The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts, by Robert Thorogood

The latest installment of the beloved cozy crime series.

Murder is afoot in the idyllic English town of Marlow. Football star Gary Wise is shot dead at the rear of his property, and soon local thriller writer Mike Saxon  succumbs to the same fate. It seems the town’s celebrity class is being targeted, causing flighty TV presenter Angela Guthrie to worry she’ll be next. This is obviously a job for amateur sleuths Suzie Harris, professional dog walker, Becks Starling, the vicar’s wife and the crossword setter Judith Potts, their unofficial leader.

A spanner in the works is the appearance of Judith’s step-daughter, Eleni. Eleni is the daughter of Judith’s Greek husband Philippos, who died in 1976 on a boat trip off the coast of Corfu in suspicious circumstances. Eleni claims to have proof that Judith was responsible, even though Greek authorities cleared her name. Eleni dogs the three women, leaving Judith seriously rattled and unable to perform at her best.

​The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts is the fifth book in the successful Marlow series. Like all previous books, it’s a tightly plotted story with three irrepressible characters that readers will love. The Marlow novels balance entertainment and humour with the feel good themes of enduring friendship and personal resilience. 

The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts, by Robert Thorogood. HQ Fiction. $32.99

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang

 

China expert Dan Wang explains why China needs to slow its pace of building, while America needs to to do the opposite. 

Dan Wang was born in Yunnan, China. Aged seven, his family moved to Canada, hoping to build a better life. As an adult, Wang has lived in both China and the United States, these experiences informing his work as a technology writer. 

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future benefits from an easy to understand premise. China is an engineering culture, capable of producing enormous infrastructure projects on budget and on time, but often of dubious quality and utility. America, on the other hand, is a lawyerly society. Once a great engineering nation, the US now is mired in a thicket of laws, rules and regulations, stopping much needed building. Wang argues that China needs be more lawyerly and adopt some breaks on their engineering zeal, while the US, with its crumbling infrastructure, could learn from China’s can-do approach.

One wouldn’t expect a book on comparative economics and engineering to be such a fun read. Breakneck is just that. Wang brings first hand experience and a gift for organising complex ideas into a rollicking narrative that humanises China - authoritarian on the surface, but messy and complex underneath. 

A brilliant explainer from a generous guide. 

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang. Published by Allen Lane. $55

APRIL2026

Ivy and Bearlock: The Case of the Missing Flower, by Kristyna Litten

A fun, endearing, endlessly inventive children's mystery for emerging readers.

Young Ivy and her grandfather Bearlock Holmes are crime sleuths. When they go on an outing to the botanic gardens to see the famed agave flower, which is blooming for the first time in 100 years, they are shocked to find themselves plunged into a mystery. The great flower has been stolen. Detective Hopkins, a rabbit that has a habit of falling asleep on the job, is the first at the scene. But you guessed it, he promptly succumbs to a nap. It’s left to Ivy and Bearlock to use all their crime solving skills to solve the mystery. The plot thickens as a honey trail, involving beekeeper Wilfred Buzzbee, queen bee Beatrice and badger honey sellers Bruce and Barry, leads to an unlikely culprit. 

Writer and illustrator Kristyna Litten has created a real treat for young mystery fans. The story has a delightful cast of characters, witty dialogue and innovative twists and turns. Readers are taken for an exciting journey that includes beekeeping, archeology and underground tunnels. There are also puzzles, interesting botanical facts and other fun educational aspects. Written in the style of a graphic novel, with intricate and charming illustrations, newly independent readers will love Ivy and Bearlock. 

​Ages 5-9

Ivy and Bearlock: The Case of the Missing Flower, by Kristyna Litten. Published by Magic Cat Publishing. $21.99

APRIL26

Hot Chocolate on Thursday, by Michiko Aoyama

Twelve interconnected stories from the celebrated Japanese author Michiko Aoyama.

Michiko Aoyama is a bestselling author in her native Japan. Two of her books, What You Are Looking For is in the Library and The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park have recently found their way into English translation. Now her first novel, Hot Chocolate on Thursday, has been published. (The sequel, Matcha on Monday, is due out later this year.)

The novel is comprised of twelve interconnected stories, each featuring a colour theme. Characters are briefly introduced in one chapter, then expanded up in the next, until the final chapter where the original main two characters, a waiter and his customer at a cafe, are brought full circle. In between there is a broad cast including mothers, child care workers, artists, gallery owners, students, travellers and an elderly married couple. These are everyday people, hoping for love and connection, but fearful of rejection and loneliness. Aoyama’s books have sometimes been described as therapy, and there is a self-help quality about her writing, but her light touch also succinctly captures the human dilemmas we all face. The fiction of Alexander McCall Smith - stories that explore the moral quandaries of everyday people - would probably make a good parallel.

I was struck by one paragraph in Aoyama’s novel, where she neatly encapsulates how the mind often works against itself:

“We live in ignorance of what the next second holds. There are things beyond our control that come to us unbidden. In those moments, anxieties that multiply endlessly cause us to imagine fearful scenarios. Even though these are stories of our own fabrication, we are threatened by them as if they were immutable futures handed down to us by someone.”

Gentle, easy reading, feel good fiction, containing a core of wisdom and truth.

Hot Chocolate on Thursday, by Michiko Aoyama. Published by Doubleday Uk. $34.99

APRIL26

Glyph, by Ali Smith

 

Scottish novelist Ali Smith shows how the weight of history is still felt in the present. 

Two sisters, Petra and Patricia, are very close when growing up in the 1990s as young girls, but fall apart during adulthood. Petra, the older sister by two years, recalls strange incidents from their youth, in particular a story told to them by an elderly woman at a family party. The woman was some type of messenger during the Second World War and during an errand came upon a dead flattened body, probably run over by a tank. The remains of the body are like a thick leathery strap. The story haunts the girls as they play games that try to recreate the dead soldier. Another story, this one from the First World War, is equally shocking. A sensitive young soldier leads a horse rendered blind by chemical warfare into the woods, and doesn’t return. He is later found guilty of desertion and shot. 

In adulthood, Petra revisits these stories and out of the blue, contacts her estranged sister, Patricia. The two women re-connect, and Petra discovers Patricia now has a teenage daughter, Billie. Billie has gotten into a spot of bother with the police when attending a free Palestine protest. 

For the most part, Glyph (the name given to the flattened man) constitutes a dialogue between two sisters, seen from the perspectives of both women. A third perspective is offered by Billie, who brings a contemporary critique of war. The language Ali Smith employs is light and playful, with lots of amusing word games, giving the novel an immediate and of-the-moment aspect. It feels like the characters are there with you. Where things get dark is in the descriptions of war violence and the questions raised about the morality of portraying - whether in literature or child’s play - those who have died in tragic circumstances. Hence the novel swings from cheerful childhood innocence to the horror and violence of war.

A deceptively simple story told in a loose style that could have gone off the rails in the wrong hands, but Ali Smith shows a deft hand in balancing the light and the dark.

Glyph, by Ali Smith. Published by Hamish Hamilton. $39.99

APRIL26

A Shadow of Myself, by Peter Flamm

A man troubled by war tries to lose himself by impersonating someone else.

While roaming the scarred battlefields of Verdun in north eastern France, a German man named Wilhelm Bettuch comes across the corpse of a dead surgeon, Hans Stern. A working class baker himself, Wilhelm decides to steal the papers of this professional man, return to Germany, and impersonate him. Things go surprisingly smoothly. Posing as Hans Stern, Wilhelm discovers he has a wife, named Grete. She recognises him as her husband, and any differences in personality she puts down to the traumatic effects of war. Hans/Wilhelm also discovers that neighbours and friends easily recognise him.

But a troubling inner voice says he will be caught. The family dog, Nero, treats him suspiciously. And family friend and prosecutor Sven Borges claims to be on his tail. When Hans/Wilhelm is summoned as a witness in a court case, he risks serious consequences. 

Peter Flamm (real name Erich Mosse, 1891-1963) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. First published in 1926, A Shadow of Myself is on one level about survivors of trench warfare during the First World War, but on another level it delves into themes of self and presentation of self in society. Hans/Wilhelm (the two are somehow convincingly mixed into one entity) very much hides behind a mask, his inner self a roiling ocean of doubts, anxieties and fears. The text  denies the idea of concrete personality and identity, that hard surface and false veneer we try to wear. In an extraordinary passage, Flamm describes individuals as mere expressions of biology and mysterious nature:

“...our parents aren’t our father and mother, not their blood alone, we have every animal inside us, every plant, all of them speaking their muffled language, as embryos we still have all their shapes, breathing with gills, we’re fish and reptiles and animals, the whole of creation is inside us…we’re all brothers, we’re all one, there’s no guilt because we’re not ourselves…”

The novel’s narration is paced like a thriller, as Hans/Wilhelm constantly fears detection. Even though he is surrounded by friends and family, and  lives in a bustling city, he is nevertheless haunted by a terrifying isolation, a world that can never understand him. In tone and atmosphere, A Shadow of Myself is reminiscent of Kafka’s nightmare existential classic The Trial (the framing device Flamm uses is that of a courtroom confession, where Hans/Wilhelm tells his story.) 

A hundred years after it was first published, this exceptional work of war time fiction can now be enjoyed by English readers. (Translated by Simon Pare.)

A Shadow of Myself, by Peter Flamm. Published by Pushkin Press. $32.99.

MAR26

Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevsen

An abandoned wife takes a victory lap of sorts, giving an excoriating commentary on her friends, lovers and family. 

Lise Mundus is a celebrated poet. Her husband, Vilhelm, is an equally famous newspaper editor. After twenty years of marriage, he has abandoned his wife. From a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad, searching for a lover. She takes up with Kurt, an aimless drifter  who lives above her flat. The relationship is pretty meaningless to Lise, just a way of filling in the empty hours. What really gives her life a semblance of meaning is a steady stream of exasperated, ironic and often comical commentaries on Vilhelm and his many lovers. Lise is also critical of herself and her own behaviour in the relationship, although the tone of these self-reproaches is breezy and glib. 

As this mad, patchwork narrative barrels along, we know a reckoning is ahead, for in the first page we learn that Lise is already dead.

Vilhelm’s Room was Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel, published in 1975. It is a bit of a train wreck, but one you can’t look away from. The story jumps all over the place, characters come and go erratically and the narrator’s voice is hard to pin down. Sometimes it’s Lise narrating, sometimes a third person narrator, sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s who. That might make it sound like a challenging read, and it is to a degree, but the novel’s extraordinary psychodynamics - the ex-lovers, the self loathing, the sexual competition, the painful loneliness- make it compellingly universal. Our darkest moments are here laid bare in a prose that is both despairing and witty. The reader doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Interspersed through the madness are insightful passages where Ditlevsen discusses relationships, childhood and personal struggles. If Vilhelm’s Room has a theme, it is the latter. Lise is flighty, cheerful and witty, even if this is at core a very rancid type of wit, the enjoyment of Vilhelm’s character assasination. Underlying all this is a serious mental illness. Lise talks in earnest about suicide, claiming the thought of it is her only happiness in life, as it provides her the freedom to choose when her misery will end.

Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel is shocking and raw. It’s also darkly comic, with a nervous energy that propels the story. The book should perhaps come with a warning, especially anyone suffering from mental illness. 

Brilliant and original, but also deeply saddening. (Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell.)

Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevsen. Published by Penguin. $26.99

MAR26