stuff in order this year for a future podcast episode, I was getting a little tired of the template she followed in the last few (suburban or almost-rural setting, unpleasant family, everyone has a motive, and so on). This one has a murder method that, I have since learned, Heyer’s husband Ronald Rougier devised and which she claimed to not really understand even after she had finished writing the book. There’s also a fortune-hunting Russian prince and a young woman who treats the world as her perpetual stage, inventing a new and different character to portray in every conversation she has. Great fun.
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
When I re-read a Christie novel, I rarely feel neutral about the experience. I tend to come away either disappointed or glowing with the realisation that the book in question was so much better than I remembered. This was an example of the latter effect. I don’t recall having much to say in the past on this 1952 whodunnit about the brutal murder of a cleaning lady. Now, I think it might be a candidate for a list of the top ten Christies of all time.
Maid of the Abbey by Elsie J. Oxenham
I’m a Chalet School fan (listen to this for more on that) and since there are 58 novels in that series, I’ve never felt the need to dive into any of the other major twentieth century school story canons. I was aware of Elsie J. Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Angela Brazil, but had never read any of their work. Then I bought this book secondhand on a whim and now I’m falling down the rabbit-hole of another boarding school universe. It’s a delicious feeling.
Oxenham is primarily known for the Abbey series, which has 38 books in its main arc and then another ~45 of what are called “Abbey Connectors” — that is, spin off or prequel series that intersect in some way with the main characters. The MCU has nothing on Elsie J. Oxenham. I really gave myself a challenge by starting with this, the 28th book in the main series, but thanks to the very comprehensive Wikipedia coverage and this equally exhaustive blog, I was able to get up to speed fairly quickly.
Unlike the Chalet School, the Abbey series isn’t really centred around a boarding school so much as a Cistercian abbey. A loosely-connected group of girls and young women revolve around these romantic ruins. Some of them do go to school together early on, some of them are cousins, friends, neighbours, long-lost relations, etc. The important thing is that they believe in the spirit of this abbey and this causes them to hold themselves to high standards of public service and personal ethics. Oxenham also wove into the series her own interest in English folk dancing and folk music (I think she knew Cecil Sharp) as well as the American “Camp Fire” movement (a bit like Girl Guides??). If this all sounds random then you probably aren’t a habitual reader of early twentieth century English school stories. It just somehow... works. At least for me. Now I have to restrain myself from going on eBay and buying all the others. I don’t have space!
That was, belatedly, my reading for July: 14 books, bringing me up to 74 for the year to date. I’m a little ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.
This month’s reading was rather dominated by the bookshop mysteries, but I found some balance by adding in the Kate Summerscale non-fiction book (which, although crime-related, wasn’t something I read specifically for the podcast) and the non-crime wonder that was Small Bomb at Dimperley. Discovering the Abbey series is probably going to end up as a highlight for the year, too.
If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I’m reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don’t publish any reviews there.
Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.