Reading in Reykjavík

I must admit up front that I have a soft spot for Josephine Tey, so you may expect some prejudice in the review ;-) Year of publication: 1949 Genre: Mystery Type of mystery: Kidnapping Type of investigator: Lawyer Setting & time: England, contemporary A teenage girl accuses two women of having kidnapped her and held her against her will for a month. The case seems to be solid, but solicitor Robert Blair, retained by the accused to speak for them, is convinced of the innocence of his clients and sets out to prove it. This is the second Tey novel I read that effectively breaks one of S.S. Van Dine's detective story writing rules , and I admire her for making it so readable, because it is rule no. 7 that is broken: There shall be but one crime, and that crime is murder (my rephrasing). It is difficult to sustain reader interest in a mystery without a corpse for nearly 300 pages, but Tey not only pulls it off, she does it so well that I could hardly put the book down. It is w...

I decided to review these two Christmas themed crime novels together, as they were written by the same author team and belong to the same series, or actually two series, one by each author. I think Mary started writing her Christmas novels with Silent Night (which I haven’t read), but the first one I read was All Through the Night , which I think is her first Christmas novel to feature lottery winner and amateur sleuth Alvirah Meehan. The subsequent Christmas novels have been written in co-operation with her daughter Carol, who is a writer in her own right. Deck the Halls appears to be their first collaboration, but since then they have written a number of Christmas novels together, featuring Alvirah together with Carol’s series sleuth, Regan Reilly and her boyfriend (later husband) Jack. These two (and All Through the Night ) are not mysteries, but rather suspense novels with caper elements. The reader knows the whole time who the criminals are and the viewpoint swings between the s...