21/365: The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective by Jo Nichols

The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective
 by Jo Nichols
Rating: ★★★½
Publication Date: August 19, 2025
Genre: mystery: cozy
Pages: 352
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
The perfect summer read, full of charm and heart, written in the vein of The Thursday Murder Club or Only Murders in the Building but with a southern California twist.
Mrs. B, the landlady of The Marigold Cottages is a stubborn idealist who only rents to people she cares about: Sophie, an anxious young playwright with a dark past; Hamilton, an agoraphobe who likes to overshare; Ocean, a queer sculptor raising two kids alone; the perfectionist Lily-Ann; and Nicholas, a finance bro who’s hiding secrets.
The tenants live contentedly in their doll-house bungalows in Santa Barbara, just minutes from the beach, until their peace is shattered when Anthony, a quiet, hulking, but potentially violent ex-con moves in. Three weeks later, a dead body is discovered on the streets of the peaceful neighborhood. Anthony is arrested, and the tenants heave sighs of relief. Until Mrs. B, convinced that he's innocent, marches down to the police station and confesses to the crime herself. The tenants band together and form “The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective” to save their beloved landlady. As clues are unearthed and secrets are revealed, the community of misfits only grows more tight-knit...until a second body is found. Full of eccentricity, humor, community, The Marigold Cottages Murder Collective will keep you hooked until the last page.

Back in the mid-1980’s I read a book series called Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. There were 6 (original) books in the series, published between 1978 and 1989. The author added 3 more entries between 2007 and 2014, which I have not read, and a tenth was published last year, in 2024. These books were my introduction to a whole different world, having grown up in Boise, Idaho, in a self-contained bubble of relative conservatism.

They were set in a fictional apartment building run by quirky landlady Anna Madrigal, on Barbary Lane in San Francisco, with the action in the first book starting in 1976. Maupin presents an ensemble cast of residents, gay and straight, young and old(er), male and female. These were probably the first books I read with queer characters that presented them as complicated and completely normal, uncaricatured, human beings. They were wildly impactful to me.

I bring this series up, because I am weirdly reminded of them by this mystery. If Tales of the City and The Thursday Murder Club got (gay) married, moved to Santa Barbara and had a baby, it would be this book. We have the quirky landlady and the ensemble cast of residents, young and old, gay and straight, male and female. It’s about friendship and found family and, of course, murder.

I had quite a bit of fun with it.

20/265: 3 short stories from Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
by editor, Sarah Weinman
Publication Date: August 27, 2013
Genre: crime
Pages: 356
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365

Fourteen chilling tales from the pioneering women who created the domestic suspense genre

Murderous wives, deranged husbands, deceitful children, and vengeful friends. Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them?

In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.

Saturdays in the fall are college football days, and I’m lucky enough to have season tickets to my local college football team. These games are really fun, but also really long. It’s a 2 hour drive each way, tailgate and then the game itself. Start to finish, it’s a 12 hour day.

So, not a lot of reading time.

I decided last week to add some loose scheduling to my reading. Tuesdays are going to be a short book from my Penguin classics box sets. I’m thinking that Thursday will be an NYRB classic. And Saturday is vintage mystery. I haven’t gone beyond that level of scheduling.

So, it’s Saturday – which means I’m going to read vintage crime (something published before 1980), and I had 12 hour day, so it’s definitely going to be short stories from one of my crime anthologies. This one was closest to hand.

I read 3 stories:

The Splintered Monday by Charlotte Armstrong: this was my least favorite of the three, and is really only very loosely suspenseful.
The People Across the Canyon by Margaret Millar: this story was extremely creepy and effective. It had some overtones of the supernatural and included one of those chilling children of the corn type child characters.
A Case of Maximum Need by Celia Fremlin: I recently read my first Celia Fremlin and really liked it. She was a sort of British Patricia Highsmith who wrote psychological domestic noir. This was a short story that ended with a very surprising twist.

And, if you’re wondering, my team won . . .

19/365: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Beneath the Sugar Sky
by Seanan McGuire
Rating: ★★★
Series: Wayward Children #3
Publication Date: January 9, 2018
Genre: fantasy
Pages: 174
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365

Beneath the Sugar Sky, the third book in McGuire's Wayward Children series, returns to Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children in a standalone contemporary fantasy for fans of all ages. At this magical boarding school, children who have experienced fantasy adventures are reintroduced to the "real" world.

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest – not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.) If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests...

A tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do. Warning: May contain nuts.

I really like this series so far. Each novella is connected through the Eleanor West School for Wayward Children, but they stand alone.

Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.

The series is a linked set of portal fantasies, where children who don’t quite fit into our mundane, unmagicked world find a door to a world that fits them better. Sometimes they return to our world through a door and they are sent to the School for Wayward Children, as they wait for the door to (re)open so they can return to “their” world. Sometimes the doors open, and sometimes they do not. They yearn for their doors.

This entry begins to define the worlds. There are nonsense worlds and logic worlds; there are watery, drowned worlds, and there are death worlds, reminscent of Orpheus, filled with pomegranate trees. This book focuses on Confection, a candy land world that has been created by a series of bakers, where the evil Queen of Cake is running rampant and must be stopped.

McGuire owes a debt to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, but she has created a whole new set of fairy tales.

18/365: A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

A Month in the Country
 by J.L. Carr
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1980
Genre: fiction
Pages: 160
Project: Project 365
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

I have a shelf of NYRB Classics. They are reliably good and, as a pleasant side benefit, they look fantastic lined up next to one another. My library also has a good selection of them available for check out in both print and digital formats. They tend to be quite pleasingly designed, with very nice paper, so I strongly prefer to read them in print.

This is not one of the books that I own, however. I have checked it out of my library twice, reading it first in 2020, and again today (yesterday, when this goes live). It’s one of the best that I’ve read, and that is definitely high praise, because I have loved many of the books published by NYRB Classics.

This is a perfect gem of a novel. It is told from the first person perspective of Tom Birkin, who arrives in the village of Oxgodby to uncover and restore a suspected medieval mural in the local church. Oxgodby seems to be a stand-in for the real Osgodby, a village on the north Yorkshire coast, where the author attended school.

This is a perfect summer read, replete with gorgeous language. Tom Birkin is a veteran of the Great War who is suffering from shell shock. Over the course of the book, he slowly uncovers the mural, which turns out to be quite a bit more significant than he expected, and he slowly recovers from his wartime experience. The descriptions of the glories of an English village/countryside summer are lovely.

Several of the villagers become prominent characters in the novella: Charles Moon, a fellow veteran who is in the village to locate a missing grave, the Reverend Keach, who is responsible for the restoration contract with Birkin, and his surprisingly beautiful wife, Alice, with whom Birkin falls in love. There is a second vicar, of the local low church, Ellerbeck and his wife, who play a sigificant role, and several other characters who play a small part in Birkin’s summer.

This one of those books which a review cannot do justice. My summers were entirely different from the one described in A Month in the Country, but, still, I found myself thinking about the indelible moments in my life in the same way that Carr was able to convince me that the summer Birkin spent in Oxgodby would represent that same sort indelible experience for him. The days that you cannot forget, not because they are particularly memorable, but because they somehow overflow with significance in their mundanity.

It’s a stunningly beautiful book that I will buy for my own shelves, so that I can return to it again and again.

17/365: The Fire Engine That Disappeared by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

The Fire Engine That Disappeared
 by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
Translated from: Swedish
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Martin Beck #5
Publication Date: January 1, 1969
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 213
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
The lightning-paced fifth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, finds Beck investigating one of the strangest, most violent, and unforgettable crimes of his career.The incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because somehow a regulation fire-truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what if, anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: "Martin Beck"?

This is the 5th book in the Martin Beck series of Swedish police procedurals. I’ve read through book 6, but had skipped this one because it wasn’t available as a digital checkout through one of my library systems. Fortunately, I was able to double back and get it as a print book. There are a total of 10 books in the series, so I am now over the halfway point.

I preferred this entry to the next one, Murder at the Savoy (which I read first), because I felt like the plot was better. These are definitely police procedurals, and they are very old school. They don’t rely on flashy technology or CCTV footage because neither DNA nor ubiquitous surveillance cameras have been invented yet. These are the classic “put on your shoes and knock on doors” procedurals. The crime is solved through solid police work and nothing more.

I get the impression from reading these books that Sweden in the 1960’s was a fairly grim place, and a far cry from the sleek, modern cities (or the picturesque countryside) that I picture when I think of it today. The authors depict it as a rough and tumble working class society, with quite a lot of organized crime and vice.

The series is named for one of the characters, Martin Beck, but it is really an ensemble enterprise, similar to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. In this particular installment, Martin Beck does not play a starring role. All of the characters are important and distinct from one another. A solid entry into the series.

16/365: The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling

The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
 by Rudyard Kipling
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Little Black Classics #24
Publication Date: October 11, 2014
Genre: short stories
Pages: 52
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'
Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, where he grew up. This is just a small selection from his inexhaustibly contentious and various early work.

Tuesdays are the longest work day for my employment contract, where I have the least reading time available, so I’ve unofficially decided that I will be reading one of the books from my Penguin box sets – either the black classics or the modern classics – on Tuesdays.

I’ve previously read Kim by Kipling, and I liked it pretty well. Kipling has fallen out of favor in these late, post-colonial and anti-imperial times, because he did write from a distinctly British view point about colonial India. I have never read his children’s stories – the Just So Stories and the Jungle Book – although I have, of course, seen the Disney adaptation of the latter.

The 6 stories in this tiny book:

Thrown Away
False Dawn
In the House of Suddho
The Bisara of Pooree
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
The Story of Mohammad Din

are stories for adults, not children. I enjoyed them a lot – they are packed with imagery. Each story is told from a first person perspective, although I don’t think the narrator is identified in any of them. They are strange and morbid little tales, addressing death, opium addiction, magic and suicide. There isn’t much backstory – the reader is plunged directly into the story which barely get going before they are over. The best of them is also the title story, The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.

Kipling was wildly popular during his lifetime, although he seems rather conspicuously old-fashioned (and racist) at this point. But he had style, and I think I’d be interested in some of his children’s stories.

15/365: The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett

The Chemistry of Death
 by Simon Beckett
Rating: ★★★★
Series: David Hunter #1
Publication Date: September 26, 2006
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 313
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
Three years ago, David Hunter moved to rural Norfolk to escape his life in London, his gritty work in forensics, and a tragedy that nearly destroyed him. Working as a simple country doctor, seeing his lost wife and daughter only in his dreams, David struggles to remain uninvolved when the corpse of a woman is found in the woods, a macabre sign from her killer decorating her body. In one horrifying instant, the quiet summer countryside that had been David’s refuge has turned malevolent—and suddenly there is no place to hide.
The village of Manham is tight-knit, far from the beaten path. As a newcomer, Dr. Hunter is immediately a suspect. Once an expert in analyzing human remains, he reluctantly joins the police investigation—and when another woman disappears, it soon becomes personal. Because this time she is someone David knows, someone who has managed to penetrate the icy barrier around his heart. With a killer’s bizarre and twisted methods screaming out to him, with a brooding countryside beset with suspicion, David can feel the darkness gathering around him. For as the clock ticks down on a young woman’s life, David must follow a macabre trail of clues—all the way to its final, horrifying conclusion.

I expected this to be a pretty bog standard modern British mystery in the vein of Ann Cleeve or Peter Robinson, and in that respect I wasn’t far wrong.

But within that framework was a really solid, well-plotted procedural featuring an engaging amateur sleuth with an intriguing back story. David Hunter is an accomplished forensic anthropologist who has left crime behind when his wife and daughter are killed by a drunk driver, taking a job as a country GP in a small English village. I was reminded – a little bizarrely, to be honest – of James Herriott of All Creatures Great and Small fame. David takes the job and relocates to the village of Manham, which isn’t exactly a cozy place. There is a lot of drinking, a fair amount of backstabbing and unfriendliness towards outsiders and, as it turns out, a really creepy serial killer stalking and murdering young women.

When the first set of partially decomposed remains are found, he inserts himself in the investigation, which causes the local authorities to investigate him and discover his background. They ask for his help, which he reluctantly provides.

There is a pretty good twist, as well. I can’t say that I figured it out, but I can say that there was a moment when the thought crossed my mind that something might not be exactly as it seems, which is what turned out to be the case. The ending gets pretty crazy – as I was reading, my room kept getting darker and darker but I was so engrossed that I didn’t want to get up to turn on a light.

It looks like there are five more in the series, and a seventh book to be published in November. They might be a little bit difficult to source, but it looks like my library systems have at least some of them. All in all, this was a very pleasant surprise, and especially for a book that I wasn’t expecting to be as good as it turned out to be.

14/365: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

A Psalm for the Wild Built
 by Becky Chambers
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Monk and Robot #1
Publication Date: July 3, 2021
Genre: sci fi
Pages: 151
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.
Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

As I have probably already mentioned, I really enjoyed the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. These are a series of loosely connected science fiction novels starting with A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, published in 2014. I read the whole 4 book series last year.

Chambers writes what I would probably call semi-cozy sci fi, and which some readers call boring. I would love to find more sci fi that has a similar vibe, though – character driven, small scale, relatively low stakes adventures. There are no galaxy-wide wars here, no power crazed maniacs blowing up solar systems.

After I finished Wayfarers, I checked what else she had written and I found only the 2 novellas in the Monk & Robot duology: A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown Shy.

I really enjoyed this novella, which is sweet and heartwarming. It starts with the premise that, on Panga many centuries ago, the robots gained sentience and instead of enslaving them, the people of Panga released them from servitude and watched as they wandered into the wilderness. Sibling Dex, a monk, has a parallel experience when he becomes dissatisfied with his life and decides to become an itinerant tea monk, circuiting the villages with his foot powered tea wagon, dispensing tea and a listening ear. The precipitating event of Dex’s disillusionment is his desire to find, and hear, crickets calling. On his journey, he meets Mosscap, the first robot that a human on Panga has encountered for several hundred years. Mosscap is on a quest of his own.

This is a very quiet book about a pleasant utopia. It’s almost an article of truth that every utopia is a dystopia in disguise but here, really, Panga is a utopia. Which means that it is, at best, implausible and, at worst, impossible. The idea that human beings would allow sentient robots the agency to choose a life for themselves that doesn’t include laboring in factories on behalf of the humans is, sadly, laughable. We don’t even allow our fellow humans that agency, after all. But, it is nice to envision a world where human beings are their best and most generous (collective) selves instead of, inevitably, the worst and most oppressively selfish version of ourselves.

13/365: The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Bookshop
 by Penelope Fitzgerald
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1978
Genre: fiction
Pages: 160
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.

It is easy to be fooled by the title and plot summary into thinking that this will be a charming and quirky story about a bookshop on the English coast, in the manner of an 84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff.

The Bookshop is, at a minimum, poignant. It might even qualify as grim. I liked it a lot, even if the ending did break my heart a bit.

It is extremely well-written, with clear, economical prose. The main character, Florence Green, is a widow of reduced circumstances living in the hardscrabble seaside down of Hardborough – a name that could not be more apposite – on the coast in Suffolk County. Because I just finished A Fortnight in September, I had to check to see where Suffolk was, in relation to Bognor Regis, in Sussex. They are not too far apart, both on the Eastern coast of Southern England. Hardborough seems to possess nothing of the liveliness and prosperity of Bognor Regis, however. Our dear friends, the Stevens family, will not be visiting it anytime soon.

Florence decides that she will take her small inheritance and open a bookshop in Hardborough. Things go well for a bit, as she establishes herself in The Old House and begins to stock her shelves. There is a peak with the decision to purchase 250 copies of Lolita to sell in the bookshop. This seemed to me an astonishing number of copies of the same book for her small community, but controversy sold in 1959, apparently, as it sells in 2025, and she makes a packet. This causes her to become overly confident because, as it turns out, there is a storm brewing in the background of which Florence is blissfully unaware.

That’s where the book took a turn for me. I was invested in the success of the bookshop and of Florence. I wanted it to turn out well. Friends, it does not turn out well.

Florence is an unassuming woman of immense dignity, and I appreciated that, but in our year of the lord 2025, reading a book where the wealthy and powerful cavalierly squash someone so vulnerable for no good reason and without caring at all about the impact of their machinations on her, well, I’m not going to lie, it was rough. I closed the book with a feeling of desolation and fury at the injustice of it all.

I will definitely read more Penelope Fitzgerald. An author who can so deeply invest me in one of her characters has something worth exploring.

12/365: The Skeleton’s Holiday by Leonora Carrington

The Skeleton's Holiday
 by Leonora Carrington
Translated from: Spanish
Rating: ★★½
Series: Penguin Modern #10
Publication Date: February 22, 2018
Genre: short stories
Pages: 48
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
'Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.'
These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and Grand Guignol humour.
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

After buying my box set of 80 Little Black Classics from Penguin, a second set of small books published by Penguin made its way onto my radar. The Penguin Modern Classics Box Set is 50 books with entries from George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Italo Calvino, and many others. I decided to add it to my collection as well.

This is the first one that I have read from the set – I am very pressed for time today and wanted to make sure that I completed my reading early. I selected this small book of 7 short stories because I had heard of the author’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet, which is published by NYRB classics and which I was interested in reading. Before I read this. I’m now not at all sure that I want to read anything by her ever again.

She is described as a surrealist, which is a movement I know almost nothing about, beyond Dada and Magritte, with his weird paintings. I goggled surrealism, and Wikipedia tells me that:

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader André Breton, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality. It produced works of painting, writing, photography, theatre, filmmaking, music, comedy and other media as well.

I still don’t really get what that means, and I didn’t like the stories enough to pursue it further.

Because they are super weird. Carnivorous rabbits and possible vampires, hyenas who dress up to attend a ball in the place of the young girl in whose honor the ball is being held, a woman who is ten feet tall, a different woman who lives on a traffic island and who knits her face from cosmic wool, and a skeleton who sets off to see a fortune teller all make an appearance.

They were like a fever dream, without the fever or the dream. Surrealism apparently just isn’t my jam.