Isabelle Goddard

Reluctantly, Jack Carrington has been dragged into helping organize a crime conference in the village of Abbeymead, complete with several authors of crime fiction giving talks and other delights. Flora Steele, on the other hand, is happy to be able to set up a booksellers booth at the conference, while a new acquaintance, Rose Lawson, looks after Flora’s bookstore. Meanwhile, Maud Frobisher has placed her mobile library van at the venue to promote her services as well. It turns out that Maud has come across a rare first edition of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” which she hopes to auction off in order to raise money for the mobile library, but before that can happen, she is found dead in the van and the rare book gone. The police believe that Maud’s assistant must have done it, but Jack and Flora realize that many more people could have had the opportunity, and the motive….This is the eighth book in the Flora Steele cozy series, set in late 1950s England and featuring the very plucky Flora Steele and her fiance, crime writer Jack Carrington. Their relationship has grown throughout the series, which is nice to see, but I like that the solving of the mystery is given more weight than the romance. The main characters and their friends are also likable and interesting, and the setting of a small village in the 1950s is well depicted. I think one could pick up this book without having first read the previous seven, although most likely the reader would then want to go back to the beginning (“The Bookshop Murder”) to better understand the relationships between Flora, Jack and the rest of the village; recommended.… (meer)

cozy-mystery, bookmobile, bookseller, england, village, first-edition, theft, murder, investigation, amateur-sleuth, fiance, local-law-enforcement, 1950s, twisty, friendship, rural, famous-author, local-gossip, relationships, threats, suspense, suspicion, writers, wry-humor

Flora and Jack involve themselves into the murder of their beloved librarian and theft of a valuable first edition during a crime author seminar. Old friends and new contribute to the red herrings and twists. Several people turned out to be in serious need of money and there was that near miss that injured Jack. Very well done!
I requested and received a temporary digital ARC of this book from Bookouture via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!
Pub Date 20 Feb 2024… (meer)

Flora Steele has agreed to accompany her boyfriend, writer Jack Carrington, to France after he is summoned there by his mother, who claims that someone is out to harm her and who has just barely survived being run over by a car in Paris, an accident in which her companion did not survive. Flora knows that her ex-boyfriend is in France and wants to take her to a cemetery where he swears he has seen her parents’ graves, but she is suspicious of that story and of him. Upon arrival in Provence, however, both Flora and Jack have to reassess their assumptions about how truthful the stories they have been told actually are, and who is indeed in danger…. This is the seventh Flora Steele cozy, set in 1957; usually the tales are based in an English village, but this one takes our heroine (and hero) into France instead. I liked the interplay between the characters, and the story of the Italian Count to whom Jack’s mother is affianced and his rather nutty family is entertaining. But I expect authors who write historical novels to have done their homework, and this book gets a half-star off its rating (to 2 /12 rather than 3) because of bringing in the use of “the Heimlich Maneuver” to save someone from drowning, not noting that this was first described in 1974, almost 20 years after the period in which the book is set, and also it is effective when a person is choking, not drowning. That slip-up really disappointed me as I’d believed Ms. Allingham’s rendering of 1950s England (or, in this case, France) to be reasonably accurate and now I’m not sure how much I’d trust any other books in this series. A shame, really, in more than one sense of the word.… (meer)