How lovely to be able to kick back and read something to relax with.  Evans Above is the 1st in a 10-book series featuring Evan Evans,  a constable in Wales. This is a kind of cozy series in a way, but with serious procedural elements as a basis. There are also some very funny lines in the dialogue.  

Evans Above
By Rhys Bowen
1997 (original) 
Read by Roger Clark 6h 30m
Rating 9 for the fun
(#1 in Constable Evan Evans series) 

The village of Llanfair, Wales, has a new constable. Evan Evans has quit city life for the slower pace of the country-side. But there’s action here, too. It seems the body of an unidentified man was recently found at the base of a nearby cliff. He was apparently fell or was pushed.

Shortly after that discovery, the dead body of a London policeman was found not too far away, also at the bottom of a cliff. Are these deaths related somehow? And an 8-year old girl from a nearby town has also apparently been murdered. Scary times.

Sergeant Watts seems rather dim and thinks the two newly discovered bodies were not murders, but just coincidence. Evans isn’t so sure about that. And there’s more, just to keep law enforcement busy and on their toes. Mrs Powell-Jones is terribly upset about the prize-winning tomatoes in her garden which has been vandalized by … well … she knows who it was! On top of that (blah-blah) but Mrs Powell-Jones is a pest and there’s a LOT of sometimes unscrupulous competition for the prizes at the local fair. 

And a child molester as well as other prisoners have been granted early release so they’re on the loose, but all this got lost in the news as that was full of Thatcher and Hussein and a train robbery.  

The story is mostly procedural, with minimal romantic interest and some light dry humor.  Good!  

In March of this year I got book #4, Evans and Elle, in the series when it was on sale. I’m a bit pickier about cozies but I totally love some and because I very much enjoyed #4, I put #1 on my Wish List. Then,  a couple weeks ago another sale came along and this time I went on a little shopping spree getting books already on my Wish List which acts as a kind of “TBR pile” (To Be Read). But now (since this last sale) I’ve got a real “TBR file” I’m working on. There are 8 books in there, all lined up on my Mac screen.(And there are 150 books on my Wish List – that number goes up and down, it’s down now.) 

I had physical TBR piles before Audible and Kindle came along and I started really using them. Even with Prime it still took 2 days to get my books. Before that it might have taken 5 days to ship, but with 5 books in an order, the shipping was free so I saved up my list and when it got to 3 I always stuck in a couple more. Of course my TBR shelf expanded to 2 and 3 levels – lol. It took months and months to get rid of that, maybe a couple or three years (because I was reading my new purchases at the same time. 

So after the  immediate gratification of Kindle and Audible books my habit became to read as I bought and to buy as I read. No real TBR pile!  I’d read one book then go buy another one because whole stores were available pronto!  I read my old TBR pile down from about 200 books to I think 60? And when I left California I just left them there because I wasn’t going to have much room here in ND – the house was already full (it had been my mom’s and my grandma’s and her sister’s before me).

So I’ve been interested in reading Rhys Bowen for years because some of the covers of the “Royal Spyness” books look so enticing. The sales finally dragged me in (lol). That’s what happened with the now ended, Needlecraft series by Monica Ferris. I started at # 8 because I was wanting a Christmas book and I was so surprisingly amused I got hooked.  Ah me…