Snapshot Reviews: Mysteries

I have been a bad blogger. I am remiss in my reviewing.

I have a hard time reviewing books; I mean, who really cares what I think? But to technically finish most of my challenges, reviews are required. Besides, I know that I like to know what my friends think about books, it helps keep me from wasting my time! So I am doing a few quick reviews of my recent reads.

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey: This was a very different sort of mystery; no crime occurred until very late in the book, and yet I enjoyed it quite a bit. The setting was interesting, being set in a College of Physical Training for young ladies in the first half of the 20th century. (In fact, I found the setting interesting enough that I found a book on this aspect of British education and it's impact on women's lives that I want to read.)
This is a quiet book. Lots of observation of characters. I am finding that I enjoy Josephine Tey quite a bit. Four stars.
 (Note: There are occasional glimpses of historically accurate yet still disturbing ways of thinking, such as when the very lovely protagonist describes a dress as "nigger brown." It is jarring. I see a lot of this in British writing from that era.)

A Christmas Hope by Anne Perry: I received this book as a review copy, so I supposed I'd better review it! I really like Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries, but I had never read any of her Christmas series. After this one, I will.
Claudine is a comfortable, well-to-do lady who is only really happy when she is volunteering at Hester Monk's clinic, a place very familiar to Perry fans. In this story she stands up to society to save the life of a man wrongfully accused of murder. The story was well-done and enjoyable.
Four stars.

The Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth: Even though Agatha Christie was writing in the same era as Patricia Wentworth, her books don't read as dated as Wentworth's do. This was a perfectly acceptable, if outlandish, story. I will probably try another of Wentworth's Miss Silver books at some point, and see if they are better than this one.
Three stars.

Book Review: Murder on Monday by Ann Purser

You know how it is when you finish a book one day and you don't remember all that much about it the next? Yeah. That.

This book is a mystery of the cozy variety, set in an English village, with an amateur sleuth. (This one is a cleaning lady for several houses in the village.) There were a number of things that kept this book from being an intro to a new repeat-read author for me. The story was very slow. It seemed like the book could easily have been about 2/3 the length that it was. There were lots of not-all-that-likeable characters. And unfortunately, the protagonist was chief among them. (She had a bad attitude and was, arguably, not a great parent.)

I sensed the solution about halfway through the book, but felt like the windup was almost too fast, especially given the slowness of the rest of the book.

The book wasn't awful. The writing was fine. It just wasn't my cup of tea.
Three stars.