I posted on this thread at the start and then promptly fell off it again 
. Anyway, here are this year's books so far:
1. Christopher Fowler, Hall of Mirrors. This is the 16th installment in the Bryant and May series, and takes place in 1969, when John and Arthur were (relatively) young men. The novel plays with the idea of the golden age country house mystery, and Christopher Fowler has fun introducing (and subverting) all the stock figures of this genre, including the vicar, the ex-military man with a peppery temper, the grande dame who owns the house and the vacuous blonde who has accompanied another guest as his mistress. Luckily, we avoid tedious cliche when it becomes evident that almost all the guests are lying about something or hiding a secret - and the setting, at the fag-end of the sixties, with the Manson murders, Woodstock and the moon landing in the background, and dubious property developers building shoddy high-rise flats in the East End, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and a drug-riddled ashram all featuring in the story itself. The set-up took so long that the murder itself didn't happen until halfway through the book; I found 5he narrative sagging a little before that point, but I enjoy spending time with Bryant and May so much that I didn't really mind. As a huge golden age detective fiction nerd, and as a devoted fan of B&M, I enjoyed this book very much, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as an introduction to the series. If you're already acquainted with B&M, however, there's much to enjoy here, including Arthur meeting a young Maggie Armitage (and acquiring Victor, his gaudy yellow Mini), and John appearing in a series of increasingly outlandish and fashionable clothes.
2. Kate Atkinson, Festive Spirits. This has already been reviewed a few times on here before. it's a rather slight volume of 3 Christmas-related short stories, but I bought it on a whim just before Christmas because it looked so gorgeous. The stories are short but just as sharply-observed as you'd expect - I particularly enjoyed the first family relationships in the first and last stories. I didn't really know wheat to make of the sudden pitch into magical realism at the end of the middle story, but I love Kate Atkinson so much that I'll overlook that lapse. I know she's a bit Marmite on here, but I found these stories a lovely way to make the transition from cosy, insular family Christmas back to work and school and everyday drudgery. I'll probably read them again next Christmas!
3. Elly Griffiths, The Ghost Fields. I've got tickets for an event with Elly Griffiths next month, as her next book (The Lantern Men) is set in the Fens, near(ish) to where I live. I'm going on a bit of a Ruth Galloway binge over the next few weeks, hoping to catch up on all the ones I haven't read before the author event! This is book 7, and I enjoyed it more than some of the previous ones. There's not much in the way of forensic archaeology (and the mystery itself is a bit thin - I'm getting a bit tired of the "Ruth has idiotically put herself in jeopardy with the insane murderer, in a place that's cut off from the rest of the world for some reason, but luckily Nelson/Cathbad has realised in time to come to her aid" penultimate scene that's in every book), but the character development is enjoyable and the book feels calmer and more rounded than earlier ones. I'm looking forward to dashing through books 8-11 in the next 4 weeks!
4. Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. I LOVED this! One of my favourite books last year was An Experiment in Love, and there are a couple of stories in this collection (Comma, The Heart Fails Without Warning) that draw in similar material. She's so very good at drawing unlikeable characters, especially the kind of repellent, sly children who manage to be both pitiable and unprepossessing. Many of the other stories contain the delicious nastiness and weird-yet-ordinary events at which she excels, and the spot-on observations and descriptions are wonderful. To me, this felt more like the Mantel of Beyond Black than Wolf Hall, but that may be because of the contemporary settings.
5. Nicola Upson, The Angel with Two Faces. Second in the Josephine Try mysteries. I had my doubts about the first one (about the rather anachronistic language - characters talking about "relationships" and so on), and about the heavy reliance on coincidence and melodrama - and this books hasn't exactly quelled those doubts! The books are actually very well written and researched, but the plots are a bit ridiculous, as if Nicola Upson has decided to throw every single gothic ingredient into her pot and give them all a big stir. Murder! Doomed relationships! Child abuse! Fey children who may or may not be reliable witnesses! Dead babies! Witchcraft! Transgressive love! - they're all in there, plus a couple more ingredients that I haven't listed because they'd spoil the plot. I did enjoy it, up to a point, but felt both cross and exhausted by the end. I'd already bought the third book in the series, so will probably read that, but possibly no more.
I'm now rushing to finish Americanah, which is due back at the library on Thursday, but have been temporarily seduced by The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy, which is a Virago reprint of a 1920s satire that was both scandalous and immensely popular when first published...