It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about bigging up a book you love and think doesn’t get enough attention:

If you could recommend one overlooked book, what would it be and why?

This sounds quite like the prompt from the week before last, but I’ll pick something else to talk about this time! And I’ll go with a different genre, too: let’s talk about the work of E.C.R. Lorac, a classic crime writer who turned out some excellent mysteries with human characters and vivid settings, but rarely gets spoken about now (and is certainly not considered one of the Queens of Crime).

But the prompt says “one overlooked book”, so I need to pick a specific book — and that’s harder, because my favourite book by E.C.R. Lorac isn’t in the series that I love best overall. So, let’s go with Accident by Design. It’s one of her Inspector Macdonald books which hasn’t yet been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series (yet?), and features her usual ability to evoke characters and settings… and the culprit surprised me because it was someone I really didn’t want it to be.

I generally enjoy all her books, though, and it’s hard to say where to start exactly: I don’t think I’ve even read the first Inspector Macdonald book! There’s a certain amount of continuity between the books, but not so much that you’ll be missing anything if you start in the middle.

Oh, and you wanted to know my actual favourite? That would be Death of an Author, the only one I’ve given five stars, which has been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series.