Month: April 2021

Partners in Crime: The Ambassador’s Boots

Summary: The new U. S. Ambassador to Britain confides to the Beresfords that on the voyage there someone substituted another travel bag for his, a bag that only contained his boots.

Self, you may go back to this blog some years hence (if the code rot hasn’t claimed it yet!) and say ‘strange, there was an unusually long period between updates and then all at once one day!’ and this episode is why. There’s a scene where one of Tuppence’s friends is wearing a lovely suit and calling the others ‘chums’ and all that and despite some eugenics issues (sigh) it’s generally a delightful character moment and you were like ‘oh I NEED to get a screencapture of that’ and you never did and then it was a whole month later?

Anyway, that’s what happened. And you liked this episode. Except for the part where you knew it was a fake out at one part but for some reason the acting made it seem like it was Albert’s scheme to get noticed by his bosses, not someone else’s scheme.

Think of England by KJ Charles

Summary: England, 1904. Two years ago, Captain Archie Curtis lost his friends, fingers, and future to a terrible military accident. Alone, purposeless and angry, Curtis is determined to discover if he and his comrades were the victims of fate, or of sabotage.

Curtis’s search takes him to an isolated, ultra-modern country house, where he meets and instantly clashes with fellow guest Daniel da Silva. Effete, decadent, foreign, and all-too-obviously queer, the sophisticated poet is everything the straightforward British officer fears and distrusts.

As events unfold, Curtis realizes that Daniel has his own secret intentions. And there’s something else they share—a mounting sexual tension that leaves Curtis reeling.

As the house party’s elegant facade cracks to reveal treachery, blackmail and murder, Curtis finds himself needing clever, dark-eyed Daniel as he has never needed a man before…

 

Well, I read the sequel to this first (Proper English, about Fen and Pat who are in this as well) and was like ‘well I’d certainly like to see more!’ so I picked this up! Even though both involve a good deal of death and blackmail, the mysteries had very different tones to them. Especially since partway through, this one turns into a spy caper.

I have a confession: I have gone the whole book without looking up what a ‘dago’ is and I’m pretty sure it’s nothing nice.

Man. The moment where the POV stops calling the love interest by the surname and by his first, that’s A+ right there.

It had an amazingly gory end. A ‘I really really was not expecting that’ level of gory.

Overall I think Proper English was more my speed, but I definitely enjoyed reading this one and was disappointed to find out there was no further ones in the series. I’ll just have to try her other books.

Ghost Twins #1

Ghost Twins: Mystery at Kickingbird Lake

Summary: The former home of the Ghost Twins, Robbie and Beka, and Thatch, the Ghost Dog, is now a rental at the Kickingbird Lake Resort. First visitors: the Shook Family. And a cat? Poor Thatch! The Shook kids find a treasure at the lake. It belongs to the Ghost Twins—and they want it back . . . .

So this is a fairly lighthearted and small ‘oh we’re just ghost kids having antics!’ book which was a perfectly fine quick read but it has the added bonus that if you read it from Kim Shook’s perspective, it’s actually a horror story where she nearly dies in a horrible accident… POSSIBLY CAUSED BY MURDER GHOSTS.

So definitely an A+ book and going on my horror shelf.