Author: veritywilde

Journalist, armchair sports fan, book worm and show fiend. There's a sentence you don't hear too often.
Book of the Week, books, detective

Book of the Week: Murder of a Lady

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This week I’m back with a murder mystery – and another British Library Crime Classic – after a run of more than a month without one! This time it’s an impossible murder in the a Highlands by Anthony Wynne.

The murdered lady of the title is Mary Gregor, the sister of the laird of Duchlan, who is found stabbed to death locked in her bedroom of the family castle. Our amateur sleuth is Dr Eustace Hailey, who is in the grand tradition of the Golden Age mystery, and who happens to be staying nearby when the body is discovered. Despite being told that the victim was a kind and charitable woman, he soon uncovers evidence that suggests the reverse and that the situation at the castle was not a happy one. In fact even after her death, Mary Gregor still seems to loom over the building – and then more deaths happen.

This is definitely one of the more fantastical of the BLCC’s I’ve read, with a strong vein of highland superstition and mysticism. In fact there was a while when I was wondering is the solution was going to involve the supernatural so impossible did it seem for anyone to have carried out the crime. But it does stick to the rules of the detective club – although the solution is quite something, it is just about plausible.

I bought my copy at the Book Conference second hand sale, but this is also available on Kindle and Kobo and is actually pretty bargainous at £1.99 as I write this, although it should be noted that the ebook edition isn’t a BLCC one (there are some of these where the paperback and ebook rights appear to have got separated) so I can’t vouch for the quality of the ebook version. And if you want more impossible/locked room mysteries, I have a post for that too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 24 – April 30

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It’s the first of May so Happy Bank Holiday Monday if you’re in the UK. We have three this month because it’s the Coronation next weekend. I’m hoping this all means some extra reading time for me but who knows what will actually happen. Anyway, all the usual end of month stuff coming up this week after a productive week of reading at the end of April – even if the long running list is still long!

Read:

False Scent by Ngaio Marsh

The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Mother of the Bride Murder by Leslie Meier*

Hand in Glove by Ngaio Marsh

Paper Cuts by Ellery Adams*

Beach Read by Emily Henry

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne

Started:

Falling Hard for the Royal Guard by Megan Clawson*

Absence of Mallets by Kate Carlisle

Still reading:

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes by Kate Strasdin*

Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor*

The Empire by Michael Ball*

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

Reach for the Stars by Michael Cragg

Two books bought. Oops daisy.

Bonus photo: my second rugby match in less than a month! This time watching the Saints beat Leicester (whilst following the women’s six nations on the phone)

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

books

Books in the Wild: New Releases in the real world

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I had a slight quest around the central London bookshops this week looking for something specific and although I didn’t find it, I did find several books that I’ve written about here – which I can now attest are actually gettable in stores!

Firstly let’s start with this week’s BotW, Happy Place, proudly in hardback and in a nice prominent spot in Waterstones the day after release day.

Next up, this table display in Foyles where I have read – or have waiting to read really quite a lot. After writing about Aunty Lee yesterday, I really need to read Vera Wong… to see if it gives me the same older lady charm I got from that. Then there is Killers of a Certain Age, getting its second mention of the week, the latest SJ Bennet, Magpie Murders which as I mentioned the other day is on TV at the moment, The Three Dahlias which is one of my favourites so far this year and came out in paperback this week and finally A Fatal Crossing which I wrote about last year.

And finally the romance offer table where I valiantly tried to find two books to buy. When I’m doing buy one get one half price I like to do it as one book I know I’ll like (or at least by an author I have liked previously) and then take a chance on something or someone new with the other one. But I’ve already read the Susanna Hoffs and I have the Megan Clawson and the Alexis Daria on the kindle. I’m about three Marian Keyes behind at this point so I can’t buy more before I’ve caught up and everything I’ve read about Colleen Hoover suggests that she is Not For Me so I couldn’t really justify anything – this time at least!

Happy Saturday everyone!

Series I love

Series I Love: Aunty Lee

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Having mentioned the Singaporean super rich in last week’s Recommendsday, today I’m returning to the city for a mystery series and Ovidia Yu’s Aunty Lee books.

Rosie Lee is a widowed lady of a certain age, who runs a home cooking restaurant. She doesn’t need to work – her husband left her plenty of money – she does it keep her busy and because it helps her keep her finger on exactly what’s going on in the city. In the first book, two women are found dead and as she knows both of them – one has eaten at her restaurants, the other had been due to be a guest at a dinner party – she starts to investigate. This sets up both the way Aunty Lee straddles different parts of Singaporean society but also how she meets the police officer who appears through the series.

The mysteries aren’t always the most complicated – I’ve figured out the culprit fairly early more than once – but Aunty Lee’s and her world is a delightful space to spend time that it doesn’t actually matter. If you liked the world of Crazy Rich Asians, this is the cozy crime version of that except that I need to issue a warning: these books will make you hungry. The presence of food in a cozy crime series is nothing new – I mean lots of series have recipes included after all – but very few of them make your mouth water the way that Ovidia Yu’s do – even if you’re like me and you know that your chili tolerance is not enough to be able to cope with some of it! I have written about a couple of these before – there’s more about Aunty Lee in the posts about Deadly Specials and Meddling and Murder (which doesn’t seem to be attached to the series on any of the online vendors, even though it is and Aunty Lee book as you can see from the cover).

These are all available on Kindle and Kobo – and yes it really annoys me that the covers don’t match as a set – and I’ve occasionally spotted them in shops, I own one in paperback because of that!

Happy Reading!

Book previews, books

Out this week: new T J Klune

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I’ve already written about one book out this week, but actually it’s a busy week for it. And among them is a new one from T J Klune who wrote The House in the Cerulean Sea which I loved a few years back. This one is called In the Lives of Puppets and is a Pinocchio retelling. I’ve read a fair few fairytale and folktale retelling a over the years but I’m not sure I’ve ever done Pinocchio – or at least I can’t remember that I have so this is definitely intriguing!

Uncategorized

Recommendsday: Feel good novels

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After having such a good time reading Nora Goes Off Script, it sent me off on a quest for other books that will just leave you with a happy smile on your face and the urge to force all your friends to read it. And it took me a while to bring you this week’s Recommendsday – because although I did some targeted reading for new options for this some of them were so good that they ended up as BotW posts too – more on that later!

Anyway, my starting place for this sort of post is often Goodreads’s the “other readers also liked” section for the book in question, to see what avenues that takes me down. But frustratingly, as is often the case for relatively new releases (Nora… came out in summer 2022) it seems to be dominated by other recent releases and I don’t think that Lessons in Chemistry (on page sexual assault), Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (death), Something Wilder(death again) and Killers of a Certain Age (even more death) for all that they are excellent (and obviously right in my reading wheel house because I’ve recommended all of them!) are not quite the same low stakes and low stress experience that Annabel Monaghan is giving you with Nora.

Of the linked recommendations, Thank You for Listening was probably the closet to this of the list – and I couldn’t put that down when I read it last year – but it’s only a six months since it was a BotW, see also Better than Fiction which was mentioned even more recently so I had to come up with something fresh…

And now we get to stuff I read with this post in mind and which ended up as Books of the Week themselves – there’s The Soulmate Equation and Funny You Should Ask and you could probably also include The Roughest Draft. I think Romantic Comedy was always destined to be a BotW, but it does also make you feel good so lets throw that in there too.

So now we look at stuff I read longer ago that is also feel good. So there’s Kate Spencer’s In A New York Minute, which I mentioned in the autumn. But going back even further there’s The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling which is a second-chance romance with witches, and which is less dramatic/high stakes than the blurb would lead you to believe. Then there’s Kate Claybourn’s Love Lettering, which was a BotW three years ago (!) which is a slow burn romance with people who become unexpetedly friends and then… more. Also Sally Thorne’s Second First Impressions, which was a slightly more recent (two years ago) BotW which is a charming and frothy romance which does have some stakes, but it’s not peril. I liked it so much that I’ve actually bought myself a kindle copy now (I borrowed it from the library when I read it initially).

Finally as I mentioned in the Nora post, the Goodreads blubs compares it to Evvie Drake Starts Over so if you haven’t read that, you should totally should. It’s definitely reminded me that I have Linda Holmes’s second novel Flying Solo on the ebook tbr. And it wouldn’t be a feel good book post without me mentioning my beloved Gone With the Windsors which is not a romance (and the rest of these are) but also Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, which is itself a retelling of Pride and Prejudice – so is romance to round it all off.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books, new releases

Book of the Week: Happy Place

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It’s the last week of April and I’m bang on time with a review for once – because Happy Place is actually out today. Astonishing work from me for once!

Emily Henry’s new novel is about Harriet and Wyn, who are on a weeklong summer holiday with their group of friends who don’t know that they broke up five months earlier. They’ve all been going to Sabrina’s dad’s cottage in Maine since they were students but now he’s decided to sell it they’re there for a last hurrah and neither Harry or Wyn can bring themselves to spoil it by telling everyone that they’ve broken up – especially as the others all call them the perfect couple. But as the days pass it’s clearer and clearer that they’re not over each other and pretending they’re still a couple is not helping any of it at all…

This is definitely at the women’s fiction end of the romance genre – yes, it follows the rules but it’s actually a lot about Harriet herself and her own personal growth as well as about her relationship with Wyn. It also made me cry more than once, so there’s that – Him Indoors got quite worried about me sniffling away at the end of the sofa – but by the end of the book it was worth it, even if I had a couple of minor quibbles along the way that mean I didn’t like it quite as much as I liked Book Lovers, but that was a high bar to reach!

You’re going to be able to get this everywhere – and it’s even got a nice coordinating/matching cover to the other three Emily Henry Romances. You can get it on Kindle or Kobo here and I’m expected the physical copy to be on the tables in all the bookshops, the airports and probably the supermarket too.

Happy Reading!

books, stats, The pile, week in books

The Week in Books: April 17 – April 23

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It’s starting to feel very spring-like. Of course now I’ve said that the weather will probably teach me a lesson, but this week I’ve been wandering around at times without a coat and thinking about getting some of the more summery outfits out. In book terms, I was away for a couple of nights last week so haven’t managed to read much more of the Michael Cragg, so the ongoing list has grown again, but apart from that it was a good week of reading.

Read:

Singing in the Shrouds by Ngaio Marsh

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers

Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson

The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones

Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers

The Cheat Sheet by Sarah Adams

Premeditated Mortar by Kate Carlisle

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Started:

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu

Still reading:

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes by Kate Strasdin*

Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor*

The Empire by Michael Ball*

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd

Reach for the Stars by Michael Cragg

One new arrival – but it was a gift not a purchase and it was also the reason I managed to resist in Daunt – I needed the space for it in my suitcase! But that was it last week. Go me.

Bonus photo: a lamb frolicking. I said it was starting to feel like spring!

*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.

not a book, streaming

Not a Book: Keep Sweet

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I only got two thirds of the way through the first episode of Keep Sweet the first time I tried to watch it – despite thinking I was prepared for how grim that would be given that I’ve read Under The Banner of Heaven and Educated and listened to the whole series of Unfinished: Short Creek. It took nearly nine months for me to come back to it – because if there’s one thing that the second half of 2022 and the start of 2023 has been for me it is a test of my resilience. But I did come back to it, and now I have some thoughts to share.

So Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey is a documentary series about the Fundamentalist Mormon Church, focusing on the rise (and fall) of their leader Warren Jeffs. Now given that I’ve already mentioned several other things based around this group, it may seem odd to describe them as secretive. But they are – and the only reason we know what we do is because of people who have started to speak out after leaving the religion and the court records around the trial of Warren Jeffs.

The FLDS are a polygamist group and there is a lot more to unpack about them than you can fit in one four part documentary series. If you already know a bit about them, you’ll notice that there are some bits missing from this, or that the reality isn’t quite as neat as the documentary makes it seem. But I liked that uses the women who were affected to tell the story and explain what it was like to grow up in a cult, why they believed what they did and how they escaped or broke free. As I mentioned at the start of the post, the first episode is quite grim, but if you can cope with that, it gets easier – or at least you know what you’re dealing with. If you are interested in religion in America, cults or the like, this is probably going to be at least slightly of interest to you if you haven’t already watched it.

That first weekend I started watching it was actually the weekend that it was released, so you you might now have to search for it on Netflix because as we know the algorithm prioritises the new. And there is always something new on Netflix – the latest being a documentary about the Waco Siege, which I will probably also watch at some point.

And before I go – if this is of interest to you as well as the posts I referenced at the top about Educated and Short Creek, I’ve also written about Murder Among the Mormons, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and slightly tangentially Bad Bets and The Cult of We.

Have a great Sunday everyone.