An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good and An Elderly Lady Must Not be Crossed (Elderly Lady #1, #2) by Helene Tursten

Lynnie    
Amy       

contemporary fiction

The title of the book is the summary. :)

Lynnie's Review

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good was an unexpected pleasure! I won't lie, I only downloaded it from the library because the title and cover caught my attention.

Maud- the elderly lady in question- is indeed up to no good at all! Stubborn, irascible, calculating and disarmingly spry for her age, Maud's tales of murder and mayhem often made me laugh out loud in disbelief. Is any of it realistic? No, not really but, honestly, I didn't care; I'm only sad that it's over. I would have never thought that a book about a serial-killing old lady would be so entertaining, and I feel somewhat guilty about enjoying it as much as I did, but there you have it. None of Tursten's stories in this collection are particularly surprising and you might even say it was formulaic, but it was a few hours very well-spent, in my opinion.

Amy's Review

Maud is an 88-year-old Swedish woman who often finds herself at odds with people.  She’s reclusive, wealthy, well-traveled, and comfortable in her own skin.  She is also decisive, confident, self-serving, and lethal!  This book is a quirky oddity of a story collection and I couldn’t help but be amused while reading about Maud’s antics and scenarios.  It’s a quick read.  The book was translated from Helene Tursten’s Swedish so felt a bit clunky to read at times. But it flew by, nonetheless.

Amy  

fiction

This sequel to An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good provides more examples of Maud’s poor behavior.

I could have done without this sequel.  Having another book full of even more awful manipulations and premeditations by Maud takes her evil deeds beyond quirky, toxic, and shameful to downright criminal and psychopathic. I don’t remember all the stories from the first novel but I don’t remember them feeling this dark and deranged. I really grew to despise Maud in this book. In fact, I would’ve stopped listening to the audiobook halfway through, but I didn’t have another one available and it’s a very short novel. The author attempts to redeem Maud in the end, but it was too little too late. The woman is unredeemable in my mind and I’m seriously concerned about the author, Helene Tursten, too. This was not amusing or cute at all.  Further, for a short novel, there were many long, boring sections between the meatier servings of the story.

The audiobook was read by Ann Richardson. She had a decent repertoire of female voices (although, no accents) and wasn’t a bad actor when voicing characters. But she had no male repertoire at all. She also had one of those robotic “narrator” voices when not voicing a character. I’ll give her a B-.