An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good: Stories by Helene Tursten; translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy --- 171 pages

Helen Tursten is the author of two mystery series featuring female detectives, set in her native Sweden: the IreneHuss Mysteries and the Embla Nyström Mysteries.

She was asked to contribute a short story to a  Christmas crime anthology and couldn't come up with an idea until she thought about looking at crime from the criminal's perspective.

And that's how irascible Maud sprang full grown from Tursten's hindbrain. Maud is 88 years old, and looks like a typical old granny --- but her age is the perfect disguise for her criminal acts.  One reviewer said Maud, like Miss Marple, looks quite harmless and helpless; but underneath is as clever and ruthless as Dexter.  These five interconnected short stories are equal parts black humor and domestic malice. This reader was left laughing and hoping for more of Maud's murderous adventures.

Click HERE to read the * review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble

The Dark Flood Rises: A Novel by Margaret Drabble --- 325 pages

This is a scathingly funny and clear-eyed look at those so-called golden years in a world that celebrates youth and desperately avoids confronting mortality.

Probably you have to be old enough to really appreciate it.  If you read the first paragraph and find yourself laughing hysterically as you nod your head yes, oh yes! --- then you are old enough to brave the rest of the story. If not, then put it aside for another ten or twenty years.

Briefly, Drabble introduces us to Fran Stubbs and her circle of family and friends, of various ages and mental and physical frailties, all coping in their own distinct ways with the process of aging and its inevitable conclusion.

Click HERE to read the review in the Washington Post.

Click HERE to read the review in The Guardian (US Edition)