Marty Wingate

This is a marvelous story of found family. It's beautiful on many levels. I've only known Ms. Wingate as a writer of cozy mysteries, and she has branched out to historical fiction with this one, and to my mind, reached a higher level.

Olive lives a shrinking life in post-war England. The man she intended to marry died early in the war. Then her brother, her only sibling, died at Dunkirk. Her father was unable to cope and took to his bed, wasting away with grief and anger, as Olive and her show more mother nursed him, and then he passed. Lastly Olive's mother has just died after a lingering illness. Olive has lost her purpose and has no inheritance, and no particular skills beyond cooking/housekeeping/invalid care. But then her old friend Margery returns to their coastal town from London, where she went at the start of the war. Her uncle who raised her has passed away, and left her his home, Mersea House, and his general store business. Unhappy in London, Margery has come back to take over and modernize the store, despite some local opposition to a female businesswoman and her new ideas. And she wants to run the large house as a boarding home, and sees Olive as the perfect housekeeper/manager. The job is a godsend for Olive, Margery starts by bringing two tenants from London, and off we go. Then the bombshell. Margery is told that she is the legal guardian of an 11-year-old orphan, Juniper, that she didn't even know existed. Juniper is the daughter of Margery's first love, and neither he nor his late wife had relatives. When Juniper was 4, she was stricken with polio and her mother passed away with it. She has been in hospitals and foster homes ever since. She can't walk without braces and crutches, and her father could not cope with her at home. He has now passed and here we are.

How this group comes together, bonds as a family, and builds a home for themselves is a warm and wonderful tale. Ms. Wingate has done a good deal of research on the challenges that polio survivors faced in those days before the Salk vaccine. It rings very true with stories my mother would tell of the "summer plague" that was so widespread and frightening when she was a child. So overall, I loved this book. show less

I’ve loved both of Marty Wingate’s Birds of a Feather cozies, The Rhyme of the Magpie and Empty Nest; however, Every Trick in the Rook simply didn’t measure up to the first two. It just seemed so contrived. Julia Lanchester, tourism director at Smeaton-under-Lyme, Suffolk, has been happy with both her job and her live-in boyfriend, Michael Sedgwick. Unfortunately, Julia’s ex-husband, gone for five years, turns up one day and gets killed at the estate where she works. The gutter press show more focuses attention on Michael as a probable suspect and …

…And then the novel veers off course. Michael leaves both Julia and his job working for Julia’s father to lead the tabloid press away from Julia and Rupert Lanchester? Really? Does this make any sense? Why wouldn’t they just stake out both sites? And since when does the murder of a two-bit bird scientist start a press feeding frenzy anywhere? It’s not like Julia is Kim Kardashian. Rupert, while the beloved, longtime host of a BBC Two nature show A Bird in the Hand, would get no more attention than Bill Nye the Science Guy should his family suffer the loss of a no-name ex-son-in-law. Let’s face it: The gutter press doesn’t operate like this. They save their venom for someone who might actually sell newspapers, not a non-celebrity.

I’m not giving anything away — well, not much anyway — as all of this occurs by about 15 percent into the ebook. One implausible event or character leads to another culminating in an implausible climax near the end. I still love Julia Lanchester, but she’s even more self-doubting, impulsive, and whiney than usual. I hope that she — and author Marty Wingate — can get their acts together before book No. 4. They’ve both been so wonderful thus far that I’m hopeful enough that I’ll be back for that novel, despite the flaws of this one.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group, and Alibi Alibi in exchange for an honest review. show less

Curator Hayley Burke is excited by the prospect of staging an exhibition of Lady Georgiana Fowling’s first editions in a posh hall in Bath, although the task is a daunting one. She manages to recruit Oona Atherton, an exhibition manager with whom she had previously worked; Oona is a harridan of a boss, but she is very good at what she does and she gets things done, and Hayley is comforted by the knowledge that she herself will not be subject to Oona’s orders. There is little time to show more waste, but when Oona turns up dead, having been shoved down a staircase, Hayley must first find another manager and then, hopefully, find the murderer, before another killing takes place…. This is the second of a projected series, and as with the first book, the setting is a good part of the pleasure of reading. Ms. Wingate’s characters are entertaining, the details of planning a full-scale exhibition are fascinating to read about, and the mystery and its solution are fairly laid out for the reader to pursue. I’m having a bit of a “cozy” moment these days, finding these types of mysteries almost the only thing I want to read, and this one fit the bill nicely. One need not have read the first book to enjoy this one, as there’s enough back story given here to clue the reader in. Recommended. show less

Hayley Burke is the new curator of The First Edition Society, a library dedicated to first editions from the Golden Age of Mysteries. How she got the job, I’m not sure, because she’s never read a mystery, which made me laugh. It’s a sweet position she doesn’t want to lose, but when a member of an Agatha Christie fanfic group is murdered at the library, Hayley’s future there is threatened — she allowed them in, after all.

I loved the setting of Bath, England, and the gorgeous show more Georgian home that housed the precious books. The murder mystery is definitely Christie-inspired, with many quirky suspects. With her job at stake, as well as the survival of the society itself, I can understand why Hayley would want to launch her own investigation, or at least give the police a gently nudge here and there. I can’t resist a cozy mystery revolving around books, and this one was a quick, fun read. Now I need to catch up on my Christie.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. show less