No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. New Books Alerts brought a surprise to my inbox recently.
Did you catch it? Not the book itself, although I did rush out to the shelves to see if it was there. The review. It is 2016 and a New Book Alert showed up with a review by none other than the great (and very late) Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the beloved Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.
Now those who are not devotees of British crime fiction may never have heard of Miss Sayers, but to me her name was as eye-catching as a five-star review. She wrote the Lord Peter series between 1923-1937, twelve books in all. (If you are interested, author Jill Paton Walsh added four more titles to the series, bringing the Lord Peter tales to sixteen.)
By the way, the book, Death of an Airman by Christopher St. John Sprigg, was on the shelf, so now I have a new story to read, recommended by an author, long gone but yet, still very much here. And that is one of the things I love about books. Old friends, both authors and characters, never completely leave us.