Reading blackout before the end of the first bingo month and two more completed bingos in week 4 for a total of three bingos so far -- if anybody had told me this going in, I'd have questioned their sanity.  Not least because I had a major project to complete this month, which I knew was going to involve a lot of meetings and time in the car -- but all that time spent driving, and waiting for meetings to begin, turned out a blessing in disguise.  Either way, I'll take it!  Especially since my final reads for my card turned out really, really great as well.

Now that I've completed my books for the squares on my card, I'm going to move on to a couple of the squares not on my card -- first and foremost those from which I'd have picked my options for my three transfiguration spells if I had needed them.  I'll be posting my progress with those on my bingo master tracking post.

The Lady Detectives is a compilation of four full cast radio dramatizations of early Golden Age mysteries focusing on women detectives; not only pioneering works of detective fiction as such but works that give their women protagonists much greater agency than the majority of their female contemporaries would have had in real life -- without, however, leaving the social confines of the time when these stories were actually written (and when they are also set).

Given both the "gaslight" setting of these mysteries and the length of this compilation (about three hours total), this seemed the ideal audiobook to use for the "Read by Flashlight or Candle Light" square.  I listened to the first two episodes last night while taking a bath, with my lovely new changing bottle lights on a chair next to the tub, and the remaining two episodes afterwards in bed (with a flashlight style light on my bedside table).

The Redhill Sisterhood by Catherine Louisa Pirkis is one of Pirkis's Loveday Brooke mysteries -- a collection of which I ordered forthwith after having listened to this dramatization, which was by far my favorite of the lot.  Assuming that the dramatization represents Ms. Brooke's character by and large accurately, she is an enterprising young lady who is not afraid to put the (of course exclusively male) professional police firmly in their place, and of all four female amateur detectives featured here, she is also one of the two most resembling Sherlock Holmes in her approach to logics and reasoning.  Unlike the three other ladies featured in this collection, she seems to be investigating crimes merely for the fun of the thing, not out of some sort of personal or charitable compulsion (which especially endeared her to me). -- This particular case concerns suspicions of robbery and theft that have arisen against a society of nuns in rural Surrey.

Mr Bovey’s Unexpected Will is one of several cooperatios by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, featuring Ms. Florence Cusack: both Sherlock Holmes's and Loveday Brooke's equal in razorsharp logics and stone cold detection powers, but unlike Ms. Brooke, secretly suffering from a nervous affliction (which in turn provides her with her own medically-trained Watson-type sidekick).  In this particular case, she is engaged in an investigation involving fraudulent coinage and a millionaire's singular will.  Like all stories co-written by Robert Eustace (who was a doctor by training), the mystery's solution substantially depends on scientific processes; but while part of it is easy to anticipate (as is at least part of Pirkis's Redhill Sisterhood's solution), enough remains -- at least in this dramatization -- to create a bit of an element of surprise at the end.

The Golden Slipper is one of Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange mysteries, involving an investigation into mysterious instances of theft occurring in New York's upper crust society. Ms. Strange is a member of that society herself (and thus arguably ideally placed to conduct this type of investigation), but she has a charitable motive to seek out gainful employment instead of living off her father's money and waiting for a husband to come along.

Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady, finally, involves a woman who, shortly after her marriage, finds out that her husband's name (and thus her own married name) is false and that under his real name, he had stood accused -- without either having been convicted or judicially cleared -- of having murdered his first wife.  Impulsively and staunchly believing in his innocence, she sets out to clear him once and for all. -- Even in this dramatization, which condenses a 400+ page novel down to less than an hour's worth of listening, it becomes clear just how much of this story is pure Victorian melodrama; yet, Collins doubtlessly has to be credited with having created not merely some of the first detective novels as such but even one (in 1875) that features a woman as its chief investigator.

Ugh.  If I hadn't been listening to this for Snakes and Ladders I would have DNF'd.  Much too heavy handed use of pseudo-occult phenomena for my taste (also, the dead animals thing was done so much better by Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze; it just felt like copycatting here) -- and I really, really dislike stories in which the narrator comes across as a passenger of / on the train of events instead of the conductor; particularly if, as in this case, as a scholar (s)he ought to have had ten times the brain power required to solve the mystery on their own, instead of becoming a plaything being buffeted around by adverse forces and having to rely on someone else both active and prescient enough to see through the bad guy's machinations and save our narrator's behind in the process.  (And don't get me started on the bad guy's motivation and psychological makeup.)  Why, Ms. Roberts Rinehart, why?  You could do sooo much better!

Also, note to self, another audobook narrator to avoid like the proverbial plague henceforth is Gary Dikeos.  Stentorian declamation devoid of any sort of nuance (except when reproducing dialogue, of which there was way too little to make a difference here, however), which pretty much killed any sort of atmosphere Roberts Rinehart was obviously aiming for.  If I'd liked the story as such any better than I did I might have given it another chance with the print version just to get that irritating vocal performance out of my head.  As it is, I probably won't -- unless I encounter it in an omnibus collection or anthology somewhere, in which case I just might reread individual snippets.  Even then I doubt I'll revisit the entire book, however.  For now, I'm just glad I've got this one out of the way so my little helpers and I can climb that ladder on the Snakes and Ladders board ...

I needed a break from all the Christmas and winter reads I've been indulging in lately, so I squeezed this one in -- the print version has been lingering on my shelves way too long as it is.  And I'm happy to have finally started on a series that I've long had a feeling I would like: There's a tiny bit of TSTL syndrome and a few somewhat implausible character actions / choices, as well as a bit of tautological writing at the beginning (surprisingly so, since by the time she published this book, Jance already had another successful series under her belt that had been running for almost a decade), but all of this is essentially over and done with -- and Jance and her protagonist Joanna Brady have found their book series feet -- by the end of the second or third chapter, and from then on we're off to very solid enjoyment.  The solution is clear pretty much from the word "go", too, but once the book finds its feet, it's fun to just come along for the ride.  This is definitely a series I'm happy to have added to my library.

And go figure, the audio version I listened to even has a bright red and orange cover, so it qualifies for the St. Nicholas square in 24 Festive Tasks!

I decided to backtrack a bit to the series's first (I think) Christmas entry, which is set right after Meg and Michael's marriage and in which Meg is in charge of organizing Caerphilly's annual holiday parade -- emphatically not a "Christmas" parade, since it includes a nod to Diwali (complete with elephants), as well as a Kwanzaa float, which obviously makes this book a fun match with "24 Festive Tasks".

Andrews had definitely found her Meg Langslow legs by the time of this book, and the writing and plotting is great fun ... of course a holiday parade themed on The Twelve Days of Christmas offers countless opportunities for things to go hilariously haywire, but you still have to be able to hit just the right balance of humor and storytelling instead of simply stringing together a series of (wannabe) quirky incidents and characters, which not every writer is able to pull off convincingly.  Perhaps the one tiny letdown was that the murderer (and their motive) was fairly obvious well before the conclusion of the book, but still, I very much enjoyed my annual return to Caerphilly for Christmas the holidays.

And since a whole rafter of turkeys show up in various parts of the book -- they march in the holiday parade, they're being offered as charity gifts to the local poor, they're roasted at one of the local church community's food stand, and a turkey also features in the Christmas dinner "in the off" at the end of the story, to be prepared by Meg's mother -- I feel justified in using this as my Thanksgiving square read in "24 Festive Tasks" ... even if the turkeys are not accorded quite as prominent a role as the titular six geese (or actually, 37 geese ... or make that 38, counting one deceased of natural causes).