A couple of murder mysteries

I'm just back from four days in Cornwall, had a lovely time seeing my Cornish family down there and made the most of it because it's clearly going to be a while before we can go again. My husband is 'at risk' from the corona virus, with a heart condition and diabetes, and as such we'll have to isolate ourselves for the duration. I won't be bored... books and book blogging, jigsaws, knitting, cooking, the garden, social media... but I will badly miss my daughters and grandkids. We're a close knit family who support each other in everything and that will be a loss. Still, it's necessary and this too shall pass.

I have a couple of crime book reviews to catch up on, first up, Castle Skull: A Rhineland Mystery by John Dickson Carr. This is my 3rd. book for the European Reading challenge covering the country of 'Germany'.

Fifteen years ago a flamboyant stage magician, Malegar, died when he either fell or was pushed from a moving train. Now an actor friend of his, Myron Alison, has died, set alight and burned to death on the battlements of Malegar's old home, Castle Skull. French detective, Henri Bencolin, and his associate Marle (the narrator of the story) are asked to go to the castle, near Coblenz on the Rhine, to investigate. They stay opposite the castle in the home of the dead man, Alison, which is now being lived in by his sister, Agatha. A whole list of suspects are also staying, along with Bencolin and Marle... can the two men, plus the German police, get to the bottom of this mystery?

There's a lot more to this story than I've outlined, to be honest I found the plot quite hard to follow, overly melodramatic, and was constantly confused as who was who and what happened when. My confusion did clear as the book moved on and I did begin to enjoy it a bit more. But I never did take to the detective, Bencolin, didn't feel that his character was fleshed out at all and mostly the book was inhabited by a large cast of very unpleasant people. What did come over strongly was a sense of the Rhine, the dangers of the river, its moods, the high cliffs and hills on either side, the traffic on it and so on. I enjoyed that aspect more than the mystery if I'm honest and will see if I can see any non-fiction books about the river and its history.


Next, Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell, I saw this reviewed on Pat's blog and thought it sounded rather good: it was.

Laurel Mack's teenage daughter, Ellie, went missing ten years ago. The family, Laurel, her husband, Paul, and two older teenage children, basically imploded. The marriage slowly fell apart and the two older children moved out as soon as they could. Ellie disappeared off the face of the Earth that day but Laurel has never given up hope that she will be found alive or at the very least her body found so that the family can have closure. She's having coffee in a café one day when a man walks in and starts to chat to her. He's Floyd, an American, and gradually the two begin a relationship. The odd thing is, he has a nine year old daughter, Poppy, who, shockingly, looks just like Ellie. How can this possibly be?

I read this in two sittings and actually had to make myself stop the first session and go and cook a meal. It really is a pageturner. And different as there aren't any police or private investigators, just Laurel trying to sort her life out and be normal for the first time in ten years, but this question of what happened to Ellie, unsurprisingly, just won't go away. The book is quite agonising to be honest because of course the reader knows or can guess at things that Laurel can't see. There are multiple viewpoints but it's not confusing, very cleverly done in fact. In essence, a scary, psychological sort of book... not always my thing but this one worked very well indeed for me.

I hope everyone who visits and reads this blog stays safe. A few of us have decided to try and post more often during this crisis to keep people's spirits up, please join us! Judith at Reader in the Wilderness plans to start a Friday meme so go and read her initial post about it here. It sounds like a lot of fun and we all need that at the moment. Take care.

~~~oOo~~~