I said the other week that December was short on new releases, so for the second time this month I’m mentioning a series I haven’t read by an author that I’ve read other books by and this time it’s Kathi Daley whose T J Jensen series I’ve writen about before and who also writes the Zoe Donovan series that I’ve read a couple of it the last few weeks. This is a new entry in her Cottage on Gooseberry Bay series. This is a mystery series set around holidays in a small town by the seaside. Christmas Bells is the twentieth in the series, so I have a lot of catching up to do. It’s promising a mystery set around a Christmas tree lot that’s ten years in the making. These are in Kindle Unlimited, and I’m trying not to hold the covers against them!
Last year I did a post of Christmas-themed new releases in series, this year I thought I would do a follow up to a 2022 post and look at some of the not-new Christmas-themed entries in series. Does that make sense? They’re Christmas books, they’re in series, they’re not new releases and I didn’t mention them in that post year years ago. Boom.
Forbidden Fruit by Kerry Greenwood
I’m starting with Kerry Greenwood because she was one of the female authors we have lost this year that I really enjoyed reading. I reread the entire Corinna Chapman series after she died and Forbidden Fruit (which I read in June!) is the fifth (of seven) and the Christmas-set instalment. Corinna is fairly agnostic about the season and portrays the exasperations and annoyances of it well – the shoppers drive her mad and the heat is oppressive. Instead of being able to relax she finds herself dealing with a reapeat offender runaway donkey and a host of minor inconveniences. On top of all this, her partner Daniel is investigating two teenage runaways, one of whom is very pregnant. Brigid and Manny are determined not to be found, and Daniel and Corinna find themselves dealing with a religious cult (and others) on the quest to help them.
The Dead of Winter by Nicola Upson
The Dead of Winter is the ninth in the Josephine Tey series, and another book I read in June this year (clearly a month for Christmas reading!) when I was filling in gaps in the series after they were all on offer. It’s 1938 and Josephine and Archie have been invited to spend Christmas on St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. In case you’re not familiar, this is a tidal island, and so when a murder happens it’s a closed group and Archie needs to solve the murder and keep the island’s residents safe from the killer. As always with this series, it’s darker than you expect and it’s a bit unusual for reasons that are spoilery, but it’s very much in the tradition of Golden Age mysteries as well as mixing real people and events with the fictional. I’m not gonig to say that this is the best place to start the series, but it is possible to read as a standalone and would give you a good sense of what the series is about.
Shakespeare’s Christmas by Charlaine Harris
This is the third in the Lily Bard series sees her heading away from Shakespeare for her sister’s Christmas wedding. As I said in my post about the series, Lily isn’t a cozy crime heroine – there’s too much darkness and trauma for that. And the mysteries can be pretty dark too – and this one is because it is the one where you learn the full scope of Lily’s backstory. And this is why I think it works quite well as a standalone – because Lily has a reason to snoop around in this but also because often the criticism of the series is that it’s dark and Lily isn’t likeable, but when you read this you understand why she always takes a pessimistic view on the world.
And I realise that the recommendations in this have got progressively darker, but sometimes you’ve already had enough saccharine and sugar at Christmas and you want a palate cleanser right? And if you do want something lighter, I have plenty of other Christmas posts for you including my recent Meg Langslow at Christmas, but also Classic Christmas mysteries and Christmas is All Around as well as the ones I linked at the top.
Yeah, I know, it’s only been three weeks, but I’m back with another British Library Crime Classic pick. I can’t help myself but in my defence, this only came out in the summer, so it’s a relatively recent release and it’s also in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so I’m going with it.
When Will gets a phone call from the wife of an old school friend to come and help her, he finds himself drawn into a rather seedy potential scandal. A young woman called Rose has come to call on Celia and says she is pregnant, and the father is Celia’s husband Humphrey. Celia wants Will firstly to deal with the visit, but then because he’s a lawyer to try and handle the situation for them. The Odd Flamingo of the title is a seedy club where Will and Humphrey both used to visit when they were younger, but where Humphrey it seems is still a habitue. Will’s staid life is soon caught up in potential murder and blackmail as he tries to work out what is going on.
Nina Bawden is probably most famous for her World War Two set children’s novel, Carrie’s War. This is from the very start of her career – her second published novel which originally was published in 1954, twenty or so years before Carrie’s War. But you can see the shadows of her later work in it, even though the audiences are so different. It’s got plenty of twists and turns and it keeps you turning the pages. The portrayal of the London underworld is really atmospheric and there isn’t really a sympathetic character among any of them, which I liked about it but may frustrate others. I really enjoyed it – I raced through it to see how it all turned out and which particular awful person was going to be responsible for it all.
As I said at the top, this is in Kindle Unlimited so it’s not on Kobo at the moment but of course it’s also in paperback and the British Library shop is still doing three for two again at the moment – so you could buy this and Death in High Heels and get A N Other BLCC for free!
A very busy week, and increasing numbers of Christmas books on the list, despite the fact that I still have a couple of states still to go. Two more ticked off this week though. Nearly there.
Read:
The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter
I feel like I’ve been on a bit of a run of long term favourite old movies recently, but I’m back with another one because Dick Van Dyke’s 100th birthday was yesterday (13 December) and given that I’ve already told you how much I love his other big kids movie role in Mary Poppins, this seemed fitting.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the iconic story of a magical car owned by a not very successful inventor and which takes him and his family on adventures, including to rescue their grandfather from a foreign land where children are banned. It’s loosely based on the children’s book of the same name by Ian Fleming (of James Bond fame). By loosely I mean the whistling sweets, the flying and the floating of the car are from the book, but the whole Baron Bomburst plot is… not (the book has gunrunners on the French coast instead!). Chitty probably has just as much plot as Bedknobs, but it has a lot more musical numbers. Bedknobs is a kids movie with some songs, this is definitely a movie musical.
It should be stated up front that the Child Catcher is one of the scariest villains in all children’s movies and if you’ve got kids do remember that before you show it to them for the first time. Robert Helpmann is amazing playing him and it’s a creepy scary character and performance that can easily give kids nightmares. Dick Van Dyke is perfect for the chaos energy of Caractacus Potts – a scatty inventor and single dad who can be totally oblivious to anything but his work but who has made a contraption to cook food for his family. And he also gets to show of his dancing. I’ve put the Me Ol’ Bam-boo scene in here because it’s just so good – it’s basically the equivalent in this of the Chimney Sweep on the roof scene in Poppins, with massed dancing and tricks except that Van Dyke is two beats behind for a lot of it because the schtick is that he’s copying the others and learning it as he goes because he’s hiding from a man who’s just had a disastrous hair cut from one of his inventions.
The music is by the Sherman Brothers, who basically did the music for all my childhood favourite children’s movies because they also did Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and of course The Parent Trap as well as most of The Jungle Book. And just to link it to my favourites even more, Irwin Kostal who conducted the music also did The Sound of Music (as well as Bedknobs and Mary P). Like Bedknobs and Broomsticks this was in my sister and my Saturday night rotation when we were kids, again recorded off the TV onto VCS and I’m pretty sure I still know all the words to the songs even now. I definitely borrowed the easy piano book from the town library more than once so that I could play the songs and sing along. Side note: I know that the word “quay” is pronounced “key” and when I’m singing along to Hushabye Mountain in the film I’m fine with the line “down by the quay” but any time I encountered it written down when I was playing the piano music it trips me up. Anyway.
And if you’ve watched the James Bond films there is a bit of cross over here too beyond just the fact that they’re both Fleming creations. Baron Bomburst is Gert Fröbe aka Goldfinger and the man that is scrapping the wreck of Chitty at the start of the movie is Desmond Llewellyn aka Q. And the screenplay is written by Roald Dahl (yes him) who also wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice. And it’s produced by Cubby Broccoli’s Eon movies and so of course because they’ve just been sold to Amazon there is talk of a remake, which is one thing we really do not need. This is already not a short film. It’s over two hours – nearly half an hour longer than Bedknobs and nearly ten minutes longer than Poppins – and I’ve never known a remake to be shorter than the original! But in any case, this is pretty perfect as is.
Happy Saturday everyone, we’re in the middle of December and I’m back with a round up of the books that have arrived in the house over the last little while. I’m expecting to be doing a post-Christmas Books Incoming this month too, so consider this a first bite of the December cherry.
As you know, a couple of these are already off the pile – I read Second Chance Romance last week pretty much as soon as it arrived, although I paced myself while reading it to try and make it last. Strawberried Alive from Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery series is this year’s Arizona book for the Fifty States Challenge, and Sugar Plum Poisoned will be next years – as will One for the Books from her Library Lovers series for Connecticut. Actually there are quite a lot here that could end up being on the 50 states list next year – To Brew or Not to Brew is the first in a cozy mystery series set in Pennsylvania that I picked up in Waterstones Picadilly when I was checking out their Legami popup, Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is a short story collection set in Alaska and the American West, Love is a War Song is a romantic comedy with a pop star and a cowboy set in Oklahoma and On Spine of Death is the sequel to last week’s Book of the Week Buried in a Good Book and set in Washington. That just leaves the non-states books and Do Admit is a graphic novel about the Mitford sisters while How to Spot a Fascist was a purchase in Riverside Books.
I’m breaking my own rules today, and instead of a post about a book series, it’s a post about the latest movie in the Knives Out series, which is hitting Netflix in the UK today after a two week cinematic release – and we went the other weekend.
Wake Up Dead Man sees Benoit Blanc return to investigate the death of Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks, a charismatic but fire and brimstone type priest, who is killed in a seemingly impossible crime during the middle of taking mass. He is assisted by Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a young priest who has been set to Wick’s church as punishment for having punched another deacon. Jud is the obvious suspect – as he has had conflict with Wick, but despite the fact that Wick’s congregation is in a thrall to him, but all of them might also have reason to want him dead.
I’ve seen all of the Knives Out films at the cinema and I don’t remember the other two being as laugh out loud funny as this one is. As in there were multiple moments where the screening I went to was audibly laughing at the movie. There is also a literary connection to this, which I can’t explain without spoiling the plot, but which had my brain working in the background of watching it to try and figure out what clues I could take from it to the solution. Daniel Craig looks like he’s having a ball as Blanc – again – and that just adds to the fun of the thing too. The supporting cast is as starry as ever, I particularly enjoyed Andrew Scott’s turn as
It does have a slightly different tone than the previous films – but not so different that if you didn’t like the previous movies I don’t know that this will change your mind. I think Rian Johnson is also making more commentary on the state of the world at the moment as part of this as well. If the last movie was picking at the ultra-rich and their lives, this one is going at organised religion – and that may hit differently with audiences too because obviously there are more people involved in religion than there are ultra rich! I’ll definitely be watching it again on Netflix though to try and spot the things that I missed first time around too.
I’ve been reading Julie Mulhern’s 1970s-set Country Club Murders series whenever they drop into a price band that I can justify, but this week she’s got a new book out which is the first in a new 1920s set series. Murder in Manhattan features Freddie, a female journalist in Prohibition New York who finds herself caught up in a murder investigation when someone she wrote about in her magazine column is found dead. The blurb says it’s inspired by the first female reporter at The New Yorker and also drops a load of famous names from the period so this could be a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Happy December everyone, it’s nearly Christmas and I’m back with the last batch of Kindle offers for the year. And there are a lot of festive offerings on offer and as most people only read Christmas books in the six weeks or so around the holidays, I’m going to focus mostly on them this month.
On to the non-festive stuff. One of my favourite new books of the year is 99p too – Layne Fargo’s The Favourites, just in time to fill the gap left after the Grand Prix final at the weekend and the European Championships in Sheffield in a month’s time. I also made The Rom Commers a BotW I loved Legends and Lattes when I read it earlier this year and the new book just came out, so it’s nice to see Bookshops and Bonedust on offer too. We’ve also had some teaser photos from the filming of series two of The Rivals – if you haven’t read the book yet it’s on offer as well.
Now considering that I finished the new Olivia Dade last week this may be a surprise to you, but you all know I like Olivia Dade and Second Chance Romance was indeed great fun, but Heir Apparent is a new release and I enjoyed it although I have some quibbles as you will see so I have things to say about it that you won’t have heard before!
Lexi Villiers is living in Tasmania and in the middle of training to be a doctor. She’s busy building an independent life for her herself. But on New Years Day a helicopter lands and her grandmother’s right-hand man steps out to tell her that her father and her twin brother are dead and she needs to come home. Lexi’s grandmother is the queen of England and Lexi is now next in line for the throne. She’s got to decide if she wants to return to the family fold – and if she does she’s got to figure out how to get the British public to warm up to her and how to deal with the scheming that surrounds the monarchy, particularly from her father’s younger brother Prince Richard who is next in line after Lexi.
So in case you’re wondering, in the world of Heir Apparent, Charles II’s wife died and he remarried to his mistress Barbara Villiers, who then acted as Regent when Charles died before their eldest son was of age. This means that Armitage has been able to invent her own cast of characters and a distinct history for the House of Villiers, but as a reader you can also spend time spotting where she’s taken inspiration from the real British royals. So Lexi’s mother died young after an acrimonious divorce from her father, who went on to marry his mistress. You get the idea.
This is a really fun and page turning read – partly because of how much fun it is looking at those parallels to the real royals. I really enjoyed it – right until the end where I don’t think it quite stuck the landing. I really can’t explain why without giving huge, huge spoilers, but I suspect that other people may feel the same as me. It’s a great sun-lounger read right up until that point though, and I don’t even think that the ending issue is because Armitage is leaving room for a sequel. So that’s frustrating. But your mileage may vary on that ending – and you won’t know until you’ve read it! If nothing else it will make for a debate at all the book club meetings – and it’s a Reese’s Book Club pick so it’ll be popular on that front.
I got my copy from NetGalley and as it only came out on Tuesday last week I haven’t had a chance to look for it in the bookshops yet, but I will report back in when I do but it should be really easy to get hold of in the US because of that Reese pick. It’s also available on Kindle and Kobo and as an audiobook.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 