A-Z Blogging Challenge: Letter O

We've reached the half-way point of our A-Z Blogging Challenge. Every day in April (except Sundays) I will be doing a post for each letter of the alphabet. It is my plan to make most of my posts reading &/or book-related. April 18th is brought to you by the Letter O. And, since the Crime Fiction Alphabet, sponsored by Mysteries in Paradise, is also on the Letter O--I'm going to let my entry do double-duty.

So....O is for Oliver--Anthony Oliver. I could find little background on him--but he is a former Welsh actor who gave up the acting business and took up the antique business. His mystery series revolves around the art and antique world and features the sleuthing twosome of John Webber, a not-quite-retired police inspector, and Lizzie Thomas, a housewife who finds herself in the midst of all sorts of trouble. His set of four stories, all written in the 1980s, are quite fun and funny.

In the past I have read Oliver's first detective novel, The Pew Group. In that one, we had what seemed to be a most innocent murder. Doreen Corder didn't mean to do it, but somehow her foot jumped out just as her odious husband reached the top of the stairs. Her husband was in the antique business and left her almost nothing in his will. All she has is the Pew Group, a very ugly but extremely valuable piece of pottery that she hopes to sell for a pretty penny. But then it is stolen. Doreen takes comfort in the arms of the young and handsome Joseph O'Shea while her mother, Lizzie Thomas, and John Webber work on recovering the Pew Group.

This year I have Oliver's Cover-Up on my list of books to read. It will help me take care of a few challenges and it will show me what Oliver's work was like when he stopped writing--because Cover-Up is his fourth and final book. In this one Joseph Greenwood, a successful art dealer with a penchant for paintings, is unaware that a date with death is looming as he drives through the English countryside. He is distracted by a hot tip he has received about a very valuable and rare Stanley Spencer painting. A painting that is currently in the hands of the one-time actress Victoria Varley. But after only one look at the prize, Greenwood winds up dead--and Victoria and the large bundle of money Greenwood brought with him have vanished. Flaxwood residents Lizzie Thomas and John Webber soon become involved and find out that art collecting can be a most unhealthy business....priceless masterpieces seem to lead to wholesale murder.