I love elly griffiths all her books have been such a good read. This book had me gripped from the start. I can not wait to read more!

We are catching up with Stephens and Mephisto in 1964 Brighton. The setting is vividly portrayed, and it’s good to see old characters again. Very different from the Norfolk setting of the Ruth Galloway mysteries, but an excellent read.

I really enjoyed this book. I haven’t read the previous books in this series but love Elly Griffiths’ writing. It’s like she is chatting next to me, so easy to read.

The setting of Brighton in the early sixties is fabulous. I remember going there in 1970 and finding it to be a magical place. I still think it is. I thought all the characters were believable, although I found Edgar’s wife’s moaning about her lot to be annoying and unlikeable. She must have known what life had in store for her as that was the way women were treated at that time. My mother had to give up her career too, but my sister and I were never felt to be to blame for her change of circumstances. Such a lot for her poor children to cope with.

The setting of the scenes was so well done I could picture it all in my mind as I read the book. I didn’t feel that I had missed out by not reading previous books, so great writing Elly. The battle on the beach between the mods and rockers was brilliantly described, it fired my imagination.

The disappearance of three girls is the main event of the book, although it takes the death of one of the girls before it is taken seriously by police. When the famous Ruby Magic goes missing, the pace increases again. I loved the way that nineteen year old police officer WPC Meg Connolly is described and used to go undercover. She is a fabulous character, full of life and eagerness. She would be a great long term character if she is used in follow up books to this novel. This is a time when women were treated as second class citizens and this book certainly highlights that. The police force were incredibly sexist and this comes across brilliantly.

I also loved the character of Max, father of Ruby Magic who has her own tv show. Max is married to the famous actress Lydia Lamont, with whom he has two young children. They live in Hollywood and it is great to become aware of just how much Max misses Brighton. Following the death of his father, Max is now Lord Massingham, although he doesn’t use his title. Danger seems to seek Max out, however, as his daughter Ruby disappears.

The book is a wonderful insight into sixties Britain, with its sexism and differing cultural and social norms from our world today. It is written beautifully, allowing the reader an insight into the popular culture of that day together with an unfolding murder mystery. An excellent book.

As a long time fan of Elly Griffiths I was delighted to get the opportunity to review her newest book. Now You See Them is very different from my favourite Ruth Galloway series but I did enjoy it. I liked the plot and found the story moved at a great pace. Another winner from Griffiths.

Being a huge fan of her Ruth Galloway series I was interested to read this one. As usual when reading one of a series it took me a while to get all the characters straight and organise past events into my mind, However, I soon got lost in the story and really enjoyed the change of pace and time period. The Magic Men formed during WWII and this novel is set in 1964 so there’s been a lot of time covered and the setting is captured perfectly with mods v rockers and The Beatles playing on the radio. From a female perspective it’s interesting to see how women were treated in the police force, such as not being able to drive. We also see how difficult it is for one of the characters, DC Emma Holmes, to get used to her new role as stay at home mum, missing her working life.
Max Mephisto is now a movie star in LA which is a far cry from being a variety show magician. He’s married to an actress and they now have children too. Edgar is still in Brighton, but is now a police superintendent, One of the original war time group, The Great Diablo, has died, so Max is briefly in the UK for his funeral. He also has a meeting about a potential role in a British film and is taking an opportunity to reconnect with his older daughter Ruby - now a magician in her own TV show.
The case revolves around three missing girls in Brighton, seemingly very different Girls on the surface, but all are thought to have run away. Rather than being a fast paced thriller this is a gentle police procedural looked at from different angles as the police, a journalist and Emma Holmes are looking into the case. It’s quite slow to develop, more of a Sunday evening police series than anything gritty. However, this does give us more time to enjoy the great sense of place the author creates with the fashion, music and underneath it all a sense of a societal shift towards the cult of celebrity. It feels very authentic and added greatly to the book for me. I would like to go back and read the earlier books in the series now.

Thank you so much for my ARC and apologies to the publisher for the lateness of my review, which is due to ill health.

This is the fifth installment in Elly Griffiths' historical crime series set in mid-twentieth century Brighton. I'd read one of the previous books but think this one could probably be read as a standalone because the opening scene, a funeral, brings together all the key players and brings us up to speed with the back story.

This novel centres on a series of disappearances - young women and girls are going missing in Brighton and the police have no leads. Throw into the mix a bored superintendent's wife (herself a former police detective), a nosy journalist and the celebrated magician, Max Mephisto, and the result is an interesting but sedate investigation to find those who have vanished.

The novel is set in 1964 against a backdrop of the mods and rockers clashes on Brighton seafront. The historical detail is convincing and the restrictions on being a woman in this time period are portrayed well - Emma is suffocating as 'just' a wife and mother and there is the sense that things need to change for her and the younger women in the novel before Meg - a police officer of much promise - follows the same path.

Overall, this is an engaging and gentle crime story - a bit slow in places and ultimately forgettable, but an enjoyable read. I'd personally have liked more crime and less on the personal lives of everyone involved, but that's my personal preference and there is a lot here to like.

This is the fifth in Elly Griffiths Magic Men series and time has moved on for Stephens & Mephisto. It is now 1964 & the lives of the hero's are very different with Max a famous film star in the USA. But both have families & when Max's daughter disappears the old team pulls together.
Griffiths writes great characters & the sense she gives of the settings for her stories is excellent; whether it's the Norfolk salt marsh of Ruth Galloway or, in this series 1960's Brighton, they are equally believable& engrossing.

Perhaps not the best place to drop into the fifth book in a series - at a funeral - but it is a clever way to bring the uninitiated reader up to speed with the characters, their relationship to each other and what they've all been up to. In typical form of this type of gathering, the chat is reminiscing, polite and a little dull. But at least we know who is who and who had a 'thing' with whom.

Brighton, England in 1964. I was born too late to have lived through the 60s but it is definitely my favourite twentieth century decade. The fashion, music, television and the cult of the teenager is all vividly portrayed as the police officers try to find a missing girl. The climax to the story takes place with the fighting between the groups known as Mods and Rockers on Brighton beach as a backdrop.

The theme focuses on the roles of females, the young women who part of the youth cultures, what is important to them and how they are valued by society. Career options are limited and tend to revolve around serving men, whether that means being a housewife and mother or making the tea at work. Life is disappointing for the ambitious woman. This is not to say that the male perspective does not feature in this book, because it does. The point of view switches between a couple of men as well women, and each of them reflects on their relationships with their wives and especially their daughters. Besides being protective of their women some of them are aware of sexism and the sometimes patronising attitudes. Now You See Them - the wives and daughters - always in plain sight but noticed when they are no longer around.

It is a slow start made the more difficult because the viewpoint frequently changes within the chapters so I found myself reading back to check who it is I'm reading about. Sometimes I forgot that there were missing schoolgirls at the root of this tale. A gentle mystery, probably better read as part of the series.

Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway books are beyond criticism in my view – I love them unrelentingly. I’ve been with them since very early on, and I am very excited that the 13th book, The Lantern Men, is out in February. I can’t wait. But that made me realize that I had fallen behind in looking at Griffiths’ other books. Though my commitment can’t really be doubted: at the end of 2018 I loved The Stranger Diaries, a standalone. The latest Ruth book, The Stone Circle, I read breathlessly a year ago, then had to do some re-reading of earlier books from the series, as the plots looped round together. I re-read the festive short story Ruth’s First Christmas Tree every year. And also in 2019 Griffiths started ANOTHER series with a YA book about a schoolgirl detective, A Girl Called Justice.

But this one – the fifth of her Brighton Mysteries – came out in October 2019, when the blog was having a sabbatical. Time to catch up before being overtaken by the next one…

And this series just gets better and better. They are crime stories set in the recent past, and the wonderful seaside city of Brighton is the ever-important backdrop. By now it is 1964, and the regular characters have moved on a fair bit in their lives. Max is in Hollywood, a star married to another star. Edgar and Emma are busy with their lives and children, Ruby has a very successful TV magic show. They are reunited at the funeral of the excellent character Diabolo – he was quite old, so fair enough, but we will miss him in the books.
There is an elaborate, and very well-worked-out, crime plot, and much period detail, and of course the mods and rockers whose Bank Holiday fights in Brighton were such a very real feature of the time. There is Griffiths’ great writing - this example is Max thinking about why he got married:
He had looked into [her] eyes and had seen the promise of escape, a different life, a different identity. When he was in Cairo during the war Max had seen a man performing the Indian Rope Trick, the rope ascending upwards, seemingly without human interference. [She] had been his rope; he had grasped onto her and she had taken him towards the light.
The real-life girls’ boarding school Roedean plays a part – faint echoes of the abovementioned schoolgirl detective series.




Griffiths is always good on the clothes:

She watched [her] descend the area steps:capri pants, a fisherman’s sweater, brown hair, jaunty beret. Same Collins.


[Actually Jean Shrimpton in 1964, from Kristine’s photostream]

And funny moments:
‘What do you think you’re doing? Turning up on my doorstep with a woman dressed up as a policeman.’
‘I am a policeman,’ said Meg.
As ever the limited opportunities and minor and major annoyances for women of the era feature in the book, but not in a propaganda-ish way, it’s just factual, and the women have their own views of them.

This is such a Brighton book, like Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The pier , the promenade, the ‘policemen in white helmets’.




Teenagers are a new and exciting breed, and there is a tiny sliver of light in the lives of gay men as Brighton is so very slightly more tolerant than other places at that time. A character blows ‘the froth from something purporting to be a cappuccino – the coffee craze had really hit Brighton with a vengeance.’

All human life is there, from the posh schoolgirls to Madame Astarte Zabini the fortune teller. Wild moped rides and underground tunnels, and girls gone missing. Danger and jeopardy and crime, but also the basic good-heartedness which is always present in Griffiths’ books. And at the end a really encouraging hint about the future for this particular series.

Elly Griffiths can write as many as she likes so far as I am concerned, and I will carry on reading them forever.

Into the Swinging Sixties... 3½ stars

A schoolgirl is missing. She left behind a note saying she was going off to London in pursuit of her teen idol, film star Bobby Hambro, but her father is insistent she wouldn’t have done this and must have been abducted or lured away. When Edgar Stephens, now a Superintendent, begins to investigate he finds very little, but fortunately there a few women on hand to help all the feckless males out. There’s his wife, Emma, once a police officer but now a bored and disgruntled housewife and mother. There’s Sam, the newspaper reporter, bored and disgruntled because her sexist boss seems to think she should be satisfied to make the tea for the male journalists. New WPC Meg is bored and disgruntled because she’s expected to stay behind in the station and type reports while the male police officers get all the exciting jobs. And there’s Astarte, the mystic fortune-teller, who happily is not bored and disgruntled, but did I mention she’s a mystic? Useful for moving the plot along with a bit of woo-woo whenever it gets stuck...

I know it doesn’t sound like it from that opening paragraph, but overall I quite enjoyed this although I think it’s much weaker than the earlier books in the series, most of which I’ve thought were excellent. The book starts as all the regulars come together for the funeral of Diablo who, like Edgar and Max, had been one of the Magic Men during the war, a small Army outfit who used their skills in illusion to confuse the enemy forces. His death symbolises a break from the past. Eleven years have passed since the last book, so we’re now in Brighton in the early ‘60s, the time of mods and rockers fighting on the beach and the beginning of an era of great social change. Variety shows are no longer fashionable and Max Mephisto is now a famous film star. This means we’re no longer in the seedy world of theatres and theatrical boarding houses, and stage magic no longer plays a role in the plot. Rather a strange decision, I felt, since that was really this series’ unique selling point.

However, Griffiths handles the change quite well, quickly filling us in on what’s happened to all the recurring characters in the meantime. I didn’t think she brought the ‘60s to life as well as she had done with the ‘50s in the earlier books, but there were enough references to the changing social attitudes of the time to keep it interesting. As always, I became somewhat bored and disgruntled myself at the insistence which all crime writers currently have of ticking off all the political correctness boxes whether the plot calls for it or not, and I felt Griffiths handled this particularly clumsily. It was as if at the end she went back to a tick-list and shoe-horned in any compulsory issues she’d omitted – sexism? Tick. Feminism? Tick. Gay character? Tick. Black character? Tick. And of course all her main characters have liberal attitudes at least twenty, if not fifty, years ahead of their time.

As the plot develops, it becomes clear that more than one girl is missing, and then a body turns up. Now the race is on to find the other girls before any more of them are killed. I don’t want to tread too far into spoiler territory here, so I will simply say that I also get a little bored when recurring characters become potential victims and that happens not once, but twice in this book. It’s entirely unrealistic and is a lazy way to try to increase the tension. And the motivation of the abductor is flimsy at best.

Sometimes writing a review clarifies the thoughts a little too much and this has turned out to be more critical than I intended. While reading, I found it an enjoyable story, well written as Griffiths’ books always are, and although I felt it fell over the credibility cliff at a relatively early point, I was still intrigued enough to see how it all worked out. I did however feel that the ending was rushed and anti-climactic, and the hints that Griffiths gives at the end as to how the series is likely to progress in the future didn’t inspire me with confidence. I rather wish Griffiths would stick to standalones or perhaps trilogies or short series – somehow I always feel she runs out of steam with regards to what to do with her characters in longer-running series. I’d be happier for their personal lives to take a back seat and for the crime to be the major focus. However, I’ll probably stick around for the next one – I’m interested to see if she can make the signalled changes work. 3½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Quercus.

The fifth outing for this brilliant historical crime series. Jumping forward a decade to 1964 and rebranded 'The Brighton Mysteries'. Edgar Stephens now a Superintendent and Max Mephisto a Hollywood star, are reunited at the funeral of an old friend. With a mod and rocker invasion over the May Bank Holiday and the disappearances of several teenage girls, this is a full-packed exciting plot with lots of interesting characters. A good old-fashioned tale.

When a girl disappears from Roedean School DI Edgar Stephens is brought in to investigate. Now happily married to his former colleague Emma, Stephens is comfortable but misses the old days. At a funeral he meets up with old flame Ruby, now a TV star, and her father Max Mephisto, based in Hollywood. Their lives have diverged but when Ruby also disappears the team are brought together again.
It's a rather complex story to put into a précised but for fans of the Magic Men stories this will all make sense. I loved the way that times have moved on and the strong core of nascent feminism running through the book is great. Griffiths just knows how to tell a great story and her love of Brighton and its environs is at the heart.

This is the only book that I have read in this serious and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I guess with such a established series it would have been better to start from the beginning but it didn't stop me from engaging with the characters and story.

#NowYouSeeThem #NetGalley
Three girls have left. None have come back.
Brighton, 1963. Edgar Stephens has been promoted to Superintendent and is married to his former sergeant, Emma Holmes. Edgar's wartime partner in arms, magician Max Mephisto, is a movie star in Hollywood, while his daughter Ruby has her own TV show.
What happened next? Well, to know that you have to read this amazing historical mystry.
Characters are ok while plot was good. I personally felt it a little bit lengthy but it was good.
A good read.

#NowYouSeeThem #NetGalley I didn't realise that this was the 5th in a series when I read it. Having said that it was ok to read as a standalone but better knowledge of the characters may have made it more enjoyable. I love the Ruth Galloway series and to me, this wasn't in the same league. I realise, being set in the 60s , that it wouldn't' read the same as a modern day crime thriller but it felt just a little bit too easy going and more about the characters than the crime and maybe that was intended. An easy to read book though and quite enjoyable - despite Ms Griffiths' use of the word hallo instead of hello, which somehow grates on me in all her books!! I would still be interested to read further books in this series to see what becomes of Emma, Edgar, Max Ruby and Sam

Girls begin to go missing in Brighton. It’s 1964 and Superintendent Edgar Stephens is under even more pressure to solve the crime when a prominent (and pompous) MP’s daughter vanishes from Roedean, the famous private school. It’s the time of Mods and Rockers on the beach, the recognition of ‘the teenager’- a new idea from the USA, the Beatles, Bobby Hambro - a young American heartthrob actor who is in the UK, miniskirts, ‘housewives’ – when women were expected to give up the career for ‘family’, and institutional sexism(!) with female police officers being entrusted only lowly tasks, not allowed to drive police cars or use a radio (it’s full of fascinating, infuriating snippets such as these).

We meet the main characters at the funeral of Stan Parks the ‘Great Diablo’, a famed magician. Max Mephisto (who has worked previously with Sup. Stephens but since left to live in the USA for 11 years) returns to England to attend and his estranged daughter Ruby is also there. Many of the attenders have been in previous books of this series (unread) but this book is a read alone - albeit alluding to fascinating-sounding cases in the past, which I have yet to discover!)

The pace is fast and flowing, the subject is dealt with gently - perhaps reflecting another era a bit too softly; but it all adds to the charm and style in which the book is written. With all the hardcore crime novels which abound nowadays, it’s rather nice to read a good, old fashioned tale. It has a cast of endearing characters - coping with post war social changes, and an exciting plot - a 'comfy' read.

First novel of Elly’s that I’ve read and storyline had an interesting premise. Felt that some of the characters were a little contrived.

This is the best in the series so far - the characters have really matured and it combines a cracking - and up to date - plot with intricate, often hilarious detail. It's not easy to make such a jump in the time line of a series but Elly manages with aplomb.

This book was fast paced. Hard to put down. It flowed well and it was very well written. It caught hold of me and had me hooked from the start . I was literally on the edge of my seat reading this book.

I was pleased to be given the opportunity to read this early but found myself rather struggling to get along with it. It's the first book I've read by Elly Griffiths and, although I read quite a few crime/thrillers, this didn't grab me immediately. The storyline about Emma (who's given up work to be a full-time mother but who would clearly like to get re-involved with the police as a detective) is a good one - but all in all this book seemed a bit slow to me. Other reviewers have clearly loved it, so I'm in a minority.