Mystery Novels

A fun British mystery series you need to read

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I just finished the third installment in the Thursday Murder Club series, called The Bullet That Missed. If you haven’t read anything in this series, and you enjoy British mystery novels, I highly recommend you check them out.

The first two, The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice were wonderfully narrated by Lesley Manville and that’s how I read them, as audiobooks.

The most recent novel, The Bullet That Missed, I read in the actual hardcover book format because it was available to borrow at my local public library. The members of the Thursday Murder Club: Joyce, Ron, Elizabeth, and Ibrahim continue to surprise and delight with their resourcefulness, ruthlessness, clear-eyed take on mortality, and ability to enjoy life and each other while solving crimes.

This mystery finds the four members working together to save lives and catch a potential murderer, with help from local cops, children and grandchildren. Their interactions with technology like Zoom and Instagram are hilarious. If you are in their age group or have older friends or relatives who are, you might nod your head.

The fourth in the series, called The Last Devil To Die comes out on September 19, 2023. And I look forward to reading it!

Let me know in comments if you’ve read any of the Thursday Murder Club series.

And if you’d like to get monthly reading recommendations, book talk videos and blogs, and have access to a monthly book discussion on Zoom, join the Kindred Spirits Literary Society on Patreon.

The Heron’s Cry, A Book Review

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*This post contains Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I will receive a small compensation at no extra cost to you. This helps keep my blog ad-free.

What I enjoy in each book by Ann Cleeves is her cast of troubled, quirky, fascinating, and lovable characters combined with a satisfying murder to solve.

Just as she’s done in her Shetland and Vera Stanhope series, her new Two Rivers series provides characters I care about and mysteries that stump me every time.

DI Matthew Venn lives with his husband, Jonathan, in a house by the seashore. Matthew’s religious past still haunts him, but he makes a very good detective. Jonathan runs a local non-profit called “The Woodyard” that employs differently-abled people through a café and provides studio space and hosts events for local artists. The murders in The Heron’s Cry do involve The Woodyard and artists, just like the first book did.

Detective Jen Rafferty, a single mother of two teens, also features in this book. She does excellent detective work and feels guilty that she can’t spend as much time with her kids as she’d like.

The Heron’s Cry begins early on with a ghastly murder that leads Matthew and the team to interview families of people who died by suicide and to investigate the health care facilities that treated them. They uncover a dark online club, the true story behind an incident in the past, and find the trail that points them to the person who connects it all together. Will they solve the case before yet another murder is committed?

If you like Ann Cleeves’ books, you will enjoy The Heron’s Cry. The release date is September 7, 2021. (If you like these books, there is good news: The Long Call, the first book in this series, is being made into a new TV series to be released on BritBox in early 2022!!!)