Virtual Crime Book Club – Video and Voting Choices

Last night we held the third virtual crime book club via Zoom. We discussed Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton.

It was an excellent meeting. There were fourteen members present, including some new faces, which is great. As a group we are gradually growing. I really enjoyed the evening.

If you want to check out the video, see what’s involved in a book club meeting, you can view it below. Be aware that spoilers for the book are contained though, so if you haven’t yet read Three Hours but do intend to, it might not be a good idea to watch it.

 

We are now going to choose the next book to read. This month we are reading a BAME author. As aways if you attend the meeting you get to put forward an author or a specific book. When I informed the meeting what we were going to read, three members emailed straight after the meeting with suggestions. We are all very excited for this month. So, as always, please leave your vote in the comments below. Voting closes on Friday evening and I will then let you know the winning book. The next meeting will be Monday 13th July. Giving you three weeks to read the chosen book.

And here are your choices. (And can I just say, for our US readers, I have checked and all books are available in the US in all formats. Last night we didn’t have any of our US readers because Three Hours was only available in certain formats and was close to $20. I apologise for not checking these things before choosing them. It’s not something I will do in the future.)

Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle

Guy Collins, a British hack, is hunting for an election story in Lagos. A decision to check out a local bar in Victoria Island ends up badly – a mutilated female body is discarded close by and Collins is picked up as a suspect. In the murk of a hot, groaning and bloody police station cell, Collins fears the worst. But then Amaka, a sassy guardian angel of Lagos working girls, talks the police station chief around. She assumes Collins is a BBC journo who can broadcast the city’s witchcraft and body parts trade that she’s on a one-woman mission to stop. With Easy Motion Tourist’s astonishing cast, Tarantino has landed in Lagos. This page turning debut crime novel pulses with the rhythm of Nigeria’s mega-city, reeks of its open drains and sparkles like the champagne quaffed in its upmarket districts.

 

 

 

Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules — a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders — a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman — have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes — and save himself in the process — before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt. From a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire, Bluebird, Bluebird is a rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas.

 

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee

In the days of the Raj, a newly arrived Scotland Yard detective is confronted with the murder of a British official—in his mouth a note warning the British to leave India, or else . . .

Calcutta, 1919. Captain Sam Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force. He is immediately overwhelmed by the heady vibrancy of the tropical city, but with barely a moment to acclimatize or to deal with the ghosts that still haunt him, Wyndham is caught up in a murder investigation that threatens to destabilize a city already teetering on the brink of political insurgency.

The body of a senior official has been found in a filthy sewer, and a note left in his mouth warns the British to quit India, or else. Under tremendous pressure to solve the case before it erupts into increased violence on the streets, Wyndham and his two new colleagues—arrogant Inspector Digby and Sergeant Banerjee, one of the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID—embark on an investigation that will take them from the opulent mansions of wealthy British traders to the seedy opium dens of the city.

Masterfully evincing the sights, sounds, and smells of colonial Calcutta, A Rising Man is the start of an enticing new historical crime series.

Spare Room by Dreda Day Mitchell

Home Is Where The Nightmare Is

Beautiful double room to let to single person

Lisa, a troubled young woman with a past, can’t believe her luck when she finds a beautiful room to rent in a large house. The live-in owners are a kind and welcoming couple. Everything is fine until she finds a suicide note hidden in her room. But when the couple insist this man didn’t exist and that Lisa is their first tenant, Lisa begins to doubt herself.

Compelled to undercover the secrets of the man who lived in the room before her, Lisa is alarmed when increasingly disturbing incidents start to happen. Someone doesn’t want Lisa to find out the truth.

As the four walls of this house and its secrets begin to close in on Lisa, she descends into a hellish hall of mirrors where she’s not sure what’s real and what’s not as she claws her way towards the truth…

Did this room already claim one victim?
Is it about to take another?

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.

Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

 

 

If you’re not yet a member of the book club you can join up HERE. 

This is so that you are provided with the zoom room details the day before the meeting. We’d love to have you. As you can see from the video it’s a warm and welcoming group. Hopefully see you soon!