I mean this is almost restraint. For me anyway. And two months in a row too. Sort of. Because I did put the Christmas books in a special post or January would have looked different. But anyway, just the two books added to the pile – and I think I’ve read three from the pile since the last post, so that’s a net reduction really. If we only count that one month. So Edward VIII was my purchase in Waterstone’s Trafalgar Square and Box Office Poison has been on the want to read list for ages and came down in price. And that’s it! All I need to do more is read some more physical books. Except what I’ve actually been doing is trying to read down the NetGalley list. I really can only do one thing at a time!
It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow and after 2024’s Improbable Meet-Cute series of Originals, Amazon are back with a second set themed around the idea of a second chance after a meet cute. nd I have read them all so you don’t have to. I was really optimistic after the first three, because I really liked all of them, but then it went downhill a little. So I’m going to focus on the ones that I really liked.
The Christina Lauren has a marketing consultant who ends up in the wrong zoom meeting and then gives a brutal critique of the presentation she sees. This leads the company boss to offer her a job, but their emails turn flirty and soon she’s torn between him and her hot but mysterious neighbour. This is a a wild premise, but the banter is good and I raced through it. I’ve mentioned before that Christina Lauren can sometimes come down the wrong side of my tastes when it comes to workplaces and professionalism, but this navigates the workplace romance dynamic neatly and has an actually competent heroine who is good at her job and flirting on the side. It also has just the right amount of plot for the length, which cannot be said for some of the others in the series!
Time Will Tell has a heroine who gets a letter from her deceased grandmother revealing a long held secret – and leading her to a time capsule and a lost love affair. This starts an email conversation with the grandson of her grandmother’s lost love all the way over in England. This is also just the right amount of plot for the length, and the main characters felt really three dimensional. It was my first time reading Hannah Bonam-Young, and I would definitely give something full length a chance on the basis of this.
In Second Act Romance, an emergency replacement is drafted in to play Bex’s leading man when the cast of the musical that she’s in comes down with food poisoning. But it turns out that he’s the same guy she shared some onstage fireworks with years before. Now they’re working together again, and can they work out the misunderstanding that stopped their first encounter going any further. I’m a bit mixed on JulieSoto, but her entry in this series is probably my favourite thing I’ve read of hers. It’s a bit bonkers, but I went with it.
Of the other three, Death to Valentines Day has far too much plot for the length that it is – a murder and and romance in less than 100 pages! – and that means that there’s not a lot of time for characterisation so everyone feels quite caricaturish and over drawn. Valentine’s Slay is (thankfully) not actually a vampire story, but it is the most outlandish in terms of plot. On the other hand, it’s also the spiciest so some may like it best because of that – although for me I’m not sure I’d be up for sex about an hour after waking up buried alive, but hey danger boner is a staple of romance novels so what do I know. Anyway, although I have some reservations, they’re all short and as they were in KU I didn’t have to pay for them, so all in all a nice way to read some romance before Valentines day and try out some new authors as four of the six were new to me.
The NFL season may be over and the Seahwawks have taken the Vince Lombardi trophy back to Seattle, but this week we have a new addition to Susan Elizabeth Philips’s Chicago Stars series. I’ve written about these before – the last one actually came out the week following the Super Bowl too, but they remain one of my favourite sports romance series (maybe my actual favourite?) despite the huge swaths of NFL and NHL romances that are on the shelves at the moment. The new book is called And the Crowd Went Wild, and it has a star quarterback and an actress as the duo – now I could get cynical about this (yes Taylor is a pop star and Travis is a tight end, not a QB) except that it’s Susan Elizabeth Philips and this is what she does but also I just heard Julia Quinn recommend it on last week’s Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast. I’m really looking forward to reading this when I get hold of it.
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, and I’ve taken a break from watching the Winter Olympics for the time it takes to pull together the Kindle Offers. However if you are a Winter Olympics fan, it’s the Ice Dance Free tonight – could the Brits get our first figure skating medal in more than thirty years? Anyway, to the offers…
I’m not going to lie, it’s not the best month for offers on stuff that I read. However, there are a few things. Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers is 99p – this was a Book of the Week in December 2024. Get A Life Chloe Brown is 99p and in Kindle Unlimited too if you need a dose of Talia Hibbert in your life. How To End a Love Story is also on offer – this was a Book of the Week too, albeit I had a few reservations, but this made a bunch of best romances of the year lists in 2024 so others weren’t as conflicted as I was!
If you’re watching series four of Bridgerton and haven’t read An Offer from a Gentleman yet, then that’s 99p in it’s adaptation tie-in cover. Night Rider, which I mentioned at the end of January when it came out, is 99p this month – but I’ve read it now and can confirm that you shouldn’t be deceived by the pastel cover, it is a proper romantic suspense, but set on a cowboy ranch. I read Ava Wilder’s How to Fake it in Hollywood nearly three years ago, and her latest, Some Kind of Famous is 99p – I was mixed on that previous one but there was potential, so I’m definitely tempted to buy this one. I have the paperback of Love is a War Song on the pile, but if I didn’t I would be buying it on Kindle for 99p!
Natasha Solomon’s Cleopatra is on offer – I haven’t read this, because I don’t really read stuff set in ancient times, but I have read a bunch of her other more modern-set novels and enjoyed them, so if you do read ancient history-fiction, this may well appeal to you. The third Hawthorne Mystery, A Line to Kill is 99p which I’ve read, but so is Anthony Horowitz’s first Sherlock Holmes continuation The House of Silk. I also bought myself The Hollow Man which is 99p for reasons related to the latest Knives Out
On the Agatha Christie front, Dumb Witness from the Hercule Poirot series is 99p, and the Discworld is one of my all time favourite – Guards! Guards! – which is one of the entry points to the series. I read or listen to this at least once a year.
The Stranger Times by C K McDonnell is 99p – this is the start of a series
We’ve reached the sixth Tuesday of 2026 and I’ve picked a British Library Crime Classic as Book of the Week. I haven’t quite made it to two months since the last time I picked a BLCC book, but given that I was disappointed by a couple of the things I read this week, I really had no other option…
Cyanide in the Sun is a collection of eighteen holiday-themed short stories. Among the authors are Christanna Brand, Anthony Berkley, Anthony Gilbert, Julian Symons and Michael Innes among others. I hadn’t read any of these before – which I think is because a lot of them were either published in newspapers or in hard to get collections. And the nature of newspaper stories means some of them are really quite short, but I enjoyed that about the collection – they were in and out and didn’t outstay their welcome if that makes sense. There are a few here that are really quite clever with nice twists that leave you surprised.
I find that short story collections can be a bit patchy – with the BLCC it can sometimes be because the stories aren’t as good as you want them to be, as opposed to there being something that’s been around a bit in them. But this is a good one with stories picked from some of the most successful of the recent BLCC authors. Here in the UK it’s definitely not the right time of year to be reading holiday stories if reading about sunshine and beaches when the weather outside is wet and cold gets you down, but personally I usefully find it a nice treat to be taken away from the worst of the weather. And last week was definitely in the worst of the weather category at times!
This one is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so it’s not on Kobo, but once it has rotated out of that it should be back on other ebook platforms. And of course it’s also available in paperback which you can get direct from the British Library bookshop where they have a three for two on the Crime Classics.
It’s day three of the Winter Olympics proper and I’m having such a good time watching it all I’m almost surprised I finished anything over the weekend. But I did, although it wasn’t any of the long runners that I’m meant to be targeting. Hey ho, onwards and upwards towards the ice dance, where the Brits have a chance of a medal if all the stars align for them.
While I am going to be deep in the Winter Olympic Figure Skating Team event this evening, it’s also the Super Bowl tonight, and as you know by now, I’m a bit of a NFL fan. But it’s lucky I’ve got the Olympics to distract me, because once again the Cowboys aren’t in it. It’s been a while now. I’m starting to lose patience, but what can you do they’re my team and you have to stand by them even when they’re playing terribly. But while the Vince Lombardi won’t be heading back to Dallas this year, I thought I’d write about Netflix’s documentary about the Cowboys and the team’s owner Jerry Jones.
The official title for this is America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, and that’s very much the tone of the doc – this is the story of Jerry’s Cowboys: how he bought them and what he did with them. And it’s quite the ride. Thirty plus years on from the start of the Jerry Jones era it’s easy to forget – or depending on your age not really appreciate what happened in Dallas in the decade from the mid-80s to the mid 90s. And this will give you that – the main focus of the bulk of the episodes is the building of the team that won three Super Bowls in four years and the stories and excesses around it.
The success of this is that its has managed to get pretty much everyone involved in the rise (and fall) who is still alive to take part. And that’s some feat given the feuds and the strong feelings that people have about it all. The Jerry Jones-Jimmy Johnson situation was quite something, for perspective it was only in 2023 that Johnson was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor – nearly 20 years after the three key players of the Super Bowl winning teams that he coached. And they’re all pretty frank too. It’s very warts and all – not just with the backroom staff, but with players admitting their drug use and the special treatment they got from the police. So there’s plenty of salacious stuff in here for the casual view and fan.
The thing that really struck me was that it felt like while the massive success was happening, the players and the organisation didn’t really seem to think it would come to an end – like this is the Cowboys domination era and it will continue. And these things never go on forever in sports – whether it’s Manchester United in football or Ferrari or Red Bull in F1 you can’t stay on top forever no matter how hard you try. I also found it really interesting to help understand some of the decisions that the organisation (well Jerry!) has taken since. Even though the documentary glosses over the last thirty years quite a lot, if you’ve been following the team you can see Jerry trying to recreate the trades or the deals that brought them to that early 90s domination in the hopes that it will bring it back again.
And that explains why fans can get so exasperated with the Cowboys – it’s the most valuable sports franchise in the world according to Forbes (and has been since 2016) but it hasn’t won the SuperBowl or a Conference championship 1995. Jerry is the General Manager of the Cowboys as well as the owner – and that’s not a usual thing. But watching him in this, he’s supremely unbothered by what people think of him – he wants to do it his way or not at all.
This one is on Netflix – if you’re a sports fan it’s an interesting watch but if you’re a casual viewer and only going to watch one documentary about the Cowboys though, it should still be the first season of America’s Sweethearts!
I was wandering slightly closer to the river this week and so have been into one of my lesser frequented Waterstones branches in Central London – Trafalgar Square,
Lets start with the main window – we’ve got some of the same suspects as last week’s post here but the prominene is different. The Heated Rivalry and Half His Age are right up the top, with the new George Sanders and the literary fiction selection below. Then at eye level we’ve got a new paperback release form last week and Waterstone’s Thriller of the Month for February (and book that’s definitely too scary for Verity) Wasp Trap and slightly below that we’ve got a good mix of popular fiction, crime and romantasy. I think it’s a bit too much something for everyone and I’d prefer something a bit more focussed/themed, but what do I know.
More new releases here – the one I picked up was Greedy (can you tell from the messy pile?) which is another too scary for me, because it’s a psychological thriller about a chef who’s in trouble with the Yakuza and takes a job as private chef for a reclusive billionaire. Slightly more in my wheelhouse is Wreck, which is comped by Marian Keyes, and is about a year in the life of a normal family. One of the reviews calls it “Ephron-esque” which is very much my thing.
I’m always looking at the paperback crime table – mostly to see how much of it I’ve read! And on this occasion, not a huge amount. The Sally Smith you know I love, I’ve also done the Marlow Murder Club, The Richard Osman, Death and Croissants and the Anthony Horowitz. I have Tim Sullivan on my list of things I should try, The Bells of Westminster and the Tom Hindle are on the pile waiting for me to get to them.
And finally, on the new hardback crime shelves. The trend for older main characters seems to be continuing -along with the new HM the Queen book, there’s also Too Old For This, which is about an elderly woman who is startled when a journalist turns up to ask questions about her connection to a number of unsolved murders. It’s nice to see Miss Winter in the Library With the Knife still getting some shelf space after Christmas. And I keep seeing A Taste for Murder, which is an Italian-set mystery where a British police detective gets caught up in a murder investigation while on holiday with his teenage daughter.
And that’s the lot today – I’m off to watch the Olympics!
There are a couple of new books out this week that I’m looking forward to reading. Yesterday I mentioned the new Holly Stars mystery, but today I’m taking an opportunity to mention that Ashley Herring Blake has a new book out by doing a reminder of my post about her previous series, Bright Falls. Bright Falls is a trio of small town romances featuring snappy dialogue and some of my favourite romance tropes – including fake relationships.
The new book is Get Over It, April Evans and it’s the second book in her new Clover Lake series, following up from last year’s Dream On, Ramona Riley. Clover Lake is a lakeside town in New Hampshire – the first book featured a movie filming in the town, and the second features a resort in the town and their summer staff. I still need to read Ramona Riley – I bought it at Saucy Books in the autumn – so maybe the arrival of April Evans is the kick that I need!
It’s the first Thursday of February, and I wanted to mention that there is a sequel out today to one of last February Quick Review books, Murder in the Dressing Room. The sequel is called Missing in Soho and has a missing photographer and an attack on a private detective. As I wrote in that review of the first book, there is was a big hanging plot thread left in that one, so I’m intending to read this one to find out what happens next. I will try and remember to report back! It also should be noted that that first book has had a bit of a cover redesign since last year so don’t be confused if you spot the paperback in the shops and it looks a bit different to the one from last year.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 