Books read in July

Heavens above, has another month really come and gone? Apparently so. I was busy, so reading took a bit of a back seat and just four books were read. These are they:

37. The Ghost Fields - Elly Griffiths

38. Heirs of the Body - Carola Dunn

39. The Hanging Wood - Martin Edwards, book five in the Lake District series.

This one starts with a young woman, Orla Payne, committing suicide by jumping into a silo full of grain on her father's farm. Her brother, Callum, had dissappeared when he was fourteen and Orla seven. She has never stopped looking for him. At her place of work, a residential library, is a man who looks so much like Callum that Orla thought it might be him. Who is he? Hannah Scarlett is given a week to look into the disappearance of Callum. The case is and was complicated with many of the close-knit community involved and clearly keeping things back. Daniel Kind is also drawn into the investigation as he was a friend of Orla's. Hannah, now free, or free-ish, is reluctant to start anything with Daniel until she's sorted her head and heart out. But she certainly has no objection to working with him on this extremely difficult case. A good instalment of this excellent series, so glad I got back to it after a couple of years. I managed to follow the plot despite lots of different characters, all seemingly related by blood or marriage, muddying the waters and requiring a bit of concentration. Good writing, a bit of sexual tension, and a terrific sense of place.

40. Play with Fire - Dana Stabenow, book five in the Kate Shugak series.

Picking mushrooms out in the wilds of Alaska with friends, Kate Shugak finds a body in the ashes of an area that was burnt by a wildfire some months ago. A day or so later she's approached by a ten year old boy. Matthew Seabolt lives with his grandfather, Reverand Seabolt, a fundamentalist Christian. His father, Daniel, a teacher, disappeared at the time of the fire but no one reported him missing: the boy wants Kate to find him. It's clear that the body is Daniel Seabolt but he didn't get caught in the fire - he died of anaphylactic shock, completely naked. The authorities don't think the death is suspicious but Kate is convinced it is. Looking into the teacher's background she finds there are many questions but can she get the village community to answer any of them? Another excellent Kate Shugak outing. In this book we find out a lot about Kate's history... how she coped when she left her Native Alaskan community to go to college in the city for instance. All very interesting. The murder mystery is perhaps a little predictable, it's fairly clear what happened from early on but when the precise circumstances were revealed, at the end, I did find it quite shocking. From a fairly average beginning this series just gets better and better.

So that was my July reading. I'm not going to name a favourite as all four books were very much on a par quality-wise... all excellent, all well written, all just what I needed. Basically, because I was busy, I stuck to tried and tested crime series that I knew I would enjoy plus knew I needed to catch up on. I shall probably continue with that in August. I'm currently reading one of Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books, O Jerusalem! This is a series I've long neglected, which is a shame as the book is really good. Perhaps it's not such a bad idea if you get a bit jaded with a series to leave it for a year or two before you go back to it. That seems to have worked very nicely for me.

~~~oOo~~~