As you know from yesterday, normal service is suspended while I talk about my favourite books of 2025. When I put these posts together it’s always interesting to me to see what the patterns are in my reading in any given year, and I would say that this year has been quite low on new fiction that I’ve really loved. I’ve read more than 40 new releases from NetGalley this year (although not all of those were fiction) and a lot of them have been firmly in the middling area of the ratings. Now that could be that my tastes and what is popular in publishing are diverging, I could be turning into an old curmudgeon or I could just have had a flukey year. Any way here we go.
I’m actually going to start with a relatively recent read – A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder by F H Petford. This was a Book of the Week at the end of October, and it’s got loads of my favourite things in books: an early twentieth century setting, a murder mystery and main character who is new to the setting. It’s got spiritualists, seances and espionage, although I share some of the concerns I’ve seen on Goodreads about the title not really telling you what’s going on in the book – it’s less sceptical about ghosts than you might think from the name. I always say that I have a very mixed relationship with books with paranormal elements, but this really hit all the things that I like. It’s clearly setting up for a sequel – and I look forward to seeing how the world develops if that happens.
Next up is a Book of the Week from June. And if Ghost Hunter’s Guide… has a misleading title, A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant has a misleading blurb. Because it wants you to think that Miss Hortense is Murder, She Wrote but set in Birmingham, however it is much less cozy than that would imply. Miss Hortense is quite an abrasive character who is holding onto plenty of secrets and the community that she belongs to has been subjected to racism and discrimination on a personal and group level. So it’s darker than a Jessica Fletcher comparison would suggest but it’s a really good mystery and although it has a huge cast of characters that’s partly because it’s setting up for a series so I forgive it because there is so much potential here.
Still in the murder mystery realm, it’s Hattie Steals the Show by Patrick Gleeson, this wasn’t a book of the week, but was in my Recommendsday for theatre mysteries because I really enjoyed it and I put the first book in the series on my Christmas list so I think it deserves a place here. I love a mystery set in the world of the theatre and this is a really clever one with plenty of insider knowledge about the way that theatre productions work. Hattie is a stage manager with a slightly difficult past who ends up investigating a death at a theatre where she is about to do a week of work. THere is a third book coming next year and I’m really looking forward to it.
And finally a book that’s not a mystery – Dear Miss Lake by A J Pearce, which is the fourth (and final) book in her Emmy Lake series. I’ve loved these books so much and this is such a great end to the series. You do need to read them in order to get the most out of them, and usually that would mean that I wouldn’t include it in a post like this, but it is one of the very, very few new novels this year that got a full five stars from me with no reservations at all. A J Pearce is working on a new series set in a different time period and I’m really looking forward to reading that when it comes out.
And that’s the lot for today, but tomorrow is the non-fiction and in the meantime, Some Like It Hot is on TV this afternoon and you know how much I love that movie, so if you haven’t watched it, you totally should.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 