The Case of the Christmas Card (Book Review)

 

The Case of the Christmas Card
(Ali Dawson 2.5)
by Elly Griffiths
Audio book narrated by Julie Maisey
(4 hrs and 42 mins)

A "Christmas special" in Elly Griffiths' series about time-travelling detective Ali Dawson. 

You can read my reviews of the two previous books in the series here: 
The Frozen People and The Killing Time. 

In the first book we got to know Ali Dawson, a woman in her 50s, working with a "cold case team"  reputed to investigate "crimes so old, they're frozen". What most people outside the team don't know, is that they have even found a way to travel back in time to do research. In both books we get to follow Ali back to London in the 1850s - but even the time travellers themselves are still having difficulties when it comes to  understanding the details of how it all works - and especially, how to get back to their own time again...

In this "Christmas special", it's not Ali who goes travelling in time, though - but a famous person from the past who unexpectedly turns up on her doorstep, in our own time: The famous author Charles Dickens (whom Ali met before, back in his time.) And he doesn't know more than Ali, neither about how he ended up there - or how to get back.

Quoting Audible's teaser for the book:

"As the whole of London is in full festive swing and preparing for the most special day of the year, Ali and Dickens are exploring the town, desperate to solve not just one but two crime cases. Will they succeed before Christmas Day arrives - and more importantly, will Charles find a way back home?"

While I'm still having "difficulties" myself with the time travelling concept in these books, at the same time I did find it entertaining. 

 

The problem with listening to audio books is that it's hard to go back and look up specific things afterwards, but I think it was hinted at somewhere in this story that the real Dickens did actually at some point "disappear". So asked the all-knowing Google AI about that, and this (below) is what it came up with:

 

Charles Dickens did not permanently disappear, though he did go missing from his family for a short period as a young child, and he maintained a secret, hidden double life as an adult.

• Childhood (1824): At age 12, when his father was sent to Marshalsea debtor's prison, Charles was sent to work in a blacking (shoe polish) factory. He lived on his own in a lodging house and was essentially cut off from normal family life, an experience that left a deep emotional scar.

• The Staplehurst Train Crash (1865): Dickens was briefly unaccounted for or lost from public view during the June 9, 1865, train accident in Staplehurst, Kent. He survived the crash and famously crawled back into a suspended first-class carriage to rescue the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend before helping other wounded passengers.

• Secret Affair (1857–1870): As an adult, Dickens lived a double life. He separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1857 and maintained a clandestine, long-term relationship with the young actress Nelly Ternan, keeping her hidden from public society. 

Seeing Red

No, not "seeing red" as in being angry... I just decided to look for the colour RED on my walk in the old cemetery this afternoon. I just wanted to be out for a while, without straying too far from home. (It wasn't raining just then - but they sky was all grey, and it was the kind of day when you have to be prepared for showers.)

 

The most common flower decorating the graves this time of year is heather, with comes in a variety of pinkish/reddish hues... For my "hunt" today I decided not to count those as red - which didn't stop a few from sneaking into my photos anyway... But in the photo above it was the red begonia I was focusing on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence is golden

 

I'm finding it hard to distinguish one weekday from another just now... Monday through Friday this week have been filled with constant background noise and vibrations from the construction work going on in the nearby old football field, to turn that into a park. (Actually harder to imagine now than when they first got started, as just now it's just a playground for huge excavators and trucks and ground flattening machines playing around in wet mud... I'm finding the noise (and especially the vibrations) very tiring as it makes it hard to concentrate on anything at all; but at the same time I also don't have the energy to escape from home for very long at a time. 

Photo from Wednesday
(when it was still mostly dry)

On Thursday it was raining all day, and I didn't get out at all except for a very short walk in the late afternoon, after the moving around of mud had stopped. I know I managed to get some vacuuming done (competing with the noise from outside) - but as for what else I may have been able to get done (or not), I've already managed to forget...

Friday offered somewhat better weather (at least not as wet!) so I went for another walk to the charity shop in town around noon, to donate another old winter jacket. (If this very noisy stage of the park project keeps on much longer, I might end up with a proper wardrobe clear-out!) 

Today is Saturday, though, and no over-time going on in the muddy field - so it's been blissfully quiet! I slept late, and have then been trying to catch up with a bit of this and that - but mostly just appreciating the silence... (Noting to myself that I've not even really wanted to have radio/TV on much!)

Grey sky, but not raining in the afternoon, so I also got out for a quiet (...) walk in the cemetery...

 

 

Snapping these photos of gardening tools in the cemetery may have been inspired by me having read Jenny's (of the blog Salt&Light) post about "Red Things" earlier in the day! ;) 

Wednesday Walk

 

Yesterday was laundry day for me, and I did not get out until late afternoon, when I was finished with that - and then just a short walk. The photo above is from some other day, but autumn is in steady progress here now - every day more and more yellow leaves dropping to the ground, and (on weekdays) leaf blowers at work both in the cemetery where I usually walk, and around the estate where I live. And on top of that, the noise from the excavators and other machines at work to transform the old football field to a park... 

Today I again woke up to noises and vibrations of that kind, but also to a day promising a bit of sun. So I decided to try and escape my noisy immediate surroundings for a while by going for a walk into town - again combined with handing in another bag of clothes to a charity shop. This time, just one item, but a rather bulky one: An old winter coat, which I had decided to consider replaced by the new one that I bought on the shopping day with my brother when he was here at the end of August. And as I noted last time I was in the charity shop that they had started a special collection for winter clothes, that was a reminder for me to include my old coat in my washing yesterday; and then no reason to wait further to also get it off to the shop. 

The fountain in the main square was "up and running" today; and some new plantings had been made for autumn.

 

One of the bridges across the river, leading to the park, is decorated with pink symbols to remind of October being breast cancer awareness month. The "dressed statue" in the park had lost her knitted hat (cf my Saturday post), but was still wearing her pink skirt + message. (I did not take a new photo today.) 

While I was in town, I also popped in at the book shop to ask for the book mentioned in my Monday post. They had it, so I bought it. (The fourth and last in a series of which I already had the previous three in print.)

 I walked back home along the river. In some places, on a calm day, not all easy to sort out what's "real" vs reflection! ;)

 And at the "riverside" entrance to the cemetery, there were new autumn plantings, too:

 

How To Spend A Rainy Day

Today has been a thoroughly grey and rainy day, and by now (~ 5:15 pm) I've given up any thoughts of going out. The photos of colourful maple leaves in this post were taken one day last week, when I remembered to bring my "proper" camera on my walk (with better zoom capacity than my mobile). 

 

 

 

Of course I thought this morning that if I'm not going out, it will be a good day to get some "housework" done. 7 hours later, I can't really say I managed that either. As so often these days, I seem to have spent most of today struggling with "tech stuff" like updating apps not working as they should (or me not understanding how to get them to do so).

 

The main "hiccup" today was trying to update a (Swedish) library app (for e-books) that I hadn't used in a good while. The library had changed their login procedure, and I in turn wasn't even sure I remembered the old one correctly... So that took a while to sort out. I finally managed that part - but then I still had to struggle for a good while longer to also borrow the e-book, download it, and learn how to make (and keep!) the settings of font, text size and keeping track of how far I'd read etc. I finally managed to actually also read about 100 pages it (out of 700 something) today, though.

 

What motivated me was that I had just read a review of this newly published book, which is the fourth and last installment in a series of which I have read the previous three - and also have those in print. I'll probably end up buying this last one as well (to have the series complete); but as I do find it easier to read enlarged text on my tablet these days, I decided to try the library e-book for now. (The author, Susanna Alakoski, is Swedish-Finnish, and these four novels have to do with the history of textile industry in both countries - also involving Borås where I live. Alas I can't find that any of her books - neither this series nor others - have been translated to English.) 

 

So that more or less sums up my day: Struggling with a library app, reading a few chapters, and then blogging about it... 

 

AI-generated image from 2024. (I'm not in the mood just now to check if since then AI has learned to keep the rain outdoors...)