Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate by Alexander McCall Smith

Isabel Dalhousie thinks often of friends, sometimes of lovers, and on occasion of chocolate. As an Edinburgh philosopher she is certain of where she stands. She can review a book called In Praise of Sin with panache and conviction, but real life is . . . well, perhaps a bit more challenging - particularly when it comes to her feelings for Jamie, a younger man who should have married her niece, Cat. Jamie's handsomeness leaves Isabel feeling distinctly uneasy, and ethically disturbed. 'I am a philosopher', she thinks, 'but I am also a woman'. And more disturbance is in store. When Cat takes a break in Italy, Isabel agrees to run her delicatessen. One of the customers, she discovers, has recently had a heart transplant and is now being plagued by memories that cannot be rationally explained and which he feels do not belong to him. Isabel is intrigued. So intrigued that she finds herself rushing headlong into a dangerous investigation. But she still has time to think about the things that possess her - things like love and friendship, and, of course, temptation. The last of these comes in many forms - chocolate, for example, or seductive Italians . . .



What I thought:  My reading friend and fellow Splinter, Jan Drew, passed this book to me a while ago.  It had somehow got buried in one of my baskets of books which are waiting in the wings.  Oh dear, I thought, I'd better read this and return it to her.  I have been a great fan of the 44 Scotland Street novels because I love Bertie and have followed his development and his escapades, the hapless put-upon son of an overbearing mother who insists that he should have a pink bedroom, and take yoga lessons.  The opening chapters of Friends etc etc, the second novel in The Sunday Philosophy Club series seemed pretty inconsequential and then the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie meets Ian, a recent heart transplantee and the plot gets interesting...…………

There is a good Wikipedia entry about the novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends,_Lovers,_Chocolate

The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

After a reading of The Daughter of Time. I felt I wanted to explore Tey's detective fiction technique in a classic format.

First Edition Cover, 1948

An audio book; I find to my amusement that it is read by Carol Boyd, she of Lynda Snell.

Marion Sharpe and her mother seem an unlikely duo to be found on the wrong side of the law. Quiet and ordinary, they have led a peaceful and unremarkable life at their country home, The Franchise. Unremarkable that is, until the police turn up with a demure young woman on their doorstep. Not only does Betty Kane accuse them of kidnap and abuse, she can back up her claim with a detailed description of the attic room in which she was kept, right down to the crack in its round window.

But there's something about Betty Kane's story that doesn't quite add up. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is stumped. And it takes Robert Blair, local solicitor turned amateur detective, to solve the mystery that lies at the heart of The Franchise Affair...

What I thought:  A neat bit of detective writing with no resort to the artifices available to authors writing today, with all the available modern devices, techniques and such advances in the use of DNA and other evidence that is unwittingly left by perpetrators of crime.  Tey is upmarket Agatha Christie and I look forward to reading more titles in this genre.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franchise_Affair

Secretum discubitus

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.  She has written a compelling account of a dysfunctional family in the upper echelons of nobility.  The account reads like mystery and her research for the book, which flows like a novel, must have required superior detective skills.

...........At 6 am on 21st April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain's wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants' quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire.  For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants - even the King's doctor - pleaded with him to come out, but he refused.

After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.  But what lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?

For the first time, in The Secret Rooms, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain's stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden. This extraordinary mystery from the author of Black Diamonds, is perfect for lovers of Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

.............. as I read the final pages I could only marvel at what I had read and what it tells the reader about the lengths to which members of a family will go to protect 'the firm', to connive, to deceive, to bring the privileges which birth has conferred on an individual to bear for personal advancement and preference.  Violet, the female protagonist in the story, is a scheming woman of the worst kind.  What she represents is the lengths to which mothers will go to protect their own.