Genuinely I’m quite pleased with me this month. Honestly, I am. So all we have on the pile this month are my airport purchases – Entitled I’ve already read and is off the pile and Him Indoors is still reading Fast Money, so I haven’t got to that yet. I’m hoping it will be as interesting as The Formula was last year. Baking Spirits Bright is the sequel to Six Sweets Under which inexplicably dropped in price the other week and which I picked up to tick off Vermont in *next* year’s 50 States challenge. And then finally there is one missing from the photo which was an impulse purchase in Market Harborough this week but I managed to leave it in a bag in my parents car and haven’t got it back yet. It’s a new-to-English book by the author of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, called Days at the Torunka Café, and they had a signed edition, so how could I possibly resist. I’m mentioning it now because it would be cheating not to, and there’s no guarantee I won’t forget it next month. I also bought a Spot book, but that wasn’t for me so it doesn’t count!
Happy Friday everyone, and today I’m back with a post about a slightly unconventional mystery series – the Shady Hollow books by Juneau Black because book six, Mockingbird Court, came out on Tuesday.
This is a cozy crime series with a difference – it’s set in a small town with all the usual small businesses and our detective is a newcomer to the town who has just started a job as a reporter at the local paper. But the difference is that everyone in the town is a woodland creature – Vera Vixen the reporter is a fox, police deputy Orville Braun is a bear, there’s a Owl who runs the bookshop, a panda who runs a restaurant. You get the idea and if you think about it too much, none of it makes sense. But as someone who grew up playing with Sylvanian Families toys, I can totally get on board with it.
Apart from the whole talking animals thing, they follow the cozy crime series pattern in a fairly standard way – each book has a different murder, there’s a running story line with a romance for Vera and there are friendships and tensions in the community that develop as the series goes on. Juneau Black (who is a pen name for a duo of authors) have created a of belief system for the animals that plays a role in their lives and creates events for the animals to focus on – and for murders to occur at. And like so many non animal cozy crimes, being a reporter gives Vera a reason to be digging into crimes and – spoiler alert – dating a police officer provides her with more details than she could get alone creates tension when it needs to when she’s butting up against the officials.
The new book is Mockingbird Court and is set in the run up to the town’s Harvest Festival. According to the blurb, a famous author who is suspected of murder back in the big city sneaks into town, claiming to be innocent. Vera starts investigating, but finds that she may even be implicated herself. I’ve enjoyed reading the five previous books in the series and I’m looking forward to reading this one when the Kindle price drops to something sensible!
These are available on Kindle and Kobo as well as in paperback, although I’ve never seen the paperbacks in the shops in the UK but that might be different in the US
The latest book in Simon Brett’s Mrs Pargeter series is out today, and as I read it when I was on holiday the other week, I have a bonus review for you today!
Mrs Pargeter’s Past is the tenth book featuring the widow of Mr Pargeter, who definitely wasn’t one of the biggest crooks in Essex. This time out Mrs P is coming to the assistance of one of her husband’s former associates who has got himself into a touch of trouble because of his gambling problem. This leads us to some more of Mrs Pargeter’s backstory because the nasty characters who Short Head is entangled with are some of the same nasty customers that Mr P had some run ins with. Not that Mrs P knows about that.
I really enjoyed this – Mrs P and her deliberate refusal to acknowledge her husband’s past while making extensive use of his little black book of contacts will never not be funny to me, and in this one Simon Brett has found a way to bring in lots of the regular assistants in their various guises to help out with the mystery. I said when I wrote Major Bricket and the Circus Corpse that Mrs P is at the least realistic end of the contemporary-set Brett oeuvre and it does push on that, but it’s so funny and wry and I have a history with the characters that means that I don’t mind it really at all. Possibly not the place to start your adventures with Mrs P, but if you’ve already enjoy any of the books in the series I think it’ll work for you. I’m still hoping for another Charles Paris though.
It’s the second Wednesday of the month, so as always I am back with the Kindle deals for the month. And it’s a really good month, with quite a lot of new releases among the cheap deals – including several that I have been waiting to drop in price.
I’m going to start with Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy because it is 99p. I really, really loved this when I read it as it came out, and it was both the first book I read that had the pandemic in it but also the first in what is now a lot of books in the current trend of famous people-normal people romances in fiction (especially in romance). Just writing about it again has made me want to go back and re-read it.
Elly Griffiths‘ latest The Frozen People is on offer again – I bought it back when it was on a deal in April and really need to get around to reading it because there is a sequel coming early next year. Talking of sequels, Murder on the Marlow Belle is on offer, book five in the Marlow Murder Club is coming in January and there’s a third series of the TV series coming in 2026 too. The third Molly the Maid, The Maid’s Secret, is 99p as is
This month’s Terry Pratchett is Soul Music – if you haven’t read the story of that time when Music With Rocks In It came to the Disc, then you’re really missing out. If you like your P G Wodehouse, the fourth volume (of five) of Jeeves omnibuses is 99p. The Autumn Chills Agatha Christie collection is 99p (as well as being in Kindle Unlimited)
On the non-fiction front, Otto English’s Notorious (which is waiting on my shelf after buying it on the way to Ghana) is 99p, as is Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik and Kim Gordon (of Sonic Youth)’s Girl in a Band. There are also two of Tim Marshall’s books at 99p – Worth Dying For about the power of flags and Shadowplay about his time reporting on the Yugoslav conflict. And David Hepworth’s Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There about the British invasion of the US music charts in the 1960s is on offer too.
And that’s your lot. I’m not telling you how many books I bought while writing this because I’m trying not to think about it!
Lets just take a moment for the fact that my pick this week is a book that came out last week so I am actually topical and sort of on time for once. Lets mark it, because it happens less often than it ought to, considering the number of advance copies I have of things!
I Shop, Therefore I Am is Mary Portas’s second memoir – I haven’t read the first, but I think this picks up where the first one ends – with Mary starting a new job in charge of window displays at Harvey Nichols. During her time there (which starts in the late 1980s), it transformed from a department store somewhere mostly patronised by older ladies from the Home Counties and in the shadow of their neighbour down the road Harrods, to a headline making store at the cutting edge of the fashion industry.
I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous (not quite when if first came out, but not *that* long after that) and part of the joy of reading this is getting to see the impact that that show had on the store. But it’s also fascinating to see the mechanics of how the shop worked at a time which (in hindsight) was basically the heyday of the high street. I worked in retail for my first Saturday job was in a clothing store, but the behind the scenes of that was nothing like this – I was at a much lower level but also the clientele was very, very different. I also really liked Mary Portas’s writing style and her voice. She balances the day to day of what she was doing with fun gossipy insights into high fashion and celebrity. And she also seems incredibly normal and down to earth with it that it’s easy to forget that she was moving in really high powered circles until she suddenly mentions how upset they were when Princess Diana died because they all saw her in the store all the time, or when she gets Naomi Campbell to do her instore fashion show.
This is a really good read that would work whether you remember the time that Mary is talking about or not, but I think you’ll get different things out of it depending on whether you remember the time before internet shopping or not! It would also be a great Christmas book for someone who is interested in fashion.
My copy came from NetGalley, but it came out last week and I’m expecting to see it in all the bookshops ahead of the festive rush, especially because it made a bunch of the anticipated book lists earlier in the year. And of course it’s also in Kindle and Kobo.
After the very solid end to September, October started very slowly on the reading front – much like September did and this week’s list is mostly being held up by novellas. But that’s OK sometimes right? Especially as last month had none. I’ll just keep telling myself that. In my defense, the Brian Inglis is long and I am making good progress on it and I went to the theatre as well. Anyway, moving on. Onwards to next week…
It’s Sunday and I’m back again with another theatre post because I cheered myself up about being back in the UK and the terrible weather with a trip to see a play on Tuesday.
Born with Teeth is a play about the relationship between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. In this European premiere, Will is played by Edward Bluemel and Kit by Ncuti Gatwa. The exact relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare is a matter of huge scholarly debate, but in this telling the two men are collaborators at the least. Over the course of a tight 90 minutes you see the changing fortunes of the two men as we go from 1591 to 1593. Elizabethan England in this telling is a surveillance state rife with spies, where a playwright can struggle to make enough money to live unless they have a wealthy patron – or a side hustle.
For me, the performances are the star here – I find it hard to work out if the play would actually work anywhere near as well with two different actors. Gatwa and Bluemel play brilliantly off each other, and the similarity in their statures is an asset as the fortunes of the two men change and their relationship develops – there’s no physical dominance in terms of height – it’s all in the performances and charisma.
We saw this on Tuesday, and before we went to Wyndams theatre we spent half an hour people watching at the Noel Coward (which basically backs on to it) where it was the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, which has transferred in from the National, where Gatwa played Algernon. I love Earnest and was annoyed to have missed out on that one (too slow on the ticket buying front for it to be in my budget) so was keen to see Born With Teeth to see Gatwa and also to see why he might have chosen to do this rather than transfer in with Earnest (Olly Alexander is now playing Earnest, with Stephen Fry as Lady Bracknell instead of Sharon D Clarke) and I can see why this appealed to Gatwa – a two-hander, with plenty of scope to stretch your acting chops, rather than re-visit something you’ve already done. Gatwa was my favourite but I was both pleased and surpirsed to see that Bluemel who I only knew from My Lady Jane (RIP) was so good and so nearly as good as him!
This is on until November 1 – we got a good deal on tickets and it was definitely worth it for the performances. And if you like Shakespearean speculation, go and see this now, because I don’t think it’s something that will work as well without performances as good as these!
Happy weekend everyone, and when we were on holiday I did my traditional wander around the supermarket to see what that book selection was like in Gran Canaria, because I always like to see what has made it into translation, and what covers they’ve been given.
So i hose the romance section for the first picture because a) I like romance and b) I think it’s a good summation of the whole thing – some books in translation, mixed in with Spanish authors and no real pattern to which of the translated authors get new covers and which don’t!
I picked this one out because as you can see, the sports romance trend has made it to Spain. There’s Elle Kennedy, Stephanie Archer and Elsie Silver in that first photo above, but this is a home grown one. There isn’t an English version, but it’s a tennis romance where the hero is an up-and-coming player who comes to the heroine’s father for coaching help because he’s in a slump. And just like so many authors at the moment, it sounds like Anna Farres started out on Wattpad.
You all know how much I loved Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, so here it is in Spanish, with the same cover design as the UK hardback had – but in paperback. and I think it works really well in Spanish. I do like this design better than the paperback adaptation it got in the UK – the retro computer font hints at the game design element of the book. Yes the wave is from the computer game, but you don’t know that – so I think the paperback with just the wave and then a more boring/standard font and layout is a bit of a miss.
This is A Lady’s Guide to Scandal, the sequel to A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting, I picked this one out because it’s actually got the American cover translated, as opposed to having the UK cover (and a quote on the cover from The Bookseller, which is British!). And it just goes to show what a mix it is on the cover front – it doesn’t even really seem to decided by genre- the Jojo Moyes in the first picture has the UK cover, this has the US cover, Nora Roberts has the US cover for The Mirror, the Elsie Silver has the same illustration in slightly different versions on the UK, US and Spanish versions.
And finally I’m finishing with Dan Brown, because they seemed to be completely different covers to the UK and US ones – and they didn’t have the new one at all and I couldn’t work out if that was because it was sold out or because it hadn’t arrived yet. And also because it was displayed with kids books!
Most read author: tough to tell – two Jill Churchill books, two Tom Mead, but also some quite long non-fiction which might be more than both!
Books read in 2025: 284
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 803
A pretty slow start to the month, but a solid month in reading in the end because of the holiday and more than four hours on the plane to Gran Canaria and back. I’m particularly pleased with the number of books from the NetGalley list this month – I’m still way behind, but it’s my best month in ages on that front, so I’m going to try and keep that going if I can, although the actual physical pile is worryingly huge at the moment so I need to try and get that down too!
Bonus picture: some more sunshine and palm trees from my reading spot on holiday!
*often includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – but not this month!
I’m a big fan of Sherry Thomas’s Lady Sherlock series, so it would be remiss of me not to mention that Thomas has a new book out this week, even if it’s not another instalment in the adventures of Charlotte Holmes. The Librarians is a neither historical nor a romance – per the cover it’s “A Novel”. Those words can sometimes strike terror into my heart when it’s an author that I’ve enjoyed in other genres, but the blurb is promising. It’s set in Austen, Texas with four librarians whose secrets are threat to come out into the open when two bodies are found in the library after a murder mystery themed games night. This one looks like it’s only out in hardback in the UK, no Kindle version, so I may have to wait a while to read it, but I will be keeping my eyes peeled for it in the shops.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 