June was not my best reading month. For quantity or quality. I guess I gambled a bit by reading some books outside of the crime fiction genre. Sadly, these were frustratingly disappointing. Moreover, my crime fiction reading, despite being from authors I have read before, did not fare so well either. Although this did make it easy to pick my book of the month…
Max Murray is not an author I would have automatically predicted to be my month’s winner, as previous reads by him have been rather mixed. But The Voice of the Corpse (1948) is the best mystery that I have read by him and I found it to be an interesting poison pen mystery, in which the letter writer is bumped off before the book even begins. Yet her toxic legacy lives on in the village where she had resided. Nevertheless, Murray’s approach to detective fiction is far from orthodox and the same can be said for his amateur sleuth, who is hugely reluctant to indulge in that occupation. This weakens the final third of the story, but the writing style and the central characters make up for this. In particular there is an unexpected source of amorality to be found in the seemingly vague mother of Celia Sims (the young female lead of the story). For me she was one of the most interesting characters in the piece.
Looking ahead to July, having fallen into a bit of a reading slump near the end of June, I plumped for a couple of books from series I know I usually enjoy. Reviews for these will be appearing soon and whilst they were not bad mysteries, they didn’t quite give me the lift I was hoping for. Fingers crossed my zest for reading will kick back into gear this month.
