My Year in Books 2019: June

I only got chance to read three novels this month, sadly, as other stuff kept getting in the way. I'm halfway through a fourth one at the moment, but since there's only six hours of the month left, I think I'll have to save that one for my July post!

So, here's my (shorter than expected) post about the books I read in June. In case you're interested, you can see the posts from the rest of the year here: January, February, March, April, May

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris (2011)

Back to the pile of books I bought on a tour of charity shops in Bakewell (and I’ve still got quite a few to get through!). Despite having read a few duffers, I’m definitely enjoying the surprise factor with the books I’ve read this year. I’ve been consciously avoiding reading reviews, and only skimming blurbs, when I choose titles, so I’m going into most books with no real expectations. This was the case with Gillespie and I – a stonking book (the edition I read was over 600 pages long) set in late Victorian Glasgow. I’ll be honest, surprise factor aside, this one was a bit of a disappointment. The narrator is Harriet Baxter, an unmarried woman in her 30s who travels to Scotland from London after the death of her aunt. Arriving in Glasgow for the International Exhibition, Harriet stumbles into the lives of Ned Gillespie, an artist, and his family. She becomes close to the Gillespies, but tragedy is just around the corner. Or rather, not quite around the corner, because it’s around 250 pages before anything dramatic actually happens. There’s a fantastic conceit at the heart of Gillespie and I (no spoilers, but remember I do love an unreliable narrator), but the execution just didn’t do it for me. It’s extremely slow-paced, and once you’ve twigged the game Harris is playing (which I did, sadly, quite early on), it feels even slower. Sadly, I have to say that this one was just too much of slog for me.

The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths (2018)

Briefly breaking off from my Bakewell purchases to read a book my mum lent me. She’s become quite taken with Elly Griffiths’s Dr Ruth Galloway series, ever since I lent her The Janus Stone. I think she’s been catching up with the whole series, but I seem to just be dipping in and out. I’ve read the second and ninth titles; The Dark Angel is the tenth book, so at least it wasn’t too jarring a leap from the last one I read. This book sees Ruth Galloway travel to Italy to help out Italian archaeologist Angelo Morelli with a perplexing find. Ruth once had a one-night-stand with Morelli – of course she did! – so the book, like the previous titles, is just as concerned with the investigators’ private lives as with any murder or mystery. In fact, this was even more pronounced in The Dark Angel. The creepy archaeological enigma outlined in the blurb and preface is brushed away almost immediately (a massive disappointment), to be replaced with a rather bloodless tale of a murdered priest. This death is almost entirely eclipsed by the ongoing saga of marriages, affairs and pregnancies that proliferate throughout the series. This time, it’s Ruth coming to terms with Harry’s wife Michelle being pregnant, and Shona thinking about cheating on Phil. In truth, it’s more like a soap opera than a crime series, and I just found The Dark Angel a bit of a let-down. Might leave this series for my mum from now on.

A Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore (2010)

Back to the books I bought in Bakewell charity shops… and I’m really not sure I read the blurb on this one carefully at all. Turns out that A Place of Secrets is much more of a romance than I normally read. But hey! surprise factor! The book tells the story of Jude, a woman with a PhD in eighteenth-century studies who works for an auction house. Jude is asked to handle the sale of a collection of books at Starbrough Hall in Norfolk, which (coincidence!) is the estate on which her grandmother grew up. Jude travels to Norfolk, reconnects with her sister and niece, and discovers that the latter is suffering from the same bad dreams that troubled her as a child. As Jude delves into a mystery in the rare book collection – a missing teenager from the 1700s – she also tinkers around with a puzzle from her grandmother’s past, possible supernatural occurrences related to an old folly on the Starbrough estate, the potential sale of said folly by a dastardly landowner, her grief over her dead husband, and her feelings for a hunky writer/animal-lover who lives in the cottage where her grandmother once lived. There is a lot going on in this one, but it’s handled with a light-hearted, almost fluffy, touch… and a helluva lot of coincidences. The way the solutions to the various mysteries dovetail is almost too much to swallow… but I still found the story rather charming, in its own way. Maybe I’m mellowing.