Deputy Chief Crighton is a worried man. He had been called by publisher Jefferson Judd earlier in the day. Judd told him that his estranged wife, Cora, had visited him the previous night and demanded money from him. On Judd’s refusal (he feels that she would spend it on her drug addiction), she had threatened … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Follow this Fair Corpse by Laurence Dwight Smith (1941)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Inspector Dew of Barshire is told by the Chief Constable that Scotland Yard had contacted him regarding an Irish national, Desmond O’Neill whom they suspect of spying and passing information to the Germans. The Yard had been following O’Neill, but then they lost trace of him. His last known whereabouts were Canford Grange, the estate … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Who Died at the Grange? by Michael Halliday (1942)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Artist John Lumsden is found dead in his studio. The disarray in the studio shows that Lumsden had put up quite a fight before being strangled to death. Enter Scotland Yard detective Charles Blair with Sergeant Harry Dawson. Detectives, according to the author, are of various types: There were jocular detectives, and grim detectives, and … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Frame-Up by Andrew Garve (1964)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Time to wind up the book. The last grouping begins with Ernest Bramah’s The Malignity of the Depraved Ming-Shu Rears its Offensive Head which is an extract from his book Kai Lung Unrolls His …| a hot cup of pleasure
Tired of living life in the fast lane, writer Lola and her artist-husband Jack Storm, decide to shift to the countryside in order to concentrate on their art. The beginning seems promising when the…| a hot cup of pleasure
It is Wednesday and time for me to move on to the second review of the book, this time looking at the authors whose lives straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We begin with Sir Walter…| a hot cup of pleasure
Great English Short Stories, a mammoth book, over 1000 pages long and comprising of more than 80 stories, has stories in the English language, arranged chronologically. It is difficult to write jus…| a hot cup of pleasure
3 posts published by neeruahcop during August 2025| a hot cup of pleasure
….and the firelight flickering in the hearth brought back dreams that could have hurt because they were all of a happiness that was finished irrevocably, once and for all. Susan Laird, who lost her husband, Phil, an RAF pilot, during an air-raid, now lives for her son Buster, born after his father’s death, and her … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: With Willing Hands by Diana Ridley (1945)→| a hot cup of pleasure
In Vicki Baum’s novel, we see post-WWI Germany facing economic decline. The upper class is slowly coming down, the working class is almost out on the streets. The novel opens in a house shared by two such families: the Burthes and the Schliepkes. Geheimart Burthe lives with his wife, his daughter Charlotte, and his son, … Continue reading #WIT #Classics Club: Feme/ Secret Sentence by Vicki Baum (1926)→| a hot cup of pleasure
On to the last part of the book: the authors who saw both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. There are 39 authors in this section, so I have divided it into two parts. We begin with Ouida,…| a hot cup of pleasure
This post contains minor spoilers. My Classics Club list contains quite a few novels that I read in an abridged form in my childhood. One such text is Jules Verne’s French classic Voyage au centre de la Terre, first published in 1864. A revised version containing additional chapters appeared in 1867. It is this edition … Continue reading #Classics Club: Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne (1867)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Last Year, I started this mammoth book and even posted about it. Everything was proceeding to plan when I ran across a novelette by Benjamin Disraeli. Seriously, what is a 70+ pages work doing in an anthology of short stories? On top of that, the satire failed to work for me. The long and short … Continue reading SSW: Great English Short Stories (ed) Reginald Hargreaves and Lewis Melville (1930) – Part III→| a hot cup of pleasure
John Horton is a mild-mannered small-time businessman stuck in a bad marriage. His wife, Ethel, spends more time with artistic ‘modern’ young men who John finds utterly vapid. There are…| a hot cup of pleasure
4 posts published by neeruahcop during July 2025| a hot cup of pleasure
“What a peculiar path I’ve had to take in order to reach you.” One of the best parts of blogging is getting recommendations from friends. Thus, when my friend, Eden (check out his wonderful blog @ http://www.edenthompson.ca/blog ) praised Modiano’s book , I knew I had to read it. Author Jean Daragane is a recluse … Continue reading #Paris in July: So you don’t get lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano (2014)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Living on the moors, the Woodrows are a strange family. The paterfamilias feels a great wrong was done to him by the world when his father was hanged for being a traitor during WWI. With his wife, he tries to prove his father’s innocence but when all their efforts come to naught, he withdraws from … Continue reading Mass Murder: The Survivors by Anne Edwards (1968)→| a hot cup of pleasure
When Rachel Haskell Dunlop recommends her artist friend, Erich Humphrey, to remodel her ancestral home, Pine Acres, she has no idea that her widowed mother, Marcella Haskell would fall in love with Erich who is fifteen years her junior and wish to marry him. She is livid as are her siblings: Millicent, Raymond, Fred, and … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: This Death was Murder by March Evermay (1940)→| a hot cup of pleasure
“Thinke upon me as long as it is pleasant and convenient to you to doe so, and afterwards forget me…” Lawyer William Hunt is enjoying his evening when he gets a call from Celia St…| a hot cup of pleasure
Mary and William have never known their father. However, it has never bothered them. The two are extremely self-contained and close to each other. When William is three and Mary a year older, their…| a hot cup of pleasure
