I’m not going to lie, this month’s Quick Reviews have been a tricky one to pick and write because as I mentioned on Sunday it was a bit of a strange month in reading what with all of the skating. I skipped a Book of the Week because of that, I read a few things that I’m going to use in other posts, and quite a few things that weren’t very good – or at least that I didn’t want to write about! But I’ve made it in the end even if it’s a slightly strange selection.
Managed Mayhem by Patti Benning
Lets start with something that I did like. As you know I’ve been working my way through a lot of Patti Benning mystery novellas, some of which have better premises than others – the motel one where people keep dying is a bit of an issue for me, because I definitely wouldn’t want to stay somewhere where a body a week is turning up, but the search and rescue dogs one at least has the excuse for why she keeps finding dead people. Anyway this is the first in a new series, once again set in Michigan where our heroine is Bridget who has been called in by her aunt to go and help with her novelty shop. The aunt is in Europe on holiday and things seem to be going wrong in her absence so she offers Bridget a free room in the apartment above her garage if she’ll go to Mill Creek and sort it out. Bridget has her own reasons for wanting to get away from her normal life but when she arrives in town she discovers a shop that doesn’t seem to have made any money in years, a missing store manager who then turns up dead in her aunt’s basement. The mystery is good enough but the potential for the series is better.
Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto
Gwen is a violinist, who has made it into the New York Pops Orchestra against the odds. Xander is the star of a classical crossover pop group who has inexplicably joined the Orchetra to play first cello. They don’t get on, but then Gwen is promoted to first chair – a job that Xander thought was going to be his and their rivalry kicks up a notch, right until it doesn’t. I read Julie Soto’s Forget Me Not a couple of years ago and althoug it was a BotW I thought it didn’t quite deliver on what it promised in the sample. But I liked the sample for this one (again) and went for it but this is another occasion where I missed a cue until too late because we’re back in the Reylo fic world. And I’m a bit over the tiny heroine and tall brooding misunderstood hero now because there have been so many (see also Love Hypothesis, and many others). This also suffers a bit from the fact that the heroine is a pushover, there is a comically evil villain and the whole Xander/Alex split started to drive me wild. But, judging by goodreads this has worked much better for people who are possibly less jaded than me!
A Deadly Affair by Agatha Christie
As you may have realised at this point, I’ve been working my way through the “new” Agatha Christie short story collections as they hit Kindle. We’ve had the seasonal collections and this on is themed around love and the depths that love can drive people too. There are all her big detectives included here but quite a few have been in other collections, so if you’ve done the other collections here, you may recognise some here like I did. On the bright side though, I’ve just started working my way through the David Suchet Poirot from the start as they have hit Netflix, and one of the early episodes I watched last week was based on one of the short stories in this that I read the week before!
That’s it for this month. May February provide me with better options for next month’s Quick Reviews. A final reminder of last month’s (less than usual) Books of the Week: Totally and Completely Fine, Meet The Newmans and Beattie Cavendish and the Highland Hideaway.
Happy Humpday!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 