Rhi Reads

The Case for Murder

I love a murder mystery. Mad for them. I don’t mean gruesome true crime, police procedurals or hardboiled, gritty affairs, oh no. I mean whimsical murder. Whodunnit murder. Cosy murder with nosy neighbours, cups of tea and incompetent detectives. Murder where the gory details are never shared, and the plot ties up nicely in a drawing room in the final pages. 

I recently finished a book that was not a murder mystery; it was a fluffy little number called Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. And while her character is talking about horror, this line summed up my sentiments exactly:

“But the more I read, the more I grew to love the writing behind the story - how the authors made impossible situations believable. I liked how each book was both predictable and unique, comforting and unexpected. Safe, but never boring.”

There is something deeply comforting about the predictability of a cosy mystery. It’s a ritual. You know someone will die, you know there will be red herrings and misunderstandings and an eccentric suspect or two, and you know, with complete certainty, that by the final chapter order will be restored. Justice is not the object, though - it’s the gathering of clues, the hand clapped dramatically to the forehead when the final stone is unturned, the gasp, the inevitable groan of “Ohhh, of course it was him!”. 

Sometimes in life we need an achievable goal. Some little thing we can control while the chaos around us threatens to destabilise the larger, loftier ones we promised ourselves. This year, that goal for me was to read all of the Miss Marple books. I’ve loved Agatha Christie for years - after all, she is the queen of my favourite genre - and I’d read most of her other books. But for some reason, I’d never picked up a single Miss Marple. Perhaps it’s because the Marple series, which stands at twelve novels, is positively dwarfed by the volume and acclaim of the Hercule Poirot books. There are 33 of those, and two of them, The Murder of Roger Akroyd and Murder on the Orient Express, are consistently lauded as two of the best mysteries ever written. And it’s true. They are. 

Miss Marple may inhabit the same universe as Poirot, but the characters could not be more different. Poirot is persnickety, confident, and more than a little conceited. A former detective with the Belgian police, he approaches murder with theatricality and sharp logic. I adore him. Miss Marple, on the other hand, is an amateur, and proudly so. She presents as a doddering spinster, gardening and knitting her way through deductions while everyone around her underestimates her. That, of course, is exactly what makes her so effective. After all, who wouldn’t spill salacious village gossip to a sweet old lady draped in shawls? 

And now, somehow, I have two remaining and it’s only June. I suppose I’ll have to find a new goal. Another small, manageable thing to control and achieve while the rest of life carries on in all its unpredictability. Maybe I should move on to her short stories. There are only 150 - should get me to the end of the year.

My favourite AC mysteries:

  • The Murder of Roger Akroyd

  • A Murder is Announced

  • And Then There Were None

  • Murder on the Orient Express

  • 4.50 From Paddington

Books read in May:

  • Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell 

  • Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

  • The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side by Agatha Christie

  • Chai Time at the Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran

  • Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

Rhianna McCourt

Musings on a Re-Read

Returning to a book you once loved can be a risky thing to do, almost like revisiting a version of yourself and your taste from another time. In this, my inaugural column, I thought I’d indulge in some unapologetic wordplay, and examine the re-read. 

This week, I returned to a book I adored in 2020, Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. Six years ago, I found it warm, quirky and charming, a story that navigated the messiness of people and life with heart and careful comedy. In 2026, I’m struggling to make it past the first fifty pages. I’m bored. Maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe it's that I now know the twist. Or maybe some books only belong to the moment in time you first encountered them.

Not all re-reads falter. Last year, I decided to return to a book I read in high school. On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta is a story lodged somewhere permanent in my mind: somewhere formative. Would it be the same? I certainly am not. But re-reading this book transported me to my 14 year old self, and I devoured every page, remembered every chapter, like the book had been patiently waiting for me to come back. 

Re-reading, I think, mirrors so many other parts of life. We revisit places, relationships, jobs, expecting them to feel the same, and maybe hoping they won’t. Sometimes they meet the expectation, sometimes the memory is better. Sometimes they reveal that what we loved wasn’t ever just the thing itself, but who we were when we first experienced it. 

A book that doesn’t live up to its memory is disappointing, sure, but it’s also helpful. It tells you you’ve changed; your taste has sharpened or softened, your perspective has shifted. And when a book does live up to expectations, what a joy! You’ve found a little thread connecting who you were to who you are now. 

So, maybe my irritation with Anxious People is unfair. I find myself judging the book and wondering why I liked it so much. But perhaps the question isn’t whether a book holds up on a second reading, but whether we do. 

Books that demand a re-read:

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman 

And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

1984 - George Orwell

Rhianna McCourt