The Book in my Bag at the moment

They've republished the Josephine Tey books and I've dipped into a couple.
They are filming Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur series in Wales soon, so that could be something. Plus the library should have them.
Have you ever read Rosemary Sutcliffe. I know they're classed as children's books but they aren't really. [/quote]

Trey's books are detective stories. They were contemporary ish at the time. At least the recent past to when she was writing. They do contain past thinking and stuff. She is a beautiful writer.

She was very popular. Some books were made into films.

Amazon will give you a full list. Josephine Tey, she was very popular in her time. They're not hard to read and I've always wondered why there wasn't a TV series.

Some lovely old fashioned English too.

It was, back in 1988

One of the two accused women was played by Rosalie Crutchley who was very good at faintly sinister roles!

I’ve just looked at her Wikipedia entry, she had a very long and varied career

Well the talk was very interesting. The author said she chose the time frame - six years after Culloden because mostly after that the jacobites changed their allegiance and became part of the UK ruling classes with gusto, including lots of involvement in plantations and slavery, and at every level of empire and colonialism, including all officer ranks in the army and Navy. She said it gets more than a bit leary after Culloden and she didn't want to write about that - how they got their wealth and land back.

She also said this is likely to be her last crime/mystery novel. She has plots and drafts for other books set in the Highlands and Islands but her current publishers have refused to let her do that, even with a different name. Her contract was due for renewal and after this latest bestseller they were pushing for more of the same. She has made the decision not to renew her contract with them.

There were lots of interesting questions and discussions.

Venue missed out - no refreshments or snacks at all.

I've just read a flimsy bit of froth and it was what it said on the tin. Except the author had the protagonists regularly watching the sunset over the sea.

What's wrong with that you might ask. Well it was set in Northumberland and we don't get sunsets over the sea on the east coast.

I felt like noting it on her twitter page, but I restrained myself because if neither she or her editor knew that, why bother.

I recently bought two current hits, The Maid and The Other Black Girl (authors names forgotten!)

The Maid is a delight, a murderer case set in a luxury hotel. I really enjoyed the ambience of the hotel and the quirkiness of the heroine. I would say she is somewhere on the spectrum. I read it was going to be made into a film starring Florence Pugh.

The Other Black Girl is marketed as The Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out. It is set in the very white world of publishing where the protagonist is the only black employee, until a second one joins. Is this new woman an ally, or an implacable enemy? To say it is oddly structured is an understatement and also extremely slow. The protagonist, Nella, is obsessed with race, and it is just so drawn out that I was wondering where the Get Out sequence was supposed to be! Eventually I read about 200 pages, googled the plot and just read the ending, which was also very disappointing. Maybe it would work better as a film.