It’s Boxing Day and I’m starting my annual end of year series of posts about my favourite books that I’ve read this year. And I’m starting with the New to Me novels because actually this is where some of my highest rated books of the year have been. But coming up over the next few days there’s also new fiction and non-fiction.
And I’m starting with A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith because I read both the Gabriel Ward books this year and they could have been on either list because they’re both so good. I’ve gone with the first one to feature here, because I have that rule about firsts in series and so it totally makes sense, but it’s sort of a recommendation for both the books rather than just one. It’s 1901 and Gabriel Ward is a barrister who lives and works inside the Inner Temple in the City of London, a self-regulating enclave populated by the legal profession. His ordered life is about to be disrupted by the discovery of the body of the Lord Chancellor on his office doorstep and is coerced into investigating what has happened. Gabriel is a great character and the Inner Temple is a brilliant setting for a mystery – it’s a closed community which works for the plot but it’s also something that most readers will know very little about and so there’s loads of fun titbits in there for you to enjoy as the author is herself a barrister who lives and works in the Inner Temple and so knows it inside out.
Next up is a book that’s been getting buzz for a couple of years but that took me a while to get to because of my slightly strange relationship with fantasy novels. But Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree is right in the part of the genre that I like. Viv is a retired bounty hunter who takes up residence in a coastal town so that she can set up a coffee shop and start a new life. Thune reminds me in a lot of ways of a Terry Pratchett city – and I mean that as the highest compliment. This has less satire and less peril and more romance than a Discworld book but I really, really liked it.
And finally I couldn’t not include the Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths as I binged through the whole series in under two months earlier this year. The Crossing Places was a book of the week in February and I’d finished the lot by early April. Ruth is a forensic archeologist who works at a fictional university in Norfolk. In the first book she is called in by the police after a body is found in the marshes and this sees her become the force’s go to for old bones but also tangles her life up with DI Harry Nelson. And this is the point where I have to say that some people will not want to read this series because Harry is married and as I said in my series post this will be a dealbreaker for some readers. But it wasn’t for me, and I just loved reading these. And because I was coming to this a decade after everyone else I could just go straight on to the next book every time I finished one. This is a series that also features the pandemic – because it happens in real(ish) time and Elly Griffiths couldn’t pretend that it didn’t happen – and I didn’t hate that either.
Coming up we’ve got my favourite new fiction reads of 2025, but in the meantime, enjoy Boxing Day – and if you’re in the the UK, Paddington 2 is on tv this afternoon, complete with the finale musical sequence to Sondheim’s Rain on the Roof from Follies.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 