book adjacent, not a book, theatre

Not a Book: Into the Woods

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It’s Easter Sunday and if you have a long weekend I hope that it is going well so far, and not too encumbered by the sort of weather that a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK always seems to cause. For the third weekend in a row I have a theatre related post for you and to be honest, I don’t think it’s the end of the run of show posts because I’ve seen a lot of shows in the last six weeks – including two this week alone. But this week I’m going with another Sondheim show to join my posts about Here We Are and the Frogs, Merrily We Roll Along and Old Friends.

Into The Woods is Stephen Sondheim’s take on some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, intertwining them to tell the story of a childless baker and his wife who try to life a curse that has been placed on them by a witch but finding her a series of items in the woods. This brings them into contact with other story book characters. We’re taken through the story by a narrator. I can’t really tell you much more about the plot than that without giving too much away, but the story takes the familiar fairy tale tropes and plays with them. Sondheim’s music is often tricky to perform – there are difficult harmonies and tunes that don’t go where you expect. Into The Woods has got repeating motifs that evolve through the show – you’ll come out humming snatches rather than having an earworm of one tune stuck in your head. The lyrics are brilliant – clever and often witty and even the spoken lines have a rhythm to them.

In the Stephen Sondheim canon, Into the Woods comes after Sunday in the Park with George and is the second of his three collaborations with James Lapine and is at the tail end of his run of what was probably his best work. I had seen the movie of Into the Woods, but this is the first production that I’ve seen in person – the last time it was in London was 2010 when I wasn’t seeing as much theatre for various real world reasons. That production had Hannah Waddingham and Jenna Russell, this one has Jamie Parker and Kate Fleetwood. Now when I (first) went to see it Jamie Parker got injured midway through the first act* and was replaced by his understudy, and there were also understudies on for The Baker’s Wife and Little Red. But I enjoyed it so much that I went back this week to try and catch some of the people that I missed before they leave (more on that later) and to get a different view of the stage.

And as you can see – I was higher up and further back but straight on and that means I could see a lot more detail of the set and the action behind. If you’re going to see this then try and be as front on as you can – I think probably ideally a level down from this seat in Gallery 2 but those seats are pricey – so for the money this was excellent. And I did get to see all of Jamie Parker this time with the original Baker’s Wife Katie Brayben. There were still a few understudies on though – including Little Red again but also Jennifer Hepburn as the Witch. All the performances were excellent, but I can imagine that when it’s the full main cast it is really quite something because I definitely have preferences having seen it twice. I can really see why it earned 11 nominations at the Oliviers – as I said in my Producers review last week I’m expecting the winners to come from this and Paddington. That said I’m expected possibly more Paddington given that Paddington took the Whats On Stage awards – although they are voted for by the public and the Oliviers are voted by the industry so there maybe a difference there. I haven’t seen Paddington because tickets are like gold dust until the summer so I can’t judge, but this is truly brilliant.

In fact it’s been such a success that the run at the Bridge has extended until the end of May, having been originally due to end on April 20th. There is a cast change that comes with that though – the details of which were announced last week and is the reason why I hurried back this week to try and catch Parker and Brayben before they left. The replacements are pretty good too – Rachel Tucker, John Owen Jones and Melanie Le Barrie are all names in their own right, and Hughie O’Donnell is who I saw take over as the Baker mid-performance and he was very good too. Not going to lie, I am tempted to go back again..

Happy Easter if you’re celebrating, happy Sunday if you’re not!

Into the Woods is at the Bridge Theatre until May 30th

*if you know the show, he got injured somewhere in the sequence in the wood shed.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Quinn’s Spring 2026

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Happy Saturday everyone, and this is the third instalment from my bookish wander around Leicestershire the other Saturday. I’ve already covered the bargain book selection at The Works, and the beautifully curated selection at Kibworth. This week it’s a revisit to Quinns, where I was mostly looking at what they had picked out to put on the displays because I love seeing what booksellers have picked to highlight.

This is the mystery and thriller table in the window and I haven’t read a single one of them. Which is fascinating given how many mysteries I read! I know that the Asako Yuzuki and the Uketsu are too scary for me – as is so much of the stuff that’s got dark and moody covers. I have a Janice Hallet waiting to be read on the pile though and I’ve read Sophie Hannah’s Poirot continuations but not her own stuff, and I used to read Lisa Jewell when she was writing women’s fiction.

It’s a similar sort of story here. I have read all of Joanne Harris’s other Chocolate books so I have Vianne on the kindle waiting to be read and the same with the Gill Hornby, which is the latest of her books related to the Austen family. I saw The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry the other week as you know, so I was tempted by the Rachel Joyce which is about the daughters of a famous artist who has died in Italy and the masterpiece he went there to finish is missing. This is Jennie Godfrey’s second book – the first has been everywhere and it’s definitely on my list to try, if I can just get the pile down a little bit!

We’re back to authors who I have books waiting to be read on this table too – I’ve got one of Francis Spufford’s on the actual self and the same with Natasha Pulley. The Gregory Maguire is his new Wizard of z prequel hot on the heels of the success of Wicked – the book of which I didn’t manage to finish. The intruiguing one on this table though is Winterbourne, which I hadn’t seen before. It came out at the end of January and it’s about a librarian who goes to a remote Island off the coast of Scotland to catalogue the library of a grand house. It’s described as a chilling and unpredictable mystery and a reinvention of the Gothic genre, so who knows if I can deal with that – I’ll wait for the paperback!

I’m finishing with a bonus picture from the Waterstones, just to prove to myself that I really do read books I’ve read The Potting Shed Murder, Murder on the Lusitania, Knife Skills for Beginners, And Then There Were None, The Housekeepers and The Thursday Murder Club off this table and the first Antique’s Hunter book (although not this one) and I have How to Solve Your Own Murder on the pile too. And now I feel better!

books, stats

Reading Stats: March 2026

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Books read this month: 33*

New books:26

Re-reads: 7 (6 audiobooks)

Books from the to-read pile: 10

NetGalley books read: 8

Kindle Unlimited read: 6

Ebooks: 3

Audiobooks: 6

Non-fiction books: 1

Favourite book: of the things that have been published Agnes Aubert but also the upcoming Nora Breen sequel

Books bought: lets just skip over this because that Saturday in Leicestershire was a lot and that’s before anything else I did…

Most read author: Jess Kidd with Murder at Gulls Nest and the sequel

Books read in 2025: 92

Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 598

A pretty solid month all in. I was actually quite surprised when I came to put this together because I thought I had more novellas in there than I did, but actually my dedication to the NetGalley list and reading from the pile at weekends has paid off a bit. Not as good on the non-fiction front though, so that’s something to work on – and it’s Good Friday today so maybe Easter weekend is my opportunity. All the motorsport is cancelled after all!

Bonus picture: Leicester Square Theatre right back at the start of the month ahead of a recording of The Horne Section podcast – complete with former Taskmaster contestant special guests!

*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – 4 this month!

Book previews

Out This Week: The Geomagician

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The stats are coming up tomorrow as a Good Friday treat for you all, but before we get to that given that I’m on a run of cozy fantasy books I wanted to mention this one, which came out on Tuesday and which I’m already reading (but haven’t finished yet so this isn’t a review!). This is an alternative history type historical fantasy in a world where magic is real and Mary Anning (who was a real life fossil collector and palentologist) is a struggling fossil dealer who wants to be accepted into the Geomagical Society of London but is stymied by her gender and her lack of formal higher education. But one day she is out fossil hunting after a landslide when a pterodactyl egg hatches in her hand. Ajax could be the thing that makes her career – but the emissary from the society is her former fiancé and soon she is stuck between rival factions of the society with their own agendas. This is blurbed by Heather Fawcett (as in Emily Wilde and Agnes Aubert) which is why I requested it – so far (just over a third in) it’s a bit less cozy and has more religion than I was expecting, but I’m interested to see where it goes and how it all gets resolved.

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March 2026 Quick Reviews

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It’s the first day of April and it’s also a Wednesday, so I’m back with the quick reviews from last month. This was an interesting one to pick – because there were quite a lot of books from last month that I want to write about, but a lot of them fit into other posts that I’ve got planned, but in the end it’s worked out ok – with three murder mysteries so it even feels a bit cohesive! The stats are coming up – but I think it’s fair to say that I did quite well on the to-read pile front and on the NetGalley one too, and this post reflects that: two books from NetGalley – both recent releases – and one from the pile.

A Murder in Eight Cocktails by Kelly Mullen*

Willa is a recent (early) retiree who has turned herself into an ASMR cocktail influencer. When she’s invited to the launch of a new bar, she’s excited to make content for her account – even if her husband is less than enthusiastic. But when she arrives at the even she discovers it’s being hosted by her ex-husband and things go from bad to worse when the owner of the bar is found dead on the rocks below the ocean-side bar. The police think it’s suicide, but Willa isn’t convinced, and soon she’s teaming up with her ex-husband and her current husband to try and figure out what really happened. I wanted to like this more than I did, but I found the way that Willa bounces between unhappiness with her husband’s “dullness” and enthusiasm for working with her ex-husband quite trying. I think the push-pull was meant to create tension in the story (beyond the murder mystery) but I thought it reduced the reader’s sympathy/empathy for Willa because she never really gives concrete examples of the problems in her marriage or tries to address them with her husband (she just seems to get exasperated) and is written in a way that suggests that she might jump ship to her ex. The mystery was interesting though – although I’m not sure about an emotional support chameleon…

The Pie and Mash Detective Agency by J D Brinkworth*

Jane Pye and Simon Mash are a couple who start taking a private detective class in their free time and end up investigating a real live case as part of their final assessment. A woman called Nellie Thorne has been reported missing by her boyfriend – except that she is not the first Nellie Thorne to go missing, there have been at least five of them over the last fifty years. Can these two wannabe PIs work out what has happened to all the Nellies? Ok, I’m not going to lie, this didn’t really work for me. I was hoping it would, but I found it quite hard going. There is some fun dialogue between Jane and Simon, but you never really got to know them that well – what their personalities are like and why they are a thing – beyond the snark. The mystery was quite convoluted and I felt like it couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to go all out into the surreal/fantastic or stay in the cozy crime lane. Hey ho, this happens – the cover is lovely though.

Fishing for Trouble by Elizabeth Logan

This is the second book in a cosy crime series set in Alaska. Charlie has taken over running her parents diner after moving home following a broken engagement in San Francisco. In this it’s high summer, with long days of daylight and lots of seasonal workers. But when one of those seasonal workers collapses and dies in her diner, Charlie starts to investigate. So this didn’t really work for me. Charlie doesn’t have a lot of personality beyond liking her cat (shown by buying him loads of cat toys she can run from her phone while she leaves him home alone all day) and being a bit immature as well as somewhat too stupid to live. It’s a shame because the details of life in Alaska make for a nice change from most cozies.

A quick reminder of the other posts from March – the Recommensdays were Books set in the Tower of London, and some first in series books; and the Books of the Week were The French Bookshop Murder, Slow Dance, The Love Haters, Murder at Gulls Nest and Love and Other Brain Experiments.

Happy Humpday!

Book of the Week, cozy crime, first in series

Book of the Week: The French Bookshop Murder

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I said yesterday that I wasn’t sure what I was going to pick today and it turns out it’s actually a book I finished on Monday. But that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Zoe Pascal has relocated from her life in England to a small village in southern France where she is going to run a bookshop. But when she arrives in Sainte Catherine the locals are strangely hostile and there’s an undercurrent in the village that she just doesn’t understand. Then the body of a tourist is found in the local church – not long after she was due to meet Zoe. Suddenly Zoe finds herself under even more suspicion – from the gendarmes now as well as the locals. So she sets to to try and undercover the killer and the mystery at the heart of the village.

This is a lot of fun, with a really good puzzle as well as the murder mystery. I had a few bits figured out, but not all of it and I really enjoyed the village setting and the cast of characters. I could really picture the historic houses and Provençal countryside. There appears to be a tie in going on with a prior series by Greg Mosse, which I will be tempted to pick up – but there is a sequel to this to read first!

This is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, but it’s also still available on Kobo and there is a paperback too, although as only one of the London Waterstones‘ has it on click and collect you may have to have a bit of a hunt for it.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: March 23 – March 29

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It’s nearly the end of March and Easter is fast approaching. The clocks have sprung forward and my commute this morning was plunged back into darkness again after a couple of weeks of glorious daylight. I had a day off last week and a day of work from home and the lack of commuting reading time on those two days shows up on the list and the fact that I’m not really sure what I’m going to write about tomorrow…

Read:

A Death in the Dark by Ellie Alexander*

A Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh

Just As You Are by Camille Kellogg

Mrs Spy by M J Rowbotham*

Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh

Fishing for Trouble by Elizabeth Logan

Cloaked in Chaos by Patti Benning

Started:

The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula*

The French Bookshop Murder by Greg Mosse

Still reading:

Game Changer by Rachael Reid

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

I managed to resist buying too many books this week, considering how over the top I went last week, but if you are in the market for books, Dawn Tripp’s Jackie is 99p on Kindle at the moment – I don’t know how long it will last because it doesn’t say, but march ends shortly and often that is the cue for price changes.

Bonus picture: I do not need novelty salt and pepper shakers. I do not need novelty salt and pepper shakers…

*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 Producers (again)!

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Yes, yes, yes, I realise that this is the third time I have talked about The Producers here. Once when I saw it at the Menier in late 2024 and wrote a review, and then I reminded you of it when the transfer to the West End started last summer. But this week I went back again (third visit!) and I couldn’t resist.

So as previously mentioned, this is the first West End revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, the musical version of his classic movie that sees a Broadway producer and his accountant try to put on a surefire flop that they’ve oversold to investors so they can get rich. This revival has four Olivier nominations (the ceremony is in two week’s time) for Andy Nyman (Max Bialystock), Marc Antolin (Leo Bloom), Trevor Ashley (Roger De Bris) and Best Revival. I think it’s going to struggle to win any of them because it’s such a strong year and they’re up against Paddington and Into the Woods (which have been incredibly well reviewed and taking awards in the run up) but it really is an excellent production of a genius show.

Now I mentioned Andy Nyman there, and the reason that I went back to see the show again this week is because Andy is out of the show until mid-May because he’s doing a play in York, and he’s been replaced by Richard Kind. Now if you don’t recognise the name, you will recognise the face because Kind has been in so many things possibly most notably Only Murders in the Building, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the voice of Bing Bong in Inside Out. But he was also one of the replacement Maxes in the original Broadway production, and was also Max when the show played at the Hollywood Bowl and now he’s bringing it to London. And he’s wonderful. It was only his second night when I went (there was a gala performance on night three though) and he was brilliant and more impressively it already looked like he and Marc Antolin had been working together for months, despite the fact that he’s joining a very different production of a show he was last in more than a decade ago. Kind is 69 now, and he’s a tad slower around the stage than Nyman and had a couple of moments where the muscle memory of the old version seemed to kick in, but I’m pretty sure that will iron out – if it hasn’t already.

As you can see I was quite a long way back in the stalls, but that didn’t really matter because it’s not a show that has a lot of stuff happening high up and some how Kind manages to make the more subtle choices he makes reach the back of the room. If you haven’t seen the show already, you could make this your excuse and if you have it’s worth going to see the different version of Max that Kind is giving. I’ve had the tunes from the show stuck in my head all week – in fact some of them are so catchy that they started being earworms at the mere thought of seeing the show again!

The Producers is on at the Garrick Theatre and is booking until mid-September, Richard Kind is in it until May 9 with Andy Nyman returning on May 11. And if you want to see Nyman, there’s a code on the show’s website for some money off if you’re booking more than 8 weeks ahead…

Have a great Sunday everyone.

bookshops

Books in the Wild: Kibworth Books

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As I said last weekend in my post about The Works, I’ve been on a bit of a bookshop odyssey and during that I finally made it to Kibworth Books. This is only about 20 miles from home, but as is the way of country roads, actually takes about 45 minutes to get to, hence not having got there before. But it was worth the trip because the selection is great and the staff are incredibly knowledgable and helpful. I can confirm: I bought books. Three of them.

So this is the front of the front table which has a really good selection that tells me that this is a bookshop that might understand what I like and have recommendations for me! I’ve read the Sittenfeld and I have the Hornby on the pile waiting. I’ve also raed a bunch of the crime selections there – and have the Elly Griffiths on the pile too. So I eyed up a few of these, although my actual purchases didn’t come from this table!

And you know me, I always check out the romance section, because I read so much of it and I also think you can tell quite a lot about a shop by what they do with romance. and in this case it’s a small but seemingly carefuly chosen selection. There’s stuff here that I’ve read like Funny Story and One Day and authors that I’ve read (If not those precise books) which suggests that some of the others might be things I’d like too. Also I have Match Point on the pile and I really should get around to that too.

And the other section I always look at is the crime section. And apologies for the wide shot, but it seemed to make more sense to do one big paragraph on crime than three small ones! So there is plenty of series action here including loads that I read (and some I don’t but might get around to some day) – with Elly Griffiths, including Ruth Galloway ( can you believe that that binge was this time last year?!) and her Brighton mysteries; Mick Herron for the people who’ve been watching Slow Horses, Kate Atkinson for the Jackson Brodie fans; Richard Osman, Richard Coles, Anthony Horowitz, and all the rest – along with some less usual stuff. When I was chatting about books at the till, the recommendation was the Holly Stars which I’ve read (and the sequel) but the next one I hadn’t even come across so of course thats one of the ones that I bought. And a quick mention for the Agatha Christie and BLCC selection to cover off the classic crime fans.

And finally, how amazing/adorable is this? I thought this was so cool, although my picture of it isn’t the best so doesn’t really do it justice. Google tells me that it’s a little kit that you make yourself which makes it extra impressive because there is no way that I would have the patience and find motor control to assemble something this tiny and finicky – and that makes it extra impressive. Anyway, I really had a great time visiting Kibworth Books, bought three books even though the pile is huge and will be going back again next time I’m up that end of the woods.

Have a great weekend everyone.

cozy crime, series

Mystery series: Writer’s Apprentice

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It’s Friday again and I’m back with only my second post about a mystery series this year.

This is a small town cozy crime series with a literary twist – there are six books in the series and I’ve read five of them. At the start of the series, in A Dark and Stormy Murder (which was a BotW back in the autumn of 2024) Lena London is an aspiring suspense author who moves to Blue Lake in Indiana because she’s just landed her dream job as assistant to her favourite author Camilla Graham who is based there. As it’s a mystery series bodies start to turn up and there are love interests and the first book also sets up a running back story mystery that needs solving involving a secondary character.

Unlike a lot of mystery series, Lena actually choses between her love interests pretty early and the running mystery isn’t dragged out too long either. Julia Buckley introduces new regulars as the series goes on too which helps broaden the world and introduce new avenues for corpses to appear – although the same person is the prime suspect in the first three mysteries for reasons related to the running side plot. Blue Lake is a nice setting and Lena’s status as a new arrival, albeit from not far away and with a friend living in the town, means that you get explanations of who is who and what is what pretty naturally in the narrative, which isn’t always the case.

The fifth book did feel like a bit of a shift from the other four with a missing person and a (possibly) evil corporation coming to town rather than a body and I didn’t like it as much. I think the series probably did need to do something a little bit different but the direction of the plot felt a bit confused and like the book couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to move towards a more cozy thriller type thing. Number six (aka the one I haven’t read) has a different cover style and is significantly more expensive and isn’t linked to the previous five on Amazon so I suspect that it may be a different publisher, which maybe suggests that the previous one didn’t work as well for other people two.

That said the first four books in this series are good, well plotted mystery stories with a nice setting and a good cast of characters and are worth a look if you see them around. Unlike a lot of the cozy series I read these are available as ebooks on Kindle and Kobo, and I’ve picked up a couple of these from the Big Waterstones in Picadilly, so they’re easier to find than some of the mass market series I read.

Have a great weekend!