Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Author’s Guide to Murder

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For the second week running I’m picking a book I finished on Monday. I did this to myself last week by picking Vagabond and now I’m creating another potential problem for Future Verity. Fingers crossed the train journeys this week help me with a bigger reading list to chose from and break the cycle…

On a remote island off the Scottish coast, Castle Kinloch is a gothic mansion that’s been turned into a writers retreat in the hands of a literary superstar. Except Brett Saffron Paisley has just been found dead in the folly in the grounds and three American writers who were staying at the castle are among the prime suspects in the case. Kat de Noir writes erotica, Cassie Prigle writes cozy mysteries and Emma Endicott writes historical fiction – but the three of them say they’re working on a novel together, but the detective in charge of the case is suspicious.

This says “A Novel” on the front, but actually this is Williams, White and Willig doing a murder mystery that’s also a satire about the literary world. Now I will say that this is a big shift from what the three of them usually write – which is timeslip historical fiction like The Lost Summers of Newport – and I’m not sure they did a good enough job of setting that up for the regular reader. The characters are very caricaturist and I found it pretty hard going for the first half or so, then it improved as I realised that they were going for maximum ridiculous. Or at least I hope that’s what they were going for. By the end I was won over by the absolutely bonkers finale to the mystery strand and the fact that everyone got a happily ever after.

Basically I liked it when it was over more than I had during the reading process which makes this a bit of a strange one, but hey this has got very, very mixed reviews on Goodreads, so I thought it was worth writing about because I think that says something about the expectations management on this one for regular Williams, Willig and White readers and the blurb saying it’s Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote which really doesn’t describe what’s going on here either. I did love the nods to their other characters and real life authors in this but I definitely prefer their historical fiction – and I suspect if we get another book from the trio (and their usual publication schedule was every other year which should have made this year a year but I don’t see one on the schedule) then they’ll go back to that.

This one is an import from the US if you want it in an actual copy so you’re probably going to have to order it rather than stumble across it in a shop, but it is on Kindle and Kobo – although I think £6.99 is probably a bit much for how much I liked it!

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 31 – September 6

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Two mistakes this week that mean that the list is shorter: two nights at the theatre and committing to a non-fiction book. Add to that the fact that I wrote about the Tim Curry memoir last Tuesday despite finishing it on Monday and I’m in a bit of a bind for tomorrow. Hey ho. Many train journeys this week so hopefully reading balance will be resumed.

Read:

Vagabond by Tim Curry

A Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh

The Kennedys and the Windsors by Caroline Hallemann

The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

Laura Clark Is Away from Her Desk by Helen Russell*

That Detestable New Girl by Dora Chapman

Started:

The Author’s Guide to Murder by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White

Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch by Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent

Still reading:

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

A bunch of Kindle books bought (because I was writing the offers post) but no actual hardcopies of anything.

Bonus picture: A sad victim of my fight with a buddleia over the weekend. So far, the buddleia is winning…

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Quarterback

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The NFL season starts on Wednesday so I thought I’d write abou tthe Netflix series Quarterback today, which has now had three seasons – the latest of which came out in mid July.

Each season follows a group of quarterbacks across the course of an NFL season. The first series followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota across the 2022 season, the second saw Cousins return with Joe Burrow and Jared Gough across the 2024 season and the third season in Joe Flacco, Jayden Daniels, Baker Mayfield and Cam Ward in the 2025 season. If you’re wondering why the gap between the first two seasons – the 2023 season saw a documentary series called Receiver about Wide Receivers instead, reportedly because of the difficulties in finding quarterbacks to feature in a second season at the time.

Each season the quarterbacks featured are at different points in their careers. If you know NFL you’ll have already twigged that, but for those of you (most of you?) who don’t, in the first season Mahomes was aiming for his second Super Bowl, Cousins was a decade into his NFL career and the established starter at the Vikings and Mariota was trying to establish himself as a starting quarterback at Atlanta after having spent a couple of seasons as backup or injured.

Quarterback has got great access to the teams and players – it has the subjects mic’d up during their games which was a first for the NFL. It also has Peyton Manning as one of the producers (it’s made by his production company and Patrick Mahomes’ one) and I suspect Peyton is the reason for this. For the non-NFL fans, he’s part of the Manning dynasty – his dad Archie was an NFL quarterback, his younger brother Eli was an NFL quarterback and his nephew Arch is currently quarterback in college footbal for the Texas Longhorns – he’s the son of Peyton’s older brother Cooper who was a highly rated college footballer before his career was cut short due to a spinal condition. Among his many, many accolades Peyton won two Super Bowls and an Super Bowl MVP and he’s rated as one of the best quarterbacks of all time. So if anyone was going to be able to persuade the NFL to give access and players to be involved it’s him.

Because I watch NFL it’s hard for me to judge how appealing this is going to be for people who don’t, but this was one of the first of the series to appear off the back of the success of Drive to Survive and it’s one of the better ones. Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf) appeared earlier in the same year as Quarterback and I didn’t make it through a whole series of either of those. I have watched a bunch of series of Amazon’s documentary series All or Nothing which started with NFL but hasn’t done an NFL series since before the pandemic and has branched out to other sports and I think this offers more for the casual fan because unlike All or Nothing which follows one team each year, this has the wider focus. I watched the first season back when it came out and binged it, tried Receiver when that started and didn’t get through it, then forgot about Quarterback until the third season came out – but then I binged series two in one day and then series three across the next week around actually doing other things, so I clearly enjoy them – even if they haven’t featured Dak Prescott (from my team the Cowboys) yet.

Once I’d finished this, I moved on to Any Given Saturday which is about the 24/25 season in the SEC conference of college football, which was fine – but missing some of the big teams and just generally not as focused as this. So if you like your NFL documentaries it’s an interesting watch, but it’s not an entry point series really.

Happy Sunday – and enjoy the NFL when it starts with the reigning Super Bowl champions the Seahawks at home to the Patriots on Wednesday. I’ve got to wait until next Sunday when the Cowboys open their campaign against the Giants at the stadium which is back to being known as the MetLife after spending the summer as the New York New Jersey stadium for the World Cup.

tribute

Happy 80th Freddie!

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My love of Queen and of Freddie Mercury is one of my lesser mentioned personality traits here, but it is strong and enduring. Astonishingly it’s 35 years since he died and today he would have been 80. I remain baffled that it can now be more than twice the amount of time since he died than it was the first time I set foot in the Dominion Theatre to see We Will Rock You, which was such a key moment in my teenage years.

The Freddie auction exhibition three summers ago was just an evening of me wandering around with my mouth open at seeing all the things. And the music is still in heavy rotation – even if I hated the biopic. One of the great what ifs of my personal interest areas is what would Freddie have done if he had lived* and what music we might have had. As it is, there’s plenty of music to still enjoy – and this week Mary Austin has popped up giving interviews that are longer than the very short couple of bits she did when the auction happened so there’s lots to dissect there too.

For my videos I’ve picked one of my favourites of the (slightly) lesser known (but still on the Greatest hits I) Queen songs in Seven Seas of Rhye and my favourite of Freddie’s solo videos – I love the dancing-chasing sequence. It’s just so camp and funny. And I say solo videos because I find it hard to discount Barcelona as my favourite of his solo stuff – I adored it from the moment I first heard it which I never know if it was before it was used as the title song for the BBC Olympics coverage in 1992 but I do know for sure that I was tremendously disappointed in 1996 when they (obviously) used something different! Oh and one more before I go: Breakthru, filmed on the historic railway line an hour up the road from here where we used to go to see Santa and ride on a train every year when I was little**.

Happy Birthday Freddie – and thank you for all the music and all the joy.

*another is how many F1 titles would Ayrton Senna have won, I think you can make a case that he would have had either or both of 1994 and 1995 and if he had had then Schumacher might never have become the force he did and even more of F1 history would have been different

**it’s also the railway line in two Bond Movies (Octopussy and GoldenEye), at least one Poirot and also the Biggles movie, which John Deacon wrote some of his very rare non-Queen music for.

books, stats

Reading Stats: August 2026

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Books read this month: 31*

New books: 25

Re-reads: 6 (all audiobooks)

Books from the to-read pile: 7

NetGalley books read: 4

Kindle Unlimited read: 11

Ebooks: 3

Audiobooks: 6

Non-fiction books: 1

Favourite book: The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy, but it was close with Swordheart and also Vagabond

Books bought: two actual books, ten ebooks

Most read author: the three Helen books probably mean Linda Graeme, but they’re not long books (and the print is big) so it could be T Kingfisher because Swordheart is 450 pages!

Books read in 2026: 264

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 595

A pretty good month in reading. I’ve tried to tackle the to-read pile after the huge amounts of books acquired in July and actually done ok on that front despite spending a of time away from home. I read all the August released I’d requested from NetGalley which is pretty good going (and I’ve even written some about them) and I (mostly) resisted the urge to buy more physical books – even if I did have a bit of a bonanza time while writing the Kindle offers. We are however heading into the bumper autumn release season so I dread to think what I might manage to get up to this month.

Bonus picture: Judy! on the wall at the Palladium. I’m not going to say it was my favourite thing about the trip to JCS because that would be unfair on how much I enjoyed Richard Armitage as Herod (which is under five minutes of the show and late in the second act). But it was high on the list!

*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – 8 this month!

Book previews

Out This Week: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

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We’re in September and we’ve started to get the first of the autumn releases so I actually had some choices for my new book pick this week but I’ve suddenly been seeing this everywhere and although I can’t quite work out why it sounds like a lot of fun and so I’ve picked it for this week. According to the blurb, history professor Philippa ups sticks to the seaside house she inherited from her grandmother after life gives her a wake up call in the form of a sinkhole. Her grandmother was a writer of romance novels and she’s going to be sharing the house with a reclusive writer who also turns out to have been a romance novel cover model. I’m not eve sure I need to write any more about the plot because I think you can already tell why I picked this one. I just hope it lives up to the promise of the blurb when I read it!

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: August Quick Reviews

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As ever, the first Wednesday of the Month is quick reviews day and I’m back with three more books I read last month that I haven’t talked about yet.

Murder-Sur-Mer by Hugh Morrison

This is the third in Morrison’s Clarice and Cliff series and sees our titular leads tying the knot and heading off on honeymoon to France. Of course crime follows them there – in the form of a murdered jewel thief in their hotel room. The French police seem to them to be making slow progress and determined to look in the wrong places so they take it upon themselves to try and solve the crime. I don’t like this series as much as the Rev Shaw mysteries but this was a light, easy read even if I had the rough outlines of the solution figured out fairly early on. I don’t know if the fact that I’ve been listening to the Miss Marple series has made me a bit fussier at the moment but that can’t be ruled out as a factor in my opinion on this one. Still I liked it the most of the books I’m writing about here today – and I’ll be keeping an eye for the next one – they’re definitely a step above the J G Colgan that I mentioned last month.

The Truth About Love by Stephanie Laurens

This is the twelfth book in Laurens’ Cynster series. I’ve read the first six and then 14th as well. This one was written 20 years ago, which probably counts as an old school romance at this point and it did feel a bit like it – that or my tastes have changed, although to be fair I did start reading historical romances of this sort in around 2008 so it’s not that old school for me! Anyway our hero is Gerrard Debbington a painter who is desperate to paint the gardens of Hellebore Hall, but the only way the owner Lord Tregonning will let him do that is if he also paints a portrait of his daugher, Jacqueline. And Jacqueline is (of course) our heroine, she’s been the target of rumour and innuendo since the disappearance of her suitor and the death of her mother, and is hoping the portrait will help clear her. And of course they fall in love but also solve the mysteries. And I was much more interested in the mystery solving than I was in the romance, but maybe that’s just me. It’s a bit gothic and a lot overblown (anyone actually believe that a portrait can reveal guilt or innocence?) but as I found it on the bookshelf at the hostel I didn’t spend anything on it and and so I can’t complain too much. That said, it was a really useful indication of how my reading tastes change and evolve – it’s the first Laurens I’ve read in some years and as I didn’t love it, I took the opportunity to clear some space on the to-read shelf by checking for any physical copies of Laurens on there and moving them to the charity shop bag!

The Murder on the Enriqueta by Molly Thynne

I read this thinking it was going to be another murder on a boat story – but although the first murder does indeed take place on a voyage from Argentina to Britain, despite what you might take from the blurb the main action happens after that boat journey in London. Chief Inspector Shand is on board ship for that murder and finds himself drawn into events in London because also on board ship is the widow of Lord Dalberry, making her way to England after the death of her husband where two young cousins of her husband encounter her. In terms of plot this is as bonkers as some of the maddest of the Girl’s Own books – I’m talking C Bernard Rutley and Rita Coutts level madness here – but it’s no where near as easy to read. I’ve read two of Thynne’s other books and enjoyed them much more than this one which I can’t really recommend.

Book of the Week, memoirs, reviews

Book of the Week: Vagabond

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As I said yesterday, it was a bit of a grim week on a lot of fronts, one of which was the celebrity death front. And although I finished this on Monday so it’s technically cheating, it feels somehow right to make Tim Curry’s memoir this week’s pick.

In case you missed the last fifty years of pop culture, Tim Curry was an actor who first rose to prominence as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in a role he reprised in the movie version The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went on to play an eclectic range of characters across his career – and if you’re a millennial he will likely have been a key figure in one of the movies or TV shows that defined your childhood – whether it is Muppet Treasure Island, Home Alone 2, Annie, The Wild Thornberries, The Worst Witch or Clue. And there are more I could have picked – he was that prolific. He had a stroke in 2012 but continued to do some voice work and occasional appearances after that.

Vagabond came out last autumn and was much awaited as Curry didn’t give a lot of interviews (although he was always great value when he did) and rarely revealed anything about his personal life. And if you’re looking for juicy scoops on that front, this is not that. He warns you right at the start he’s not talking about his love life and he sticks to that. What this is is a gallop through the rest of his life with a look at his early years it feels mostly because he thinks it helps you understand his attitude to life: his father was a navy chaplain whose job meant they moved around a lot and then died young (in his late 40s from a stroke), quite a distant relationship with his mother who didn’t understand him and a boarding school education all of which added up to a very self contained and independent adult. He does a really good job of making you feel like he’s revealing a lot about himself while actually keeping a lot back – basically a memoir on his own terms, which he sets out very clearly at the start.

I am one of those who first saw him in one of those 80s and 90s roles and then graduated to Rocky Horror as a teen and then missed out on seeing him as King Arthur in Spamalot because I was a penniless student at the wrong end of the country at the time. So I learned a lot about his career from reading the book but what I enjoyed the most about it was how much it felt like it was really in his voice. And I know I said that he didn’t give a lot of interviews, but the ones he did were memorable and of course he’s done so much voice work over the years that it is easy to imagine him saying the words as you read it – and he did read the audiobook and I can’t tell you the willpower it took not to also buy the audiobook when I had the hardback on the pile.

I’m glad that he got to tell his story on his terms – even if he wasn’t entirely sure about the whole concept as he said several times through the book. I’m annoyed at myself for the fact that it took him dying for me to bump the book to the top of the to-read pile but strangely it did feel like a good time to read it and having read all the obituaries and watched all the clips this week it was nice to read about his life in his own words – and spot where quotes had been lifted for the obits or stories that he had told in interviews popped up or were lightly referenced. But I enjoyed reading it and it’s out in paperback now and if I was running a bookshop I’d be putting it in an obvious place for people to happen across right now.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: August 24 – August 30

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Happy Bank Holiday Monday to all who celebrate it. Although to be fair last week didn’t feel like much of a week to celebrate. I was looking back at my photos from last week when I was writing this and saw the ones from the Proms on Monday – which was wonderful but feels like a life time ago given Dolly Parton on Tuesday night, Tim Curry on Wednesday and then of course the landslides in Nepal where the news on the numbers of missing just keeps getting worse and worse. But here we are. The list this week is short – I had the Proms, then I had a migraine, and then we did a last minute flit to the Far North to visit my sister for the weekend which we hadn’t planned. I read lots of books while we were there – but I don’t think Where is Pierre, That’s not my Dinosaur, Six Dinner Sid or any of the other dozen or so books I read my niece really count here. That said, Six Dinner Sid is a stone cold classic and I really loved Where is Pierre which I hadn’t seen before.

Read:

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

Murder-Sur-Mer by Hugh Morrison

Battle of Round House by Tananarive Due

The Cairndale Orphan by J M Miro

After Park by Patti Benning

Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

Started:

Vagabond by Tim Curry

The Kennedys and the Windsors by Caroline Hallemann

Still reading:

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

After doing so well for the rest of the month and not buying anything I cracked – two books bought. But they weren’t impulse purchases, or at least not really. I promise I’ll explain in the next Books Incoming

Bonus picture: waiting for the American Classics Prom on Monday night – it’s on TV (or bits of it are) later this week, and it’s on BBC Sounds if you just want the audio. It’s worth it – especially the Rhapsody in Blue with the Marcus Roberts trio.

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Jesus Christ Superstar

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For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre show for you. And this year after missing out on the last couple of summer’s hit Andrew Lloyd Webber revivals basically because I had seen them before in other productions and wasn’t prepared to pay top whack for something I hadn’t loved before just because it had a big star and then regretted it because they became the hot ticket, sell out raves, this year I was in the queue for tickets for Jesus Christ Superstar tickets as soon as they went on sale. Admittedly this is mostly because my Theatre Friend Tom is a massive Eurovision fan and: Sam Ryder, but also I like to think we learn from our mistakes. And so, this Sunday you have my review of the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber revival – which is also the last of his Mega Hits/principle works* that I hadn’t seen live.

And here’s the thing. What I learned from this is that I don’t like Jesus Christ Superstar. I just don’t. Sam Ryder was singing the heck out of the score and Richard Armitage was great as Herod (much better than Boy George who we were originally scheduled to see would have been) but it’s just not a show for me. I had forgotten/blocked out that the only reason I owned (and occasionally watched bits of) the film of the 2000 revival was because it had my teen theatre crush Tony Vincent in it as Simon Zealotes (even though he originally played Judas in the Broadway revival that recording was based on). But I’ve never bothered to see it live until now and I feel like now I’ve seen it once I never need to see it again.

But I am clearly in the minority here. It has sold phenomenally well – if you were trying to get a ticket for this summer run at the Palladium now you’d struggle to get one for under £100, so even though our tickets were the most expensive ones I’ve bought this year we still got a bargain compared to that – and it’s moving to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane after Hercules closes there for a run from October to January and then it’s touring. The audience when we saw it were wildly enthusiastic – with an attempt at a mid show standing ovation for Gethsemane – and seemingly quite a lot of non-theatre regulars. This is not the first time I have found myself out of step with prevailing trends – after all I didn’t really like Hadestown that much (I would rather sit through this JCS again than Hadestown) and everyone else loves that. And that’s fine. (Almost) Anything that gets people into theatres is a good thing – because the industry needs regular theatre goers to survive.

But if you were a visitor to London and asking me what to see this summer, I’d be sending you elsewhere – unless you specifically said “I want to see an Andrew Lloyd Webber mega musical” because even though this expensive it’s not this summer’s very hottest ticket because that’s Hamilton with Leslie Odom Jnr, which is really the thing to see if you want to make people jealous. Not that I’m still bitter about my total lack of success in getting tickets for that.

Have a great Sunday, and I leave you with the aforementioned Tony Vincent doing Superstar on American TV in 2000, which contains two of the three things I (reliably like) in JCS: the classic “Jesus Christ Superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are” phrase and the lyric “Israel in four BC had no mass communication”. (The third is Herod’s song)

*Principle is a tricky one to define, but at this point I have seen: Joseph (more than once), JCS, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express (more than once), Phantom of the Opera (more than once), Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind. I haven’t seen The Likes of Us, Jeeves, Tell Me On A Sunday, Song and Dance, Cricket, Beautiful Game, Woman in White, Love Never Dies, Wizard of Oz (with his additions at any rate) Stephen Ward, School of Rock, and (Bad) Cinderella. I’ll let you decide whether that’s all the main ones.