#percy jackson#pjo#walker scobell#annabeth chase#pjo tv show
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The trouble with people who said what they thought was that they didn’t always think a lot.
-Slight Mourning, Catherine Aird
Books of the Month: Sep 2024
The rest of the StoryGraph monthly wrap up means functionally nothing because of the way I use it to record reads, but it's fun to see the trajectory of the reading month! As you can see, I started September still in my cozy mystery season, transitioned to slightly more classic mysteries, and occasionally interjected with completely different books altogether (like a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird I picked up for free from the library!). Here's my books of the month:
The Religious Body (Catherine Aird): I discovered (via Libby and Hoopla) this sort of late-Golden-Age mystery series (first one published in 1966) in September, and have been working my way steadily through it since (though I'm trying not to binge them too quickly). The kind of series where the police detectives are consistent across books but the series mostly isn't about them personally. The first one (The Religious Body) is good and has moments of gentle humor (nuns make very bad witnesses to murder b/c they are all practicing "custody of the eyes"); honorable mention also to The Stately Home Murder (book 3) where the stately home in question does have a noble family residing, but also they let in paying tour groups regularly.
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Janice Hallett): A stand-alone mystery/thriller told through documents (emails, WhatsApp messages, interview transcripts, other research) about a true-crime writer trying to figure out what really happened about 18 years ago with an apparent cult murder/suicide. Any story written as a collection of documents requires a little suspension of disbelief when it comes to just how thorough those documents can get (especially at the end); also I will say (trying to avoid spoilers) that the actual twisty solution to the crime involves some connections and maybe coincidences that also require a little suspension of disbelief. However! All that said, this book had me gripped while reading, and I will be looking up the author's other works. If this is a genre you enjoy, this is a book to check out.
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee): I doubt I need to give a mini-summary of this one! I don't think I'd reread this since middle or maybe high school. It holds up. Something about the lens of a bright young girl who prefers to wear overalls and is doing her best to understand why people are the way they are really helps to drive home all the messages. It has moments funny, and sweet, and really unfairly sad, because that's how life is. I'm going to hold onto the free copy from the library, even though I discovered after I got home that someone annotated bits of it in purple pen.
I discovered Catherine Aird’s Calleshire Chronicles this winter and have been enjoying working my way through them. I had a bit of a shock, however, when I started reading Inheritance Tracks this weekend (Book 25, published 2019), and realized she must have been working from the same mystery story prompt that I did when I wrote Diamonds to Dust, the second Pauline Gray novella. Not a bad shock—after 24 books I’d be surprised if Aird didn’t occasionally need to rely on writing prompts to kick-start an idea—but I just didn't expect a well-established mystery author to use the same prompt as I, a not-well-established mostly-fantasy author who dabbles in mystery, used. I don’t know why, especially as it was a particularly intriguing prompt, but I didn’t!
She is, of course, taking it in an entirely different direction than I did (one of my favorite writing games is giving one prompt to a bunch of writers and seeing the vastly different takes they all have on it), and I’m gonna be honest here and say that even just a couple chapters in her take looks way more creative than mine (I was not at the top of my creative game when I wrote D2D, though I am proud of how it turned out in the end—but it took more editing than almost any of my others books to get it there)—but it’s fun.
Books of Catherine Aird in order
Catherine Aird is the pen name of English author Kinn Hamilton McIntosh, who writes crime fiction novels. She is the author of the Sloan and Crosby series (aka The Calleshire Chronicles), which is the series that almost all of her novels belong to. Aird was born in Yorkshire, England, where she attended Waverley School and Greenhead High School. She served as Chair of the Crime Writers’ Assocation for 1990-91 and a Member of the Order of the British Empire due to her work with the Girl Guides. Catherine lives in a village near Canterbury, Kent, England, where she enjoys the village life.
Sloan and Crosby
The Religious Body (1966) — Buy on Amazon!
Henrietta Who? (1968) — Buy on Amazon!
The Stately Home Murder / The Complete Steel (1969) — Buy on Amazon!
A Late Phoenix (1971) — Buy on Amazon!
His Burial Too (1973) — Buy on Amazon!
Slight Mourning (1975) — Buy on Amazon!
Parting Breath (1977) — Buy on Amazon!
Some Die Eloquent (1979) — Buy on Amazon!
Passing Strange (1980) — Buy on Amazon!
Last Respects (1982) — Buy on Amazon!
Harm's Way (1984) — Buy on Amazon!
A Dead Liberty (1986) — Buy on Amazon!
The Body Politic (1990) — Buy on Amazon!
A Going Concern (1993) — Buy on Amazon!
Injury Time (1995) — Buy on Amazon!
After Effects (1996) — Buy on Amazon!
Stiff News (1999) — Buy on Amazon!
Little Knell (2000) — Buy on Amazon!
Amendment of Life (2002) — Buy on Amazon!
Hole in One (2005) — Buy on Amazon!
Losing Ground (2007) — Buy on Amazon!
Past Tense (2010) — Buy on Amazon!
Dead Heading (2013) — Buy on Amazon!
Learning Curve (2016) — Buy on Amazon!
Inheritance Tracks (2019) — Buy on Amazon!
Constable Country (2023) — Buy on Amazon!
Sloan and Crosby Collections
Last Writes (2014) — Buy on Amazon!
Standalone Novels
A Most Contagious Game (1967) — Buy on Amazon!
Short Story Collections
Chapter and Hearse (2003) — Buy on Amazon!
Anthologies
1st Culprit (1992) — Buy on Amazon!
The Man Who... (1992) — Buy on Amazon!
Playing Dead: Short Stories by Members of the Detection Club (2025) — Buy on Amazon!
BELATED ENTRY: CATHERINE AIRD (Born Kinn McIntosh 1930-Died December 21st 2024,at 94).English novelist,who wrote under the pen name of Catherine Aird. She was the author of more than twenty crime fiction novels and several collections of short stories. Her witty, literate, and deftly plotted novels straddle the "cozy" (where sex or violent acts,were carried out 'off scene') and "police procedural" genres and are somewhat similar in flavour to those of Martha Grimes, Caroline Graham, M. C. Beaton, Margaret Yorke, and Pauline Bell. Aird was best known for her successful Chronicles of Calleshire, a series of crime novels set in the fictional county of Calleshire, England, and featuring Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Berebury CID, and his assistant, Detective Constable Crosby.Catherine Aird - Wikipedia
To his way of thinking its metaphors were the only useful part of horse racing; the only thing worth putting on a horse in his philosophy being Lady Godiva.
-A Late Phoenix, Catherine Aird
Recently finished this silver age mystery; I love the stylish mod cover.
Unearthing the Past
A Late Phoenix by Catherine Aird Sometimes book finds can be so serendipitous – you can stumble across something in a second-hand bookstore; a cover can catch your eye; one of your favourite publishers can bring out a new-to-you author. Nowadays, however, many of my fun finds come from recommendations from other bloggers, and this book is no exception. Furrowed Middlebrow, a wonderful blog from…
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