Kathryn's Inbox

Picture it. Adelaide 2025. I'm walking through my favourite bookshop, passing the crime section when I turn around and I just happen to spot ... The Golden Girls? The hilarious 1980s sitcom, back in the form of a delightful cosy mystery titled Murder by Cheesecake?   Bring it on! Murder By Cheesecake is the first in a soon to be series of cosy mysteries staring Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia. Rose has been tasked with organising a traditional St Olaf style wedding (complete with lots of silly traditions) for her beloved niece and the others are doing their best to pitch in, especially as the groom's snobbish family aren't all that keen on the idea of a small, quirky wedding. However, things don't truly go awry until Dorothy's unpleasant date for the wedding is found dead in the freezer, his face buried in a traditional St Olaf cheesecake. Worse still, Dorothy is the prime suspect and she and the girls need to move fast to clear her name and keep the wedding on ...

There are a whole lot of animals at the heart of the latest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaption, a whole house full of them in fact, and Jessi Ramsey junior officer of the BSC has been trusted to care for them for a whole week. While the Mancusi's are away, Jessi will be taking on a sitting job of a different kind, caring for three dogs, five cats, various birds, rabbits, hamsters and even a snake. Meanwhile, the BSC are having some internal problems, mostly due to Kristy being bossier than usual. How can Jessi manage to look after a house full of pets for a week, and help to fix things at the BSC?  This was a fun and entertaining read. It's been a long time since I read the original--so long that I was a little skeptical of this one going in. The number of pets the Mancusi family had seemed wildly extreme, as was the fact that they would trust an eleven year old kid they had never met before to care for them for an entire week. Then, of course, I had to remind myself that...

Like many of us, journalist Nevin Martell is a diehard fan of the utterly brilliant daily comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. Looking For Calvin and Hobbes is equal parts a study of the comic and the story of how Martell sought to find out more about the comic's reclusive author Bill Watterson, who turned his back on multiple deals for merchandising, an animated series and who does not seek fame or notoriety in any way, shape or form. Martell never gets to interview Watterson, but what we go get is a solid story on how a was never spoiled by over-exposure or merchandising and remains beloved by fans, interviews with all kinds of people including Lynn Johnson who created the wonderful For Better of For Worse daily comic, and an outline of Watterson's career.  This was an interesting read. I knew close to nothing about Watterson but for the fact that he never allowed his comic to be monetised, and the story of how Calvin and Hobbes came into being was an interesting one, along with t...

Hannah Kent's memoir, about a year long student exchange to Iceland and how it inspired her bestselling novel Burial Rites is absolutely fascinating from beginning to end. The author shares with the reader how, at age seventeen, she left Australia in the middle of summer and arrived in Iceland, a country so different from her own, in the middle of winter. There she would discover careless adults, new traditions, friends that would become family and, eventually, the story of Agnes Magusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Some years later she would return to research the life of Agnes Magusdottir and turn it into a story that would become an award winning and bestselling novel.  I enjoyed reading this for a number of reasons. First, like many Australians I find Iceland to be both fascinating and very far away. It was interesting to read and discover more about the real Iceland and how people live their day to day lives. Second, I loved the inside glimpse to how the aut...

A fake marriage for a very surprising reason is at the heart of this fun, cozy romance set in Bath. August is a dreamer, big on ideas and personality. Flynn is smart and quiet and, as his ex-girlfriend put it when she dumped him, not at all adventurous. Disenchanted with love, he returns from Japan where he has been living for the past four years to Bath and, after some troubles finding suitable accommodation, he sees the perfect flat advertised. There is just one problem. August has her heart set on that very flat, mostly due to something that her beloved grandmother said to her many years before. At the viewing, Autumn and Flynn discover that the eccentric landlady will only rent the flat to a married couple, and soon the pair come up with a novel solution ... This was a fun and cozy read, with most of the drama revolving around how the main characters keep up the pretence of being married, their guilt about telling a lie and the further complications it causes when they start fallin...