A big surprise yesterday (Friday) the long delayed 32nd title in Quintin Jardine’s ‘Bob Skinner’ series arrived. The Roots of Evil starts during a Hogmannay event to celebrate the arrival of 2020. I must admit that it took me a while to get into the book, because the three-year gap between titles, remembering exactly who was who took a while. That caveat apart I thoroughly enjoyed being back in the world of Scottish policing. The 33rd title in the series, Deadlock, is due to be released in Canada in March.

S.J. Bennett’s follow-up to The Windsor Knot is called All The Queen’s Men and is due for release at the beginning of March. Set in Buckingham Palace the story revolves around the difficulty in keeping track of objects, particularly art in a facility with 775 rooms, miles of corridors and unknown numbers of treasures. I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with a most interesting collection of characters.

A new author to us is T.A. Willberg whose first mystery Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder has just been released. Set in London in the 1950s it is very evocative of the locked room mysteries of the period. Marion Lane is a first-year apprentice in Miss Brickett’s Investigation and Inquiries, a secret investigation service hidden deep below the streets of London. The organization has links reaching back to WWII and although it does co-operate with Scotland Yard the links are very tenuous in order to protect the organization.

As always, I do dip into the used shelves to go back to some of my favorite titles. I have just recently re-read Dick Francis’ Hot Money and the first of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.