The latest book I completed is also an old favourite cosy thriller, Strangers in company by Jane Aiken Hodge which appeared as the paperback above and also in a Hodder hardback. Jane Aiken Hodge, sister of children's author Joan Aiken, was a prolific writer of historical and contemporary thrillers who died in 2009. You can read about her in the Wikipedia article or on Goodreads. I also regularly reread her Private life of Georgette Heyer which is a great book about one of my all time favourite authors. Hmm maybe that's another I could read soon?
Strangers in company wasn't written as an historical novel though some might find it so now. It is set in the Greece of the Hounta, the Colonels' Greece, and written in 1973 contemporaneously. I lived in Greece soon after the fall of the Hounta and find it nostalgic rather than historical though many of my young friends and staff would not have been born then. I love reading fiction set in Greece and enjoy the places in which this book is set.
The story is that of Marian who embarks on a bus tour of classical Greece as the paid companion of a young woman, Stella. Marian had been feeling paranoid in London as though someone was watching her and was she ever right! I love the familiarity of Athens, Delphi, Sparta, Mycenae, Tiryns, Nafplion and other places I travelled around close to the time the book is set. I hadn't read Strangers in company for a long time but I still found it both gripping to read and comfortable to put down and take up again. I've been very tired and busy recently so it was great. Jane Aiken Hodge is a good writer who creates a great sense of place and suspense. The leadup to and scene in Mystra is a good example of this. A nice little touch is one of the characters reading My brother Michael by Mary Stewart, another novel set in Greece which I always enjoy immensely.
No comments:
Post a Comment