Anticipated books 2022

We’re a few days in to 2022 now, and after the orgy of posts about the past year, it’s time for me to have a little look ahead to the books we have coming our way in this new year.

So the obvious place to start is with the stuff that I’ve got pre-ordered already. Firstly there’s the follow up to Hither, Page by Cat Sebastian, which I’ve been waiting for for ages. It’s called the Missing Page and coming out in the middle of the month (a little late birthday present for myself). Also before the end of January is the Alexis Hall’s first historical romance called Something Fabulous. Also from Alexis Hall, but not pre-ordered yet, and not out until August is Husband Material, the sequel to the wonderful Boyfriend Material.

Away from the romance-y side of things, there is the fourth in the Isabel Rogers’ Stockwell Park Orchestra series. The Prize Racket is out in January and sees the gang taking part in a TV music competition. I can’t wait to see what havoc they wreak. There’s a bit longer to wait for the the Vinyl Detective series, which is out in May, is called Attack and Decay and the musical genre this time is… Death Metal. I cannot wait.

Then there is the stuff that I haven’t pre-ordered yet because I’m waiting to see who has the best edition of it. So that’s books like Amongst Our Weapons, the ninth Rivers of London book. I’ve managed to get the last couple of those in nice signed editions from author events and I’m hoping to do the same again. Also in this category is Heartbreaker, the second in Sarah MacLean’s Hell’s Belles series – this year I got Bombshell sent over from Word in Brooklyn to get a signed copy of the American edition, but I’m hoping that by this summer we may be at a point where Sarah MacLean can come over again and there will once again be a tea party, although my mania for matching sets means I’m not ruling out buying in the American version again…

On top of all of that there are a few things that I have already waiting for me in the NetGalley pile, for I am a very lucky duck. Included in that is Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair, out later in January and which is a fictionalised look at what happened in the 11 days that Agatha Christie disappeared for in 1926. I do love a fictionalised real life person book – see my enduring passion for Gone with the Windsors and also my various posts about other examples over the years. Also on the historical mystery front and on the same day is Tom Hindle’s The Fatal Crossing, which is a murder mystery set on a transatlantic crossing in the 1920s. A Scotland Yard detective happens to be on board and so starts to investigate, but he only has a few days to figure out what has happened. Also out the same day as is the very buzzed about The Maid, which features a murder victim discovered by a chambermaid at a fancy hotel. It’s already been optioned for a movie and the info on NetGalley talks about a lot of elements that I like but it also has a couple of people giving it blurbs that make me wonder if it’s going to be too dark for me. We will see…

I’ve had a bit of a fallow period on the historical romance front – with even a few of my old favourites letting me down – but I have high hopes for Sophie Irwin’s debut A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting, which is set in 1818 and features a young lady who needs to catch a rich husband so the bailiffs don’t move in, but who’s plans could be thwarted by the brother of one of her suitors. Based off the blurb it ticks a lot of my boxes – I’m hoping for it to be a bit of a modern mash up of The Nonesuch and Masqueraders. It’s out in May, so you may have to wait until then to find out if I’ve got the right signals…

I’ve tried to be a bit restrained with my requesting finger on NetGalley, because I still have a lot of books outstandint there – and (once again) one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to deal with that, so just one more to talk about on the advance copy front. Dial A for Aunties made it onto in my best books of the year list for 2022, and I have the sequel Four Aunties and a Wedding via NetGalley already – it’s out in March.

Also on my best books of last year list was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. He has a new book out in June – called Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. The blurb says it’s bringing together some of the best of his writing in the New Yorker – and as I’ve read quite a lot of his New Yorker stuff after I heard Winds of Change (and before my New Yorker subscription expired!), I want to see it in the flesh and have a flick through before I buy it, in case I’ve already read a lot of it, but if you haven’t got a New Yorker subscription, this should definitely be on your list.

You may have noticed that a lot of the books that I’ve talked about so far are for the start of the year. I suspect that’s because the pandemic and the supply chain issues are conspiring to mean that some of the stuff that should already have come out has been pushed back into early 2022 and that some of the stuff that would already have been announced is still waiting on dates and details. So this is where this post gets a bit speculative. The fourth in Jen De Luca’s Well Met series, Well Travelled is due out in September, it’s still long enough away that pre-ordering the Kindle edition isn’t an option in the UK, but as I’m still waiting for my library hold on Well Matched to come in, I can cope!

Over on Facebook Kerry Greenwood has written about the fact that she’s writing a new Phryne Fisher novel called Murder in Williamstown. She’s hoping it will be out in Australia by the end of 2022, but we do often have to wait for the UK edition, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much. I’m also hoping there will be something new from Gail Carriger in 2022, but so far she’s not giving any dates for anything in her newsletter so it’s all very up in the air. I’m also hoping the the 2024 date for the next Tessa Dare book gets revised back to 2022, but The Bride Bet is still showing as TBA on her website so anything could happen there too. Despite even less information – it hasn’t even got a title on Amazon or Goodreads yet – I’m more hopeful that the sequel to Battle Royal will be out in 2022 – Lucy Parker usually releases a book a year, so I’m clinging to that.