Iona Whishaw's 3 favorite reads in 2026

• 2024
• 2026

I think this is an excellent second book in the Nora Breen series that began with Murder at Gulls Nest, when Nora Breen, an ex nun and nurse in her fifties arrives at a seaside town called, wonderfully, Gore-on-Sea, ( a place fairly crying out for murders!) to consider her options in life. It's 1954, Nora is smart and creates agency in her own life by choosing to leave the nunnery and look for life on her own terms, which includes, for example, to dress in men's clothing because they are comfortable and she looks sharp, and to clearly be attracted to the local Detective Inspector Ridout, certainly intellectually, but possibly more. And not that she doesn't have another suiter...clever men like strong women. In Murder at Spirit Lodge, she and Ridout investigate the death of a medium in a story that goes back to the war, and hauntings by people that are surely dead.
I find her books brilliantly written, and suffused with Nora's intelligence. There never seems to be any decent weather in Gore-On-Sea which adds to the atmospheric sense of something-is-bound-to-go-wrong. I look forward to her next one!

This is part of a series of books by the English Writer S J Bennet in which Queen Elizabeth at varying stages of her reign becomes involved in solving a murder. Earlier books take place in the latter years of her reign, this one takes place early on, in 1961. I adore these books because I loved the queen and Bennet so magically captures her personality in these books...that combination of the formality of the office and her delightful sense of humour. In this one she's heading off to Lancashire on the royal train, and a slightly unhinged and very drunk member of her party is certain she's seen someone throwing a body in a pit in a distant field from the window of the train as it is speeding through the countryside. Of course, no one believes her. But there is that friend of Tony Armstrong Jones, her brother in law, who has decidedly gone missing...The queen, obviously not to be seen going around in a trench coat with a magnifying glass in hand, stays decorous at all times and works with the help of her personal secretary, who get to places the queen can't, to solve the crimes. I've have both read and listened to these books. The reader is terrific!

A new Longmire book by Craig Johnson is always a reason to celebrate. Sheriff Longmire is one of my very favourite characters in literature. He's oldish for the kind of physical peril he's always putting himself in...I think he's meant to be in his late fifties, and ageless at the same time. Canny-smart, fearless, and deeply, deeply kind and witty, in a sardonic sort of way. His body must be an absolute symphony of scar tissue based on the adventures I've read of his lawman activities in the fictional Absaroca County in Wyoming. In this one, the much reviled patriarch Pepper McKay is found dead. There's a wonderful interplay with Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov here as Longmire sorts through the sons and others who'd love to see the old man dead. What I love about these books, is the cast of characters; his undersheriff and all-around badass babe Vic Moretti, and his closest friend Henry Standing Bear; both are Vietnam vets, and of course, who holds it all together? Ruth back at the station, who doesn't put up with too much nonsense from any of them. Of course this book has a Russian spy imposing himself on the action and weaving in and out, as a dark precursor, I hope, to the next book. This book ends with Longmire and a pretty clever mule being stuck right in the middle of a massive raging forest fire. This will add no end of additional scars to his body if he makes it out!