#WWWWednesday – 10th June 2026

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Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

Country People by Daniel Mason (John Murray via NetGalley)

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family.

So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, who possesses, in Kate’s, words, ‘a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere’. Soon he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales – from a ghostly tree surgeon, to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress, and a photographer of snowflakes – until at last he stumbles upon a bizarre local legend, which, he begins to suspect, might not be a legend at all.

Deception by Alan Parks (Baskerville via NetGalley)

New York, December 1941. Joseph Gunner, former soldier, is off the front lines and on the streets of New York, tasked with helping tip America into the Second World War.

Working for a section of the British Secret Service, Gunner spends his days covertly encouraging pro-war sentiment through planted news stories, radio broadcasts and even blackmail.

But when a honeytrap mission with a prominent US politician goes wrong and the young woman involved is found dead, Gunner realises he has a target on his back. Who silenced her? Who knew their plan? And who has betrayed Gunner?

As he investigates, Gunner is plunged into the secretive world of Nazis in America, the NYPD and the mobs of New York, as the body count quickly stacks up. With world events accelerating, Gunner finds himself in a race against time before he becomes the next victim. Soon, he’ll uncover a conspiracy that goes beyond what he thought was possible.

Murder at the End of the World by Akani Arake, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (ARC, Pushkin Vertigo)

An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and the human race has just over two months to live. But twenty-three-year-old Haru, stargazer and chronic worrier, is still trying to pass her driving test.

Then she finds a body in the boot of her car: a woman, stabbed and tortured. There’s a murderer on the loose. And it turns out that Haru’s driving instructor is an ex-cop with a manic devotion to justice.

So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the two women team up to catch the culprit, no matter where it takes them.

After all, the world’s not quite over yet…

What I’ve Just Read

Dwell by Rue Baldry (ARC, Northodox Press)

January 1919. A new gardener at a snowbound boys’ boarding school catches everyone’s attention. There is a rumour that he is a war hero.

Nineteen-year-old Albert is haunted by his experiences in The Great War, and fighting the temptation of one particular prefect. What they want is illegal. Being caught would ruin them both. 

When Albert’s past catches up to him, their quest for a place where love can safely dwell comes under even greater threat. (Review to follow)

A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie (Collins)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Book Review – A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie #ccpin #20BOS26

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About the Book

Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his “counting house” when he suffered an agonizing and sudden death. On later inspection, the pockets of the deceased were found to contain traces of cereals.

Yet, it was the incident in the parlour that confirmed Miss Marple’s suspicion that here she was looking at a case of crime by rhyme….

Format: Hardback (191 pages) Publisher: Collins
Publication date: 1954 Genre: Crime

Find A Pocket Full of Rye on Goodreads

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My Review

A Pocket Full of Rye was the book chosen for me in the latest Classics Club spin.

As I was reading the book I realised that most of my knowledge of Agatha Christie novels comes from watching TV adaptations. I vaguely remembered some elements of A Pocket Full of Rye but luckily not enough that I was able to work out the culprit, the motive or the way the crime was carried out.

Assigned to investigate the sudden death of businessman Rex Fortescue, Inspector Neele of Scotland Yard soon discovers it was not due to natural causes. But how the crime was carried out eludes him although there is no lack of possible suspects who might have possessed a motive. Fortescue was a rich man but not particularly liked even by members of his own family. Estranged for many years from one of his sons, he had recently remarried a much younger woman. Perhaps the motive was money or, as his elderly sister-in-law hints, perhaps the answers lies with events much longer ago. What really puzzles the Inspector is a curious feature of the crime: that there was rye in the dead man’s pocket.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away when I say there are more crimes to come, just as inexplicable as the first one. The prime suspect, the person who might have benefited most, couldn’t possibly have done it. Or could they?

Miss Marple doesn’t come on the scene for a while but when she does her talent for observation, insight into what makes people tick and ability to coax information from people without them noticing is of immense help to Inspector Neele who, by this point, is rather floundering. He’s interviewed lots of people, gathered what evidence he can, checked backgrounds, established a timeline but still there’s something not quite right. He can’t put his finger on it. Perhaps after all, they’ve got everything the wrong way around.

At one point, a character remarks, ‘The whole thing seems so wildly improbable. Like a detective story.’ But of course that’s the point. The story is improbable but it’s hugely entertaining trying to get anywhere near the right solution. As Christie’s other famous detective would say, it gets the little grey cells working. However in my case it was to limited effect. I think I probably suspected every character of being the culprit at some stage proving the author’s genius for misdirection and red herrings.

Of course, a theory – even one of Miss Marple’s – is just a theory until there’s proof to back it up, which is why the ending is so brilliant.

A Pocket Full of Rye is book 3 of my 20 Books of Summer 2026. I alternated between my lovely secondhand copy and the audiobook superbly narrated by Richard E. Grant.

In three words: Ingenious, entertaining, classic
Try something similar: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas by Agatha Christie

About the Author

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

She also wrote the world’s longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”, Christie has been called the “Queen of Crime”. She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

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