Reading: Ellie Haskell Series by Dorothy Cannell

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Hello, my dear reading lovers! 📚

It’s now a great time to sit in your favorite chair near the fireplace, wrap yourself in a warm blanket, grab a cup of hot cocoa, and dive into reading.

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Today I invite you to meet a wonderful author of the detective

Dorothy Cannell

If you love and appreciate detective stories in the style of cozy provincial England, filled with everyday details and gentle irony, then you will definitely like her books.
But first I would like to say a few words about the writer herself.
Dorothy Cannell was born on June 23, 1943 in London. At the age of 20 she moved to the USA, where she got married. The writer has four children and ten grandchildren.

In total, Dorothy Cannell is the author of 18 novels (you can find them here). Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to read them all. But I was lucky enough to read most of the novels in the series dedicated to Ellie Haskell.

The series includes 13 books and begins with The Thin Woman, written in 1984.

Nice people everywhere know that family reunions are occasions of wholesome pleasure, more innocently rewarding than lavender-scented sheets in the airing cupboard or fresh pots of homemade bramble jelly cooling on a marble pantry shelf. I hope, therefore, that posterity will not judge me harshly when I confess I read the invitation to Merlin’s Court with the same panic I would have accorded a formal notice that I was to be executed at the Crown’s convenience. The gently worded letter on thin violet writing paper summoned me to a gathering of the clan at the ancestral home of an aged uncle. My horror lay in the knowledge that I could no longer conceal my disreputable secret from the relations I had cleverly avoided the past few years. Advertising campaigns describe such as I in soothing terms—full-figure girls. But who are we kidding? One simple three-letter word says it all.

Oh yeah! It all started that way. But at that moment, interior designer Ellie could have imagined how this trip would turn out for her!

Just a little disclaimer: if you like guys with guns, exciting chases and fights, this book is definitely not for you. But if you are interested in family secrets and a little psychopaths and all this in the interior of good old England, then the link to the books is above.

I may be wrong in my assessments, but The Thin Woman (1984) was included in the hundred best works of the 20th century, and another novel in the series, The Widow's Club (1988), was recognized as the best novel of the year and was nominated for an Agatha Award.

So, the first in the series is the novel The Thin Woman. And it seems to me that only in this case the order of reading is of fundamental importance since we get to know the heroine herself and all her crazy family. As for the rest of the books in this series, they have a more or less independent character and the sequence of reading them will not affect the understanding of the plot unless you discover that the heroine has again become childless and you will understand that you have slightly mixed up the sequence 😉.

No matter how hard Ellie tries to be an exemplary housewife, wife and mother, what can she do if she constantly stumbles upon corpses or gets into dangerous troubles! At the same time, our heroine is far from Lara Croft both in character and in physical capabilities. And at the beginning of the story, she is actually a girl with dozens of extra pounds. She has all the same problems that thousands of women face and this makes the detective story very domestic and ordinary. Well, how domestic and ordinary murder can be...

In general, if I convinced you, the link to the books is above. Or look for your options😉

Ellie Haskell Series