A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries! A Is For Archer

C. J. Archer is an author I have just discovered. She seems to be very prolific, writing both mysteries and speculative fiction. This novel, Murder At The Mayfair Hotel, is the first of a series. The heroine and sleuth is Cleopatra(Cleo) Fox, who, in this book, has just come to live with her aunt, uncle and cousins at the Mayfair Hotel in London, after losing her grandmother, who had brought her up. She lost both her parents as a child.

Three chapters into the novel one of the guests is found horribly dead in her room. Cleo and some of the staff get together to find the murderer. Will the hotel go down as other guests find out and leave and the newspapers report it? Who could have done it? Suspects include a staff member whose father is the detective inspector investigating the case. 

This is an entertaining cosy set in the late Victorian era. Cleo is a likeable character and the Victorian hotel described is fascinating.

If you are curious about this series, this first novel is currently free on both Apple Books and Kindle, and the other ebooks are not expensive, about A$6.99 each. If you do get it on Kindle, you can buy the audiobook that goes with it for only A$2.99. Definitely worth checking out! 

A To Z 2025. Theme Release

 I’ve been doing A to Z for several years now and have forgotten some of the ones I’ve posted. And some of the books and authors I am going to mention have been on this blog before, mainly in reviews. But the theme of this year’s A to Z has not been covered here before.

I love speculative fiction and children’s/YA works. I also love mysteries. So, that’s this year’s theme. I will be covering books and authors I’ve read and enjoyed over the years.

My preference is cosies, with the occasional police procedural. 

I hope you enjoy crime fiction as much as I do! I confess I’d love to write it myself, as well as the fantasy and non fiction I’ve done for children and teens. One of these days…

Saving Susy Sweetchild: Silver Screen Historical Mysteries 3. By Barbara Hambly. Edinburgh: Severn House, 2024

Saving Susy Sweetchild is the third of the Silver Screen Historical Mysteries. This series, set in Hollywood in the 1920s, started life as Bride Of The Rat God, a horror novel in which Norah Blackstone, an Englishwoman who had married an American soldier during World War I, lost her entire family, including her husband, and moved to Hollywood with her beautiful sister-in-law Christine, a silent movie star. They had to deal with a horrifying Manchu god which tears apart its victims, who wear a sacrificial necklace. It was a lot of fun. It’s probably out of print, though I was able to get it in audiobook.

Now, the fantasy elements have been removed and the novels are murder mysteries. Norah Blackstone becomes Emma Blackstone and Christine is Kitty. She still owns three cute Pekingese dogs, with the same names and personalities as in Bride Of The Rat God. Emma still has a cameraman as a boyfriend, though his name has been changed from Alec to Zal. Between the three of them, mysteries are solved.

In this one, there are some murders, but the main issue is the kidnapping of a child movie star, Susy Sweetchild. Her current film is unfinished, so the studio is not happy, not worrying about the child herself, but how they can finish the film without her if necessary. The child has been robbed of her earnings by her mother and other relatives want to get custody so they, too, can benefit from her work. In those days, children in film were not protected. The best known case was Jackie Coogan, who later went on to play Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. When he turned 21, he discovered that his mother and stepfather had squandered all the money he had earned as a child actor. The Coogan Act came in to protect other children. 

Emma, Kitty and Zal work together to solve the mystery and find Susy, hoping she is still alive.

It’s very readable stuff, with a lot of silent era Hollywood background. Like Christine, Kitty plays villain roles and enjoys them. Kitty is a lot less ditzy than Christine, though she does like men, plural, as Christine does. Despite that, she has enough of a brain to be involved in the mystery solving. 

I think I enjoyed this one even more than the second book, One Extra Corpse. It’s not surprising; Barbara Hambly’s books never seem to go downhill. There are twenty Benjamin January mystery books and they are still going strong. 

It doesn’t matter if you haven’t read Bride Of The Rat God, though you probably would enjoy this novel more if you have read the first two books in this series.

I bought my copy in Apple Books, and they are also in Kindle, but if you prefer print books, they should be available from your local bookshop. 

 

Moonboy by Anna Ciddor. Sydney: Allen And Unwin, 2025

 

This is the latest of Anna Ciddor’s delightful time slip novels. In the others, the characters time travelled to Roman times. In this one, our heroine, Charlotte, time travels only as far as 1969, where she meets her grandfather when he was her age. Keith, nicknamed Moonboy during his childhood for his passion for the space program, is suffering dementia in his older years and is living in an aged care facility which looks after several dementia sufferers. Charlotte and her grandfather had been very close and it is hard for her to see him like this. 

Checking out his box of childhood treasures, mostly cuttings connected with Apollo 11, she puts on his footy jumper and finds that it takes her back to the past, where she meets and befriends young Keith and his family. 

She finds she can change the past, such as persuading his older sister Gwen to go to do a job at Honeysuckle Creek, the Australian tracking station which showed visuals from the moon. There Gwen becomes interested in the space program and becomes an engineer instead of working at a shop in Queensland as Charlotte remembers. This inspires Charlotte to change some more history for the better.

Charlotte finds ways to get her grandfather to recover some memories and speak again, by reminding him of the space program.

The scenes in 1969, with the moon landing approaching, are fun, especially for people like me who were there. There is one scene in a classroom where the children are given milk. I remember that. To this day there are people remembering this program with disgust because the milk was warm. My school was built of bluestone, so the milk was cool and I enjoyed it. 

There is a milk bar where Keith and his family live and sell stuff. Milk bars were convenience stores that sold groceries and sweets in the days before supermarkets became the main places to shop. Actually, there were still milk bars around till only a few years ago, near where I live(the most recent to close was replaced with a cafe). It definitely made me sentimental, but for the younger children at whom this novel is aimed, it’s history, as much as the details about Apollo 11. 

Anna has done a huge amount of research and has given links to the web sites she used, including one that shows a video mentioned in the book. 

The style of this particular novel reminds me of the work of the amazing Gabrielle Wang, best known as the author of A Ghost In My Suitcase, which was turned into a play some years ago. 

The chapters are short, and easy reading.

Highly recommended for readers 9-12. 

Available in ebook and print, at all good web sites.