Crime Fiction and More at Tea With Tales

After much discussion on the Americas Cup we enjoyed hot drinks and cheese and date scones while we shared the sports we have participated in.

We started with a short reading from Catherine Robertson’s The Hiding Places. Catherine is part of the upcoming Hawke’s Bay Readers and Writers Festival.

Several members read mystery books in the last month including In a Dark Dark Wood by Ruth Ware; The Murders at Fleat House by Lucinda Riley, Dead Girl Gone by Louise and Gareth Ward; Mortal Causes and Black and Blue by Ian Rankin; and Broken Skin by Stuart MacBride. Several of these were recommendations from previous months.

New mystery writers to our readers were English crime writer Michael Gilbert, whose novels included police procedural and courtroom dramas, and Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series set in Botswana.

Apart from mystery our readers delved into some thought provoking non-fiction. The Emperor of All Maladies by doctor and science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee provides a comprehensive history of cancer. As well as stories of those who soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and increase the store of human knowledge, the book provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments.

We then left science to enter the world of British politics with Simon Kuper’s Chums: how a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK. With eleven of the fifteen postwar British prime ministers from Oxford University, our reader found this book explained why Boris Johnson is so out of touch with the British public.

The failure of humanity in the Rwandan genocide was the subject of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire of the Canadian Forces’ book Shake Hands with the Devil. As the force commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda in 1993 Dallaire writes a first-hand account of the failures of the UN as a force for peace in the world.

On a lighter note, we went back to Britain with Narrow Escape: a year of highs and lows on the narrow boat Minerva by Maire Browne. Taken month by month, life on board for this family was a very good read.

A book that wasn’t finished because it was too close to the current reality in the Middle East was Daniel Silva’s The Kill Artist. In contrast Jeffrey Archer’s Honour Among Thieves set in the post 1991 Gulf War era was hard to put down for another reader.

We finished with a strong recommendation from several readers for Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen. A coming-of-age story set in Northern California, this book has both mystery and romance.

10 October 2024

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