bookshops

Books in the Wild: Old Hall Bookshop

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I made a little trip to one of the relatively local independent bookstores that I hadn’t been to before for this week’s post. The Old Hall Bookshop is in Brackley – home of AMG Mercedes F1 team (formerly Brawn GP, formerly BAR) and which is somewhere that I go past quite a lot but rarely drive through, hence why I’ve never stopped there before.

This one has new books, secondhand books and antiquarian books all in a beautiful old house with friendly staff. This is the central hallway – you’ve already come through one room of books to get here, and I don’t know if you can tell, but the till is tucked away under the stairs in this picture.

This is the main new book room (for adults anyway) and I thought it made really neat use of the space it had to display a really good selection of books- some of which I knew, but others that I didn’t which I think is the sign of a carefully curated collection,

I was tempted by LA Women, which sounds like it might tap into some of the things I liked about Daisy Jones and the Six, but also The Travelling Cat Chronicles. Good Girl, which is about the daughter of Afghan refugees in Berlin sounds really interesting, but I am trying to be realistic about what I will actually read and what will stick on the pile for ages. The same goes for the Book of Heartbreak – because I have romantasy novels that I bought nearly a decade ago that are still sitting on the kindle waiting for me to get around to them and I’m not proud of that at all!

I bought two books – one for me and one for mum, who asked me if I had a copy of Small Bomb at Dimplerley that she could borrow and as the only one I have is on the Kindle when they happened to have a copy in stock I was happy to buy it. You’ll have to wait until the next Books Incoming to see what I bought for myself!

Have a great Saturday!

romance, series

Novella Series: Golden Years

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It’s nearly the weekend, and so I’m following up last year’s romance novel series post with a post about a duo of romance novellas, the second of which came out at the end of December so I’m even vaguely timely with it.Is it a series if there are only two books in it? I mean, they go together because they’re grouped together on Adele Buck’s website and on Goodreads, but is it a duology or do those have to be more strictly related content? These have a common through line, but less of an actual link, so what you’re actually getting here are two bonus reviews.

The first is The Wedding Bait. Tove’s daughter is getting married. This is a cause for celebration, except for the fact that her terrible gaslighter of an ex-husband has decided to come to the wedding and is bringing wife number six with him – who is just five years older than their daughter. So that her ex can’t taunt her about being single she hires a man to pose as her date for the wedding. Patrick is technically a retired escort now but he agrees to take Tove’s assignment. But when they get to the wedding, sparks start to fly. This is so much fun that I actually read the whole thing again when I picked it up to double check something while I was writing this. The chemistry between Tove and Patrick is really well written and there is lots of lovely snark aimed at the ex-husband too.

In Meet-Cat, our heroine is Astrid, mystery novelist, widow and mum of two grown boys. When a cat wanders into her fifth floor apartment she’s somewhat concerned about where it might have come from. But it turns out she has a new neighbour in the next door flat. Ben has taken in his daughter’s cat when she moved away and couldn’t take Willow with her. But the cat seems to have taken a liking to his new next door neighbour and the two of them end up with a bit of a time share arrangement – forcing them into each other’s company. Astrid is fiercely independent and part of the joy of reading this is her and Ben finding ways to be together without her feeling like she’s giving up her freedom by wanting someone in her life.

Both novellas are a delight – the through thread (in case you didn’t guess) being self sufficent, older female heroines who are happy and don’t need a relationship to fix them, just to make their lives even better. I’ve written about some of Adele Buck’s other books before – the Centre Stage series, Fake Flame and The Anti-Social Season – and if you’ve read any of those and like them then try this. But if you haven’t and you want to dip your toe in, these would be a good place to start.

These are available on all the usual platforms where you get novellas – Kindle, Kobo etc but also from Adele’s storefront on Smashwords, which is actually where I bought her All for You novels from which I think are the last things of hers I haven’t read yet!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book previews

Out this Week: New Library Lovers

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The latest Library Lovers book, Booking for Trouble, came out in hardback in the US on Tuesday, This is the sixteenth in Jenn McKinlay’s series about Lindsay Norris, a library director in Briar Creek, Connecticut, and sees Lindsay getting involved in a murder after heading out on a book boat to some of the islands in her library’s patch, inspired by bookmobiles (or mobile libraries as we have here I guess?) that she’s seen in other areas.

But this also is my chance to talk about the demise of the mass market paperback in the US. These aren’t available on Kindle in the UK, so I’ve been buying in the paperbacks for years from the US. There are a couple of series like this, where I rely on these smaller than average (and cheaper than average!) paperback copies to get my fix. But sales have been dropping, and more and more books have switched to the larger and more expensive trade paperback format. Various people have been writing about it, but here’s the New York Time’s article from the start of the month, and Publisher’s Weekly’s from December. As a voracious and speedy reader, the price point and convenience of mass markets – especially secondhand – has been a boon for my reading – particularly in my early days of romance reading when the likes of Eloisa James and Sarah MacLean weren’t always getting UK releases. There are series that I want to finish – or continue reading – where I definitely can’t justify the hardback price for them. And given my love of matching sets, a size change is definitely not what I want either! This is one of a number of series where I’m going to have decisions to make as the next books come out.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Edwardian-set mysteries

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The tenth Veronica Speedwell mystery comes out on Tuesday next week and so I thought I’d mark it with a post about other Edwardian-set mysteries. The first decade or so of the twentieth century isn’t as popular with authors as the period between the two wars and while nothing is quite like Veronica – in terms of the humour of Deanna Raybourn’s writing mostly – there are still a fair few books for those who want them.

Hardback

The most obvious books for me to mention here are the two Gabriel Ward books which made my best books of the year posts for 2025. There is a third book coming apparently, but I’m/we’re going to have to wait a while for that – although it’s up for pre-order (and believe me I have pre-ordered it) it doesn’t have a title yet and the release date is currently late January 2027.

M C Beaton was a prolific writer under many pseudonyms and one of her lesser known series (from the pre-Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raison era) are the Harry Cartwright books, which Goodreads helpfully calls “Edwardian Mystery series”. Harry is a Boer War veteran who now helps society fix or solve difficult situations. There are four books in the series and like a lot of Beaton’s books if you read them too close together you begin to spot the formula a bit too much for comfort, but if you space them out more they’re much more fun.

I’ve only just finished The Housekeepers by Alex Hay* but I wanted to throw it in because it’s sort of tangentially related even though it’s not a mystery story per se. This is a heist story set in 1905 when Mrs King has just been dismissed from her position as housekeeper at a grand mansion in Mayfair. She decides to take her revenge, and because of her background in a shady world of con artists and thieves, she’s got the connections to do it. So she gathers a group of women around her to help her carry out an audacious plan to rob the house of all its contents during a costume ball. But as they work to carry out their plan, they discover that the house may be hiding even more secrets than they thought. This was a bit slower paced than I liked, and the comeuppance at the end happened pretty quickly, but I do like a story set in a big house – and the upstairs downstairs of this was good too. I’ve had this on the pile for ages – so long in fact that Hay’s third book is out later this year and I have been picking up the second (another crime caper) and being tempted by it only to remember that I hadn’t read the one I already had!

Lets end with the series that I’ve already written about – there’s the Lady Hardcastle books by T E Kinsey about the widow of a diplomat who makes her home in the Costwolds with her faithful maid and keeps stumbling across mysteries. Then there’s Edward Marston’s Ocean Liner series about George Porter Dillman and Genevieve Mansfield, who meet in the first book when they are on board the same ship and it all goes from there. And if you read middle grade or young adult books, there are the two connected Katherine Woodfine series – the Sinclair Mysteries and the Taylor and Rose mysteries

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, detective, first in series, mystery

Book of the Week: Hattie Brings Down the House

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Happy Tuesday everyone, and as I mentioned in last week’s BotW post that this was in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, I don’t think it’s going to be a massive surprise to you that I’ve picked this for my BotW today, taking full advantage of the fact that even though Hattie Steals the Show was one of my favourite books of last year it wasn’t actually a Book of the Week – it was in a Recommendsday, so I’m not really breaking any rules even though that Recommensday was only in October!

Cover of Hattie brings down the house

Hattie is a stage manager, who’s currently cobbling together a living by teaching wannabe stage managers and behind the scenes workers and also working at the Tavistock, a theatre behind a pub. The Tavistock’s long time patron has just died, and the artistic director is trying to keep the theatre going by staging a Shakespeare play directed by a buzzy avant garde director. There’s a valuable mask in the mix as well as conflict between the artistic team – but all that pales in comparison to the dead actress that Hattie finds in the dressing room. As the stage manager is the designated problem solver of a production crew, Hattie finds herself investigating while still trying to keep the show on track to open on time.

The mystery is good and has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. And I really, really love all the backstage information that Patrick Gleeson has put into this. As you all know, I go to the theatre a lot but I’m not in any way an actress and the closest I’ve got to being in an actual production of anything was when I played clarinet in the school musical version of Cabaret in my first year of secondary school and was the prompter for the university pantomime in my final year, which is to say I know next to nothing about this and am delighted to be learning a bit more about it. There’s lots of detail here – but it’s neatly woven in and not info dumped to you in the narrative.

This is the first book in the series, so I’m reading out of order – and I know what the issue is in Hattie’s background that means that she’s wary of the police and perhaps not getting the work that she would like. But if you were reading this first you wouldn’t and I think you might find that a little perplexing – however the reveal in book two is worth it. I’m really glad that I discovered this series and I’m not sure I would have done if I hadn’t found it in the Notting Hill Bookshop last autumn because sometimes you need a smaller, curated selection of books to discover something new rather than a massive shop where you can get overwhelmed and end up just looking for stuff that you already know that you want to read.

This is in Kindle Unlimited and suprisingly it is still available on Kobo. And even better is the fact that Waterstones say they have stock of both this and the second book in all of their central London stores so hopefully you should be able to find physical copies in stores fairly easily.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: February 16 – February 22

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The Winter Olympics hangover starts here. How will I cope without a ready flow of (winter) sports to watch all day? It’s a whole month until the Figure Skating World Championships and my final skating fix of the season – but at least we have that, for a lot of the other winter sports their seasons ended in Milan-Cortina. What will I do? What’s that? The MotoGP season starts in Thailand on Sunday? Excellent. Anyway, also in last week was a trip to the theatre so I’m surprised I read as much as I did.

Read:

A Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

A Rookie Mistake by Laura Carter

Hattie Brings Down the House by Patrick Gleeson

Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh

Falling for the Matchmaker by Jennifer Wick*

Edward VIII: The Uncrowned King by Piers Brendon

British Bulldog by Sara Sheridan

Started:

The Housekeepers by Alex Hay*

The Corpse in the Waxworks by John Dickson Carr

Still reading:

Game Changer by Rachael Reid

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

Ritual of Fire by D V Bishop

Pet Shop Boys, Literally by Chris Heath

Restraint went out the window at the weekend, because Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series were on offer for 99p each on Kindle so I may have bought the lot, and on top of that, there was one of the Alexa Martin’s that I don’t own on offer too so I snapped that up as well as three secondhand books. Ooops.

Bonus picture: my set up on Monday night for the pairs free programme. If you haven’t watched Miura and Kiyahara’s routine, you should.

*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: The Battle

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A bit of regional theatre for you this week, because for Valentine’s Day we headed to Birmingham to see a new play and it was a lot of fun with a dose of nostalgia attached.

The Battle is a play about the period in 1995 which could possibly be called Peak Britpop, where Oasis and Blur fought it out for the top spot in the singles charts. Britpop was a much larger movement than just these two bands, but the rivalry between them was fierce and really defined the era – Blur, southern and arty and Oasis, Mancunian and unfiltered. Some people will ahve it that you were either one side or the other, but there were plenty who liked both. Matthew Dunster, a former music industry A&R man, has written his first play imagining what was going on behind the scenes of the key moments that people might remember about the feud.

Anyway, this isn’t really a review, because we saw it a few days ahead of press night, and judging from the reviews a few things that we didn’t love may have changed, but is a recommendation because we had such a great time and laughed so hard so much of the time. There are some really good one liners here and some fabulous performances. The names in the cast are Matthew Horne (of Gavin and Stacey fame) as the boss of Blur’s record label, who is excellent whenever you see him but you sort of want more of him, and Louisa Lytton (Eastenders and the Bill) as Noel Gallagher’s girlfriend Meg Matthews, but I thought George Usher as Liam Gallagher (who is making his professional debut in the role) was the standout.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that the 90s are as long ago now as the 60s were back then. Because that is impossible and makes me feel a bit sick. When we saw it, the audience was wearing a lot of Oasis and Blur merch – and a report I saw on the TV earlier this week said that the bars at the theatre had reported near record sales so hopefully it’s doing well with the people who remember it when but I’m hoping it will also find an audience among people who don’t remember the original battle. And that’s because the 1990s seem to be back in fashion at the moment and going through a discovery moment for people who weren’t there at the time, which as someone who does remember particularly the second half of the decade is slightly traumatic.

Anyway, this is on at Birmingham Rep until the 7th March and then moves to Manchester Opera House for a week from 17 March. If you’re near enough by, I think it’s worth a trip.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Waterstone’s Birmingham

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We were in Birmingham last weekend, so of course I took a trip to the Big Waterstones to see what they had that was new or out of the ordinary.

But I’m going to start with the Buy One Get One Half Price table – because as you can see Murder on Line One is now in paperback but also because I wanted to ask if any of you have read Murder at the Black Cat Cafe because I keep seeing it in shops, picking up and reading the back and thinking it might be too scary for me because Japanese murder mysteries tend to be too scary for me even if in this case the author is being compared to Agatha Christie – because they also do that for the author of Murder at Mt. Fuji! Anyone able to help?

And now on to the stuff I hadn’t see elsewhere (but that is also too scary for me) a new thriller translated from Korean about a K-Pop idol who is kidnapped by a small group of his biggest. I think this for having a cover that clearly indicates that it is too scary for me, but I wish I wasn’t as terrible with scary books because this sounds like a really clever concept. And K-pop is huge at the moment so hopefully it will do well and I continue to be thrilled to see more books in translation making it to the front of bookshops, rather than just in a special section of the big university bookshops.

Lets move on to something I might actually read, and another new release: Zofia Nowak’s Book of Superior Dectecting by Piotr Cieplak. This came out at the end of January and is about a Polish woman who comes to London after her son disappears to try and find out what has happened to him. Zofia thinks it’s something to do with a writer called Steve and takes on jobs as a cleaner to try and fund her DIY investigation. This sounds really interesting – and the blurb promises laughter as well as a puzzle to solve so if I can just get the to-read pile down, I will try and get to it.

And finally we have the table of Heated Rivalry books – including the first one Game Changer which was on offer at half price and which I bought and had a lovely conversation with the cashier about them and the TV series. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to see a romance book doing well.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book previews

Romance Series: Bluebird Basin

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With the skating over and the Winter Olympics coming to a close, I’m keeping the winter sport tangent going on for ever so slightly longer with a trilogy of romance novels set around a ski resort. Slightly tenuous, but I’m going with it and you can’t stop me!

This three novels are interconnected but not really interdependent (the last one is the question mark) romances set in the ski resort of Bluebird Basin. Come As You Are which was a BotW in 2023 and was about Madison the ex-rockstar and sober living home owner and Ashley who is fighting to keep control of her family’s ski hill. She’s in her mid 40s, he’s around a decade older and they both have baggage to overcome before they can get to their happily ever after. The second book is Lips Like Sugar which is about Mad’s bandmate Cole and Ashley’s best friend Mira who end up fake dating at Ashley and Madigan’s wedding because of Mira’s awful ex. But the fake date is the start of a real connection between the two of them even after Cole has headed back to Seattle.

And finally Wish You Were is the only one I haven’t written about here beforeand is the story of Kevin and Davis, who were a couple until Kevin relapsed into drug addiction. He’s back from rehab and wants to win Davis back, but she really doesn’t know if she can trust Kev again. And the resort is so small they can’t exactly never see each other. There are themes of addiction and recovery running through the first two stories but this one has addiction and recovery much more front and centre than those two did, which is a bit less in my regular reading wheelhouse. Like the others in the series this is a second chance romance, but this time the protagonists are a lot younger, and they are looking for their second chance after Kev’s relapse into drug addiction. It’s still really well written, and it’s really emotional and builds to a satisfying resolution but I think it was a bit too high on the angst scale for me at the time that I was reading it (and to be fair, I don’t think I’ve got any more emotionally resilient since, if anything the opposite). But if you do like that, I think it’s really going to work for you. But the first two with the older protagonists were much more my thing – they’re not quite the same as the Cathy Yardley older protagonist romances that I’ve loved, but they’re not too-too far away from that.

These are all in Kindle Unlimited at the moment- along with Jess K Hardy’s two space-set romances, which I haven’t read (yet).

Have a great weekend everyone!

Book previews

Out this Week: Alexandra Vasti

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I’ve got one for the historical romance fans this week, while you wait for the second half of the latest series of Bridgerton to arrive next week! This is a paperback release of the first two books in Alexandra Vasti’s Halifax Hellions series – In Which Margo Halifax Earns Her Shocking Reputation and In Which Matilda Halifax Learns the Value of Restraint – rather than something new-new, so serious fans may have read already. I have Vasti on my to-read-once-the-pile-goes-down list because so many people in the romance communities that I hang out in are huge fans of her books, and she’s also a really interesting interview, which is usually a good sign too. This is out in Kindle next week, but in the meantime Ladies in Hating, which came out in September is on offer on Kindle for 99p!

Happy Reading!