Santa, Sorcery, Skara: What I Read in August 2025

Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer

This 1941 detective novel has been republished recently under the title A Christmas Party, part of what I think is an attempt to capitalise on the popularity of classic crime novels for the festive season. As Heyer expert Jennifer Kloester explains here, this was a phrase that Heyer herself used to refer to the book during the writing process, so it's not an unjustified rebranding. (Heyer also considered several other titles, including Death Before Dinner and Without Enchantment.) However, I agree with her final choice: Envious Casca comes from Act III Scene II of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with the full quotation being "Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through. / See what a rent the envious Casca made." It encapsulates all of the principal elements of the book — surprise betrayal, death by stabbing, and theatricality. Although I can see why some readers might find this an unnecessarily obscure choice, as an ardent Sayers fan, when reading crime fiction I personally enjoy the process of tracking down a literary reference and pondering what the writer meant by its use.

My one quarrel with the switch to A Christmas Party and the snowy cover is that it sets expectations this book cannot meet. This is not a light-hearted or festive book in the least — nothing like other examples of late 1930s/early 1940s festive crime fiction such as Murder After Christmas or The Santa Klaus Murder. The family that Heyer gathers all hate each other, a dynamic made much worse by the insistence of one character that they play nice and be jolly for a Christmas celebration nobody wants. The relentless unpleasantness grows wearying for the reader and I was surprised to find that Heyer had chosen not to include much, if any, of her trademark witty dialogue or give us any clearly redeemable characters for respite. The arrival of the murder is a relief, because it channels the book's energy away from the sheer horribleness of its characters. It is well done, but it's not at all what you might expect if you pick up the cosy-looking reprint. One advantage of being so behind with these reading updates is that at the time of writing I've now read all of Heyer's detective fiction and I can now see that this book is, in a sense, a sketch for her 1943 novel Penhallow, which does far more interesting things with a highly toxic, isolated family. Look out for my thoughts on that book in November's reading post!

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk

I've been exploring Regency-set fantasy fiction lately, and this 2020 novel came up during my research. It's set in a world with something approximating a season and a marriage market to facilitate matches between elite families, but there is also a strong magical presence. Great skill with sorcery can translate into fortune, rank and success. But only men are permitted to study and practice magic, because it is believed that if women do so, they endanger their childbearing abilities.

The main character, Beatrice, is a magically-talented young woman trying to rebel against these gender norms. While publicly pursuing the advantageous society marriage her indebted family desperately needs, in secret she chases after the books and allies that will allow her to master her powers. It's all very promising and I largely enjoyed this book. I had two major quibbles with it, though. Firstly, the relationship between Beatrice and her love interest develops far too quickly — I wanted much more caution and tension to make the payoff feel more earned. And secondly, I found the physical world of this book blurry and indistinct. I appreciate that the writer was prioritising action and plot, but since this was obviously set in an invented place, I could have done with more physical description of it.

The Abbey Girls in Town by Elsie J. Oxenham

After my initial foray into the Abbey series last month, I just happened to come across another of the titles in a secondhand bookshop and so continued my exploration. I read both out of order, so a little bit of detective work was required to work out where I was in the chronology, but it wasn't too bad. In this tale, we meet two new girls, sisters, living together in a London flat, who have got to know the Abbey girls through country dancing (which they are all obsessed with, Cecil Sharp and the folk music revival being in full swing of course). The elder of the pair is keen to write but is suffering from what I suspect we would now call clinical depression. Her struggles to climb out of her mental darkness coupled with how she grapples with the insensitivities of those around her are portrayed in a nuanced and interesting way. And then there's also just lots of passages about women learning country dancing in the 1920s. If you're not a keen school story reader, this combination probably sounds bizarre, but I promise it works! I'm still not ready to commit to becoming a full-on Abbey collector, but I'll continue to pick them up when I come across them.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

Have I ever read the first Bridgerton novel before? I'm not sure that I have, so I picked it up for some light summer reading. Quinn is very good at moving her plot along at a brisk pace and I mostly had a good time, although some of the dialogue-heavy "banter" scenes between siblings dragged a little for me. This book did cause me to wonder whether the contemporary trend for more explicit historical romance makes it date faster. Sexual mores are so fluid! When this was first published in 2000, the central conflict between the romantic leads — which is concerned with their physical relationship — probably felt quite risqué or even groundbreaking, but now it's both unconvincing and a little icky.

The Lighthouse by P.D. James

This is now the fourth P.D. James book I've read — I think — and I've yet to fall under her spell. Which is a shame, because I really want to! A lot of people I trust and admire speak very highly of her work, and she was such a major figure in late twentieth century crime fiction that I've always felt that I must be missing out. I picked up this 2005 mystery in a charity shop and was charmed by its setting on a fictional island off the coast of Cornwall. After being privately owned by the same family for centuries, the island is now operated by a trust as a completely private retreat for high profile politicians and other people for whom security issues mean they can never relax.

The discovery of a body amidst this secretive atmosphere requires Adam Dalgliesh and his team to be choppered in to solve the crime. It's all very dramatic, with crashing waves and high cliffs. A promising premise indeed. But the mystery didn't play fair to my mind, nor were the motives or characters well established. The way the story was told felt very "of its time" in a moderately unpleasant way, as did some of the major plot elements, which is not something I usually find frustrating in a book published only twenty years ago. Unless I find a very compelling reason to do otherwise, I probably won't pick up another P.D. James book.

The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler

As someone who spends part of each year in Orkney, I've been to Skara Brae a fair few times. Every time a friend or family member comes to visit, in fact. If you're not familiar, this is one of the best-preserved Neolithic settlements in the world, a village built on a sandy beach in the west of the Orkney mainland. The dwellings are 5,000 years old and were preserved under sand dunes for thousands of years before a storm uncovered them in 1850. Although it is undoubtedly an exciting archaeological site and a well-run visitor experience, I've never really connected with it emotionally in the way I do with some historic sites. It's interesting but not imaginatively engrossing to me.

Then I picked up this book in a secondhand shop. Published in 1968 and intended for younger readers (probably what we would now call middle grade?), it's a story woven through what we know of the history of Skara Brae, focusing on a single family in the run up to the great storm that drove the people there to abandon their settlement. Suddenly, I found the history much more absorbing, especially since I recognised lots of the archaeological details — such as a broken string of beads — that had been given a fictional explanation in the story. Perhaps I need to find more patience for Neolithic things in glass cases (Orkney has a lot of these), but once I'd read this children's book about Skara Brae, I suddenly found the life people once lived there much more comprehensible.

Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare

This was the Shedunnit Book Club's chosen title for September, so as usual I was reading it a month ahead to be able to prepare the bonus episodes about it for members. It's a 1942 murder mystery based on the author's own experiences of being a judge's marshal (essentially a ceremonial bodyguard) for a circuit judge in the early days of WW2. The judge in question keeps receiving death threats and making questionable decisions in his personal life, and the marshal looks on, a bewildered amateur sleuth. The crime doesn't actually come until very late in the book, but Hare does such a good job of building up the tension that you don't mind. A very well-constructed whodunnit, rightly considered a classic and beloved by the legal profession.

Skipshock by Caroline O'Donaghue

I borrowed this from the library ebook service because I enjoyed the author's young adult fantasy series All Our Hidden Gifts. (She's better known these days for her literary/romantic fiction, though I've yet to explore that aspect of her output.) This book is also in the fantasy zone, but I think intended for adult or slightly older readers. It follows a wonderfully classic template, which I really enjoyed: main character Margo is on a train to Dublin when something strange happens and she slips into another dimension. A stranger called Moon helps her and explains that she is now in a world where time is everything — rich cities in this world have long days and in the poorer ones night comes in as little as six hours, radically reducing life expectancy and economic potential. A shadowy authority is tightly controlling movement between timezones, so that the time-poor cannot move to where the hours are more plentiful. In contrast to The Midnight Bargain, above, I did feel like the world was fully realised and described here, yet this addition didn't slow down the momentum of the plot. I'm realising that this balance is very important to me in fantasy books. Anyway, as the adventure continues, Margo and Moon get pulled into a resistance movement and become spies... Only for this book to end on a shocking cliffhanger because it's the first part of a duology. I will certainly be borrowing the other part when it is published.

Venetia by Georgette Heyer

By this point in my year of reading all of Heyer's detective fiction, I had become curious about her other (much more popular) work. This book in particular, a Regency romance set in 1818, had come up in a few secondary sources as being one of her best. So I grabbed it from the charity shop and devoured it in two sittings. It was great fun! I think today it would be called a "grumpy-sunshine" romance, because the personalities of the two lead characters fall on either side of that dichotomy. The title character is feisty but not irritatingly so, and her solution to the romantic problem that the plot sets up for her is clever and funny. I like how Heyer peppers her dialogue with Regency slang, too. On this evidence, I think I might like Heyer's non-crime fiction more than her crime fiction!

That was, belatedly, my reading for August: 9 books, bringing me up to 81 for the year to date. I'm a tiny bit ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 books read in 2025.

I know I said in January that one of my goals this year was to read more non-fiction and fiction in other genres but... that doesn't seem to who I am this year. I didn't read a single non-fiction book this month, and pretty much everything else was crime, romance or fantasy (or some combination thereof). I wasn't very well this month, so I think I gravitated towards the familiar.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there. I am trying to catch up with these reviews before the end of the year...

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