Series: Amelia Peabody #7

As I stated in my previous update, it may have been a mistake to jump to the seventh book directly after the first. It’s possible that I would have been more invested in the characters and more lenient with some of the narrative twists and turns that presented themselves. But then again, maybe not.

The shenanigans in this book included an amnesia subplot and a lot of running around Egypt being attacked by a mysterious enemy. The ending was rather ridiculous. I’m not sure if I’ll be wanting to revisit Peabody’s world or not in the future. The master criminal angle was a bit much.

The cat, Anubis, was the highlight of the book.

Previous updates:

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Skipping to the seventh book in the series after only having read the first may have been a mistake. But I was trying to combine a book for both Snakes and Ladders and BL-opoly, and this book has both a dog and a domestic animal (the dog) on the cover. And as I recall, the first Amelia Peabody book was alright, and had a character who set his pocket on fire with his pipe (more books should use that scenario).

This one appears to be combining an amnesia storyline where a husband forgets his wife of a decade because apparently he's secretly tired of domestic life or something (I'm not entirely clear on that point but it sounded like a silly excuse), a doctor called Schadenfreude who claims that men and women are natural enemies (see silly excuse above), and some master criminal who deals with antiquities who apparently has shown up in a previous book.

At least there's a cool cat called Anubis.

Every year for the past two or three years, I've downloaded or pulled out, depending on format, a few short story anthologies that were specifically released for Christmas.

The Valancourt anthology of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories was just far too tempting for me not to buy, and the Christmas Stalkings compilation is also new to me. I've owned The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries and Crimson Snow for a couple of years, but still haven't finished all of the stories even once.

Christmas Most Foul is available through the KU library, and I've read three out of the four stories included. Two are Albert Campion shorts by Margery Allingham that are just okay, and then there are two full-length novels: Thou Shell of Death by Nicholas Blake, which I really liked when I read it last year, and There Came Both Mist And Snow by Michael Innes, which I've not yet read and which is the reason that I borrowed the book again this year.

I usually read ten or fifteen Christmas shorts throughout the season. 

Not much of a review, but I enjoyed this one almost as much as the first in the series, and I look forward to reading more about Amelia's adventures in the remaining books in this series.

Read for the free space/raven square.