Kerry Greenwood - The Phryne Fisher Mysteries

I've just read my way through the entire Phryne Fisher Mysteries. They're wonderful!

I really enjoyed the glimpses into the past, the little things that make books special - the brand of perfume, the mode of dress, the type of car, Protestant versus Catholic, the political landscape, the rise of the union & the beginning of the global recession.

I love Greenwood's views on World War 1 - the war to end all wars. It didn't end anything, it set the groundwork for the next 100 years of war. We're still dealing with the fallout from the decisions made in the Versailles Treaty.

It's amazing how human Phryne's character is, with all her flaws and yet so strong and sincere at such a young age - the character is only 28, but she seems to think she is so old and mature, and back then she was.

Her sexual escapades are not for the prude-hearted, she takes on new lovers, discards old lovers and does not apologise for being who she is - a strong, independent, sexual woman of the 1920s, a time not known for women's liberation. I adore her. Phryne brings the 1920s Melbourne alive. I can almost see her as she drives her Hispano-Suiza down St. Kilda's streets, solving crimes and helping people.

I've watched some of the television episodes, but they do not compare to the books for storyline or detail. If you want to meet the real Phryne Fisher, read the books! With her pearl-handled pistol, her Gitanes and silk underwear, her love of cocktails and her belief in doing what is right - even if the law says it is wrong.

Janet Evanovich - Sizzling Sixteen (2010)

This is, obviously, the 16th book in the Stephanie Plum series. Evanovich writes fun books. They follow a similar pattern each time - Stephanie, the worst bounty hunter ever, gets into lots of trouble and, with lots of luck plus a little help from Ranger, Lula, Morelli or any other friend who is unlucky enough to come across her path, gets out of it again.

It's why I like the books. They're comfort books where you know what will happen and there are no surprises. Sometimes you just don't want a book to challenge you and make you think. Sometimes you want a book to make you laugh and whisk you away into someone else's life where the problems are on a different scale to normal life and the race to fix them is chaotic, ludicrous and utterly hilarious. My favourite character has to be Grandma Mazur. I'd love to have a nutty bright pink lycra wearing Grandma like her. There's never a dull moment when she's around, especially when she's got her gun. Just keep her away from the roast chicken if you ever want to eat it.

I love the Stephanie Plum books. I've read some bad reviews where people complain that nothing changes - but we don't want change! Stephanie Plum fans love Evanovich's books because she knows what we want and she gives it to us, with a side order of Cluck-in-a-Bucket and a large box of donuts. Oh, that reminds me - don't read these books if you're on a diet. The constant eating in them will break any will you've mustered and have you dining at the nearest donuts shop. Mmmmm, donuts!

Lorna Barrett - Chapter & Hearse (2010)

This is Barrett's fourth book in her Booktown Mysteries series. It's part of the Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries that are based around different things, like tea, a diner, cooking, a bookshop and many others. Most of them are a fun read. They're gentle crime mysteries, no gore or anything confronting. Just nice relaxing reads with new blends on the old Agatha Christie style.

This series in set in a small town that was financially going under, so the council had the unique idea of turning it into a book town with lots of specialty bookshops. One of the bookstore owners they enticed into the town is the character Tricia Miles who runs the mystery bookstore 'Haven't Got A Clue'. Miles tends to fall into mysteries and trip over dead bodies as she tries to run her store amongst police harassment and town gossip whilst solving murders to clear her name or her friends.

In book four Tricia gets herself involved in a gas explosion and murder as she tries to protect her sister, cookbook store owner Angelica, from a crazed stalker whilst attempting to help her friends hold onto their businesses in a town that's not doing as well as the council would like it to. Accompanied by her cat, Miss Marple, she unwillingly falls in and out of scrapes like a bumbling middle-aged sleuth who'd rather be curled up with the latest edition off her shelves.

The series is a fun read. Great for that relaxing evening spent at home or the rainy day where you just want to curl up quietly in a warm chair by a rain-soaked window and get lost in a little mystery.

C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts (2010)

Cate Murphy is one of my favourite author's. This is book 5 in her Walker Papers series.
The stories revolve around Joanne Walker, a Seattle police detective and reluctant, but powerful, shaman. Walker finds herself battling the forces of evil in the Seattle area as she attempts to do her job as a cop and protect people. Not that she goes looking for bad things, mostly they find her and she'd rather they left her alone. But her shamanic abilities are strong, if untrained, and it's like a beacon for things that go bump in the night.

The books are well-written. Murphy is big on detail and she never loses the aim of the story. There's no unnecessary detours or characters that appear for a few chapters and then suddenly disappear without explanation. It's hard to keep a series going and keep it interesting, especially when you need to come up with a new 'baddie' in every book, but Murphy succeeds.

Agatha Christie - Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (1985)

I really enjoyed these short stories. Most of them were told by The Tuesday Night Club, a regular group of meetings at Miss Marple's home to drink sherry and talk about murder mysteries. All of the mysteries baffled the tellers when they occurred and some of the murderers escaped justice. But, as Miss Marple says, there's always justice, it just comes in different forms.

What was great about this book was that Christie would have one of the characters tell the tale and give all the clues and you'd have the chance to work out who the murderer was, and how they murdered, just like the other characters - only without the sherry and Miss Marple. I managed to completely work out half of the murders and a few more I guessed, but several left me baffled until Miss Marple would provide the solution and then I'd have a Doh! moment as everything fell into place.

They were a lot of fun and great for when you're waiting and just need to fill a few minutes of time. Each story is only a few pages long and focuses completely on each mystery. I noticed that one of them was used in the latest Miss Marple television episode "The Secret of Chimneys". They took the tale "The Herb of Death" and mixed it with a non-Marple novel, Chimneys, which had very little resemblance to its original story. It wasn't very well done, they would have been better off sticking to the actual story, which was more interesting, but that's television.

Charlaine Harris - Aurora Teagarden Mysteries

I was pulled deeply into these mysteries. I love the way Harris allows her characters to mentally and emotionally develop over the course of a series. I could feel Aurora go from a somewhat shy librarian, often in the shadow of everyone else, to a strong independent woman who could handle anything thrown at her. She's brave, caring, intelligent and compassionate - these qualities only increase as Aurora develops through each hardship. Harris truly knows how to write real people. Not that Aurora is completely like anyone I know, I'd have to live in Georgia for those rare cultural characteristics to be familiar to me. I guess what I'm saying is Aurora has that southern charm that we often hear about in movies, but rarely get to read about or experience for ourselves - until this series.

There are eight books in the series, each with a centrical murder or murders. Sometimes people are murdered for a reason - greed, secrets, madness, obsession - others are murder without reason, the hardest for families to cope with. Aurora always finds herself involved, like a magnet pointing due north, she's just drawn to them. Which is unsurprising considering her hobby is to read about real murders - and that's how book 1 begins.

These books are well worth reading if you enjoy crime novels without gore and with a strong female character unconventionally solving murders as best she can. Not that each book is wrapped up at the end in a neat comforting bow of good triumphing over evil. They're just like life - sometimes you have to choose your battles, because you really cannot win every single one.

(I couldn't fit the images of every cover, so I've just chosen my favourite three.)

1. Real Murders
2. A Bone to Pick
3. Three Bedrooms, One Corpse
4. The Julius House
5. Dead Over Heels
6. A Fool and His Honey
7. Last Scene Alive
8. Poppy Done to Death

Victoria Laurie - Ghouls Gone Wild (2010)

This is book four in a previously great series. I know I say that too often, but it's true. After the second book only a truly dedicated author keeps the character development consistent enough to bring it off. Otherwise you end up with a book that has all the same names as the previous books, but the characters have all new personalities and the relationships are dropped (as in, they were deeply in love in book three, but the start of book four gives a paragraph about how it has all fallen apart and therefore makes it okay for him/her to cheat - umm, not!) so you're all confused and disappointed and left feeling like you missed the end of the movie and will never be able to see it again. What kind of editor would okay this?

The book was still good. It was creepy and tense, but the baddie is blatantly obvious from the first chapter and you find yourself yelling at the book everytime the main characters do something stupidly illogical and utterly out-of-character - even disregarding things that have been pointedly told to them which would have solved the mystery a hundred pages ago. Also, the supporting characters reactions to blair-witch situations were overly blase. I think there were just too many characters in this book and not enough room to develop them. It would have been better to cut them out and deepen the actions of the main characters. Still, I loved the main character, M.J.'s, verbal attack and non-violent solution to the character who was terrorising animals. Perfect.

The main character is M.J Holliday, she's a medium who generally runs a ghostbusting business with her friend Gilley, but, unfortunately, finds herself filming a ghostly program with another medium, Heath, in the haunted wilds of Scotland. The plot was great. It alone made the book worth reading and put me off going to Scotland any time soon. So if you like ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump, screech and threaten-bloody-murder in the night try book one - What's A Ghoul To Do? And if you like the character Steven, M.J.'s boyfriend and investor in the business, give book four a miss and pretend they lived happily ever after at the end of book three.

Wendy Roberts - Dead And Kicking (2009)

I'm enjoying this series, even though I do not much like the personality of the main character - Sadie Novak, crime scene cleaner and ghost whisperer. It almost felt like there should be an exclamation point after that, but she really does leave me slightly underwhelmed. So no exclamation point for her. One for me, though!

Seriously - it's a fantastic series and this is the third book in. I really like the plot. It's mildly scary and definitely hard to pick the real baddies - rare for most crime books. I love the rabbit, Hairy - a very fitting name, and I liked Sadie much better in books one and two. She was less perfect, more frightened and uncertain, but still determined to do the right thing. Until book three - she's still frightened, but she's bordering on the kind of arrogant perfection that makes your teeth ache. I hope book four brings her back down-to-earth, so to speak, and returns her to her bumbling, anxious, less-than-perfect self. Honestly, a ghost is trying to kill you and you worry about eating a biscuit because you haven't jogged in a few days? Puh-leez! Focus girl!

So who is Sadie? She's a 30-something who can speak to ghosts and send them on their merry way to whatever afterlife awaits them. Unfortunately she often has to solve their murders before they'll leave - and Seattle seems to have a lot of murders. Which is how Sadie, the crime-scene cleaning lady (honestly was her name a coincidence or is the author a John Farnham fan?) tends to meet her often less-than-friendly ghosts.

How did she get this curse/gift? It's passed down through the family. When the current ghost whisperer dies a new one is called. It's like vampire slayers - only you often look like you're talking to and fighting yourself. Sadie's Uncle, who spent most of his life in an asylum, passed it to Sadie's brother Brian, who promptly killed himself, leaving Sadie reigning ghostbuster to dead Seattlites.

Honestly, try Book 1 - The Remains of the Dead, it won't disappoint.

Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare's Landlord (1996)

I really liked this book and the character, Lily Bard. Her life and her faith were completely destroyed, so she re-built her life somewhere new and made damn sure she'd never be a victim again. Lily is a strong character who thinks logically and tends to constantly be on her guard. Harris was consistent with Lily's character through most of the book. I'm still not understanding why she suddenly jumps into bed with some guy after all the hell she's been through, but it didn't derail the plot too much.

Harris writes excellent books. I'm used to her books having underlying supernatural themes, but this one was pure non-supernatural human crime. There's a murder and the finger points at all the wrong people before it lands on the real killer. The reasoning behind the killing was brilliant. I could completely understand what could lead a person to take that action and I felt a little pity for the killer at the end of the book.

The supporting character's weren't filled out, but that really helped show Lily's life. She was a loner, living on the edge of society, while playing her part in it. There are four other books in this series and I'm going to order them right now. I really like Lily and I hope Harris is consistent in her development of Lily's character. I want to see Lily get more of her life back. I want her to have some peace.