romance, series

Romance Series: Written in the Stars

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It’s Friday and it’s Pride month so I’ve got a romance series that fits the brief for you. I was going to say trilogy because there are three of them, but I think trilogy suggests that they have to be read in order or together, but you don’t – they’re linked by a friendship group but you don’t need to have read the previous one to enjoy the next on. In fact I read the first one last and it bothered me not a whit on that front.

This is a series of three connected romances set in Seattle. The first one is Written in the Stars about an astrologer and an actuary who end up in a fake relationship for: reasons – Elle is looking for the one and Darcy isn’t looking for anything after a broken engagement. The second book is Hang the Moon and features Darcy’s brother Brendan who is a side character in the first book and Annie who is in town to visit friends before she moves around the world. And finally Count Your Lucky Stars is Elle’s best friend and business partner Margot and her former best friend and first love Olivia.

These are fun romances with interesting characters and witty dialogue. I like them rather than love them – mostly because a lot of the conflict could be solved by people using their words and having conversations. But that’s a common gripe for me and honestly I’d often rather have misunderstandings based on not communicating, which is pretty low stakes over some of the Big Dramatic things and definitely over Creepy Danger ones! I’ve actually got one of Alexandria Bellefleur’s standalone novels waiting on the virtual TBR which I really should get around to before I acquire any more and she has two more books coming out this year as well, including a second paranormal romance.

The good news if you want to read these sis that book one and book three are in Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus at the moment and although the middle one isn’t, it’s still only £1.99. I think my favourite is book three – but I wouldn’t swear to it!

Have a great weekend.

Book previews

Out This Week: New Ashley Poston

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The new book from Ashley Poston is out this week, and as I’m trying to take it as a sign that I should catch up with her last couple of books as I have two of them on the tbr pile. I’ve loved some of her previous books – like The Seven Year Slip and The Dead Romantics so I’m not quite sure how I’ve let this happen. Anyway: The Someday Garden is about Sophie, the new head gardener at Lilymoor House in Maine and who gets more than she bargained for when she discovers a secret garden with a mysterious man trapped inside. Magic and/or time travel is a feature of Poston’s books so when I say secret garden and trapped man, I mean it’s got an entrance that never appears in the same place twice. The house itself also has an uncertain future, so I’m optimistic that this may be a “lets save the house” book as well as a romance. I have a mixed record with magic (and ghosts, and the supernatural in general) in books but Poston is usually on the side of the things that I like so I’m looking forward to reading this, even if I really shouldn’t be buying it until I’ve cleared at least one of her other books of the (virtual) tbr shelf.

Recommendsday

Recommensday: May 2026 Quick Reviews

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Yes I know, I know, I know. It’s the third Wednesday of June and I’m only just now publishing the May Quick reviews. But I’ve explained my reasoning – I had the early June new releases to cover and then this month’s Kindle offers were *good* – in fact there’s one spotted lats night I ought to mention – the second Nora Breen book Death at the Spirit Lounge is 99p too. But there here now and I’m sure normal order will be resumed next month!

Banton of Paramonth by Howard Gutner*

Cover of Banton of Paramount

This is a photo heavy book looking at the career of Travis Banton who was a costume designer for Paramount and one of the most important of the Golden Age. He’s known for his collaboration with Marlene Dietrich and Carole Lombard among others including Clara Bow in It. I have strongly mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand I’m fascinated by Golden Age Hollywood and it’s great to find out more about a figure that I didn’t really know much about. However, I think this is going to be one of those books where having a physical copy is going to be the key to your experience and enjoyment because I had an eproof via NetGalley and the formatting on it was a real issue. There were photo captions out of order, stuff that was marked as “a rare colour photo” that was in black and white and just a general jumble at times where picture captions were mixed together with the main text and separated from the pictures they were referring too. This meant that it was hard to follow the narrative thread of the writing because you needed to keep flipping pages back and forth to match up the photos to the captions and to keep the thread of sentences. The pictures are the great gift in this though- lots of shots of beautiful outfits.

Hattie Breaks a Leg by Patrick Gleeson*

Cover of Hattie Breaks a Leg

Hattie is back and after the events of the first two books in Patrick Gleeson’s series, she’s more unemployable than ever. That’s why she finds herself stage managing a one night only play, with a huge cast, written by a first time playwright who is also directing and who seems to have no idea how any of this is meant to work. The good news is that it pays well… the bad news is that alongside this an old friend has asked for a favour and when things go wrong with that she finds herself dragged into some very shady doings. I really like this series and this is a good fun read that I finished in one day. I have a few quibbles – I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced on the favour side of the plot and I had part of the play plot figured out fairly early, but they didn’t really stop me from enjoying myself reading it. The world of the theatre is such a good one for mystery plots – and I love all the detail about the day to day of the behind the scenes that Gleeson includes in this. This is probably best enjoyed if you’ve already read one (or both) of the other books, but it will still work for you even if you haven’t I think.

Major Bricket and the Body in the Bell Tower by Simon Brett*

This is the second book in Simon Brett’s latest series, and I definitely liked it more that the first one -perhaps because I knew what I was expecting when I went in: a espionage-adjacent mystery in a less realistic world than you get in most of Brett’s other contemporary series. This has got a body turning up in the village church on Sunday morning that Major Bricket is the first to discover, and also a threat from his past resurfacing. It’s fun and pacy and felt just more established than the first one did. A nice way to pass a few hours, even if I don’t like it as much as I like (say) the Charles Paris books.

And there you (finally) have it – the May Quick reviews are sorted and just in case you’ve forgotten because it’s so long ago the May Recommendsdays were Island-set mysteries and Cold War mysteries, and the Books of the Week were Blue Devil Woman, The Wyndham Case, Call for the Dead and The Paris Match.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: And Then There Was The One

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Happy Tuesday everyone and for this week’s post I have picked a light humorous romance that’s also a pastiche of Golden Age Crime novels. Which is obviously very much something in my wheelhouse.

Cover of And Then There Was The One

It’s the 1930s and Georgiana has become an accidental detective after a spate of murders in her cute Cotswold village. You’d think after four murders in a year they would have had enough death, but then the parish council chairman drops dead of a heart attack. Or at least that’s what the police say. Georgie isn’t so convinced though and writes to a famous London detective for help given that the village now has murder tourists visiting. Except it’s not the detective that arrives, but his secretary. Sebastian is posh, frivolous and flirtatious, and not at all the sort of person that Georgie thinks can help.

As I said, this is a romantic mystery – where our heroine is perfectly aware of the fact that charming English villages shouldn’t be hot beds of murder and is determined to solve the crime. And this has got plenty of witty banter between the characters as well. Where it didn’t quite work for me was the romance elements – because I really didn’t know what Georgie and Sebastian saw in each other and so that bit worked less well. That said I read it in pretty short order (about 36 hours I think) so it’s very readable, even if not entirely satisfying. A bit like a dessert that doesn’t quite taste as good as it looks.

I have a bit of a mixed record with Martha Waters – I really enjoyed Christmas is All Around the other year (more than this I think) but I had significant issues with the second in her Regency Vows series, although I kept forgetting that when acquring some of the others in the series. And this is another slightly mixed review I guess but this doesn’t have anything as problematic as To Love and To Loathe did.

As you may remember from the offers post, this one is 99p this month on Kindle – and it’s the same price on Kobo. I’d been waiting for an offer on it and it’s definitely worth a punt at the current price.

Happy reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: June 8 – June 14

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Happy Monday everyone! This list is shorter than I would like given the fact that I added six physical books to the pile this week and another five ebooks, but my excuse is a theatre trip and a concert, the start of the World Cup, the Le Mans 24 hours, an F1 race and grass court tennis season. I did also visit four bookshops so that’s why the purchasing happened! Anyway, onwards to this week…

Read:

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

And Then There Was One by Martha Waters

Murder at the British Museum by Jim Eldridge

Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench

Puck by Samantha Allen*

Started:

Dolly All The Time by Annabel Monaghan

Still reading:

Death and Other Occupational Hazards by Veronica Dapunt

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

As I said at the top – 6 books, 5 ebooks. Oops.

Bonus picture: the wonderful library building in the middle of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

*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 Tempest

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I had two outings this week to chose from today and I’ve gone with the Tempest for today (and the other can wait) because there is still a remote chance you might be able to go and see this one whereas the other was a total one off and if you weren’t there you’ve missed it forever.

This is the RSC’s latest production of The Tempest starring Kenneth Branagh as Prospero, in his first production with the RSC in about 30 years and directed by Richard Eyre. This is at least my third time seeing The Tempest* which makes it my second most seen Shakespeare (behind Twelfth Night, but ahead of Richard II) and as ever what I love about Shakespeare is the seemingly infinite number of ways that they can be interpreted and staged.

In this one, Prospero is a conductor – instead of a staff, he has a baton he waves to control the weather and the music that accompanies the show as well as orchestrating the movements of everyone else on the island using Ariel. And what an Ariel Amara Okereke is – suspended in the air, flying over the stage and singing – sometimes upside down. I always a sucker for the light relief in a Shakespeare play – and Trinculo (Keir Charles) and Stefano (Guy Henry) were brilliant as they plotted their drunken rebellion.

In the directors note in the programme, Eyre says that he has come to see the show through a post-colonial lens – “an island whose resources have been obtained through science and magic with a white master and two enslaved people. This element is unignorable. It is also a story in which a magician’s assistant is an invisible spirit, who manages a team of ‘spirits’, controls the weather, manipulates the enemies of Prospero like puppets and even teaches him that virtue is preferable to vengeance.” I can’t pretend to be an expert but I thought the concept and production really worked well. To me there was nothing that felt incongruous with the words I was hearing with the staging – and I’ve seen a few Shakespeare productions where that is not the case!

There is a week left in the run, which is why I’m posting this today – but every performance is showing as sold out on the RSC website at the moment. From the moment it was announced this was a hot ticket – I’m not even sure how much was left by the time it got out of member pre-sale. That said our tickets were returns that my friend snagged because she was checking the website in the hopes that something would appear, however that was back at the end of February (I was actually at the Courtauld for the Seurat when she rang me) way before the run started or the reviews came out.

There is also a chance I guess that this may come into London – like Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night did – although there may be a wait on that for a theatre and a gap in Branagh’s schedule. The next production at Stratford is a new version of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard by Laura Wade (who wrote Home, I’m Darling and is also a writer on The Rivals) which also stars Kenneth Branagh as well as Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman and which is completely sold out for the whole run as well. It may be that whichever gets the better reviews gets the transfer – The Tempest got mostly four stars from all the big reviewers. I will be watching to see.

Have a great Sunday everyone.

*I’m a bit hazy because I have a friend who adores The Tempest and she remembers going to at least one production with me when we were at school that I can barely remember so there may be more!

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Gay’s The Word

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Happy Saturday! Independent bookstore week starts today *and* it’s Pride Month, so I thought Books Incoming could wait another week so that I could write about Gay’s The Word instead.

Gay’s The Word opened in 1979 and says it’s the UK’s oldest LGTB+ bookshop. It’s on Marchmont Street – just down the road from Judd Books as you head towards the Brunswick Centre, which is home to Skoob and also Brunswick Bookshop, which makes for a very easy four bookshop afternoon should that sort of thing be your jam – we know that it is mine. It’s not a big store, but it’s got a deceptively large amount of books in there, many of which I haven’t ever spotted in an actual shop before which is always a delight.

I should say that I’m annoyed with myself because I didn’t take as many photos as I should have on my two visits in the last few weeks, but hey ho, I can’t be perfect all the time. I’m particularly that I didn’t take a photo of this shelf this week – because there were definitely more biographies on there this week and this one doesn’t actually have the book that I bought on it.

I’m not a big Young Adult reader, but I have friends who are who I will be dragging down here to have a look because this is big, varied and again had loads of stuff I hadn’t seen before, even though I feel llike the algorithm serves me a lot of YA.

This is also a few weeks old – this week it had Father Material on it as well as Star Shipped, and K J Charles‘s How To Fake It In Society (which is a hard back or I would have been tempted). I’ve got the Rose Dommu on the (virtual) shelf as well as Murder at the Hotel Orient. On the top shelf, International Relations – a m/m fake dating romance with a diplomat who needs a husband to get an ambasadorial post – looks right up my street and in the middle Show Stopper – about teens at a musical theatre competition is the one I’m going to be telling my YA reading friends about. On the non-fiction side, I’m waiting for A Queer Inheritance – which is about queer lives at properties that are now run by the national trust – to come out in paperback, and I also really want to read Queen James but it’s just as chunky in paperback as it was in Hardback.

And that’s your lot for today. Go visit an indie for bookshop week, and for double points buy a book by an LGTBQ+ author. And if you’re in or around Sheffield this pride month, don’t forget Juno Books too.

announcement

Happy World Cup!

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No series post today! The World Cup got underway last night and I think you should spend your Friday preparing yourself for the many four match days and the time zone issues that the West Coast of the US presents with the two overnight kickoff times which are 0200 and 0500 here in the UK! I’m marking it with a (vintage but not that vintage) picture of me in my euro 2012 staff shirt which has a bookish link: I got my first kindle so I would have enough reading material for a month in Warsaw without taking a second suitcase full of books…

Book previews

Out This Week: Whose Body in the Lighthouse

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Cover of Whose Body in the Library

After a glut of books that I had already read that came out last week, this week is one of those were there are a lot less new releases that I’m interested in. But never fear, there is (almost) always something that I would read, if only the pile wasn’t so huge. And this week my choice would be the new Eva Gates book Whose Body in the Lighthouse, which is the thirteenth in her Library Lovers and is doing something different which I find really quite interesting. For the first twelve books in the series, the lead character has been Lucy, a librarian in the Outer Banks. When I read book ten in the series three years ago, that book was covering Lucy’s wedding. Now two books on she’s had twins. I’ve written before about the difficulties of keeping a cozy series going and not progressing the characters personal lives but also the challenges presented by a heroine with young baby (or at least I think I have!) and Gates is dealing with this by… introducing a new librarian to get caught up in a murder. Or at least that’s what I think she’s doing – the start of the blurb is:

A new librarian’s first day goes terribly wrong when she finds a dead body on the front steps of the library.

In the thirteenth instalment of the beloved Lighthouse Library mysteries, a new character takes the reins.

And I’m not going to lie – I’m sort of fascinated by that. I can’t think of any cozy series I’ve read where the main character has been switched, much less successfully. If you can, please do drop them in the comments because I would love to read some. Agatha Christie moved the narrator around in her series, but the detective character was always the same – it was a Poirot mystery whether the narration was coming from Captain Hastings or Roger Ackroyd or whoever. So this has gone onto my list of things to watch out for because it’s an interesting and unusual way to tackle the problem.

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Kindle Offers

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I’m sorry, you’re going to have to wait another week for the May Quick Reviews, because this month’s Kindle Offers are that good. This was a really quite expensive post to write and so hold on to your wallets, here we go.

Cover of Slow Dance

So first of all there are quite a few recent releases among the offers, notably the last (sniff) Phryne Fisher book Murder in the Cathedral. Phryne books don’t go on offer that much so take advantage of it while you can. There’s also Charlotte Stein‘s recent BotW While You Were Seething, Sloane Fletcher‘s Blue Devil Woman (which is also in Kindle Unlimited), The fourth and final Emmy Lake book, Dear Miss Lake is on offer – presumably because it’s just come out in paperback, and recent BotW (although not that recent release) Rainbow Rowell‘s Slow Dance. There are a few new releases I haven’t read too including the latest Sarah Morgan Brave New Summer and Alexandra Vasti’s The Halifax Hellions.

Also on offer is Taylor Jenkins Reid‘s Malibu Rising, Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (presumably to coincide with season 2 of the adaptation), Christina Lauren‘s The Unhoneymooners, Yulin Kang‘s How to End a Love Story,Libby Page’s The Lido, Katherine Center‘s The Bodyguard, and Annabel Monaghan‘s wonderful Nora Goes Off Script which I assume is because her new one Dolly All the Time has just come out – that one is £2.49 this month. It’s Pride month (as I have already mentioned more than once) which may be why Ashley Herring Blake’s Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date, T J Klune‘s The House in the Cerulean Sea and K J Charles‘s Copper Script are all reduced.

Of the classic authors, there is the Agatha Christie classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, two Georgette Heyers – one of her mysteries No Wind of Blame and one of her romances The Toll Gate. The original Bridget Jones’s Diary is on offer (and in Kindle Unlimited), as is Erin Morgenstern‘s The Night Circus, A classic to me, Jasper Fforde‘s The Eyre Affair is on offer too – not too long now until the final book in that series arrives – and a reminder that if you’re a hardback purchaser there is an annotated edition of this one out now too.

What did I buy? Well the new K J Charles How To Fake it In Society, Martha Water’s mystery-romance And Then There Was The One, Mary Roach’s latest Replaceable You as well as Judith Mackerell‘s latest Artists, Siblings, Visonaries, all of which are 99p. And in stuff I’ve resisted (somehow) buying so far there is Margo’s Got Money Troubles which has just been adapted by Apple TV and Sofia Cousen’s And Then There Was You.

And if that’s not enough books for you, I’m sorry, I don’t know what would be!

Happy Humpday!