At the beginning my recent trip to Europe I had lunch with the mystery writer Alison Joseph and her husband Tim Boon, head of research and public policy at Science Museum, London. I met them at a science history event in 2018 and immediately became of fan of Alison's novels. She has published more than ten.
In 2018 I read two mysteries in which Agatha Christie is a character: Murder Will Out and Hiddens Sins. I also read the mystery centered around Alison's fascination with the Higgs Boson and particle physics: Dying to Know. At that point I had not read the Sister Agnes series of mysteries that began her career as a mystery writer in the 1990s. By 2000 there were six Sister Agnes novels.
This year I saw Sister Agnes was back in a pandemic mystery What Dark Days Seen. It was fascinating to see a mystery solved by a person dealing with all the pandemic restrictions. Since the pandemic began I was re-reading stories from The Decameron and Love in the Time of Cholera. Once I read the pandemic mystery I went back and The Quick and the Dead one of the early Sister Agnes novels and am now reading The Darkening Sky which is influenced by Alison's love of the Divine Comedy.
In The Quick and the Dead Sister Agnes has a deep crisis of faith. It is a very good mystery. I had no idea "Who done it" until the murderer was revealed. But the spiritual crisis of Sister Agnes is beautifully done. I would recommend the book even to those who are not fans of the mystery genre. More than twenty years ago, I read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers. The mysteries were fun, but the character of Lord Peter Wimsey kept me reading until the series was finished.
I was very glad to return to London. And it seems I picked a window between the Delta and Omicron variants that still allowed easy travel between the UK and Paris. It was my first trip on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel.
For avid readers of mysteries, I would suggest beginning with the Agatha Christie homage books. It's fun to see Agatha herself in the story. Anyone who has experienced a crisis of faith or wants to read about faith facing tragedy, The Quick and the Dead is fantastic.
