Homefront Sleuths Mysteries - (Audio) Book Reviews

 

 

The Blackout Murders
(The Homefront Sleuths Cozy Mystery Series, Book 1)

By Anna Elliott, Charles Veley
Narrated by Iona Campbell

England, 1941. The tranquil village of Crofter’s Green seems like a haven from the chaos of wartime. But when a local air raid warden is found dead in the village churchyard, five villagers decide they need to uncover the truth:

Evie Harris, recently widowed, is new in the village, where she is opening a tea shop (in spite of the difficulty of finding ingredients in wartime).
Dorothy Baker is a young mother who is helping her 
Alice Greenleaf, the village herbalist.
Blake Collins, a schoolteacher, wounded in the war (and with a talent to see patterns that others might miss).
Harry Jenkins, a retired detective. 

 

(The setup of characters reminds me a bit of "The Thursday Murder Club" which I watched as film some time around Christmas, and then also listened to as audio book - but found my impressions of the two clashing a bit in my head, so did not get round to writing a review.)

 

As I'd never heard of this book/series before, and it was included for free, I didn't expect all that much from it. But I found it entertaining enough to keep me company through the first week of my recent cold - even if I also frequently kept dozing off to it, so for that reason did not find it all easy to keep track of all details. 

 

And when I had finished the first, the next one in the series turned up for me as well - so why not continue...

 

 

 

The Spectre of Hawthorne Manor 

(The Homefront Sleuths Cozy Mystery Series, Book 2)

By Anna Elliott, Charles Veley
Narrated by Iona Campbell 

 

"England, 1941: Evie Harris doesn’t believe in ghosts—not even when she spots a glowing figure outside her bedroom window in the quiet village of Crofter’s Green. But when the same eerie spectre is seen by Lord Hawthorne, tied to a long-buried family scandal, even Evie starts to wonder if the past is haunting Hawthorne Manor.

Before she can investigate, Lord Hawthorne is found dead at the bottom of his grand staircase. An accident? Not likely. When the glowing figure begins tormenting Lady Gwendolyn, Evie rallies the Homefront Sleuths to unravel the manor’s secrets.

As the sleuths dig deeper, the twists keep coming:

    A furious daughter returns for the reading of the will.
    Priceless antiques vanish from the estate.
    And Lady Gwendolyn’s strange behavior hints at dangers far beyond ghostly hauntings.

With hidden passageways, family feuds, and wartime schemes at every turn, the sleuths must race to uncover the truth. Is the danger truly from the dead—or the living?"¨

(Just quoting the Audible presentation in full with this one.)

Having got to know the characters a bit better now, I think I'll also continue with No 3 in the series - which also automatically popped up as soon I had finished No 2...

 

 

 

For those who prefer reading with the eyes rather than listening, I see that the books are also available for Kindle at rather reasonable prices.

Following the Tracks

 

The combination of winter sun and freshly fallen snow does often tempt me to go out for a little while, even if at present I prefer not to stray very far from home. It was on Friday that it snowed all day. By now (Monday) it's obvious that where no official paths have been  cleared, people still make their own... Like across the lawns to the playground (above)!

But humans are not the only ones leaving tracks in the snow! Here, for example, a big bird or two seem to have been out walking in the company of two hares... 

Tracks like these always make me think of a chapter in Winnie the Pooh, where Pooh and Piglet go following some tracks, which they suspect may have been made by a Woozle...

 ... but the tracks keep multiplying, so that after a while it seems there must be at least two Woozles, now also joined by, perhaps, a Wizzle... 

 

... and after yet another turn around the same bush, the two friends begin to fear that there are even more potentially dangerous animals about...

 But of course all is explained when Christopher Robin turns up:

'Silly old Bear,' he said, 'what were you doing? First you went round the spinney twice by yourself, and then Piglet ran after you and you went round again together, and then you were just going round a fourth time - '

 

Shadow Shot Sunday

Today started with a view of blue sky and white fluffy clouds - a rather rare sight lately.

 

Also quite a lot of white fluffy stuff on the ground again, since the snowstorm on Friday. The rectangular spots of light are reflections from windows on the building across the lawn. 

 

Low sun casting long shadows

 

In the afternoon, I decided to venture out for a short walk to catch a few of the rare rays of sunshine, and to get a "feeling " for how slippery or not it felt on the ground. It wasn't "too" bad, but I still felt that even using two walking poles I had better keep my eyes on the ground with every step. I did go over to the old cemetery, but only went in far enough to snap this photo of a path that had not been ploughed:

 

  

Life in a Snow Globe

 

 Photo edited in "HDR-ish" mode in Picasa3. 

After a couple of weeks of the weather staying cold, windy and dry, but without throwing more snow at us - yesterday (Friday), it was in snow-globe mood again, the whole day. So we're back to be being pretty much covered in the white stuff again. 

The head cold that hit me from "nowhere" about 1½ week ago has pretty much kept me indoors since then, and I haven't been doing much at all unless you count using up about a ton of paper tissues and cough drops. (The inside of my head has kind of been feeling blurry like a snow globe all on its own, much of the time...) 

(istock image - not my own photo)

Luckily, I had ordered my usual bi-weekly grocery delivery for Thursday - when the weather was still on good behaviour and did not cause any delays. (Besides groceries, I also stocked up on paper tissues and cough drops...) And after I got the delivery sorted, I even managed a short walk to get rid of a couple of weeks of recyclable waste in the right bins; before Nature started throwing the next lot of snow at us. So yesterday I could just stay in and watch the snow-globe-like weather from the comfort of my own home. 

On the whole it's been a long period of "doing" very little. A lot of the time I've just been half-dozing to radio, TV and audio books; with a few excursions into Blogland now and then in between, when I've felt up for it. 

I have got through the whole original B&W Forsyte Saga TV series that I managed to find available on YouTube (mentioned in some earlier post). I watched the 26th and last episode today. I did enjoy being able to see "the original" again, as this was probably one of the first TV series of "grown-up" kind that I ever watched back in my youth. In 1967, I was still only 12 years old, so I'm not entirely sure if I did see it then (might depend on what day of the week and what time of night it was broadcasted?) - or perhaps not until it was rerun again here in 1970? But even so. I don't think any of us back then would have been able to imagine the explosion of various ways we'd have 55 years later of watching pretty much anything, at any time...

A Full Moon for Skywatch Friday

 

Looking out of my kitchen window on Sunday afternoon, I noticed the full moon, and went to grab my camera. I think the photo below is probably the best shot of the moon I've ever managed with my little Sony DSC HX 80 compact camera.

31/01/2026, 16:46

Linking to Skywatch Friday