Mostly Murders

My January reading was dominated by great debut novels, from Tudor-era action in A Bastard’s Bosworth to delicious Japanese food in The Kamogawa Food Detectives, gothic Holmesian mystery in the early 1900s with Strange Beasts, a character-driven crime drama in Blood Between Us, colonialism and identity in A Memory Called Empire, strong women, representation and resistance in Mother-Daughter Murder Night, character-driven crime fiction in The Reluctant Coroner and a cute cosy travel mystery in Diamonds on the Danube.

I enjoyed two rereads by the Queen of Crime, The Body in the Library which was the recommended read of the month for readchristie2026, and The Seven Dials Mystery, which was on my radar due to the new adaptation.

I enjoyed an ARC of Last Take, book 2 in the great DI Ryan Hale series, I dug into some nonfiction stories of crime, madness and obsession with The Devil and Sherlock Holmes and read relaxing cosy mysteries with The Murders in Great Diddling, The Secret, Book & Scone Society and The Case of the Deadly Dog Show.

I read books set in the Tudor-era, in 1903, in the 1920s and 1940s and contemporary novels. I read books set in England in London, Devon, Cornwall, Leicestershire, Derbyshire and the Peak District and New Forest. I read books set in the US in North Carolina and California, books set in Kyoto in Japan, Paris in France, around the Danube River in Hungary, Austria and Germany, and in space.

My reads this month covered cosy mysteries, classic murder mysteries, historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, crime drama, police procedural, culinary cosy and nonfiction. I reread two books by the same author, read two books by writers I already know and ten books by writers I haven’t read before.