#6degrees: from The Arsonist to His Burial Too

March 4, 2019 Lark_Bookwyrm 6 Degrees 3

It’s the first Saturday in March (OK, it’s the first Monday; I’m running late)… which means it’s (past) time for #6degrees, the Six Degrees of Separation book meme.

Six Degrees of Separation is hosted monthly by Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month, she posts a book title. The idea is to create a chain from that book to five other books in a row. Each link can be anything you want — the same author, the same title, the same subject, books you read on the same holiday — just some sort of connection between one book and the next.

Ready? Here goes:

For March 2019, the starting book is The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper. It’s a true-crime story about an Australian arsonist, who set two of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. I haven’t read it.

Another book about arson that I haven’t read is Blue Smoke by Nora Roberts. It’s about a female arson investigator, and it’s on my TBR.

The title of Blue Smoke reminds me of White Smoke (Andrew Greeley), a novel, and something of a mystery/thriller, about the Catholic Church’s next papal election. (Well, “next” as of when the book was written, which was during the papacy of John Paul II.) This book leads me to…

Another mystery involving the Catholic Church, but this time set in 12th-century England. Ellis Peters’s One Corpse Too Many is her second mystery featuring Brother Cadfael of Shrewsbury Abbey. It’s one of my favorites.

Peters also wrote contemporary mysteries (as with Greeley, I mean “contemporary to her time,” i.e., the 1950s-1970s/) Sticking with the church theme of the last two links, Rainbow’s End find the victim at the foot of an Anglican church tower. And that makes me think of…

Catherine Aird’s His Burial Too, a locked-room mystery featuring a corpse buried under at least a ton of broken marble statuary in—you guessed it—an Anglican church tower.

So there you have it: arson to murder-by-statue in six steps. Next month’s starting point is Ali Smith’s award-winning novel, How to be Both.